3 ms·

This is a bad analogy - the instructions for making everything in the cell is in the dna, so you also have the blueprints for the hardware fabrication plant.

crusso 9y ago
Don't some features of the cell that you get from your mother replicate themselves, like your mitochondria? Granted, mitochondria have their own DNA - but aren't considered part of the human chromosome. Besides mitochondria, isn't there a whole cellular bootstrap environment that the DNA doesn't specifically encode for?
rleigh 9y ago
No, it's a pretty reasonable analogy. For the original point, if all we had was machine code, and that code had a complete description of the machine which could run it and how to create it, it would still be useless without a machine to process it. The code on its own would not be sufficient to create the machine. You can't make use of DNA without all the complex machinery required to transcribe it, translate RNA and replicate it. There's a chicken and egg problem. The DNA does indeed encode the instructions to make and assemble all the rRNA, tRNA and protein sequences to do this, but you have to already have the machinery in place to do so. Kind of like compiling a compiler. You need an initial manual bootstrap, which in the case of life as we know it, took place many millions of years in the past. Just as the code for a compiler is just so much meaningless ones and zeroes without a working compiler to process it, so is DNA in the absence of the translation machinery. Without any context for how to process it, it's just a meaningless jumble of bases. One thing to think about. If we discovered intact dinosaur remains with non-degraded DNA, could we resurrect it? We don't have the machinery since it was lost with the death of the organism. But we could potentially bootstrap it by placing it in the cell of a related species, e.g. a reptile. But if it was a completely different form of life, we wouldn't even know where to begin.
- haihaibye 9y ago
  >> if all we had was machine code, and that code had a complete description of the machine which could run it and how to create it That's a reasonable analogy but it's not what the original poster said.

crusso 9y ago

Don't some features of the cell that you get from your mother replicate themselves, like your mitochondria? Granted, mitochondria have their own DNA - but aren't considered part of the human chromosome. Besides mitochondria, isn't there a whole cellular bootstrap environment that the DNA doesn't specifically encode for?

rleigh 9y ago

No, it's a pretty reasonable analogy. For the original point, if all we had was machine code, and that code had a complete description of the machine which could run it and how to create it, it would still be useless without a machine to process it. The code on its own would not be sufficient to create the machine. You can't make use of DNA without all the complex machinery required to transcribe it, translate RNA and replicate it. There's a chicken and egg problem. The DNA does indeed encode the instructions to make and assemble all the rRNA, tRNA and protein sequences to do this, but you have to already have the machinery in place to do so. Kind of like compiling a compiler. You need an initial manual bootstrap, which in the case of life as we know it, took place many millions of years in the past. Just as the code for a compiler is just so much meaningless ones and zeroes without a working compiler to process it, so is DNA in the absence of the translation machinery. Without any context for how to process it, it's just a meaningless jumble of bases. One thing to think about. If we discovered intact dinosaur remains with non-degraded DNA, could we resurrect it? We don't have the machinery since it was lost with the death of the organism. But we could potentially bootstrap it by placing it in the cell of a related species, e.g. a reptile. But if it was a completely different form of life, we wouldn't even know where to begin.

haihaibye 9y ago
>> if all we had was machine code, and that code had a complete description of the machine which could run it and how to create it That's a reasonable analogy but it's not what the original poster said.