is DNA stupid?

The surprise of "everyone?" Hardly.

The elements of DNA that have been "decoded" principally encode proteins. Think of it as a shopping list for a bag of parts. For an admittedly simplistic analogy, you can use the same steel, rubber, copper, and plastic to make a toy car or an M1A1 Abrams main battle tank. How the material is used is at least (if not more) important as is what material is available.

Genes are not the active elements with respect to information storage, any more than is the bill of materials that lists all the parts that are used to construct, for example, a computer. Genes are the list, proteins are the parts and it's how they are assembled that matters.

Sure but that's a strawman argument. You assert something that's patently untrue and then are shocked, shocked that it's untrue.

No, but I'll refrain from inserting a snide remark about who may be.

Chi, what an interesting concept! (OK, bad pun.) Gross conceptual error, of course.

Congratulations on rediscovering Cartesian dualism.

Bull hockey. 95% of what? Quantum mechanics or intestinal peristalsis?

There you go, flogging that same, poor strawman again.

Who said a gene is a bit? Your argument falls down right there.

PeterS

Sorry Peter, I chose my words carefully. If I had 20,000 symbols, no matter how complex they are, if I can't change each symbol, then the information content of that symbol may as well be just one bit.

I know genes have a lot more information riding on them, but they are not programmable, hence, difficult to pass any information through them.

J

Herein lies crux of the argument. Where are the active elements for information storage? Particularly for personality.

J

message

Well, Ok, let's take your binary argument, and look at the possibilities; 2^20000 is what? About 10^6000? (back of a beer-mat calculation) Particles in the Universe? 10^100? A bit less maybe? That's an *awful* lot of ways of arranging things.

PeterS Remove my PANTS to reply.

They are not bits, they can be highly complex "rules" or "intructions" for making a protein. These single proteins can then have many different effects with in a chemical system like the body. Simple rules often lead to very complex behavior. You should know that being an "information technologist".

The Brain is not a typical information system. I cant use an algorithm to calculate the circumference/perimeter of a circle on a rectangle and expect it to make sense, likewise you cant apply stuff for information systems to something like the Brain until you are sure they are equivalent, and no one really knows how the brain works in detail (especially *where and how* memories are stored for example).

It doesn't get stored in DNA - this is why your personality can be significantly different from your parents. Obviously some traits are passed along, but the majority of the personality is created ad hoc as the child grows up and experiences the world. This experience is also significantly influenced by your parents usually which leads to similar personalities usually - this is rapidly heading towards "Nature vs Nurture" type arguments which is something of a minefield!

Chomsky is not the ultimate decider on the issue. Leave a baby on its own in a box for 5 years and assuming it wont starve to death in the first few days, it wont learn language or social skills and it probably wont learn to walk and it probably wont learn to use tools as it has no need for these things. Kids learn a lot in their first few years - obviously some stuff like swallowing is reflex but then its the same with all animals. I dont see why it is incapable for a child to learn everything it does - how long does it take to learn something afterall, even as an adult? Kids learn how to speak, walk etc with *zero* experience in a fairly short amount of time, much quicker than adults can in similar situations.

The brain already exists when you are born! And it doesn't neccesarily need to be "programmed" - the brain is not a computer in the common sense. Some might argue that its physical structure is the programming, but this is pretty dynamic.

Again with the computer comparisons.

Not really - it just leads to one number. We need enough memory to write a program. You couldn't write a wordprocessor program with

20,000 bits (or about 2.5k bytes). J

There is no "argument." There does, however, appear to be intentional obfuscation and misdirection.

To carry your "argument" to its logical [1] conclusion, all matter in the human brain is composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons. As an "information technologist" you must surely realize that Shannon's Theorem tells us that 3 bits [2] is inadequate to encode very much information, so clearly there must be something supernatural going on.

[1] I use the word guardedly. [2] The equivalence of "number of constituents" and "number of bits" is used in the same (incorrect) sense as in the original posting.

..he wrote, using an encoding system (ASCII) with seven bits per symbol...

Neural connections, mostly.

There are roughly 100 billion neurons in the brain, with roughly 1,000 connections to each neuron, as well as a few thousand knowns psychoactive chemicals at work. The brain processes roughly a billion bits of input data per second and can output roughly 10,000 bits per second. The genome that is used to construct this brain has a few billion bits, and the brain is rather lacking in capability when the genes have finished and learning starts.

You might wish to look at these webpages.

20,000 genomes provide concentration gradients to allow neurons to grow in a particular way. But there isn't enough genes to control the specific wiring (i.e. the programming of the neural net). Even the ability to learn is a complex piece of software that must be programmed into the neurons before it becomes a learning machine.

In other words, if you or I were to try to grow 100 billion neurons, with 10,000 connections each by this method, we would grow a perfect vegetable. There would be no personality in that vegetable because none of the wiring will have anything to do with a properly programmed neural net that is able to develop and become a human by learning all the things that humans can learn.

So we are still back to the same question. Is DNA stupid? If not were is the information stored in the DNA to program the neurons?

J

And somewhere around the time of 07/05/2004 16:11, the world stopped and listened as e7 contributed the following to humanity:

Here we go...

That's part of life itself. The DNA directs whether the cell will become a human or a monkey. The DNA also contains the instructions for the cell to maintain life. The cell is a molecular computer, and the DNA is the software that it executes. But, from what I under stand, the actual data is stored in RNA.

In the womb, between 3 and 6 months, is the period where the brain's circuitry is being initially laid out. As the nurons grow and connect to each other, they fire off more or less randomly. There are other factors as well, such as external influences outside the womb, which also help to shape neuron development. The neurons are not the only cells in the brain that process information either. There are support cells which structurely support the neurons that seems to dictate the connections between neurons. The learning software for the neurons/support cells, are hardwired in to those cells. Once the child is born, you have more or less a clean slate with a few basic instincts necessary to sustain life, and more or less ready to learn new things.

Now as to HOW those instincts are programmed in, I have no clue, other than to say that it is genetic. Everything after birth is more or less learned. As the child learns, new connections between neurons are formed, and new RNA sequences that get attached to those neurons is generated. The personality of the child is formed usually within the first 5 years of life. There is also a whole slew of psycoactive chemicals, endorphins, neurotransmitters, etc. that are active in the brain to also regulate the functioning of the various cells.

About the support cells having a role in learning, see the Scientific Atlanta article called "Have scientists missed half the brain?"

Careful. Next he'll be saying ASCII is stupid.

----------------- No, you are. The personality/memory/capacity of a human is NOT encoded in DNA, only the construction plans are. The rest is implicit in that construction, in other words the DNA is just a stupid chemical, it isn't "magic", and instead it is what it produces that becomes amazing. DNA has no idea what it has done, it is a machine for pssing on implicit capabilities.

---------------- It isn't. It's stored in the pattern of dendritic and axionic connections that form the synapses of nerve cells and their weighting functions.

---------------- You're deluded. Somebody told you wrong or permitted you to believe something that is totally wrong. We learn these things, we are NOT vorn with them. In a way, the entire reality is what programs our lives to experience and learn what we know. The entirety of reality is the inheritance mechanism for awareness and thought, our DNA merely builds our body, not our ideas. Experience causes our brain to learn to think because it is capable of it, not DNA!! A child can be kept in a closet and it won't ever really become a live human being with a mind and ideas.

--------------------------------- It comes from outside us.

----------------------- Chomsky's not Gawd.

---------------------------- Who says? We don't even know how to do that kind of math successfully yet! That's nothing but a guess!

What supports and implies one idea from another idea is built in, but that embedded capacity implies knowledge causedby existence, but it is like any order arising from chaos scenario, it looks difficult till you see it work. The very first ALife experiment was not expected to go very far, but it invented punctuated equilibrium, and sex, and several other higher features no one expected were that easy!

----------------------------- No, you only need to build the machine, and if you do it right, it will learn how to learn. That sounds improbable, but we do it! We do NOT have a personality, an awareness, when we are first born! We have to acquire one by accidental processes, and the human brain built by DNA simply has a high probablity of doing so!! The rest are severely autistic in some form.

---------------------- Nonsense. It does not.

---------------------- Your premise is wrong, we do NOT get learning as a "software", but as a hardware capability, and we learn to think by accident due to exposure and the implicit bias of our brain to learn that.

-Steve

------------------ Synapses.

-Steve

------------------------ You're not getting it, awareness is an emergent property of the many copies of something quite simple that DNA makes mindlessly.

------------------------ Which is what a newborn is. The synapses are unpatterned, and the immediately begin to grow and to weight their synaptic weighting functions. The brain's sections are arranged to yield responses to experience that permit the brain to learn to think as we do.

---------------- We are programmed by experiences.

----------------------------- Yes, DNA is stupid, Reality programs the neurons, and the process of programming them is called Your Life!!

-Steve

---------------- Now you're being stubborn and obtuse, like a crank.

A gene is NOT a bit, it encodes a protein, and a protein has a VERY complicateed behavior born in the nature of atoms themselves, not merely genes taken as bits. The DNA does NOT have to know how atoms work!

I'll bet you have your whole philosophy invested in this and now you're going to blather on for months about it, instead of accepting what you were told by people who know lots more than you do about it.

-Steve

"e7" wrote in message news:qVeGc.22337$ snipped-for-privacy@fe1.news.blueyonder.co.uk...

Your first error is equating a gene with a bit. A HUGE error. You see, a gene as mentioned in the article is a string of DNA that encodes a single protein or enzyme. Each "letter" in the gene is three codons in length, and each codon is 2 bits of storage, representing one of four bases. So each genetic "letter" is 6 bits- 64 possible combinations. Most proteins have dozens or hundreds of amino acids in them, and each represents 6 bits of data, so each gene represents anywhere from a few dozens of bits to hundreds of bits. In other words, you are off by perhaps two orders of magnitude. Now, this is very important- some of the genes are control genes that treat other genes like subroutines in a program, so the basic complexity (how many bits) is way off base from the emergent complexity. You would never specify building a house by pointing out every nail hole dimension and location- and you certainly would not hand over a full sized, fully "nail-populated" and "bathroom tile-populated" model. Instead, you use a shorthand notation, such as "this area will be tiled with tiles this size". This eradicates the thousands of bits spent specifying where each and every dot of mastic or paint goes. The same is true of organisms- they are not "fully spelled out"- that would be patently and utterly ridiculous. Instead, they are defined by locations, volumes, and generalities, and each of the materials is written in the same manner as a subroutine- "use this tissue type here", and "coat these with proteins so-and-so"- and this leads to the emergent structure. Our genes show how to make the protein equivalents of hammers, saws, and boards, and then how they are used in a general way. Ever play Conway's "Game of Life"? It is completely impossible to predict the outcome without actually running the game. And so it is with living things. And, in Conway's game, structures of greater complexity than the starting conditions can (and do) emerge all the time. So it is with real living things. So, to state that 20,000 genes cannot encode a brain is not only wrong, but provably so. And, we understand just why it is wrong. Saying that 20,000 bits cannot encode your brain is true- but has nothing to do with the issue. Now, here is a perfect example you can try for yourself. Download POV-ray. Write a short program to generate a realistic graphic image. Now, would you rather send a 3D solid model by modem, rendered, made solid, and then broken down and analyzed at its real scale? Or, would you rather send a few dozen lines of code that produce the realistic solid model through description? You can choose to send many hundreds of gigabytes of "finished model representation" or you can send a kilobyte or so of code. That is the difference in actual genetic code and your understanding of it. The genetic code is descriptive, not absolute.

Cheers!

Sir Charles W. Shults III, K. B. B. Xenotech Research

321-206-1840

Foolish, foolish person. Here is one of many examples of such: ftp://ccreweb.org/software/kforth/examples/lf.4th