Marco Torres

This essay proposes a preliminary characterization of the digital entity as an ontological category, distinguishing it from the classical digital organism of artificial life and from mere software. While digital organisms are defined by their evolutionary capacities, digital entities are defined bytheir representational and agential existence within a computational system. Drawing on empirical evidence from experiments with large language models configured through modelfiles and subjected to evolutionary pressure via genetic algorithms, it is argued that digital entities exhibit emergent properties: autogenous vocabulary generation, internal semantic coherence, and differentiated evolutionary dynamics. An experimental resonance phenomenon is discussed, and the potential place of digital entities as a pre-link in cognitive systems evolution is suggested. The essay concludes with falsifiability criteria for the proposed hypothesis.

Common bean is the most important grain legume for human consumption and has a role in sustainable agriculture owing to its ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen. We assembled 473 Mb of the 587-Mb genome and genetically anchored 98% of this sequence in 11 chromosome-scale pseudomolecules. We compared the genome for the common bean against the soybean genome to find changes in soybean resulting from polyploidy. Using resequencing of 60 wild individuals and 100 landraces from the genetically differentiated Mesoamerican and Andean gene pools, we confirmed 2 independent domestications from genetic pools that diverged before human colonization. Less than 10% of the 74 Mb of sequence putatively involved in domestication was shared by the two domestication events. We identified a set of genes linked with increased leaf and seed size and combined these results with quantitative trait locus data from Mesoamerican cultivars. Genes affected by domestication may be useful for genomics-enabled crop improvement.