"The Strange Inevitability of Evolution"

FB: a lovely and informative read
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"Natural selection supplies an incredibly powerful way of pruning variation into effective solutions to the challenges of the environment. But it can’t explain where all that variation came from. As the biologist Hugo de Vries wrote in 1905, “natural selection may explain the survival  of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival  of the fittest.” Over the past several years, Wagner and a handful of others have been starting to understand the origins of evolutionary innovation. Thanks to their findings so far, we can now see not only how  Darwinian evolution works but why it works: what makes it possible...These ideas suggest that evolvability and openness to innovation are features not just of life but of information itself. That is a view long championed by Schuster’s sometime collaborator, Nobel laureate chemist Manfred Eigen, who insists that Darwinian evolution is not merely the organizing principle of biology but a “law of physics,” an inevitable result of how information is organized in complex systems. And if that’s right, it would seem that the appearance of life was not a fantastic fluke but almost a mathematical inevitability."

http://nautil.us/issue/20/creativity/the-strange-inevitability-of-evolution

This was a beautiful article, certainly answering a question I had not heard posed before.

I really like this, kind of what I want part of my future research to be - "the connection between phenotype and genotype retains many mysteries. Arguably it is the biggest mystery of the post-genomic era we are now entering, in which it is proving unexpectedly hard to identify where many inherited phenotypic traits are encoded in the genotype"