**Links to**: [[Genes]], [[Biology]], [[Redundancy]], [[Alicia Juarrero]], [[Stephen Jay Gould]], [[Michael Levin]], [[Polycomputation]]. ### [[Refrain]]: redundancy is never _redundant_. ### Degeneracy From the Latin _degeneratus_, past participle of _degenerare_, to degenerate originally exploited the idea of becoming “inferior to one’s ancestors, to become unlike one’s race or kind, fall from ancestral quality,” (etymonline.com, 11 Sept. 2023). This is an excellent idea. In biology, ‘neutrally’ speaking (or to us also affirmatively posed): degeneracy is akin to informatic redundancy, where the functions of different elements in an organism can take on different roles, depending on the context in which they become activated. See also the related concept of [[polycomputation]]. Or the argument for this to be the case in [[03 Semantic noise]]. También me parece que somos todxs unxs degeneradxs.