The reason the bacterium works so well, Doyle finds, is that it is organized in much the same way as the Internet. Both the Internet and E. coli are conceptually organized like a bow tie, with a broad fan of incoming material flowing into a central knot and then flowing into another broad fan of outgoing material. On the Internet, the incoming fan is made up of data from a huge range of sources— e-mail, YouTube videos, Skype phone calls, and the like. In E. coli, the incoming fan is made up of the many sorts of food it eats. As information and food move into their respective bow ties, they get homogenized: E. coli breaks down its food into a few building blocks, while the Internet breaks down its motley incoming data streams into streams of standardized packets.

From the knot, both bow ties then fan out. E. coli turns its building blocks into DNA, proteins, membrane molecules, and any other special ingredient it needs. On the Internet, data packets reach a computer, where they can be reassembled into the original e-mail, YouTube videos, Skype telephone calls, and the like.

A bow-tie organization allows both the Internet and E. coli to run quickly and efficiently. If E. coli (like all bacteria, indeed like all living things) did not have a bow tie, it would have to use a different set of enzymes to make each of the thousands of different molecules it needs from each type of food. Rather than use such a huge, slow system, E. coli just points all its metabolic pathways into the same bow-tie knot, making everything from the same raw materials. Likewise, the Internet’s bow-tie architecture means that it doesn’t have different ways to handle, say, e-mail traffic and instant-message traffic. Everything passes through as the same types of data packets.

Fascinating.