3 ms·

This question is something of a category error - there are no "facts", only "theories which have a greater or lesser amount of evidence in favour of them". Some

This question is something of a category error - there are no "facts", only "theories which have a greater or lesser amount of evidence in favour of them". Some theories have such an overwhelming amount of evidence in favour of them that we call them "facts". But the presence of random mutation is extremely well documented, yes - how else do you explain why identical twin humans don't have identical genomes? A great majority of corruptions have no effect, because biological systems are highly resilient to change; the analogy you want is less "delete a line of code" and more "delete a single machine from AWS". Some corruptions are so bad that they cause the organism to fail completely at the embryo stage. Some corruptions have an effect which is detrimental in one environment but beneficial in another; the whims of nature decide whether such an organism survives. Some corruptions are simply beneficial, and if they're sufficiently beneficial then they take over the gene pool in not many generations.

shadowgovt 5y ago
There's a pretty good book of essays, "Group Theory In the Bedroom," which touches on the quest to unravel the DNA code in the time between the discovery of DNA chemically and the invention of the high resolution microscopy technology that allowed for direct observation of DNA strands. Multiple mathematical approaches were taken based on myriad theories of information encoding, compression, and redundancy. For a brief period of history, the question of how DNA worked wasn't one of biology, but one of statistics and information theory. Unfortunately, once they had the technology to observe DNA directly, they discovered that almost all of the theories were just wrong, because the encoding from DNA trigraphs to amino acids is basically nonsense. It's not structured, or organized, or elegant. Like so much of biology, it's a hot mess of accident and coincidence, and massively, inefficiently redundant... But, that redundancy has an interesting property. The most commonly used amino acids in protein formation are encoded by a large number of DNA triplets, and in general, one edit to those triplets results in a triplet that codes for the same amino acid. In hindsight, it is perhaps not surprising that the encoding schema from DNA to amino acids is edit-resistant. (What cooks my noodle regarding the redundancy is: do we see the redundant DNA encoding because those amino acids are most commonly used, or are those amino acids most commonly used because a large number of DNA triplets code for them so they are statistically likely to be more prevalent? ;) ).
- wirthjason 5y ago
  Love the title! Can never go wrong adding “in the bedroom” to liven up a title. There’s a math book that also has a catchy title: Mathematics and Sex, by Clio Cresswell
- specialist 5y ago
  Just bookmarked "Group Theory in the Bedroom", thanks. I just listened to interview with Rama Ranganathan about "evolutionary physics". https://news.uchicago.edu/story/big-brains-podcast-explores-whether-scientists-can-unlock-natures-design-secrets https://news.uchicago.edu/story/big-brains-podcast-explores-... I couldn't really follow their discussion. From your post I'm guessing you'd get a lot more out of it. Your questions about redundant encodings seems related to Ranganathan's assertion that biology can be both efficient and adaptive. Whereas with human design, efficiency and resilience is a more of a tradeoff. Any who...

shadowgovt 5y ago

There's a pretty good book of essays, "Group Theory In the Bedroom," which touches on the quest to unravel the DNA code in the time between the discovery of DNA chemically and the invention of the high resolution microscopy technology that allowed for direct observation of DNA strands. Multiple mathematical approaches were taken based on myriad theories of information encoding, compression, and redundancy. For a brief period of history, the question of how DNA worked wasn't one of biology, but one of statistics and information theory. Unfortunately, once they had the technology to observe DNA directly, they discovered that almost all of the theories were just wrong, because the encoding from DNA trigraphs to amino acids is basically nonsense. It's not structured, or organized, or elegant. Like so much of biology, it's a hot mess of accident and coincidence, and massively, inefficiently redundant... But, that redundancy has an interesting property. The most commonly used amino acids in protein formation are encoded by a large number of DNA triplets, and in general, one edit to those triplets results in a triplet that codes for the same amino acid. In hindsight, it is perhaps not surprising that the encoding schema from DNA to amino acids is edit-resistant. (What cooks my noodle regarding the redundancy is: do we see the redundant DNA encoding because those amino acids are most commonly used, or are those amino acids most commonly used because a large number of DNA triplets code for them so they are statistically likely to be more prevalent? ;) ).

wirthjason 5y ago
Love the title! Can never go wrong adding “in the bedroom” to liven up a title. There’s a math book that also has a catchy title: Mathematics and Sex, by Clio Cresswell
specialist 5y ago
Just bookmarked "Group Theory in the Bedroom", thanks. I just listened to interview with Rama Ranganathan about "evolutionary physics". https://news.uchicago.edu/story/big-brains-podcast-explores-whether-scientists-can-unlock-natures-design-secrets https://news.uchicago.edu/story/big-brains-podcast-explores-... I couldn't really follow their discussion. From your post I'm guessing you'd get a lot more out of it. Your questions about redundant encodings seems related to Ranganathan's assertion that biology can be both efficient and adaptive. Whereas with human design, efficiency and resilience is a more of a tradeoff. Any who...