In a message dated 5/19/01 8:33:28 AM, Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
writes:
>CurtAdams@aol.com wrote:
>>
>> Organisms with complex macrostructural construction abilities
>> have rather slow doubling times. If you want to look at a house-
>
>Not if they're nutrient unlimited. Doubling time of biomass
>in a fermenter is quite impressive.
We don't have anything complex that grows in a fermenter.
The fact that they're simple is essential to fast growth in
a fermenter - you can just mix them around.
>> builder, the appropriate model is a tree, with doubling times in
>> years or decades. Further, we're a very long way from
>> engineering trees to grow particular shapes. And think how
>That's arguable. It's a threshold thing, so you can't extrapolate
>from presence or absence of progress in current time window.
There's no threshold in structural complexity. You can and do
have structure at any size and any degree of precision. We can
structurally modify plants, a bit, but nothing like the precision
required. For house-growing, deviations of a fraction of an
inch would have to be recognized and communicated across the
organism and we don't have anything like that in plants.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 10:00:06 MDT