The Open Thread posted at the beginning of the month has gotten really, really big, so I've gone ahead and made another one. Post your new discussions here!
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
Sure, but the answer is very simple. Gene regulatory networks are not RSI because they are not optimization processes.
Intrinsically they aren't optimization processes but they seem computationally expressive enough for an optimization process to be implemented on them (the same way X86-arch computers aren't optimization processes). And if you are a bacteria it seems it should be something that is evolutionarily beneficial, so I wouldn't be surprised to find some optimization going on at the gene network level. Enough to be considered a full optimization process I don't know, but if not, why not?