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.)
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
Edelman and Gally define degeneracy as "the ability of elements that are structurally different to perform the same function or yield the same output", separating it from redundancy among identical elements, and add that such elements "may yield the same or different functions depending on the context in which it is expressed". They name gene networks, neural networks and evolution itself as domains where it is prominent. Both halves of the sentence's definition come from that passage. The sentence's glosses, codon-amino-acid mapping and antibody recognition, are the article's wording; the work names the genetic code and immune systems at the level of domains.
“Unlike redundant elements, degenerate elements can produce new and different outputs under different constraints.”
- 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.
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
Supplies the degeneracy-versus-redundancy distinction only; the other listed concepts such as Shannon coding, replication cost and distributed redundancy are absent.
“Unlike redundancy, which occurs when the same function is performed by identical elements, degeneracy, which involves structurally different elements, may yield the same or different functions depending on the context in which it is expressed.”
- … 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¶
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