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The genome is the ultimate legacy code: - it's been written for billions of years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Earliest_biological_evidence_for_l

The genome is the ultimate legacy code: - it's been written for billions of years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Earliest_biological_evidence_for_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Earliest_biologica...) - without any sort of upfront architecture or planning - the development methodology can be summarized as "change characters randomly and see if it compiles" - incredibly bloated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-coding_DNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-coding_DNA) - contains random snippets copy/pasted from other codebases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_viral_element https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_viral_element) - the only success criteria is that the "program" shouldn't "crash" before it can make a copy of itself

prossercj 8y ago
As someone who works on software for DNA analysis, this is spot on
- super_serious 8y ago
  I wonder if one were to clean up the code, removing all bloat, keeping only the relevant pieces, how would that human turn out?
  - aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
    Fixing our inverted retina would be one of the low hanging fruits: >The vertebrate retina is inverted in the sense that the light sensing cells are in back of the retina, so that light has to pass through layers of neurons and capillaries before it reaches the rods and cones. In contrast, in the cephalopod retina the photoreceptors are in front, with processing neurons and capillaries behind them. Because of this, cephalopods do not have a blind spot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina
AllegedAlec 8y ago
> incredibly bloated This would actually be preferable to how DNA seems to evolve. In most systems, there's actually quite an acute constraint to genome length due to the Error Threshold; when a genome gets too large, it has too many mutations and therefore the 'fittest' genome, often called the 'master' genome, cannot be sustained in the population. Therefore, there's quite a lot of evolution where the genome becomes essentially minified. Most often, this is done by overlapping genes on the DNA, (mostly by shifting the reading frame by one or two nucleotides for one of the two genes).
chocolate_ 8y ago
I want this comment as a poster.

prossercj 8y ago

As someone who works on software for DNA analysis, this is spot on

super_serious 8y ago
I wonder if one were to clean up the code, removing all bloat, keeping only the relevant pieces, how would that human turn out?
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
  Fixing our inverted retina would be one of the low hanging fruits: >The vertebrate retina is inverted in the sense that the light sensing cells are in back of the retina, so that light has to pass through layers of neurons and capillaries before it reaches the rods and cones. In contrast, in the cephalopod retina the photoreceptors are in front, with processing neurons and capillaries behind them. Because of this, cephalopods do not have a blind spot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina

AllegedAlec 8y ago

> incredibly bloated This would actually be preferable to how DNA seems to evolve. In most systems, there's actually quite an acute constraint to genome length due to the Error Threshold; when a genome gets too large, it has too many mutations and therefore the 'fittest' genome, often called the 'master' genome, cannot be sustained in the population. Therefore, there's quite a lot of evolution where the genome becomes essentially minified. Most often, this is done by overlapping genes on the DNA, (mostly by shifting the reading frame by one or two nucleotides for one of the two genes).

chocolate_ 8y ago

I want this comment as a poster.