3 ms·
IMHO, biology is most easily looked at as a recipe for order, from whatever ingredients happen to be laying around. Essentially, everything is in the service o
by ethbro 7y ago
IMHO, biology is most easily looked at as a recipe for order, from whatever ingredients happen to be laying around.
Essentially, everything is in the service of increasing order. And maintaining it.
Polymerase creates more genetic code out of raw ingredients.
Genetic code creates proteins.
Proteins perform all kinds of functions by leveraging physics and chemistry.
Membranes prevent all of this from being blown away and scattered in the chemical equivalent of a slight breeze.
... so, as you ask, 'Why genetic material in the first place?'
And to that, something of a tautology: because reproducing order reproduces.
Randomly assembled self-assembling assemblages constitute the major components of our environment, because everything else... didn't.
A rock is still one rock. Water is still water.
A blade of grass is now a meadow. A tree, a forest. A slightly intelligent primate, civilization as we know it. And a single mutated coronavirus, a pandemic in every country on the globe.
- neuronic 7y agoTo me, what blows most comparisons and analogies out of the water, is the insane complexity to it all. That genes can influence and interact with each other. So gene expression (= gene -> protein) can change gene expression, e.g. based on environmental factors or folding of DNA etc... Gene A is responsible for property A is way way way too simplified.
- kaibee 7y agoThe sense I get is that its more like some unholy combination of brainfuck, vhdl, and game of life.
- ethbro 7y agoTrue, but in the same way that all engineering can be complex. Which is to say, you can use quantum mechanics to augment Newtonian physics, but the latter dominates results in most usages. Biology does have the quirk that sometimes (I guess because exponential growth / propagation?) nuances dominate observed result. But usually things proceed as expected. Otherwise, we'd be killing people left and right with pharmaceutical side effects!