Degeneracy and complexity in biological systems

By Gerald M. Edelman, J. Gally. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2001

1,425 citations recorded by the source corpus.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aca7a84d7fdc2abd15daf0f0487859e7a7d3a23d

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Citations in the corpus

Variation in seed dispersal effectiveness: the redundancy of consequences in diversified tropical frugivore assemblages (2016, neutral): “Degeneracy is the ability of elements that are structurally different to perform the same function or yield the same output (Edelman and Gally 2001).”
Integrating psychology and neuroscience: functional analyses as mechanism sketches (2011, methodology): “It is generally assumed that psychological explanation is functional—that it proceeds via the functional analysis of cognitive capacities (Fodor 1968a, b; Dennett 1978, Chaps.”
Selection, Tinkering, and Emergence in Complex Networks - Crossing the Land of Tinkering (2002, background): “This feature is known as degeneracy (Tononi et al. , 1999; Edelman and Gally, 2001): unlike with redundancy, which involves structurally identical elements, degeneracy involves structurally diﬁerent elements that yield the same or diﬁerent functions depending on the context.”
Multiple models to capture the variability in biological neurons and networks (2011, background): “Problem 1: biological data are variable Even genetically identical single-cell organisms display variability in their responses to environmental stimuli and in the expression of mRNA and protei”
Resilience, Robustness, and Marine Ecosystem-based Management (2008, background): “Indeed, more generally, we are interested in the notion of functional redundancy, or what Edelman and Gaily (2001) call "degeneracy," namely, the notion that multiple distinct elements perform the same function.”
Brain-Machine Interfaces: From Basic Science to Neuroprostheses and Neurorehabilitation. (2017, background): “According to our view, such a principle, which is similar to degeneracy observed in the genetic code (221, 853), improves the robustness and flexibility of neural encoding (480).”
An Ecological Dynamics Approach to Skill Acquisition: Implications for Development of Talent in Sport (2013, background): “To achieve specific performance goals, multiple means are available to sport performers, due to the inherent degeneracy of their perceptual and action systems (Edelman & Gally, 2001; Mason, 2010; Withagen & Michaels, 2005).”
The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization (2017, positive): “The brain achieves complexity through ‘degeneracy’ (Edelman and Gally, 2001), the capacity for dissimilar representations (e.g. different sets of neurons) to give rise to instances of the same category (e.g. anger) in the same context (i.e. many-toone mappings of structure to function).”