5 ms·
I see a big parallel with the predictions for advances in neuroscience with all the predictions that were made prior to the sequencing of the human genome (the
by JunkDNA 15y ago
I see a big parallel with the predictions for advances in neuroscience with all the predictions that were made prior to the sequencing of the human genome (the author touches on this a bit too). Lots of smart scientists really believed that once the human genome was sequenced, we would have the keys to the biological kingdom. What has actually happened is that we have discovered that the complexity of the system is probably an order of magnitude more complex than previously thought. Knowing the sequence of a gene turns out to be important, but a pretty minor factor in explaining its function. Plus we are learning that all sorts of simple rules we thought were true aren't always the case.
I suspect a similar thing is playing out in neuroscience. As we peel back the layers of the onion, ever more complexity will be revealed. The things Ray Kurzweil predicts may well come true. He is a brilliant guy. But the timetable is very optimistic.
The march of biological progress is very slow, in part because all the experimentation involves living things that grow, die, get contaminated, run away, don't show up for appointments, get high, etc... Lots of people from other scientific disciplines, especially engineering related ones underestimate just how long even the simplest biological experiments can take.
- skarayan 15y ago"Lots of smart scientists really believed that once the human genome was sequenced, we would have the keys to the biological kingdom." Here's my (a computer scientist's) view on the matter: Imagine that you have a relatively complex computer system written with object oriented principles. Now, imagine that you are looking at the binary representation of this system and trying to make sense out of the whole thing. Also, imagine that you have no knowledge of how computer systems work and how the layers between the computer program, programming language, possibly virtual machine, and native code work. There are layers involved between these objects and their binary representation. I imagine that there are also layers between our genome (analogy to binary code) and the leveraged representation of ourselves (analogy to object oriented system). I think that this is why it is hard to make much sense out of the genome, even though the human genome was sequenced. I also imagine that this is why it is hard to make sense out of the brain by looking at the brain directly. An analogy would be that we are again looking at binary representation of information. It would be far more useful to figure out how this stuff works. I am not sure how this is done at this time.
- roadnottaken 15y agoIt's like spaghetti code that's been written by trial-and-error for a billion years.
- neutronicus 15y agoThat has built up only by randomly merging branches, occasionally interpreting /dev/urandom/ as a patch, and keeping the branches that pass the most tests, oh, and the test suite also occasionally interprets /dev/urandom/ as a patch.
- cpeterso 15y agoBut if that code passes the unit tests, then let's just ship it and go home! :)
- jsmcgd 15y agoThis is a good analogy. Unfortunately however things could be even worse. At least in computing their is some logical design to be discovered. Biology isn't constrained by this. It might well be layer after layer of spaghetti code.
- Dove 15y agoIt almost certainly is. When you ask a genetic algorithm to design a lego bridge, you get something that looks like this: http://www.thinkartificial.org/artificial-intelligence/evolving-lego-brick-structures/ http://www.thinkartificial.org/artificial-intelligence/evolv... If our DNA was designed by the same process, it almost certainly looks the same way. There should be no abstraction beyond the strictly functional. If it's comprehensible at all, that would be a miracle.
- cpeterso 15y agoThanks for the Lego bridge link. Very awesome!
- 15y ago