Simple is beautiful: Why evolution repeatedly selects symmetrical structures
Delving into the captivating world of symmetry, we explore its profound connection with evolution. Unravel the reasons behind nature's preference for symmetrical structures, and discover why simplicity and beauty are often intertwined in the grand tapestry of life.
Life is marked by symmetrical structures, from the arms of a ******** to the identical subunits of proteins. Why this is the case is not understood.
One hypothesis is that symmetry structures are easier to encode and, hence, are likelier to evolve
- It is possible that evolution acts as an algorithm with a bias toward simplicity
- But any adaptive advantage that symmetry may provide isn’t by itself sufficient to explain its pervasiveness in biology across scales both great and small
Evolution as an algorithmic process
Simplicity of modular parts is a sufficient explanation for why evolution selects for modular systems
- Chico Camargo, one of the researchers involved in the study, highlighted in a tweet that “the crazy thing is that all of this happens before natural selection even comes into play”
Information and Evolution
The faithful replication of information from one generation to another is critical to the continuity of life, whereas errors in the process (that is, mutations) are necessary for life to evolve.
- Does information also guide which traits evolve?
- In information theory, Kolmogorov complexity describes how much computing is required to describe something.
The Simplicity of Symmetry
Overall, it is much more common for nature to produce proteins with low complexity and high symmetry than proteins with high complexity and low symmetry.
- The researchers also examined the complexity of the RNA morphospace (that is, the space of all possible secondary structures of RNA). Their simulations again showed an inverse relationship between the complexity and frequency of structures.
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