No Sooner Do I Say It Than…

I won’t pretend that the idea that neural networks operting like markets and vice verse that I threw out in my last entry) is at all original. I think I first got some glimpse of that concept in Steven Johnson’s Emergence. But no sooner do I throw it out here then I pick up an article in Wired (literally an hour after my post) that posits that network models exist in cells as well. (Excerpt below)

Alon wrote software that hunts for patterns in the gene-regulation of the E. coli bacterium. What he found was astonishing: Networks with mechanisms straight out of engineering, including amplifiers and pulse generators that would be at home on a circuit board. Alon suspected that these recurring patterns, which he dubbed network motifs, may represent fundamental building blocks of all networks.

To be fair, some scientists have come out against this concept. And there is always the pervasive everything-is-not-a-network argument. I just thought it was one of those odd moments where my mind and fate are traveling at similar speeds in a similar direction.