“Speaking crudely, a living system—an organism—consists of a symbiotic relationship between a metabolism and a replicator. …the replicator contains the blueprint of the organism, with the information needed to grow, make repairs, and reproduce. …the metabolism provides the energy and raw materials needed to build and run the replicator.”

— J. Doyne Farmer

The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1995)

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J. Doyne Farmer 15

American physicist and entrepreneur (b.1952) 1952

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“Think about the two qualities that a virus, or any sort of parasitic replicator, demands of a friendly medium, the two qualities that make cellular machinery so friendly towards parasitic DNA, and that make computers so friendly towards computer viruses. These qualities are, firstly, a readiness to replicate information accurately, perhaps with some mistakes that are subsequently reproduced accurately; and, secondly, a readiness to obey instructions encoded in the information so replicated.”

Richard Dawkins book Viruses of the Mind

Viruses of the Mind (1993)

“Let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate. What’s replicated isn’t matter (made of atoms) but information (made of bits) specifying how the atoms are arranged. When a bacterium makes a copy of its DNA, no new atoms are created, but a new set of atoms are arranged in the same pattern as the original, thereby copying the information. In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.”

Max Tegmark (1967) Swedish-American cosmologist

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2017)

“About replication. See replication crisis.”

Diederik Stapel (1966) Dutch social psychologist

http://nick.brown.free.fr/stapel/ From the authorized english translation by Nicholas J.L. Brown available as a free download in PDF format
Clearly, there was something in the recipe for the X effect that I was missing. But what? I decided to ask the experts, the people who’d found the X effect and published lots of articles about it [..] My colleagues from around the world sent me piles of instructions, questionnaires, papers, and software [..] In most of the packages there was a letter, or sometimes a yellow Post-It note stuck to the bundle of documents, with extra instructions: “Don’t do this test on a computer. We tried that and it doesn’t work. It only works if you use pencil-and-paper forms.” “This experiment only works if you use ‘friendly’ or ‘nice’. It doesn’t work with ‘cool’ or ‘pleasant’ or ‘fine’. I don’t know why.” “After they’ve read the newspaper article, give the participants something else to do for three minutes. No more, no less. Three minutes, otherwise it doesn’t work.” “This questionnaire only works if you administer it to groups of three to five people. No more than that.” I certainly hadn’t encountered these kinds of instructions and warnings in the articles and research reports that I’d been reading. This advice was informal, almost under-the-counter, but it seemed to be a necessary part of developing a successful experiment. Had all the effect X researchers deliberately omitted this sort of detail when they wrote up their work for publication? I don’t know.
From his memoirs: "Ontsporing" (English, "Derailment") Nov. 2012

“Perfect replication is the enemy of any robust system”

Daniel Suarez Daemon

Source: Daemon (2006), Chapter 31: Red Queen Hypothesis, Character: Sobol
Context: Perfect replication is the enemy of any robust system... Lacking a central nervous system—much less a brain—the parasite is a simple system designed to compromise a very specific target host. The more uniform the host, the more effective the infestation.