Degeneracy and Complexity in Biological Systems.¶
Edelman, G. M., & Gally, J. A. (2001). Degeneracy and Complexity in Biological Systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(24), 13763-13768.
Cited by¶
2 citations across 2 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Functional Redundancy (Degeneracy)
- Pure redundancy is robust against random independent failures but shares common-mode failure modes: if the mechanism has a design flaw or shared dependency, all copies may fail simultaneously. Functional redundancy in the strict sense uses different mechanisms achieving the same function (different species filling the same ecological niche, cross-trained employees with overlapping skill sets). Degeneracy, in the Edelman and Gally (2001) sense, refers to structurally different elements that can perform the same function and different functions depending on context — the genetic code's codon-amino-acid mapping, immune system antibody recognition, neural circuits.
This sourceCanonical statement of degeneracy as structurally different elements performing the same (or context-dependent different) functions, argued to underlie both robustness and evolvability; directly supports the degeneracy definition and the formal/abstract genetic-code example. (Original citation had the wrong issue/pages: 98(13), 7280–7285 → 98(24), 13763–13768.)
- Pure redundancy is robust against random independent failures but shares common-mode failure modes: if the mechanism has a design flaw or shared dependency, all copies may fail simultaneously. Functional redundancy in the strict sense uses different mechanisms achieving the same function (different species filling the same ecological niche, cross-trained employees with overlapping skill sets). Degeneracy, in the Edelman and Gally (2001) sense, refers to structurally different elements that can perform the same function and different functions depending on context — the genetic code's codon-amino-acid mapping, immune system antibody recognition, neural circuits.
- Redundancy
- … property; the failure-tolerant architecture mechanism; the information-theoretic redundancy (Shannon channel coding); the degeneracy-versus-redundancy distinction (Edelman-Gally); the cost-of-replication versus availability trade-off; the distributed versus localized redundancy structure
This sourceCanonical statement of degeneracy: structurally different elements that can perform the same function and different functions in different contexts; argued to be a universal biological property underlying both robustness and evolvability.
- … property; the failure-tolerant architecture mechanism; the information-theoretic redundancy (Shannon channel coding); the degeneracy-versus-redundancy distinction (Edelman-Gally); the cost-of-replication versus availability trade-off; the distributed versus localized redundancy structure
Verification¶
This reference passed the adversarial substantiation pipeline: it was checked to exist and to support the claim it is attached to. See how references were verified.
Registry ID ref:fb0522ca3449 · see in the full table