The Games Cells Play

The road to simplicity has not been easy. In reality, it has been a twisted path, full of obstacles and mistakes, including wrong turnings, bad solutions that were only revealed to be bad when better ones were found. 

Natural selection works in a similar sort of way. It differs from a modem computer in two respects, however. First, it is extremely slow, but that is of no great importance as enormous amounts of time have been available—some 

5 billion years since the formation of the earth, and perhaps half that time since the first living organisms appeared. Second, natural selection has no 

We start with a prison camp for dangerous prisoners that consists of six widely separated blocks that house five prisoners each—30 prisoners in total. However, each block is large enough to accommodate more than five prisoners it can hold six on a permanent basis, or more than that for short periods, during the process of reorganization, for example. The authorities have therefore decided that it is uneconomic to use six blocks for 30 prisoners one block is to be closed, and each of the remaining five is to accommodate six prisoners. 

Unfortunately, however, you not only have to contend with the genuine constraints in the prison you also have to follow rules imposed by the bureaucracy responsible for the prison service. The financial director has decided that 

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Weinberg, R. A. (1997). The cat and mouse games that genes, viruses, and cells play. Cell 88(5),... 

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