Into the Cool review

Wow, I haven’t written in a month. After passing through the biology section in my library (I’m always in the engineering, physics, computer science sections) I thought about looking for any theoretical biology/alife books that might be there and I wasn’t dissapointed; I found a book called Into the cool. It was a great read and it made me think about how this could be applied to obtain emergence, to make artificial ecosystems. Doing this could make a new kind of technology; one that doesn’t get ideas from biology but from an artificial biology embeded in technology itself.  For some reason the author doesn’t talk about this but he talks about a really relevant issue; having a unified understanding of biology might be the key to stopping global warming and predicting the effects of other enviromental issues/disasters.

But I also have a few issues with the book; it’s too repetitive, it doesn’t have a lot of diagrams and no equations (it’s for the “lay reader”; come on, if your found out about this book you are looking for more than an essay) and the authors seem to have an implicit dislike of biological simulations and as I explained above they “might” be usefull.

The book’s official site is here: http://www.intothecool.com/