I have a fulltime job which is not (directly) research (although I’m grateful to work with many wonderful research-oriented colleagues, from whom I learn a lot), so I do research on nights and weekends. I’d like to publish some interesting work in this field (described below), but I’ve currently resigned myself to the idea that it might take a very long time to do so, and the best I can do to achieve it is accumulate knowledge whenever possible - I’m happy with a monotonically positive, but very slow rate of progress (of course, I would like to go as quickly as I am able!).

One of the main problems with trying to do research outside of a traditional academic context is lack of access to both the social support structure which strongly reinforces one working on the problem on an average day (currently, no one cares if I read a game theory textbook or not), and access to cultural norms around best research practices and what is or isn’t interesting in the field.

That’s why I’m really interested in meeting people in similar situations - if you’re currently doing independent research, please do feel free to email me at ldeming.www@gmail.com to chat about how it’s going and compare notes on best practices!

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Update: I’m interested in what beauty is, what life and its goals are, and creating and internalizing examples of each.

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I want to find beauty in biology. My research is motivated by the question ‘how does evolution work’ (or, perhaps a better way of saying that would be ‘how do we answer the question evolution by natural selection was trying to answer’), and more specifically ‘does horizontal transfer of information between individuals in a single generation impact fitness to a degree that is comparable to increases in fitness from natural selection’. Basically, I’m interested in whether collective computation is, in some sense, cooler and more powerful than natural selection.

Currently, the approaches I’m interested in are:

• Attempting to quantify total information transmission between bacteria using a book.bionumbers.org style approach (going through each of genetic information transfer, chemical information transfer, and potentially electrical information transfer) and attempting to write down theoretical upper bounds on the amount of information transfer possible.

  • For example, bacteria can only replicate their genome so quickly, so if they want to send messages using genetic information there are actually upper bounds on how much they could make in a given amount of time. Or, with quorum signaling, I think you could figure out either the discrete signals or continuous number being transmitted and make some kind of inference about channel bandwith given the likely number of different quorum signaling systems in an organism.

  • This is kind of a gut check for me - if two bacteria exchange exchange no information on average over many generations (I”m still trying to figure out what a reasonable timescale to be interested in is), I’d be a lot less convinced that this is an important or useful thing to think about. Conversely, there are some studies (for example, Michael Desai’s lab had a 2016 paper showing that yeast that could sexually reproduce became more fit at the end of an experiment than yeast which asexually reproduce). I think evidence like this is interesting to support the point that some kind of coordination between the species is valuable, although it does not address the specific question I am interested in, at least in a way I can coherently think about today.

• I’d like to count the number of species which exhibit some property of communication between species members, and to get a sense for what proportion of species don’t exhibit this property at all.

• I’d like to understand the field of evolutionary game theory well enough to know if it might have useful answers to the questions I’m interested in. I’d like to understand the literature around the evolution of altruism (mostly, the theoretical arguments) much better than I do today.

Also

• What are the general principles or constraints on communication networks between living things?

  • How much energy of an individual organism do they typically take up?

  • How much can they tell the individual organisms to do things, without somehow messing the whole system up?

  • How are they typically structured, and why, if this is at all comprehensible?

  • What constrains the evolution of these networks, and how do they typically arise?

  • What is communication typically ‘used for’ in species, and why?

  • How do communication and evolution interact?

  • What is communication ‘about’?

  • To what degree do things like HGT or sex ‘count’ as communication?

• What is the question that evolution by natural selection was trying to answer, or explain?

• I feel really dumb saying this one, but what is the correct latent space for biology?

  • I feel very anxious that the future of biology will involve many things which are predictive and useful, but not beautiful or human comprehensible, so I feel mixed about this one!

  • Could be the latent space of any space

  • Perhaps a related question is, taking Feynman’s quote - ‘Nature has a great simplicity and thus a great beauty’ - what is the equivalent of this beauty or simplicity heuristic for a biologist? I’m personally most interested, selfishly, in beauty which is appreciable by whatever level of human mind is available at the time.

• What is beautiful, in biology?