I think about biological parallels to various aspects of society, the economy, life in general, and in technology specifically, fairly often.  At the same time I also think a great deal about biology from a computer science perspective, for example that the theory of evolution (well, I guess theories of evolution would be more apt, as it is an entire framework of ideas covering the development and propagation of life in a broad sense, and drilling down to individual organism development and even further to specific feature development; Darwin’s theories of Natural Selection and Sexual Selection are tiny pieces of that framework) can be abstracted to a general theory about the propogation of information, for which the information stored, changed, and transmitted in DNA (or RNA in the case of viruses, or even protein chains in prions, which recently have also been shown to evolve in a similar fashion to more complex biological molecules) is simply a specific instance.  Part of this is because I happen to be married to a biology PhD, so it is pretty common for both a biological and a computer science mindset to be communicating and influencing each other in our household, but my interests in such paths of thought predate our relationship (and perhaps were an impetus to it).

As such thought patterns are reasonably common in my weird little head, I tend to apply them to much of my professional life and the various topics that arise there (well, to be fair, there is a large blurring of professional and personal interests, so I am not sure it is accurate to make that distinction).  One thing that I have thought a great deal about is how biology applies to malware, its creation, propagation, tactics, current and future trends, and so forth.  I won’t be the first to point out that there are many, many parallels, but then I am not claiming a whole great deal of originality.

So this is what will hopefully be an introduction for a multipart series of posts, assuming motivation on my part (see previous article about how “free” my time happens to be) gets me around to producing content for the whole thing.  I suspect years from now I will be posting “Part 19″ or whatever, as some new idea pops into my head, since this concept is still evolving within my mind, influenced by my environment.  I have a brief framework for the next several posts already thought out, so it should be reasonably easy to come up with content.  My next post will begin with the concept of “Biological Cost” as that will be pertinent to many future discussions.  Beware, geek ramblings shall abound!  My regular schedule posts (which follow no regular schedule nor do they apparently conform to a regular pattern of subjects) should also continue.

~ Joshbw