He Jiankui PhD Thesis: Spontaneous Emergence of Hierarchy in Biological Systems

After reading the abstract I'm not sure what they are trying to prove. None of their examples are relevant to "spontaneous" emergence of hierarchy, they are all somehow tied to environmental or economic factors.

Hierarchy is definitely useful in some cases but has interesting tradeoffs. In emergency conditions it's very useful to have a strong hierarchy (especially if the leader has experience with that type of emergency), but during 'good times' strong top-down regulation represses creativity and adaptability.

Alternating between phases of hierarchy to consolidate good ideas from phases with high generation of ideas/diversity is probably ideal, and is probably what I would have looked into if I was studying hierarchy.

I'm going to read more of the thesis to be sure, but part about VDJ recombination seems tenuous - the fact that some aspects of VDJ recombination are regulated or vary between individuals shouldn't surprise anyone since environments and diseases vary all over the world. It's also not a new finding.

Here's some better reading about the origins of antigen receptor diversity, or as some people call it, the Generation of Diversity (GOD):

Another manifestation of GOD (2004) https://www.nature.com/articles/430157a

Evolutionarily conserved TCR binding sites, identification of T cells in primary lymphoid tissues, and surprising trans-rearrangements in nurse shark (2010) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20488795/

Evidence of G.O.D.’s Miracle: Unearthing a RAG Transposon (2017) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5428540/

Origin of immunoglobulins and T cell receptors: A candidate gene for invasion by the RAG transposon (2025) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40614193/

For context, I think this is the same infamous

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/jiankui-he

He Jiankui is better known for performing the first germ-line (i.e. inheritable by children) genome editing of humans.

Would be interesting to extend to observations of chaos or entropy one level above each recognizable hierarchy, forcing a new organizing paradigm.

(2011)