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Evolution 2.0 Prize

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Artificial Intelligence + Origin of Life Prize, $10 Million USD

Where did life and the genetic code come from? Can the answer build superior AI? The #1 mystery in science now has a $10 million prize.
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Summary

Overview

What is the Secret of Life?

Solve the #1 Question in all of Science

Origin of Life is the hardest question in science. No one knows how the first cell came about. But there’s a simpler, more fundamental question: Where did the information come from? An answer will trigger a quantum leap in Artificial Intelligence. This may be as big as the transistor or the discovery of DNA itself. A new $10 million prize seeks a definitive answer.

 

"Evolution 2.0 is a sign of a shifting emphasis in biology from regarding

life primarily as a chemical system, to looking at the flow of information."

-Financial Times Science Editor Clive Cookson

 

SCIENTIFIC PAPERS ABOUT INFORMATION AND BIOLOGY 

Biology transcends the limits of computation 

The role of quantum mechanics in cognition based evolution 

Cellular and natural viral engineering in cognition-based evolution

 

Judges:

George Church, Harvard & MITDenis Noble, FRS, CBE, Oxford University   Michael Ruse, Florida State University

George Church

George Church is a geneticist, molecular engineer, and chemist. He is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and MIT, and was a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. Developed methods for the first genome sequence. Director, BRAIN Project & PersonalGenomes.org. He is co-author of 509 papers, 143 patent publications & the book "Regenesis". He was also one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2017.

(photo By Steve Jurvetson from Menlo Park, USA - Life, Synthetic Life!)  Conflict of Interest Disclosures

Denis Noble

We have Oxford Professor Denis Noble on board as prize judge and technical advisor. He’s one of the top 100 scientists in the UK. Denis was the first person to build a computer model of an organ. It was the heart. He did this in 1960 using punch cards. His discoveries made pacemakers possible. He is a fellow of the Royal Society. He is editor of the society's journal Interface Focus and he holds a Commander of the British Empire medal from Queen Elizabeth. He organized the Royal Society’s 2016 conference “New Trends in Biological Evolution” in conjunction with the British Academy. He is president of the International Union of Physiological Sciences. Denis is an accomplished musician and pioneer of the field of Systems Biology. He is author of The Music of Life and Dance to the Tune of Life: Biological Relativity.

Michael Ruse

Michael Ruse is a philosopher of science who specializes in the philosophy of biology. He is director of the Program in the Philosophy of the History of Science at Florida State University and author of numerous books including "Darwinism and Design", “The Cambridge History of Atheism” and “Science, Evolution and Religion”. He is well known for his work on the relationship between science and religion, the creation–evolution controversy, and the demarcation problem within science. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Bergen, McMaster University, the University of New Brunswick and University College London.

 

Is $10 Million Enough Money for a Discovery of this Magnitude? 

Denis Noble, Perry Marshall and Kevin Ham at the Royal Society

 

The Mystery

Every cell reproduces itself from digital instructions, stored in DNA. DNA has the same features as modern digital devices: Layers of digital encoding, decoding and data storage; error detection, error correction and repair. Plus an ability to adapt that beggars the imagination.

How do living things repair and heal themselves, adapt to any situation you can imagine, and make choices? The genetic engineering capabilities of cells, which are discussed in the book Evolution 2.0, are not known to most people. But an answer suggests staggering implications for medicine, technology and the environment.

Cells re-engineer themselves, in real time, in hours... even minutes. The reason you have to finish your antibiotics is, germs can hyper-mutate at terrifying speed - then kill you with a vengeance.

How do cells “know” how to evolve? No human software does that. Give software millions of chances and billions of years and all it will do is crash. But life adapts relentlessly. How does it do this? What do cells know that we don’t?

And what about consciousness? In the human realm, only conscious beings create and modify code. Where does consciousness come from? Are cells self aware?

The Evolution 2.0 Prize focuses these issues down to one central question:

How do you get from chemicals to code? How do you get a code without designing one?

Perry Marshall and private equity investment group Natural Code LLC have issued a technology prize to find a person who can solve this.

What You Must Do to Win The Prize
You must arrange for a digital communication system to emerge or self-evolve without "cheating." The diagram below describes the system. Without explicitly designing the system, your experiment must generate an encoder that sends digital code to a decoder. Your system needs to transmit at least five bits of information. (In other words it has to be able to represent 32 states. The genetic code supports 64.) 

You have to be able to draw an encoding and decoding table and determine whether or not the data has been transmitted successfully. 

So, for example, an RNA based origin of life experiment will be considered successful if it contains an encoder, message and decoder as described above. To our knowledge, this has never been done.

Does life harness undiscovered laws of physics? Are there unknown emergent properties in nature?

With CRISPR gene editing technology and exponentially accelerating AI, these are questions of burning importance.

If we can unearth the underlying forces that create and propel life, we stand to reap enormous benefits in Artificial Intelligence, engineering, computer science, nutrition, aging, health, cancer research, disease treatment and prevention.

Watch the $10 million prize announcement at the Royal Society of Great Britain with Professor Denis Noble, Courtesy of Voices From Oxford

The Problem

Natural Code LLC is a Private Equity Investment group formed to identify a naturally occurring code. Our mission is to discover, develop and commercialize core principles of nature which give rise to information, consciousness and intelligence.

Natural Code LLC will pay the researcher $100,000 for the initial discovery of such a code. If the newly discovered process is defensibly patentable, we will secure the patent(s). Once patents are granted, we will pay the full prize amount to the discoverer in exchange for the rights. Our investment group will locate or develop commercial applications for the technology.

The discoverer will retain a percentage of ongoing ownership of the technology, sharing in future profits of the company, while benefitting from the extensive finance, marketing and technology experience of our investment group. Prize amount as of May 31, 2019 is $10 million. 

Code is absolutely necessary for replication and for life. Code is needed for cells to have instructions to build themselves; code is required for reproduction. Code that has the ability to re-write itself is essential for any kind of evolution to occur. 

We define code as a symbolic information passed between an encoder and a decoder (Claude Shannon 1948).

So… where did the information in DNA come from? This is one of the most important and valuable questions in the history of science. Currently, no one knows the answer.

A solution to this problem will become one of the most pivotal scientific and technical discoveries of the 21st century. The winner will receive substantial recognition.

The Challenge Breakthrough

To solve this problem is far more than an object of abstract religious or philosophical discussion. It would demonstrate a mechanism for producing novel, naturally forming information systems, thus opening new channels of scientific discovery.

Such a find would have sweeping implications for Artificial Intelligence research. This would provide a solution to the most perplexing transition currently faced by the Origin Of Life field, namely the origin of coded information.

How could the genetic code (or any coding system) come into being? This would represent a landmark discovery in the history of science and alter our fundamental understanding of the universe.

What You Can Do To Trigger A Breakthrough

  • Click "Follow" above to be notified of any status updates to the challenge.
  • Click "Accept Challenge" above to register for the challenge. You will be notified of any status updates and be able to create an entry to the challenge when it opens.
  • Click on the "Share" button or social media icons above to share this challenge with your friends, your family, or anyone you know who has a passion for discovery.
  • Leave a comment in our Comments Thread to join the conversation, ask questions or connect with other innovators.

ADDITIONAL RULES

Who can participate

The Challenge is open to all individuals and organizations who are legally allowed to participate, and who comply with all the terms of the Challenge as defined in the Challenge-Specific Agreement.

Selection of Winner

Based on the winning criteria, one prize will be awarded for a total of $100,000. If the discovery is defensibly patentable, the full amount of the prize will be awarded for a total of $10 million. In case of a tie, the winner will be selected at the discretion of the Judging Panel.

Registration and Submissions

All submissions must be received online, via the Challenge website, and all uploads can be in PDF format only. Submission reporting requirements are detailed in Judging.

Challenge Guidelines are subject to change. Registered competitors will receive notification when changes are made, however, we highly encourage you to visit the Challenge Site often to review updates.

**IMPORTANT NOTE** General essays presenting a ‘Theory Of Everything' and metaphysical constructions about the history of life, unfortunately, cannot be considered. Please do not submit materials of this kind. We are looking for entries that offer quantifiable technological progress.

~

Perry Marshall is endorsed in FORBES and INC Magazine and is one of the most expensive business consultants in the world. His Evolution 2.0 Challenge, announced at the Royal Society in London, is the world’s largest science research prize. His book Evolution 2.0 harness a communication engineer’s outsider’s perspective to reveal a century of unrecognized discoveries. 

His reinvention of the Pareto Principle is published in Harvard Business Review, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Labs uses his 80/20 Curve as a productivity tool. He wrote the world’s best-selling book on digital advertising, Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords and has consulted in over 300 industries. He has a degree in Electrical Engineering and lives with his family in Chicago.


Guidelines

**IMPORTANT NOTE** General essays presenting a ‘Theory Of Everything' and metaphysical constructions about the history of life, unfortunately, cannot be considered. Please do not submit materials of this kind. We are looking for entries that offer quantifiable technological progress. ALSO, physical experiments that achieve the objectives of this challenge could potentially be dangerous. Our judge, George Church, has cautioned us that such experiments must be carried out under highly controlled conditions. Public safety is of paramount importance to Evolution 2.0. 

Maximum length of proposal is 20 pages. (If you have much more data than that then submit a summary and we can review your full data at a later step.)

Challenge and Winning Criteria Defined

1. The Evolution 2.0 Challenge (the “Challenge”) is sponsored by Natural Code LLC, a Nevada limited liability company, also sometimes referred to in these Challenge Guidelines as “Sponsor.” Each entrant to this Challenge who submits a solution to the Challenge is referred to in these Guidelines as an “Innovator.”

2. The Evolution 2.0 Challenge is to discover a purely chemical process that will generate, transmit and receive a simple code--a process by which chemicals self-organize into a code without benefit of designer.

3. To be clear, what the Sponsor is looking for is a process where some chemicals, at some particular concentration of compounds, at the right temperature and pressure, etc. generate, transmit and receive a simple code, without any intelligent being or other life-form creating, transmitting or receiving the code.

4. A successful solution to this Challenge would mean that chemicals alone, without the benefit of minds or brains belonging to humans or the assistance of other living things, have built a simple communication system from scratch. In effect, the jar of chemicals on its own would be assigning meaning to symbols. The configuration of chemicals and not the human inventor would be making creative linguistic choices and creating a coded communication system. Basically, the Sponsor is looking for a formula or transformation process that turns matter into information—directly, with no intelligent being or other life-form making it happen.

5. The coded communication system submitted as a solution to this Challenge must be digital, not analog. So, for example, a system that merely transmits vibrations from one place to another or from one form of energy to another is not acceptable for this Challenge.

6. The system submitted as a solution to this Challenge must have the three integral components of communication, i.e., encoder, code, and decoder, functioning together.

Essential Components of a Communication System (after Claude Shannon, 1948):

All communication systems have an encoder, which produces a message, which is processed by a decoder. DNA transcription and translation matches the pattern in the above diagram. The Sponsor of this Challenge is seeking discovery and proof of a naturally occurring code, which also matches this pattern.

7. The message passed between the encoder and decoder components must be in a sequence of symbols forming characters of a finite alphabet. For this purpose, a “symbol” is a group of k bits considered as a unit. (A more complete definition of “symbol” in the context of this Challenge is set forth on page 340, numbered paragraph 8, of the book, Evolution 2.0). A “character” is a group of n symbols considered as a unit. (For a more complete definition of “character” in the context of this Challenge, see numbered paragraph 9 on page 340 of the book, Evolution 2.0). In the system, n+k must be equal to 5 or more, such that it is a 2-layer system which can represent at least 32 digital states.

8. The submitted solution must contain encoding and decoding tables filled out with their values arising from the submitted system or process.

9. It must be possible to determine objectively whether encoding and decoding have been carried out correctly. For any given system, a procedure should exist for determining whether input correctly corresponds to output. One analogy that demonstrates what the Sponsor means by this is the cause and effect relationship of a keyboard and a computer screen. Pressing an “A” on a computer keyboard should result in the letter “A” appearing on the screen; there is an observable correspondence between the two. The keyboard and screen analogy violates rule #10 below.  However, a successful entry will receive a set of (32 or more as in rule #7)  digital states on the input end (for example, a defined set of chemical concentrations, temperatures, pressures and light), convert them to an intermediate alphabet (or set of physical-chemical states) in its communication channel, then produce a corresponding set of states in its output.  Said entry will not violate rule #10.

10. Human beings may design the experiment that demonstrates the process, employing all manner of state-of-the-art laboratory equipment, creating ideal conditions, etc. However, the actual system submitted for demonstration of the solution to this Challenge may not be preprogrammed with any form of code whatsoever. Any system found to have preprogrammed code in it in any form will be disqualified from the competition.

11. The system submitted for demonstration of the solution to this Challenge may not be directly from any living organism, virus or similar entities. So, for example, phenomena such as bee waggles, dog barks, RNA strands derived from cells, mating calls of birds, etc. are not acceptable elements of a winning solution to this Challenge. RNA that forms spontaneously from simple sets of non-living chemicals (like glycolaldehyde) would be acceptable. Entrant must be prepared to show that their results are not contaminated by previously existing biological material. The submitted material will be examined for containing any pre-existing living entity, or derivatives of previously living entities, with exacting standards. Detection of such materials is an automatic disqualification.

12. The origin of the system submitted for solution to this Challenge must be documented to show that its process of origin can be observed in nature and/or duplicated in a real-world laboratory according to the scientific method.

Partial Solutions to the Problem

Winning of the prize is only assured for the first solver who meets all points of the specification. The specification here outlines the simplest known configuration that constitutes a proper communication system, based on Claude Shannon’s seminal paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (Shannon, 1948). All living organisms rely on this system, which is both a communication system and a Turing machine (Yockey, 2005).

If you have a solution which meets a significant fraction of this specification, the judges and backers of Evolution 2.0 consider such discoveries potentially valuable.

The backers of this prize have extensive business, finance, marketing, distribution, technology and product development expertise, as well as access to capital. Any solution indicating commercial potential is subject to discussion and we are interested in exploring commercial applications of your work. If your solution constitutes significant progress towards the Origin Of Information problem, you should submit your solution. Efforts that do not solve significant portions of the problem will be rejected.

The ultimate winner will need to:

-Provide data showing they have met all portions of the specification
-Conduct a live demonstration of the operation of said system
-Have their work verified by at least three independent judges appointed by Evolution 2.0

Proposal and Data Requirements

13. The merit of Innovator’s submission will be assessed based first on the content of the write up that Innovator submits. The write-up of the proposed solution should be thorough, specific, clear, and easy to read. The Judges will evaluate the content of the write-ups and will invite various Innovators to demonstrate their solutions under laboratory conditions in the presence of the Judges.

14. The write-up should include descriptions of processes, tools, and techniques utilized in the solution. Be sure to go into sufficient detail, especially in areas there your approach may deviate from conventional or traditional methods.

15. Proposals must be uploaded as a single unlocked PDF document, 20 MB maximum. Embedded hyperlinks to external content, such as videos or animations (maximum two minutes duration recommended) or anything else that might help the Judges come to a decision on a winning idea or concept, are allowed. However, there is no guarantee that the Judges will view that external content, so the proposal document itself must stand on its own.

Prizes to be Awarded

Challenge MilestonePrize to be Awarded
Sponsor awards initial prize to Winning Innovator (chosen by Judges)$100,000.00 USD
Winning Innovator who has assigned patent rights in the Technology to Sponsor obtains a Viable Patent on the Technology from the United States Patent and Trademark Office$10 million USD (as provided in Challenge Guidelines) and an equity interest in Sponsor

16. The first person to submit and successfully demonstrate such a process to the satisfaction of the Challenge Judges will receive from the Sponsor a cash prize of One Hundred Thousand Dollars ($100,000.00) USD. Only one $100,000 Prize will be awarded, and that to the first Innovator in this challenge who successfully demonstrates to the satisfaction of the Judges of this Challenge that Innovator has found a solution to this Challenge that meets all the criteria specified in these Challenge Guidelines. The demonstration of the process must be made at a location in the continental United States of America. All costs associated with this demonstration, except for travel expenses and fees for the Challenge Judges, must be borne by Innovator.

17. If the prize-winning process is also patentable, the “Winning Innovator” (the Innovator who has won the $100,000 Prize) is also eligible to receive the balance of the Prize Fund, provided the Winning Innovator complies with all of the rules and guidelines detailed below and the Innovator’s chemical process proves to be “Viably Patentable” (as that term is defined in these Guidelines). When the patent has been granted, Sponsor’s investors are legally bound to fund a Prize Fund of at least $10 million USD. Sponsor anticipates that it will take a minimum of one year, perhaps longer, to obtain this patent, from the time that the initial $100,000 Prize is awarded. If a Viable Patent is granted on the winning process by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and the Winning Innovator has complied with all the Guidelines detailed below, the Winning Innovator will receive the balance of the Prize Fund, net of the $100,000 prize money already awarded to the Winning Innovator, the balance to be paid when the patent is granted on the winning process.

18. If Innovator intends to qualify ultimately for the award of the entire Prize Fund and not just the basic $100,000 Prize, Innovator’s initial submission to the Challenge must be made in a confidential manner and meet the disclosure criteria of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Violation of those criteria voids any agreement made between Innovator and Sponsor.

19. Definition of “Viably Patentable”: The invention is valuable enough and sufficiently protectable by a patent (granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office) for an investment in the development of this invention to pay for itself before the patent expires. Such a patent granted which appears to be commercially viable in Sponsor’s sole opinion is referred to in these Rules as a “Viable Patent.” If the patent yields $10 million dollars in aggregate, via sales, licensing or contractual deals to any set of people involved in the patent or licensing by the time of the award, then that will be considered unambiguous, and not require an opinion as to whether it meets the definition of a “Viable Patent” in these Rules.

20. The decision of whether the invention is Viably Patentable is in the sole discretion of Sponsor (except as specified in Rule 20). Innovator agrees to make every effort to work with Sponsor and identify a Viably Patentable configuration, if Innovator wins the $100,000 Prize and chooses also to pursue the award of the balance of the Prize Fund. 

21. By submitting an entry to this Challenge, every Innovator gives Natural Code LLC the right of first refusal to buy the patent rights to the technology, process and system (the “Technology”) which forms the Innovator’s solution to this Challenge, regardless of Innovator’s pursuit of the balance of the Prize Fund beyond the award of the $100,000 Prize. This right of first refusal provision will be part of the Non-disclosure Agreement that Innovator must sign and will take the form of an option granted to Sponsor by Innovator to purchase the patent rights to the Technology at the same price and terms offered in writing to Innovator by a bona fide purchaser unrelated to Innovator. If Natural Code LLC declines to exercise its right to purchase the patent rights to the Technology, the Innovator is released to pursue other buyers.

22. Natural Code LLC agrees to cover all patent fees if the Winning Innovator agrees to sign over all patent rights in the Invention to Natural Code LLC and a Viable Patent is obtained from the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

23. If the Winning Innovator signs over all patent rights in the Invention to Natural Code LLC and a Viable Patent is granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on the process the Winning Innovator submits to solve the Challenge, the Winning Innovator will get the balance of the Prize Fund, net of the $100,000 Prize already paid to the Winning Innovator and will also receive an equity interest in Natural Code LLC or in the business entity created by Natural Code LLC to hold the patent rights on the Technology, as that term is defined in these Guidelines.

24. Both the Winning Innovator and Sponsor will agree in writing to work together, believing in good faith that the discovery of this invention is scientifically, technologically and commercially very valuable. A Non-disparagement clause will be included in the document conveying Winning Innovator’s patent rights to Sponsor.

25. The investing members of Natural Code LLC are legally bound to fund a Prize Fund of at least $10 million USD.

Judges

26. The Innovators’ submissions of solutions to this Challenge will be screened initially as for viability by certain officers or members of Sponsor. As potentially winning solutions are received, Sponsor will engage a minimum of three (3) judges (“Judges”) with appropriate scientific background and credentials to evaluate further the submissions to this Challenge which passed the initial screening. These judges will evaluate those submissions and will determine whether any of these Innovators should be invited to demonstrate their solution in the presence of the Judges under laboratory conditions.

27. The Judges’ decisions, including as to whether any particular solution merits the $100,000 Prize, are final and binding. Sponsor reserves the right in its sole discretion to disqualify at any time any entry that it determines does not comply with the criteria stated on this webpage or with these official Challenge Guidelines generally.

28. Natural Code LLC will post non-qualifying submissions of all entrants who grant permission to do so. Several non-qualifying submissions have been posted and can be viewed at www.evo2.org/submissions.

Communication

29. English is the official language for submissions, proposals, presentations, and all communications.

30. Applicants may be contacted for follow-up information by Sponsor; telephone or Skype interviews may be requested.

Eligibility – Who May Submit Entries

31. The Challenge is open to all individuals or groups of individuals who are over the age of majority in their province, state, territory or country of residence. It excludes employees representatives, relatives, dealers and agents of Natural Code LLC and/or HeroX (and their respective affiliates).

32. You do not need to be an engineer or scientist to enter this Challenge. Anyone from any academic field or discipline may enter the Challenge.

33. Any individual, business entity or other organization may submit their own solutions to the Challenge. However, any solution so submitted must be the original discovery of the Innovator and not a mere reporting of someone else’s discovery.

34. Sponsor reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to disqualify any Innovator who is (i) found to be tampering with the entry process or with the operation and administration of the Challenge; (ii) acting in an unsportsmanlike or disruptive manner, or with the intent to disrupt or undermine the legitimate operation of the Challenge; (iii) or in violation of the Challenge Guidelines at any point. 

35. Automated entries or votes sent via bots will be disqualified. Automated and/or repetitive electronic submissions (including but not limited to entries made using any script, macro, bot or contest service) will be automatically disqualified and transmissions from these or related accounts may be blocked. Sponsor reserves the right to seek damages and other remedies from any such Innovator to the fullest extent permitted by law, including but not limited to criminal prosecution.

36. Innovators must comply with these Challenge Guidelines. Innovators will be deemed to have received, understood and agreed to these Challenge Guidelines through their participation in this Challenge, as evidenced by their submitting a solution to the Challenge.

37. No purchase or payment of any kind is necessary to enter or win the competition.

38. Each Innovator must sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement with Sponsor before that Innovator’s initial submission is accepted for review by the Judges.

39. Innovator is responsible for all state, Federal and local income and other taxes, etc. which may be levied against Innovator as a result of winning any of the prizes offered in this Challenge.

40. Innovator is responsible for all expenses related to the initial development of the invention into a demonstrable solution to this Challenge. In other words, all of the costs associated with developing, preparing, demonstrating and submitting a solution to this Challenge will be borne by the Innovator, including Innovator’s transportation and travel expenses if asked by the Judges to demonstrate Innovator’s solution.

Governing Law

41. The Challenge is subject to applicable Federal, state and municipal laws and regulations and is void where prohibited by law. All issues and questions concerning the construction, validity, interpretation and enforceability of these Challenge Guidelines or the rights and obligations as between the Innovator and Sponsor in connection with the Challenge shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Illinois and the laws of the United States of America as applicable, including procedural provisions, without giving effect to any choice of law or conflict of law rules or provisions that would cause the application of any other jurisdiction’s laws.

42. The decisions of Sponsor and the Judges of this Challenge with respect to all aspects of the Challenge are final and binding.

Licensing and Copyright

43. Any submission made in connection with this Challenge must be an original work created by the Innovator or the Innovator team members, and the Innovators must have all necessary rights in and to the submission.

44. The submission must not infringe upon or violate any laws or any third party rights, including, but not limited to, copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, privacy, publicity or confidentiality rights or other proprietary or contractual rights and must not include material that is libelous, defamatory, or tortious.

45. Innovators must obtain, and make available to Natural Code LLC upon its request, all necessary permissions, licenses, releases, waivers of moral rights and other approvals from third parties necessary for Natural Code LLC to use and exploit the submission, in whole or in part, including without limitation, to reproduce, make derivatives, edit, modify, translate, distribute, transmit, publish, license and broadcast the submission and the results of Innovator’s demonstration worldwide, by any means.

46. To participate in the Challenge, Innovators must agree to these terms, as amended from time to time during the time period of the Challenge.

47. Applications and submissions will be retained by Sponsor; information and data will be accessed only by Sponsor and its competition partners and not sold or shared.

Disclaimers

48. The specifications posted at http://www.naturalcode.org regarding the competition to provide the winning invention or solution to this Challenge, as well as similar text published in the book Evolution 2.0 (by Perry Marshall), have been expanded and clarified by these Challenge Guidelines.  Therefore if there are any contradictions among these sets of published rules and guidelines, the provisions in these Guidelines, as may be later amended, shall govern.

49. These Challenge Guidelines are subject to change. Registered Innovators will receive notification when changes are made. However, Innovators are encouraged to visit the Challenge Site often to review updates.

50. Sponsor is not responsible or liable for late, lost, incomplete, illegible, misdirected, stolen, delayed, damaged or destroyed entries, notifications, or replies; nor for lost, interrupted, inaccessible or unavailable networks, servers, Internet Service Providers, websites or other connection, related to the Challenge; nor for errors of any kind, including but not limited to human, electronic, mechanical and/or technical in nature; nor for failure or technical malfunction of any telephone network or lines, computer and online systems, servers, computer equipment, software, e-mail, players, or browsers on account of technical problems or traffic congestion on the Internet, any websites related to the Challenge, including without limitation the Challenge Webpage, or any combination thereof or otherwise; nor for any injury or damage to Innovator, Innovator’s computer, or any other person’s computer related to or resulting from participating in or downloading material in connection with the Challenge; nor for incorrect or inaccurate information; nor for weather conditions, event cancellations, delay or rescheduling or other factors beyond the Sponsor’s control.

51. CAUTION: ANY ATTEMPT TO UNDERMINE THE LEGITIMATE OPERATION OF THIS CHALLENGE MAY BE A VIOLATION OF CRIMINAL AND CIVIL LAWS AND SHOULD AN ATTEMPT BE MADE, NATURAL CODE LLC RESERVES THE RIGHT TO SEEK DAMAGES OR OTHER REMEDIES FROM ANY SUCH PERSON(S) RESPONSIBLE TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW.

Timeline
Updates25

Challenge Updates

83-Year-Old Heart Scientist Rocks the Foundations of Evolution

Oct. 7, 2020, 9 a.m. PDT by Evolution 2.0 Prize

Denis Noble is the guy who figured out the cardiac rhythm which made pacemakers possible. He was the first person to model a human organ on a computer - in 1960. 

He did it on borrowed computer time at University College London at 2am using punch cards, after pedaling his bicycle through the dark streets of the city.

If you have a friend or relative with a pacemaker, they owe their life to Denis. He received a Commander of the British Empire medal from Queen Elizabeth. He’s a Fellow of the Royal Society and has a list of honors as long as your arm. He is surely one of the 100 most respected scientists in the UK.

Based purely on heart research, he concluded evolutionary biology had major, fundamental, foundational problems. (Picture building a 4-story house on swampland that floods twice a year). 

This is because when Denis “knocked out” genes that regulate heart rhythms, what happened was entirely different than what “selfish gene” evolutionary theories predicted would happen.

As chemist Steve Benner likes to say, “If the airplane crashes, your theory is wrong.”

Denis concluded that the Modern Synthesis had literally gotten cause and effect backwards. By ignoring major aspects of systems biology, evolutionary biologists had shot themselves in the foot two ways: 

First, they had exposed the field to relentless criticisms from people who doubt evolution itself.

Second, medical and disease implications of evolutionary theory were being misunderstood and mis-categorized. This has been a very expensive mistake. Not just financially but in terms of lives.

Denis is former president of the International Union of Physiological Sciences. At their international congress in 2013, he de-constructed the Modern Synthesis and proposed a path for re-inventing evolution.

Denis will be laying fresh foundations for evolutionary biology - and therefore cancer as well - during this remarkable 3-day online Cancer & Evolution Symposium:

www.cancerevolution.org 


What does Cancer have to do with Evolution???

Oct. 5, 2020, 9:40 a.m. PDT by Evolution 2.0 Prize

How many of your favorite people on Earth have you lost to cancer?

My list is long and growing. My dad died at age 44. Cancer took out my grandpa, numerous aunts and uncles, and my dear friend Tom Hoobyar, the closest person I had to a dad in my adult life. I’ve got two childhood friends who are my age battling it right now.

In my book Evolution 2.0, I said: "Cancer is evolution run amok, and until we get evolution right we’re never gonna beat cancer."

A friend put me in touch with a scientist named Henry Heng because of my book. Henry is a cancer researcher in Detroit. 

Long before I wrote anything about cancer, Henry had reached the conclusion, simply based on his own cancer research, that the conventional theory of evolution was unworkable.

He saw that cancer evolves at breathtaking speed – especially once you start trying as hard as you can to kill it.

This is why chemotherapy is so often a death sentence.

Standard evolutionary theory couldn’t account for any of this. It explained “survival of the fittest” but not “arrival of the fittest” – which, if you think about it, is THE question.

The old model did a poor job of explaining the Cambrian explosion, the proliferation of species that happened 540 million years ago. Ken Pienta calls tumor metastasis “The Cancer Cambrian” because the two behave exactly the same way.

Henry felt we should be doing a much better job of answering these questions. He insisted that, if we found answers… we would also beat cancer.

And maybe our loved ones would stop dying early.

Major evolutionary systems like epigenetics – from the “Swiss Army Knife” I describe in my book – were either ignored or simply “tacked on” to the old theory. Like someone slapped giant race car tires on the rear axle of a rusty 1991 Ford Escort and called it a race car.

Evolutionary theory had to be stripped down to the engine blocks and rebuilt from the ground up. Because so far as Henry could tell, these systems were the very engine of high-speed cancer evolution.

Henry offered a superior model. He wrote a book in 2011. His manuscript was well on its way to getting published by a major academic publisher.

But one of their traditional peer reviewers threw a fit.

Henry’s book got canned.

Fast forward to 2019 and his book gets rehashed, rewritten, re-released under the title Genome Chaos. It explores the overlooked details of how cancer cells evolve. 

Then Henry got in touch with James Shapiro, a well-known geneticist from the University of Chicago. Shapiro had published a book with a similar perspective on evolutionary change in 2011 with the title Evolution: A View from the 21st Century.

Shapiro had come to nearly identical conclusions as Henry, before Henry did, but from a completely different vantage point. As Shapiro began comparing notes with Henry, he realized:

“Most people think of evolutionary biology as (hopefully) providing lessons to cancer biologists. But cancer may well have more to teach us about evolution than traditional evolutionary studies!”

The lessons may also arrive much faster. Because a handful of cancer cells can explode into 1000+ species in a matter of weeks. Cancer is “time compression” for an evolutionary biologist.

Evolution is the key to cancer… and cancer is the key to evolution.

This is why I’ve teamed up with a group of world class scientists including Henry Heng, James Shapiro, Denis Noble, Azra Raza and Bruker CEO, Frank Laukien. We are bringing the best cancer renegades together with the best “new school” evolution researchers. 

We’re organizing the first conference in history to specifically focus on high-speed mechanisms of biological evolution as they relate to cancer biology and therapies.

This is an interdisciplinary conference bringing together scientists from a dozen fields, from Harvard, Yale, MIT, Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and MD Anderson. We are re-thinking cancer biology at a high level.

The Zoom conference takes place October 14-16. Not only will we provide 3 half-days of intensive discussion and discovery, many of the speakers will be hosting live Q&A sessions in subsequent weeks.

Register here:

www.CancerEvolution.org


$10 Million Prize Announcement at the British Royal Society

July 17, 2019, 1:27 p.m. PDT by Evolution 2.0 Prize

 

Evolution 2.0 Prize Announcement at the Royal Society, London UK 31 May 2019

 

Paul Flather, Oxford University:  Welcome everybody and good morning. This is a very special occasion. I have the simple job, which is simply to welcome you and to introduce our main speakers, who will have the much more complicated task of explaining why we think this is a special moment. 

 

We do think it’s a special moment because there is at the moment a fierce debate about evolutionary theory, and we think that we are in the middle of a fairly significant and radical change, so that the theories that were so brilliantly evoked by Charles Darwin and then his various successors, loosely termed neo-Darwinians, is now under challenge again.

 

I hope that our guests this morning will be able to explain a little bit about how this works and how exciting this is for our future thinking about how our bodies work; and maybe how thinking and machines and future inventions may be constructed. As I say, this is in a sense complicated, but complicated in an interesting way.

 

We can only marvel, as we understand more and more about ourselves, how amazingly our bodies have this power to engineer change in a way that’s way beyond our current capacities for understanding.

 

Even though people tend to marvel so much about artificial intelligence, we’re pretty convinced that cells are far and away ahead of the game.

 

The really exciting thing is to see how we can further our knowledge of the way cells can change, and their direction. It’s not a simple linear direction. It’s much more randomized, but nevertheless it’s randomized with a purpose. So I do think this is an exciting moment, and thank you all for joining us this morning.

 

My job now is to introduce our first speaker, Professor Denis Noble, who’s a scientist extraordinaire. We regard him very much as our dear friendly polymath. He’s a physiologist, he’s a biologist, he’s a philosopher, and he’s a linguist.

 

He’s also an activist. I personally got to know him best when he started a campaign to save investment and research in science - the famous Save British Science campaign in the 1980’s.

 

He first came to prominence with his work inventing a model of the human heart, which eventually led to the introduction and development of pacemakers, which we’re all familiar with.

 

He’s very much involved in these current debates around the idea of systems biology, and he’s expressed his ideas in two wonderful books, very easily readable, very accessible – The Music of Life and more recently Dance to the Tune of Life.

 

Denis, would you like to explain a little bit more about the current debates and what’s happening now, and the background to this prize which we’re going to be announcing shortly?

 

Denis Noble, Oxford University:  Yes, thank you, Paul, for that. I’ll be fairly brief. It seems to me that, yes, there is a lot of discussion now about the fundamentals of biology. I was involved just three years ago in helping to organize one of the rare joint meetings between the Royal Society and the British Academy, which occurred in 2016 and has been published in the Royal Society’s journal, Interface Focus.

 

The articles in that issue, which are under the heading of “New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives,” indicate what is going on. It was an absolutely fascinating meeting.

 

Incidentally, the huge hall here was completely full. In fact, there was a huge waiting list for people to come to the meeting.

 

One of the people who was present was Perry Marshall, and I’ll come onto Perry in just a moment, and the prize.

 

The next significant development for me was meeting up with a remarkable bacteriologist at the University of Chicago, James Shapiro, who wrote this book, Evolution: A View from the 21st Century. James Shapiro worked for a period in the last century with Barbara McClintock.

 

Some of you will know that her major discovery was what we sometimes call “jumping genes,” the ability she found in chromosomes in corn for chunks of the genome to move from one part of the genome to another. She wouldn’t have called it the genome in those days. It wasn’t even known that it was DNA. It was the basis of the genetic material.

 

She received a Nobel Prize for her discovery of what we would now call mobile genetic elements in 1983, at the age of about 81.

 

Jim’s book explains how that led in turn to him questioning some of the fundamentals of the way in which DNA is interpreted. Nobody, incidentally and certainly not in this room, is challenging the importance of DNA, the importance of there being a database there that enables cells to pass on from one generation to another the valuable information that is in DNA.

 

I think what is common between certainly some of us is that DNA is more controlled than it is controlling. That’s the way I would put it, and that’s exactly what Barbara McClintock said too in her Nobel Prize lecture, which is published in Science. She said the genome is an organ of the cell, which I think gets the idea of causation the right way around.

 

That leads me to Perry. Perry, you’re extraordinary. You’re a business man. You have a reputation for marketing. You have bestsellers in books like 80/20 Sales and Marketing, The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords, and Industrial Ethernet. But you end up also publishing a book which has a title not very different from James Shapiro’s, Evolution 2.0, where he has it as A View from the 21st Century.

 

I read this book very, very carefully because I found it initially a bit puzzling how somebody like you with your background, admittedly with technological knowledge – you started off as an engineer – but still I was intrigued to know to what extent were you getting any of it right.

 

And Perry does, more or less, because what he writes is not very different in terms of perspective from what I write in my own books.

 

When Perry approached me with the news that he had a number of investors willing to put up a major prize, I was intrigued.

 

Why should there be a prize?

 

As I see it, we’re adding various processes to the story of evolutionary biology, particularly the control by epigenetic factors and the fact that material can go down via microsomes to the germ line and so on.

 

But it leaves two things, it seems to me, then completely unexplained. How did life get going in the first place and what is the origin of the genetic code?  I would regard those as the two very, very big questions for science today.

 

On how life got going in the first place, there are people trying very hard – Lee Cronin is a good example in Glasgow – to start with simple chemistry in a dish to find out how it could be that proteins might have evolved from simple structures to very much more complicated structures.

 

But we’re still a long, long way away from understanding how all of that could come together in a cell, and then eventually develop a store which is DNA.

 

I put it that way because I can’t see personally how DNA could have been there at the beginning. After all, DNA requires a cell to enable it to reproduce. It requires the cell also, incidentally, to correct errors in that reproduction replication process.

 

That then leads to the other big question. As DNA evolved, where did the specific code – what these three nucleotides mean, if that’s the right word, for this particular amino acid – where does that come from? Because with triplet code there could be many possible ways in which you could arrange that.

 

Did it happen by the chance chemistry, being that it went one way rather than another? In which case there’s no explanation at all. Or is there some good chemical reason why that code should be as it is rather than anything else? That would be important to question, like if we find life on Mars or one of the moons of Jupiter or wherever we might eventually find it in the solar system, will we find the code is the same?

 

Will we find there’s a code at all? Or could it be you’ve got organisms that are essentially cells without DNA? That’s not impossible, incidentally.

 

I agree with you, Perry, that it’s the biggest challenge which, at the moment, we could say biology faces. I say the biggest because you might think the origin of life is even bigger, and in a sense it is, but I think this just conceivably could yield to the way in which the chemistry process enabled it to happen in the first place. I just somehow think there has to be a reason why it is as it is.

 

So when you asked me whether I’d be on the judging panel for this, I tell you my first reaction was that I don’t know enough. That’s what I said. I’m not sure whether George Church at Harvard said the same. I hope not.

 

Perry Marshall:  No, he didn’t say that.

 

Denis:  Good. And Michael Ruse at Florida State, who’s a philosopher – and incidentally, just to reassure those who might wonder whether there are any sort of metaphysical questions involved here, he’s a card-carrying atheist/agnostic, so at least we get that one on the table. We are a funny old mix.

 

Anyway, I think the best thing now, Perry, is you tell us why you decided to launch the prize. Why is it as big as it is, and where does all the funding come from? There’s a question. Over to you, and I’m sure you’ll get even more difficult questions from around the table.

 

Perry:  Good morning. Thank you. It’s an honor to be here at the Royal Society. We’re here doubling the prize amount, and it’s the first significant activity I’ve had here in Europe discussing this. In the first 10 minutes I’m just going to give you the background and then we’ll do Q&A after that. And I’ll have a little word from Kevin Ham.

 

This story starts literally in this little Chinese bus in western China, where I went to visit my brother in 2004. My brother was an English teacher who was also working part-time as a missionary in China, and we had been having discussions back and forth because he was increasingly doubting the whole religious thing writ large.

 

Emails were going back and forth and we were discussing it, and when I got there I realized: he’s thrown this whole thing out the window.  We’re pastor’s kids so this is a bit of a shock to my system, and a shock to the family dynamic, shall we say.

 

So I was feeling a little uncomfortable and we got into this argument. I would say that I retreated to my comfort zone, which is engineering, because I’m an electrical engineer. I say, “Bryan, look at the hand at the end of your arm. This is a nice piece of engineering! You don’t think this is a collection of random accidents, do you?” and he goes, “Hold on!” and he just came right back at me with the standard, “Perry, all you need is random copying errors of DNA and natural selection and millions of years and you’ll get a hand and you don’t need any engineering.”

 

I didn’t really have a problem with evolution per se, but I’d never quite heard it phrased quite that way. I’d always looked at my hand and said, “There’s something very, very intentional going on here,” and he was challenging that.

 

In a few seconds inside my own head I thought:

 

“Okay, I already know without pushing this argument any further that there’s a whole bunch of biologists who would agree with him and not agree with me. And I know from what I’ve done so far in my career and in school that there’s a lot of things in science that are very counter-intuitive.

 

“You know what? I don’t know.”

 

I said to myself, “Perry, why don’t you stop arguing with your brother right now,” and it wasn’t helping anyway, if you know what I mean. We’re trying to have a pleasant visit.

 

So I made a decision that when I get home I’m going to get to the bottom of this. He had already been dragging me with him against my will anyway, and I already had a whole cloud of religious and philosophical questions.

 

I said, “You know what? I’m an engineer. I know how to read a scientific paper. I’m scientifically literate. I’m going to go home and I’m going to let science make this decision for me. My belief system could completely change, and that’s terrifying, but you know what? Here we go,” and I just leaped into the void.

 

That’s how this started. What’s about to follow is a story of transforming what started as a philosophical and religious question and turning it into an engineering question and then eventually turning it into a prize.

 

I went home and I started obsessively reading and buying books. I’m an entrepreneur and, if you know entrepreneurs, they’re all obsessive/compulsive kind of people. Probably scientists are too, I’d imagine. I started buying books and going to websites and voraciously digesting things from all parts of the spectrum, everything I could get my hands on, and here’s what I discovered.

 

For a while I floundered helplessly. I was just inundated with information and I couldn’t make sense of it and I couldn’t figure out, “What’s the starting point with this? Which facts do you put first and which facts do you put second?”

 

One day I was trying to understand DNA, genetic mutations and genetic code, and I suddenly had this flash of recognition, and here’s what it was.

 

I had written this book here, Industrial Ethernet, for a major society of process control engineers.

 

If any of you have trouble sleeping tonight, this may help, but it actually turned out to be fascinating how all the 1’s and 0’s go on a wire and how ingenious all of it is. I was studying DNA and mutations and all of that, and suddenly I was like, “Wait a minute! I’ve seen all of this before. I know what this is!”

 

The diagram on the screen shows the dissection of an Ethernet packet on the top, and on the bottom transcription and translation of DNA, and you can see graphically how similar they are.  Mathematically they’re identical. It’s encoding and decoding. It is a communication system. There’s an encoder, a message, and a decoder.

 

All the sudden, I had all of these familiar things that I could attach all of this to. I’m like, “Okay, I can start with this. I understand genetics. Genetics is digital communication. I understand digital communication because I wrote an Ethernet book.”

 

Suddenly a whole bunch of suspicions also came along, which took two or three years to later confirm, but it all just fell in place.

 

The ABC’s of a communication system is that you have an input that goes into an encoder. It gets turned into a message and then it gets decoded.

 

I send you a text message, it gets encoded on my phone, it gets turned into 1’s and 0’s, and it comes into your phone through Wi-Fi or what have you, and you read the message.

 

If what was put in corresponds properly to what came out, then communication has successfully happened.

 

On the left here is part of an ASCII table. 1000001 is a capital A, 1000010 is a capital B. In DNA, AAA is lysine and GGG is glycine. If you have an encoder, a message, and a decoder and a table, you have a communication system, and that’s exactly what’s in every biology book known to man.

 

As I started to explore this, I came to this realization that there’s a million codes, 999,999 are designed, and then there’s one that we don’t know where it came from, and it’s DNA.

 

Denis and I talked on the phone after the Royal Society meeting 2-1/2 years ago and I said to Denis, “Ten years ago when I was in the beginning of this, you could have pegged me as a card-carrying Intelligent Design guy,” based on exactly what I just told you.

 

To an engineer this looks totally designed. But there were a couple of things that caused me to shift my position to be very much in concert with what Denis and people like James Shapiro and others espouse. Maybe we’ll get into that later, it’s up to you, but I got very fascinated with evolution itself.

 

When I discovered Barbara McClintock, my inner geek just went crazy because she discovered that corn plants cut, splice, edit, and re-engineer their own DNA in real-time. To an engineer who was tempted to be a creationist, I suddenly saw this, and a whole universe opened up.

 

I’m like, “Oh, this is way, way more interesting than anything I’ve been told so far.” This was probably in 2006 that I discovered Barbara McClintock, yet it had taken me two years of reading and researching before I actually found it.

 

I’m asking, “Why isn’t this front page news?” so I became immensely fascinated with evolution itself. This is the greatest engineering problem ever, and neither of the camps, so to speak, are doing it justice.

 

Then you get to the origin of life and the origin of code, and it would be easy to just abdicate to a divine explanation. But I suspect that there are some principles here that science has not figured out. I still believe in God, but I don’t like the “God of the gaps” arguments. They routinely fail and we’re trying to get past this.

 

Here’s how the prize works. If you can produce a self-organizing digital communication system, we’ll write you a check for $100,000 and there are no other strings attached. The first person that shows up who’s done this gets a check.

 

But if your process is patentable, then Natural Code LLC will fund the patent and pay you $10 million for the rights for it; and partner you into the company so that you participate in the profits as it grows, because I think this would be extremely valuable intellectual property.

 

I think that origin of life, evolution itself, AI, and maybe consciousness are really the same single problem, not four problems.

 

And I think an answer to this question of “How do you get from chemicals to code?” would unlock the door to all those problems. That’s what I suspect. I don’t know that that’s true, but that’s what I suspect.

 

Why a prize?

 

Information is the central question in biology. Where does the information come from? How is the information processed? How is information from one species to the next in an evolutionary process actually generated?

 

Computer programs don’t rewrite themselves, but cells do. DOS did not evolve into Windows by itself, but bugs evolve into superbugs in 30 minutes. So there’s something that people in the software world don’t understand at all.

 

Alexa and Siri understand every word you say but they have no idea what you mean. Your dog doesn’t understand a single word you say, yet your dog knows what you mean.

 

There’s a fundamental difference between biology and human technology, and I think this would bridge that gap. A solution to this will revolutionize technology and medicine, for reasons that should be obvious, but we can talk about it in the Q&A.

 

Here is one of the reasons I wanted to have this meeting: Last summer I had a long conversation at Harvard with George Church. He’s the godfather of modern genetics, you could say. We talked about the risks and the dangers of gene editing and CRISPR. We can edit DNA as easily as inserting a picture into a blog post. You can buy a gene editing kit on Amazon for $169 USD with free shipping.

 

I think that the information question in biology has not been treated seriously enough. There’s not enough journals about it. There’s not enough books about it. Most people are dealing with this as a chemistry problem. I think it’s an information problem.

 

If we don’t take this information problem seriously enough, I think we’re going to make some very big mistakes and we won’t be able to put the toothpaste back in the tube. I hope we can talk about that today.

 

The judges are:

 

George Church from Harvard and MIT. Everyone in genetics knows who he is. He’s incredibly prolific with 143 patent apps. He’s a fascinating guy.

 

Denis Noble from Oxford, the first to come on board. He needs no introduction here.

 

Michael Ruse from Florida State University. The president of HeroX, who hosts our prize, said, “Perry, you’re a Christian and people are automatically going to think this is some kind of Intelligent Design publicity stunt. Can you get an atheist on your panel?” and I said, “Let me see what I can do,” so we got Michael Ruse.

 

I love Michael. He’s a hilarious guy. He’s also very friendly. He’s not combative. He’s been involved in many debates and discussions about science and religion. He’s been in some of the creation trials as an expert witness in the United States. You all know how different the United States landscape is with this question than Europe, so he came on board.

 

So I have these judges, and at NaturalCode.org we have the whole prize description. It redirects to the HeroX website. We have a ten-million-dollar prize, and I think we need a substantial sum of money to pinpoint the importance of this question.

 

Paul Flather:  Thank you very much, Perry. So just to reiterate, what we’re announcing today is that the prize is now $10 million USD, and that’s completely new and a huge increase from previous thinking about it. It’s the first time, Perry, that you’ve talked about this prize beyond America, so this is in a sense trying to turn the prize into a global prize.

 

The third key element is that you’ve realized that this prize goes beyond chemistry and biology and engineering. It’s really about information, which is central to the way that we operate in society in terms of our body, so these are the major announcements this morning in the Royal Society in this very special conference room.

 

Perry:  I believe this is the most fundamental question in science that can be precisely defined.

 

Paul:  Thank you very much. We’re going to open it up to questions, but before I do we’re going to bring in a close colleague of yours, Kevin Ham, who’s kindly joined us and flown in this morning, who wants to add his perspective on this.

 

Kevin Ham:  Thank you, Dr. Flather. I’m privileged to be here at the Royal Society. My name is Kevin Ham and I’m from Vancouver, Canada. I flew in for this occasion and the announcement of the $10 million prize. I’m one of the investors and I just wanted to give you the background story of how I came into it, which leads me to my childhood.

 

When I was 14 I was skating around on an ice rink. By suppertime I could barely bring my spoon to my mouth. By dinnertime I could barely walk. I ended up in a children’s hospital, admitted for an autoimmune disease.

 

While I lay in bed for the next few weeks I wondered if I was going to live, and if I did I decided I was going to be a doctor, so that was kind of like my mission in life.

 

At 16 I started studying and reading the Bible, and I came to believe there was a God. I did a Bachelor of Science in biochemistry, and then I got into med school, finished med school, and became a family doctor at age 30. While I was in my medical residency I saw 40 patients a day, 10 minutes per patient, and I just thought it was like a factory so I thought, “You know what? I don’t want to do this like a business.”

 

I knew that the internet was going to be a revolutionary medium, greater than any media revolution that we’ve experienced in history, so I decided to create an internet business. So I did that and it started making more money in one month than I did the whole year in residency, so I thought I’d do that for about six more months and then go back to medicine. 

 

But I haven’t gone back to medicine. I’m still doing business.

 

I met Perry in 2016, about three years ago. We were having dinner and I wanted to meet him because of his 80/20 book. His book talked about 80/20 being fractal, so there was an 80/20 inside of 80/20 and that fascinated me. It totally changed the way I thought about business, about life, about everything actually.

 

We were having dinner and then he started telling me about this other book that he had written, Evolution 2.0, and that fascinated me.

 

After our 5-hour dinner I put my hand out and I said, “I’m in. I want to be involved in this prize.” He told me he was trying to get investors at $1 million in, so I said I’m in.

 

I was the fifth investor, and then we started having these annual meetings. We had our first one in Hawaii, our second one in Napa Valley, and our third one is going to be in Iceland this summer. Now the number of investors is double at 10 and it creates this very eclectic unique group of people from all walks of life, so that’s pretty exciting.

 

Part of the thing that I got from this was, “That makes a lot of sense, what Perry just described.” This genetic code, all of us with 23 pairs of chromosomes, multiplies and then it differentiates into diversified cells that become tissues and organs and billions of unique beings and species. Even with the same code you get different expressions of beings, even with twins and triplets and so forth, based on the external and internal factors. That’s just so amazing.

 

Then I thought, “Why isn’t this being taught in school?” I never heard of anything like this before. I was like, “Perry, this needs to be in the schools. It needs to be introduced.” I was thinking, “How is Perry, who’s an electrical engineer, able to understand and explain DNA and genetics better than I can understand it?” and I loved this stuff and studied it. I wanted to support this to get the information out into a broader arena.

 

Obviously the $10 million prize might be an incentive for people, a little bit more incentive than just – I don’t know how much you win in a Nobel prize, but…

 

Paul:  It’s less than that. This is a wonderful challenge for us. Thank you, Kevin.

 

Kevin:  Thank you.

 

Paul:  This is a very informal meeting, so it’s open to anybody to ask questions of Denis and Perry.

 

Denis:  Could I just report one thing to Paul before we open up, very quickly?  A number of people who would have been very willing to come just found the time was too short. They include two past presidents of the Royal Society.

 

Martin Rees has had very interesting discussions with you, Paul, about this, seeing it not terribly different from the “Just Six Numbers” problem, which is the title of his book.

 

How on earth can one explain the constants of the universe in the models? Venki Ramakrishnan himself, the present president, is walking in Wales, which is your country. We wished him well, but he said he hoped the meeting would go well.

 

We’ve been in contact with around 10 Fellows of the Royal Society in total, most of whom are not able to come, but the interesting thing for me – because, I will be honest, Perry, I wasn’t totally convinced this is the right way to go at the very beginning.

 

I’m your skeptic, while being on-board fully in terms of being a judge. I’m a skeptic because I’m not totally sure that it can be done.

 

Nevertheless, I’m amazed and interested by the fact that a lot of the Fellows of the Royal Society we contacted said, “Look, we don’t know whether this can be done either, but it should be a challenge,” so I’d thought I’d just report that before we open up.

 

Paul:  Thank you very much, Denis.

 

Audience:  I didn’t quite catch the terms. I was noting them down, Perry. Tell me again the terms of winning the prize and the IP and all that, of how the judges will decide whether someone has done what’s needed.

 

Perry:  This slide right here really summarizes it. If you can take some chemical process and, without cheating, get encoding, message, and decoding through some emergent property or what have you, then you’ve solved the prize.

 

And it doesn’t have to be the genetic code. It can be any kind of code.

 

It needs to have a certain number of symbols in it, and the specification goes into all that, but basically we’re just looking for exactly what you see on the screen, where you can draw an encoding table and a decoding table and see that it’s working correctly, and you’ve won the challenge. At that point you get $100,000.

 

Then the next question is, is this defensively patentable? And if it is, the investors are agreeing to pay for all the research costs and the patent costs. And when the patent is granted, then the discoverer gets another $9.9 million, making the total $10 million, and the inventor also gets a stake in the company, Natural Code LLC, and whatever intellectual property that we can commercialize or sell.

 

Audience:  Why shouldn’t the discoverer just do it himself, just keep all the IP and bring in a lot of other investors? Why should he or she go to you?

 

Perry:  They can do that. The discoverer can say, “I’m just going to go sell this to Microsoft.” Then you, as the discoverer, are going to have to go do battle with Microsoft and their attorneys. You’re going to have to get money out of this thing, and it’s going to cost you a lot of money to hire your attorneys to do all of that.

 

I’ve got a sheet here, listing some of the investors. I’ve got a guy who used to manage $60 billion for Mesirow Financial and was the president of the world’s 2nd oldest bank for their United States office. I’ve got very savvy serial entrepreneurs, marketers, investors, some of the smartest business people I’ve ever met… and remember, I’m in the business consulting profession.

 

I think a person has a much better chance of going into that gladiator fight, and coming out alive, with a bunch of guys who have a bunch of their own money at stake.

 

But yes, if somebody discovers this, they’re going to have to decide, “I would rather collect my $10 million and also work with these people.”

 

Audience:  What would you see as the money-making applications of this system that would make it so valuable?

 

Perry:  I think if you could pour chemicals in your bathtub and get digital communication to occur, you’ve created some kind of AI. And you’ve done something nobody in Silicon Valley has ever done. All of the AI in Silicon Valley is from guys typing on keyboards. This would be some kind of a naturally-occurring digital communication.

 

I think this correlates to origin of life. If there is a naturalistic explanation for origin of life; if origin of life is a proper scientific question, and not just an eternal mystery and not just a religious or spiritual thing with no physical answer; then there must be a process. And we don’t know what it is.

 

Every time you discover a major new principle in science, technological applications multiply. Einstein discovers E=mc2 and 20 years later we’ve got nuclear fission and things like that. The implications of theory of relativity or any of these things – I think it would be like inventing the transistor, except a new kind of transistor.

 

Audience:  How complex does the message have to be?

 

Perry:  It’s in the specification. It’s 32 states. The genetic coding table has 64. We arbitrarily decided that if it could represent 32 different states, that would be more than enough. If you go to NaturalCode.org and click on the prize requirements, there’s a document there that explains it all in exact detail. In fact, I wrote the specification and just about stole it out of an engineering textbook by Bernard Sklar.

 

Denis: What interests me about the question is wouldn’t there also be the natural discovery of redundancy?

 

Perry:  I don’t know, but when I had that epiphany of, “Wait a minute. DNA and Ethernet are the same. That means there has to be error correction. That means there’s noise. That means there’s a signal in a noisy channel, which needs to have enough redundancy to make it intact. It means that if the first bacteria was 3 billion years ago, then that noise channel has had to be robust enough. It means that there has to be error correction.”

 

All of that occurred to me in about a minute, and then it took me two or three years to find out that, “Yes, all of that is true.”

 

When I discovered Shapiro’s work and found out there’s three levels of error correction. I have become obsessed and fascinated with this question, and I just don’t think enough people are interested enough in it. This is where the action is! We live in the information age and nobody knows where 1’s and 0’s come from. So now what?

 

Denis: I very seriously doubt whether Silicon Valley can do it. You see, there’s a huge difference between water and silicon, and I’m not just referring to the fact that they’re different chemically. In a silicon chip you point to the network of things. In water the very points that form the network are wandering around stochastically. I think that’s an enormous difference.

 

What’s the implication of that? If it can only be done in water, you’re going to have to recreate you and me.

 

Perry:  I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. And I deal with AI every day because I’m in the online advertising business. Google and Facebook are spending billions of dollars on AI for that purpose. Whenever a big company like this tells you about their “smart” technology, you just need to insert a “not so” – “not so smart AI,” “not so smart Siri.”

 

Have your kids or grandkids ever played with Alexa? When they ask it questions, they’re doing the “Turing Test.” All computer codes and computers are deterministic, and I do not believe that biological organisms are deterministic.

 

Barbara McClintock demonstrated that in her Nobel Prize paper. She talked about plant galls. An insect burrows into a plant and the plant will develop a genetic rearrangement in response to that insect, and it’s unique to any particular insect that might be there, which of course is completely unpredictable.

 

I don’t think biology is deterministic, and I don’t think we’ll ever achieve real AI until AI is no longer deterministic.

 

Denis:  But then it would have to become Artificial Agency, not artificial intelligence. There’s a big difference between AI and AA, and I think AA probably can’t be done with silicon. That’s the way I would put it.

 

Perry:  I think agency is the real question here. Organisms have agency and we don’t know where it comes from or how it works, but it’s clearly there.

 

Paul:  Can I ask a naïve question then? Does that not raise a whole lot of subsidiary questions about how you manage agency and whether you might be losing control of a whole new raft of evolutionary developments?

 

Perry:  Yes. All the sci-fi movies and HAL 9000…?

 

Paul:  I wasn’t going to go there, but in a way…

 

Perry:  Let’s get it all on the table. First of all, none of that is going to happen as long as silicon is deterministic. All those scenarios are distractions from the fact that somebody always owns those technologies and is always pushing the buttons.

 

This prize is actually a little scary because if somebody figures this out… we might actually have the first Artificial Agency, and people may shrink back from that.

 

I’ve thought about this very hard. To just put it bluntly, I think it’s better if we own this than if Monsanto gets it. This could come with a ton of questions and responsibilities, but we need to talk about all of these things before we have it, not after.

 

I’m open to all those conversations. I’m not afraid. We need to think about these things.

 

Paul:  Can I ask a more practical and possibly naïve question? I can see Denis and your two fellow judges who’ve had an application – in one sense the judgement that this is a successful bid is teleological in the sense that can it be patented, can it be applied? But Denis, how will you actually make a judgement about a successful bid? Is it possible? I think we know that in some ways science is continuous, isn’t it. There ain’t going to be “the final answer.”

 

Denis:  It’s obviously possible to judge whether somebody has built a self-creating code transmission system because it will be there in the physical. So there’s no difficulty with the judgement.

 

The problem as I see it, and the reason why I say that I’m a skeptic of his judging panel, is that I even wonder whether it can be done. Now, that’s fine. Prizes can be very difficult.

 

A very interesting thing that Martin Rees said to us, a former president of the Royal Society and author of Just Six Numbers, is he said, “This is a bit like the Longitude Prize,” and everybody knows what the Longitude Prize was.

 

Perry:  Why don’t you explain that?

 

Denis:  It was the fact that ships at sea could work out a lot in terms of how time had progressed from observing the sky, but the big difficulty came from knowing where around the world in the longitude direction you were, because the sky will change as a consequence of that, in terms of time and so on.

 

It seems to me that Martin Rees got it absolutely right. That was very much like it. Was it the 19th century that that prize was announced? I can’t remember now. It’s even earlier, isn’t it? It’s a one-off.

 

Audience:  Some Royal Navy ships went down because they didn’t know where they were and went into the rocks.

 

Denis:  Exactly so, and that was what – 17th century?

 

Audience:  It might 1700-something.

 

Denis:  I think that’s right. That’s the 18th century, isn’t it? I think Martin’s got it right, though. This is a one-off. There isn’t a difficulty about knowing whether it has been won. The difficulty is can it be won? That’s the way I see it.

 

Audience:  What makes you think it can be won, that it will be possible to create something and to discover it even? Maybe it’s nothing like DNA.

 

Perry:  Yesterday at the Forum For Philosophy meeting, one of the ladies said to me, “Oh, then I imagine that your money is probably pretty safe,” because she’s a biologist and she knows this is a very hard question.

 

I said, “Well, here’s what’s interesting. Every time I sat down with an investor and pitched him on this and I said, ‘I’m asking you to sign a piece of paper that says if they solve this thing you’re writing a $1 million dollar check,” none of them were cavalier about it. None of them were like, “Oh, well, nobody’s going to win it anyway. Sure, what the heck.”

 

No. They read the Private Placement Memorandum and they went through the thing and they showed it to their lawyers and they looked at their books and everything.

 

How would you know that you couldn’t win this? I decided: the last thing I want to do is to be in the business of predicting what science won’t discover next.

 

Furthermore, I think this is such an important question that even if this isn’t solved, if people are trying to solve it, it will produce derivative insights, and the investor group is interested in those, too.

 

This is Shark Tank for biological ideas. This is not just a one-trick pony. We are interested in other things that people might bring to us.

 

We have had people bring interesting things to us in the past. We’ve had some interesting submissions. We have five submissions on the website you can go look at, and none of them passed, but you can read the descriptions and the explanations of what they submitted and why we didn’t approve them.

 

I think they’re very instructive and I think it’s a worthwhile question.

 

One of the things I learned from my parents was that you head straight into the wind and you tackle the hardest problem that you can tackle. I don’t know how to solve this. I have a few ideas of where the solutions might lie, but I don’t know how to solve it.

 

I’ve got to tell you a funny story. I was in Dubai a few years ago trying to raise money for this prize and I found myself in the offices of Emaar Corporation, which is the company that built the Burj Khalifa. It’s the biggest real estate company in Dubai. They’re worth billions, and I’m talking to the Director of Investments at Emaar. I showed him this and he totally got it. He didn’t miss a beat.

 

He was a very sharp guy. His name is Nasser Batha.

 

He goes, “Perry, I can’t fund this. This is not real estate and it’s outside of my charter so I can’t do this.

 

“…But I know who’s going to win this.”

 

“You do?”

 

He goes, “Yeah. It’s not going to be a scientist in a white lab coat at an American university. It’s probably going to be a 14-year-old kid in a Montessori school in some artistic country like Sweden or Italy.

 

“When he figures it out, everybody will go, ‘Dang, why didn’t I think of that?’”

 

Maybe that’s why I’m not willing to say this can’t be won.

 

Audience:  But has this system got to be radically different from the DNA system?

 

Perry:  It could be.

 

Audience:  But it couldn’t, because a small variant from the existing system presumably wouldn’t qualify.

 

Perry:  As long as nobody cheats. If somebody does an RNA-world experiment and the thing self-replicates and it goes and it goes… or if somebody does a Miller-Urey experiment that actually gets you encoding, message, and decoding, you win. You could do it in silicon. You could do it in salt crystals.

 

Audience:  Okay, totally open.

 

Audience:  You talked about this being a global prize. If it goes to maximize the chance of someone discovering it, that’s what you should be doing. And you said this is the first time you’ve spoken about it outside the States?

 

Perry:  In any significant venue. I’ve certainly been on some podcasts and radio programs, but nothing like this. Really this hasn’t gotten the exposure that it deserves.

 

Audience:  Do you have any plans to take it to Asia, and where would you go?

 

Perry:  I’d love to do that. In fact, if any of you have some contacts in Asia, if there’s a scientific society there that would like to hear about it, I’d love to get on a plane and go do that. I love being here today. I’m honored to be invited. What a great opportunity.

 

Paul:  Any more final thoughts or questions?

 

Denis:  One thing I’d like to throw into the pot before we have lunch. I’m coming back again to the water or silicon issue and why water is such a good medium for life developing. There are many reasons, actually.

 

Water is a very strange substance, but the most important one here is the stochasticity.

 

I seriously think that the process that would lead to that being done is going to have to mimic the way in which, for example, our immune system works.

 

The reason I say that is that – how does it work, just to go through that very quickly. There’s a challenge, which is that an invader, a new virus or bacterium arrives, for which the organism does not have the correct DNA to make the right human antigen that would latch onto that invader. It’s a lock and key, of course.

 

So what does it do? It starts the error correction and allows trillions of new bits of DNA code to emerge, but just in the region of the variable part of the immunoglobulin, not everywhere in the genome. Otherwise, you’d destroy the information.

 

That is how I see stochasticity, and I have a strong suspicion that since there are millions of possibilities of interactions between chemicals, it’s almost certainly going to be the case that what does that searches through. That’s fine. If somebody comes up with a mechanism that enables you to harness stochasticity to do that, that’s even better.

 

Moreover, it’s the reason why I suspect it can’t be done in silicon, for precisely the reason you’ve got the automatic stochasticity of chemicals in solution. You don’t have it in a silicon chip.

 

There’s a clue for somebody out there.

 

Paul:  Thank you all very much for coming. I’m delighted that we could have this meeting, and you’ve all come at relatively short notice because this meeting was added on to a very nice philosophical discussion meeting we had at the Forum For Philosophy, which Denis Noble spoke at and Perry was our very special guest.

 

It’s given us a wonderful chance to focus on this very exciting prize and to announce it. You’ve never announced $10 million before. I think it’s a significant sum.

 

Perry:  We added a digit. I’m very happy about that.

 

Paul:  Thank you, Kevin, for proving you’re one of our supporters of the prize, so we know that you’re not forced to be here, and you explained how you’ve voluntarily given your support. Thank you all very much, and now we have lunch.

 

Denis:  And over lunch, if people could think of good ideas on how Perry might expand his judging panel, I’d be very delighted. Quite apart from anything else, I still don’t know whether I’m competent to judge this.

 

Perry:  Oh, I think you’re quite competent, Denis. I think you’ll do just fine.


Evolution 2.0, $10 Million Prize, and the Royal Society of Great Britain

June 7, 2019, 5:20 a.m. PDT by Evolution 2.0 Prize

Dear Reader,

The Evolution 2.0 Prize has doubled from $5 Million to $10 Million.

I announced this at the Royal Society in Great Britain on Friday.

 

The Financial Times of London ran the story Sunday.

 

See the FT article at www.evo2.org/ft

 

***Have you ever rubbed eyes and re-read an email to make sure you weren’t hallucinating??***

 

A week and a half before the Truth Seminar, I got an email from Oxford Professor Paul Flather:

 

“Hi Perry, I’m the president of the Philosophy Forum at the London School of Economics. Professor Denis Noble and I would like to host a media event featuring the Evolution 2.0 Prize at the Royal Society.”

 

That was a surprise.

 

The Royal Society was founded in 1660. Isaac Newton is among their past presidents. His death mask is under glass in their lobby.

 

Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday and Albert Einstein debated their theories in its corridors. Arguably the most prestigious scientific institution on earth.

 

One would not expect a Chicago business consultant with a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Nebraska to be invited to speak at the Royal Society.

 

But… Oxford professor Denis Noble, “The Martin Luther of Evolutionary Biology,” knows me well. He’s a fan of my book, and a member of my prize judging panel.

 

Because the prize aims to uncover mysteries of life that have deeply puzzled scientists for centuries, Denis felt it worthy of an event.

 

The prize, which seeks the origin of the genetic code, IS a “bottom of the swamp” absolute fundamental question.

 

And there is nothing so powerful as a great question.


Denis has long insisted traditional science is too dismissive of the elegant, holistic, intentional properties of life. Life is not just molecules and chemicals. It possesses information and agency - a will to live.

 

We do not presently understand what this is or how it works.

 

Because Denis figured out the cardiac rhythm that made pacemakers possible, he’s one of the most respected scientists in the UK.

 

He has a Commander of the British Empire medal from Queen Elizabeth. So his opinion carries weight.

 

I’ve been bursting to tell you this news… but had to keep it under my hat until now. (And getting this invite a week and a half before my biggest seminar this year… my goodness, it’s been INTENSE.)

 

There’s more…

 

The prize had been $5 million since my announcement at Arizona State in 2017. I had raised backing to $9 million as of May 2019.

 

I was telling myself: If you can get $1 million more, you can double your prize to $10 million at the Royal Society...”

 

While prepping for a 3-day Seminar, I flew into action. I circled back to a bunch of people who’d turned me down. Wasn’t getting anywhere.

 

I visited my mastermind group (sort of like Roundtable, except it’s where I get MY teeth kicked in) and told them the news.

 

Spontaneously, someone offered, “How about we form an LLC and all go in together and get Perry over the hump?”

 

Eight hands went up. Deal was done.

 

Then an hour later my phone rang. A good friend says, “Hey what are all these texts I’ve been getting from you?”

 

I explained. He said, “I’m in.”

 

That filled slot #11, fully subscribing the investment pool for the Evolution 2.0 Prize.

 

The next day another investor wanted in - and went on our waiting list.

 

Two weeks later, we were in London making the announcement.

 

A video of the event will be coming soon, via Voices From Oxford.

 

Again, the Financial Times article and a photo from the Royal Society is here:

 

www.evo2.org/ft

 

The official prize page is at

 

www.herox.com/evolution2.0

 

~

 

You may be asking: “Why should I care about this anyway?”

 

First, “Where we come from” is a very, very important question.

 

Hitler, Stalin and Mao used evolutionary theories to fuel their agendas. Which is easy to do if you get it just a little bit wrong. And we’ve been getting this wrong for a long, long time.

 

Arguments about evolution are as ugly as abortion, gay rights, immigration and gun control.

 

In the USA we’ve had a war between the scientific narrative and the religious narrative for a century. It’s time we heal that rift. NOW.

 

Because today we’re faced with exponentially growing AI; and the ability to edit DNA as easily as sticking a picture in a blog post.

 

If we don’t get this straight - and soon - we’re gonna land ourselves in serious trouble.

 

EVERYBODY needs to start caring about this. It WILL affect your children and grandchildren. It’s only a question of whether it will help them or harm them.

 

Second, entrepreneurs everywhere can learn from this project. It is Exhibit A of patience, persistence and consistency.

 

I began raising money for the prize in 2012.

 

It is a very strange investment, it doesn’t resemble any other. So it was hard to explain.

 

It was especially hard to explain back when there was no book, no endorsements, no famous scientists… just a few blog posts and an idea on a napkin.

 

As Felix Dennis explains in his book “How to Get Rich,” there is NO substitute for raising money. You can’t hire it done. No avoiding it if you have a big project.  

 

It’s kind of like selling pots and pans or Cutco knives - you make a list of names (rich people of course) and go see ‘em.

 

Simple as that. Humble and dirty and necessary.

 

Another lesson is: you work and work and work and work and most of the time you see VERY little progress…

 

…then it’s like a baseball game, because when things DO happen, they move VERY VERY FAST. The game can turn in the blink of an eye.

 

This project moved further in three weeks than in the last five years. I’ve now got editors of major science journals contacting me.

 

95/5, baby.

 

Please do not forget how many light years peer reviewed science “normally” is from entrepreneurs, engineers and business people. But gaps can be bridged. And we must bridge them.

 

This also illustrates the incredible importance of knowing the right people - and physically going to where they are to meet them in person.

 

I had exchanged emails with Denis Noble long ago, but the action didn’t begin until I flew to London for a conference he organized in 2016.

 

This was not a job for marketing departments. This was a time for pressing the flesh and live conversations. There is NO substitute.

 

If you’re not pressing the flesh with real people, you’re making a big mistake, friend.

 

If you, like me, are working on something near and dear to your heart and desperately important - and no one else seems go ‘get it’ - I UNDERSTAND.

 

So press forward. Make that phone call, send the email, arrange the luncheon, write the book, shoot the video, go to the meeting, see the person.

 

Take the next step you can make, whatever it may be. And the next. And the next.

 

Do not stop.

 

And remember: Today is only the beginning.

 

Seize the day.

 

Perry Marshall

 

P.S.: Subscribe to the Evolution 2.0 Podcast at

https://evo2.org/podcast/

 

At London’s Royal Society, Oxford Professor & prize judge Denis Noble announced the $10 million Evolution 2.0 Prize with Perry Marshall

What a 1300 year old Epic Story tells us about Evolution

Sept. 10, 2018, 1:51 p.m. PDT by Evolution 2.0 Prize

How do you get to the bottom of an impossibly murky topic and find the
truth... in ANY topic or department of your life?

A 1300 year old story from Medieval English tells us how. In a private
meeting with entrepreneurs from around the world - my $26,000 per year
Roundtable group, I explain how the ancient story of Beowulf teaches us
how to solve scientific technological and business.

Listen on the Evolution 2.0 Podcast, available through most of the major
platforms including Stitcher and iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/evolution-2-0/id1411197699

https://evo2.org/the-podcast/

Perry


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