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It also blows my mind that that, even though DNA seems to just code for proteins and does not store a schematic for a brain in any way that we've been able to d

It also blows my mind that that, even though DNA seems to just code for proteins and does not store a schematic for a brain in any way that we've been able to decipher so far, human eggs pretty reliably end up growing into people who 9 months after conception already have a bunch of stuff, including visual processing, working. Of course the DNA is not the only input, there is also the mother's body, the whole process of pregnancy, but I don't know how that contributes to the new baby being able to enter the world already intelligent. It's possible that I'm not aware of some breakthroughs on this topic, though.

HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
DNA does a lot more than coding for proteins. It also controls how genes are expressed (how same gene does different things in different contexts) and how cells differentiate into different types (neurons, skin, muscle, etc) depending on location. In this way, DNA does control the blueprint for the brain, down to the initial generic wiring scheme of the cortex - six layers of differentiated neuron types, with a specific pattern of inter-connectivity. As a rough analogy, you could think of this DNA-controlled initial wiring scheme as something like an untrained transformer... the architecture is there, but won't do anything useful until it has been exposed to a lot of data, which will complete the wiring scheme (synapses = brain's model weights). The brain is going to start to learn as soon as it has sufficiently developed, which is certainly before birth, and newborn babies have been shown to already respond to things like their mothers voice which they were exposed to in the womb. Intelligence - ability to learn - is different from knowledge. A newborn baby has very little knowledge, but it does have intelligence since that comes from the brain architecture, hence ability to learn, that our DNA "encodes".
viewtransform 2y ago
The story of what we know so far about the development process is fascinating and captured in this book "Endless Forms Most Beautiful" by Sean B. Carroll (2005)
- tambourine_man 2y ago
  Not to be confused with the Sean M Carroll
idiotsecant 2y ago
It is awesome, in the full nearly dreadfully amazing sense of the word.
RajT88 2y ago
I had a DevOps engineer describe their deployment automation system as a "Giant Rube Goldberg Machine". Which of course, all programming is a giant Rube Goldberg machine, if you think about it. If you take the "Goldberg" analogy to mean "Haphazard" and not well-thought out intentional structuring, I suppose it'd be more appropriate to compare a well-written application to a mechanical swiss watch. Living beings are more "Rube Goldberg" than "Swiss Watch" - by virtue that they came to being guided not by intention, but circumstance.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  I worked on a 25 year project that stretched the tech many times in its life. On many occasions to get ambitious things to work despite a lack of good support, special subsystems were created with whatever wacky solution could be made to work, wrapped in sane surface API’s so the system as a whole could remain organized and accomplish the task well. Five or so years after any of these were created, they could have easily been replaced with more reasonable code. But they worked reliably and efficiently. Their API’s were sensible and stable. So they accumulated. If you reviewed all the code as a whole for the first time it was like finding a secret circus.
nullc 2y ago
newborns barely know how to see, they have to learn it. https://lozierinstitute.org/dive-deeper/the-newborn-senses-sight-and-eye-color/ https://lozierinstitute.org/dive-deeper/the-newborn-senses-s...
- 8bitsrule 2y ago
  Along with the native language they're surrounded with ... and have to progressively decode all the intricacies thereof.
  - butlike 2y ago
    But the language processor is in place (and arguably robust enough to map any arbitrary language in the world)
holoduke 2y ago
Yes electricity. Just like when you open up a ssd and inspect it under a microscope, its very hard to physically identify software stored on that disc. Same with human cells. Probably some electric layer containing programs of the human body.
kazinator 2y ago
It's because nature never actually had to solve that problem: "how do we encode the structure we have here into genes and chromosomes so that it can procreate". The genes randomly mutate, and their result is subject to fitness testing. The fascinating thing about evolution is that it's not actually necessary. The "unevolved" creatures persist just fine. The continued survival of cockroaches and whatnot proves that evolving to human levels is superfluous.
butlike 2y ago
I'm thinking out loud here, but what if it's akin to a copy mechanism, or compression expander algorithm like unzipping a file? The Sperm carries the requisite DNA to activate the egg, which then just executes the body's Replicate() method. The sperm being required is so people don't spontaneously get pregnant. The DNA coding for proteins is just to build the replicate() method, which then starts copying attributes from the host's (read: mother's) body. Much like how there are differences in compression/expansion algorithms (zip, tar, gz, etc..), the sperm that initiates the replication/unpacking adds non-neutral variance, hence the genetic traits of both parents present in the child. Put a different way, why reinvent the wheel if I could just grab the memoized visual processing from the parent? Then, if a trait isn't present on the host, say, mid-digital hair, I (as the replication algorithm), "wouldn't know what I wouldn't know" which could perhaps be seeing as synonymous with "evolution."
- sdwr 2y ago
  How does IVF work then? Or animals that lay eggs?

HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago

DNA does a lot more than coding for proteins. It also controls how genes are expressed (how same gene does different things in different contexts) and how cells differentiate into different types (neurons, skin, muscle, etc) depending on location. In this way, DNA does control the blueprint for the brain, down to the initial generic wiring scheme of the cortex - six layers of differentiated neuron types, with a specific pattern of inter-connectivity. As a rough analogy, you could think of this DNA-controlled initial wiring scheme as something like an untrained transformer... the architecture is there, but won't do anything useful until it has been exposed to a lot of data, which will complete the wiring scheme (synapses = brain's model weights). The brain is going to start to learn as soon as it has sufficiently developed, which is certainly before birth, and newborn babies have been shown to already respond to things like their mothers voice which they were exposed to in the womb. Intelligence - ability to learn - is different from knowledge. A newborn baby has very little knowledge, but it does have intelligence since that comes from the brain architecture, hence ability to learn, that our DNA "encodes".

viewtransform 2y ago

The story of what we know so far about the development process is fascinating and captured in this book "Endless Forms Most Beautiful" by Sean B. Carroll (2005)

tambourine_man 2y ago
Not to be confused with the Sean M Carroll

idiotsecant 2y ago

It is awesome, in the full nearly dreadfully amazing sense of the word.

RajT88 2y ago

I had a DevOps engineer describe their deployment automation system as a "Giant Rube Goldberg Machine". Which of course, all programming is a giant Rube Goldberg machine, if you think about it. If you take the "Goldberg" analogy to mean "Haphazard" and not well-thought out intentional structuring, I suppose it'd be more appropriate to compare a well-written application to a mechanical swiss watch. Living beings are more "Rube Goldberg" than "Swiss Watch" - by virtue that they came to being guided not by intention, but circumstance.

Nevermark 2y ago
I worked on a 25 year project that stretched the tech many times in its life. On many occasions to get ambitious things to work despite a lack of good support, special subsystems were created with whatever wacky solution could be made to work, wrapped in sane surface API’s so the system as a whole could remain organized and accomplish the task well. Five or so years after any of these were created, they could have easily been replaced with more reasonable code. But they worked reliably and efficiently. Their API’s were sensible and stable. So they accumulated. If you reviewed all the code as a whole for the first time it was like finding a secret circus.

nullc 2y ago

newborns barely know how to see, they have to learn it. https://lozierinstitute.org/dive-deeper/the-newborn-senses-sight-and-eye-color/ https://lozierinstitute.org/dive-deeper/the-newborn-senses-s...

8bitsrule 2y ago
Along with the native language they're surrounded with ... and have to progressively decode all the intricacies thereof.
- butlike 2y ago
  But the language processor is in place (and arguably robust enough to map any arbitrary language in the world)

holoduke 2y ago

Yes electricity. Just like when you open up a ssd and inspect it under a microscope, its very hard to physically identify software stored on that disc. Same with human cells. Probably some electric layer containing programs of the human body.

kazinator 2y ago

It's because nature never actually had to solve that problem: "how do we encode the structure we have here into genes and chromosomes so that it can procreate". The genes randomly mutate, and their result is subject to fitness testing. The fascinating thing about evolution is that it's not actually necessary. The "unevolved" creatures persist just fine. The continued survival of cockroaches and whatnot proves that evolving to human levels is superfluous.

butlike 2y ago

I'm thinking out loud here, but what if it's akin to a copy mechanism, or compression expander algorithm like unzipping a file? The Sperm carries the requisite DNA to activate the egg, which then just executes the body's Replicate() method. The sperm being required is so people don't spontaneously get pregnant. The DNA coding for proteins is just to build the replicate() method, which then starts copying attributes from the host's (read: mother's) body. Much like how there are differences in compression/expansion algorithms (zip, tar, gz, etc..), the sperm that initiates the replication/unpacking adds non-neutral variance, hence the genetic traits of both parents present in the child. Put a different way, why reinvent the wheel if I could just grab the memoized visual processing from the parent? Then, if a trait isn't present on the host, say, mid-digital hair, I (as the replication algorithm), "wouldn't know what I wouldn't know" which could perhaps be seeing as synonymous with "evolution."

sdwr 2y ago
How does IVF work then? Or animals that lay eggs?