7 ms·

The most interesting for me is the offspring, reproducing a different structure with the same genes. I think mathematically this could be the missing link in ev

The most interesting for me is the offspring, reproducing a different structure with the same genes. I think mathematically this could be the missing link in evolution, where random gene modifications are just not probable enough to drive evolution. 3 billion DNA pairs cannot evolve randomly, there is not enough time and matter in the universe to randomly try successful generations of life forms. However, bioelectric might be a much much more straightforward and fast way of driving evolution instead of randomly mutating DNA.

exe34 2y ago
> 3 billion DNA pairs cannot evolve randomly, there is not enough time and matter in the universe to randomly try successful generations of life forms the objection to the process described here is reasonable. thankfully this isn't how it works.
- treprinum 2y ago
  > thankfully this isn't how it works. Care to elaborate what lowers this probability down to "computable within adolescent age" levels?
  - empath75 2y ago
    You want people to explain natural selection and evolution to you?
    - treprinum 2y ago
      No, I want the computational feasibility explanation with some nice O(function) on biological processes. To the best of my knowledge, we still have no idea. Something like "the computational complexity of a beached fish to invent and grow a leg is O(n^2 log n) hours where n is the number of neural spikes in frontal cortex" or similar.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Fish aren't the only things that live in water. There are other marine organisms, some of which have leg-like things. What if one of those organisms, already equipped with legs, evolved to survive on the surface?
        treprinum 2y ago
        That would be fine; but we have some lineages coming from fish living on the surface. Those are the interesting ones.
        TeMPOraL 2y ago
        While metabolic advantage is a thing, I'm not sure if organisms are expected to carry minimum amount of genetic code that they actually use; in what little I know about developmental biology, I recall there's a high-level structure to the genetic code - some genes are doing more of flow control than encoding actual proteins. It's conceivable that the fish which walked on Earth was the one that managed to accumulate inactive adaptations for walking and switched them on. Also, there's horizontal gene transfer to account for. It further complicates the picture.
        exe34 2y ago
        > one that managed to accumulate inactive adaptations for walking and switched them on. https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/fish/can-fish-walk https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/fish/can-fish-... Genes get duplicated by accident, then accumulate mutations which are usually neutral or worse. Occasionally they help you achieve something slightly more useful than before. Lobed fins that helped you heave yourself back into water when you get beached would have helped. bigger lobed fins would help you get back when stranded further up the beach, or get from pool to pool. It's unlikely that an entire set of limbs, other necessary body upgrades to support them and neural circuits would just hang around waiting for all the right mutations to collect like hole punches on a restaurant loyalty card before some critter slapped their thighs and stood up and walked. Evolution does not plan ahead.
  - exe34 2y ago
    I offer paid tuition. For £50/h, I will learn stuff for you and then teach you. Prep time is typically ~3h for each hour I teach you. Minimum 1h lessons.
    - treprinum 2y ago
      I will pay you £50,000/h if you could give me a convincing answer like "the computational complexity of a beached fish to invent and grow a leg is O(n^2 log n) hours where n is the number of neural spikes in frontal cortex".
      - exe34 2y ago
        a beached fish doesn't grow legs. the problem isn't what you're willing to pay here, the problem is what you are willing to learn. my fees are not conditional on you liking the lessons. they are to be paid upfront. i accept the higher offer though.
        treprinum 2y ago
        > a beached fish doesn't grow legs Can you prove it? Show me some sort of an environment where a water-based complex organism is able to survive and thrive in dry environment prompting it to grow a new movement organ useless in the water but needed on surface and give me some less-than-exponential algorithmic complexity bound for it. If you can't do it, you don't offer valuable lessons.
        jjk166 2y ago
        The Lungfish survives prolonged droughts where its freshwater habitat dries up. It has evolved the ability to breath fresh air, secrete a mucous membrane to form a protective cocoon that helps it retain moitsture, and its fins are heavily modified to aid with land based locomotion. Lungfish are the closest relatives to tetrapods who likely evolved under similar conditions. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/west-african-lungfish/ https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/west-afric...
koeng 2y ago
> where random gene modifications are just not probable enough to drive evolution. 3 billion DNA pairs cannot evolve randomly, there is not enough time and matter in the universe to randomly try successful generations of life forms. As a biologist, I don't think this really follows. From my perspective of studying life, 3 billion DNA pairs can definitely evolve randomly - it's not even really that hard. Eukaryotic life just happened to get that because the fitness deficit from the retrotransposons weren't too bad. On the contrary, I can't actually see how bioelectric could drive evolution - only the creation of more complex structures
golol 2y ago
As I understand, the worm cells act differently because the worm is placed in a solution which interferes with their electrical messaging, so it makes sense that the offspring growing up in the same solution would grow with the same defects as the parents. I think that's all there is to it.
- hughrlomas 2y ago
  The referenced paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867421002233 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742...) specifically states that it continues after the solution is changed to plain water. > Two-headed worms made this way reveal a permanent revision of the target morphology: subsequent rounds of regeneration in plain water, long after the reagent is gone from the tissue, continue to make two-headed worms.
  - golol 2y ago
    Ok wow that's pretty strange.
skywhopper 2y ago
Indeed, they do not evolve randomly. There’s this thing called natural selection that is relatively crucial. Your interpretation of bioelectric effects as summarized in this article seems to have missed something. The bioelectric network is itself an expression of the genes involved in development. It’s not a separate magical force.
- empath75 2y ago
  It's not any different from the nervous system, really, it's just that we're now recognizing that those fields are involved in things other than sensation, perception, etc..
- spacetimeuser5 2y ago
  >>The bioelectric network is itself an expression of the genes involved in development. Yes, you may need genes to express the proteins of ion channels and gap junctions, but there is no anatomy coded by genes, no genes code for how many limbs will a biosystem have (as reiterated by Levin). And it is this level of resolution that actually mattered for years before the launch of molecular biology and medicine. >>It’s not a separate magical force. Indeed, it sort of (suppose - by up to 70%) is. If the fine structure constant, which defines the strength of the interaction between a charge and an electric field, were 4% less or more than its current value, the current world and biosphere wouldn't exist. So far physics can't explain why the fine structure constant has this exact value (~1/137, which is also unique that it is a dimenionless constant). (I'm not inferring anything, just presenting raw data).
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    > but there is no anatomy coded by genes, no genes code for how many limbs will a biosystem have (as reiterated by Levin) What's this supposed to mean? We are already able to develop bugs with missing or additional limbs by modifying their genes.
    - spacetimeuser5 2y ago
      At least in a specific experimental context and with specific animal models. When they mixed the embryos of a frog and an axolotl, there were no genes in their genome which could predict whether a "frogolotl" will have legs.
ben_w 2y ago
> I think mathematically this could be the missing link in evolution, where random gene modifications are just not probable enough to drive evolution. 3 billion DNA pairs cannot evolve randomly, there is not enough time and matter in the universe to randomly try successful generations of life forms This suggests you have not tried writing a simulated evolution based optimiser. They're quite easy to write, the hard part is what you mean by a "fitness function" (which doesn't matter for nature, it just is whatever it is). Such algorithms are also more than fast enough — remember that for the first 3 billion years we only had single-celled life, and that can reproduce in 20 minutes, so we had potentially 79 trillion generations (edit because "78.84 trillion" would be overselling the precision) before the first multicellular life. You get good results faster than that. The number of base pairs is also just a misleading statistic. For example: each of XXX, XXY, XYY, and Downs are found in around 0.1 of human births, each of which gets an extra copy of a chromosome. These specific changes may not be too good for us, but this kind of sudden massive increase is also found in some plants without negative repercussions. > However, bioelectric might be a much much more straightforward and fast way of driving evolution instead of randomly mutating DNA. I have no reason to expect bioelectric processes described in this article to be able to direct useful effects on the genome, for the same reasons I think it unlikely your own brain could by sheer willpower turn you into a werewolf. Wrong layer of abstraction.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > For example: each of XXX, XXY, XYY, and Downs are found in around 0.1 of human births, each of which gets an extra copy of a chromosome. These specific changes may not be too good for us, but this kind of sudden massive increase is also found in some plants without negative repercussions. A couple notes: Downs is unlike the other defects you mentioned in that it severely impairs the patient while the various extra-sex-chromosome disorders vary from sterility through minor impairment to what basically amounts to behavioral differences. Downs is unusual, though, in that most extra chromosomes make the fetus nonviable. As far as trisomy disorders go in general, Downs is unusually benign. Plants are better known for increasing their -ploidy (number of sets of chromosomes) than the count of an individual chromosome. A triploid human, with three copies of every chromosome, would be hopelessly nonviable. Plants are different. Really different.
jhedwards 2y ago
> reproducing a different structure with the same genes This a-ha moment for me with respect to this is that some biological processes are of the type [random process -> selection -> stable result]. This means that the genetics actually _don't_ store the information for what is ultimately produced, only the information necessary to trigger a random exploratory process and to stabilize that process when it reaches a suitable target. This is one reason why animals can flexibly adapt their development to different conditions as described in the above article.
- immibis 2y ago
  For example, human genetics encode how to make a big ball of neurons that can learn by themselves.

exe34 2y ago

> 3 billion DNA pairs cannot evolve randomly, there is not enough time and matter in the universe to randomly try successful generations of life forms the objection to the process described here is reasonable. thankfully this isn't how it works.

treprinum 2y ago
> thankfully this isn't how it works. Care to elaborate what lowers this probability down to "computable within adolescent age" levels?
- empath75 2y ago
  You want people to explain natural selection and evolution to you?
  - treprinum 2y ago
    No, I want the computational feasibility explanation with some nice O(function) on biological processes. To the best of my knowledge, we still have no idea. Something like "the computational complexity of a beached fish to invent and grow a leg is O(n^2 log n) hours where n is the number of neural spikes in frontal cortex" or similar.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Fish aren't the only things that live in water. There are other marine organisms, some of which have leg-like things. What if one of those organisms, already equipped with legs, evolved to survive on the surface?
      - treprinum 2y ago
        That would be fine; but we have some lineages coming from fish living on the surface. Those are the interesting ones.
        TeMPOraL 2y ago
        While metabolic advantage is a thing, I'm not sure if organisms are expected to carry minimum amount of genetic code that they actually use; in what little I know about developmental biology, I recall there's a high-level structure to the genetic code - some genes are doing more of flow control than encoding actual proteins. It's conceivable that the fish which walked on Earth was the one that managed to accumulate inactive adaptations for walking and switched them on. Also, there's horizontal gene transfer to account for. It further complicates the picture.
        exe34 2y ago
        > one that managed to accumulate inactive adaptations for walking and switched them on. https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/fish/can-fish-walk https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/fish/can-fish-... Genes get duplicated by accident, then accumulate mutations which are usually neutral or worse. Occasionally they help you achieve something slightly more useful than before. Lobed fins that helped you heave yourself back into water when you get beached would have helped. bigger lobed fins would help you get back when stranded further up the beach, or get from pool to pool. It's unlikely that an entire set of limbs, other necessary body upgrades to support them and neural circuits would just hang around waiting for all the right mutations to collect like hole punches on a restaurant loyalty card before some critter slapped their thighs and stood up and walked. Evolution does not plan ahead.
- exe34 2y ago
  I offer paid tuition. For £50/h, I will learn stuff for you and then teach you. Prep time is typically ~3h for each hour I teach you. Minimum 1h lessons.
  - treprinum 2y ago
    I will pay you £50,000/h if you could give me a convincing answer like "the computational complexity of a beached fish to invent and grow a leg is O(n^2 log n) hours where n is the number of neural spikes in frontal cortex".
    - exe34 2y ago
      a beached fish doesn't grow legs. the problem isn't what you're willing to pay here, the problem is what you are willing to learn. my fees are not conditional on you liking the lessons. they are to be paid upfront. i accept the higher offer though.
      - treprinum 2y ago
        > a beached fish doesn't grow legs Can you prove it? Show me some sort of an environment where a water-based complex organism is able to survive and thrive in dry environment prompting it to grow a new movement organ useless in the water but needed on surface and give me some less-than-exponential algorithmic complexity bound for it. If you can't do it, you don't offer valuable lessons.
        jjk166 2y ago
        The Lungfish survives prolonged droughts where its freshwater habitat dries up. It has evolved the ability to breath fresh air, secrete a mucous membrane to form a protective cocoon that helps it retain moitsture, and its fins are heavily modified to aid with land based locomotion. Lungfish are the closest relatives to tetrapods who likely evolved under similar conditions. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/west-african-lungfish/ https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/west-afric...

koeng 2y ago

> where random gene modifications are just not probable enough to drive evolution. 3 billion DNA pairs cannot evolve randomly, there is not enough time and matter in the universe to randomly try successful generations of life forms. As a biologist, I don't think this really follows. From my perspective of studying life, 3 billion DNA pairs can definitely evolve randomly - it's not even really that hard. Eukaryotic life just happened to get that because the fitness deficit from the retrotransposons weren't too bad. On the contrary, I can't actually see how bioelectric could drive evolution - only the creation of more complex structures

golol 2y ago

As I understand, the worm cells act differently because the worm is placed in a solution which interferes with their electrical messaging, so it makes sense that the offspring growing up in the same solution would grow with the same defects as the parents. I think that's all there is to it.

hughrlomas 2y ago
The referenced paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867421002233 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742...) specifically states that it continues after the solution is changed to plain water. > Two-headed worms made this way reveal a permanent revision of the target morphology: subsequent rounds of regeneration in plain water, long after the reagent is gone from the tissue, continue to make two-headed worms.
- golol 2y ago
  Ok wow that's pretty strange.

skywhopper 2y ago

Indeed, they do not evolve randomly. There’s this thing called natural selection that is relatively crucial. Your interpretation of bioelectric effects as summarized in this article seems to have missed something. The bioelectric network is itself an expression of the genes involved in development. It’s not a separate magical force.

empath75 2y ago
It's not any different from the nervous system, really, it's just that we're now recognizing that those fields are involved in things other than sensation, perception, etc..
spacetimeuser5 2y ago
>>The bioelectric network is itself an expression of the genes involved in development. Yes, you may need genes to express the proteins of ion channels and gap junctions, but there is no anatomy coded by genes, no genes code for how many limbs will a biosystem have (as reiterated by Levin). And it is this level of resolution that actually mattered for years before the launch of molecular biology and medicine. >>It’s not a separate magical force. Indeed, it sort of (suppose - by up to 70%) is. If the fine structure constant, which defines the strength of the interaction between a charge and an electric field, were 4% less or more than its current value, the current world and biosphere wouldn't exist. So far physics can't explain why the fine structure constant has this exact value (~1/137, which is also unique that it is a dimenionless constant). (I'm not inferring anything, just presenting raw data).
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > but there is no anatomy coded by genes, no genes code for how many limbs will a biosystem have (as reiterated by Levin) What's this supposed to mean? We are already able to develop bugs with missing or additional limbs by modifying their genes.
  - spacetimeuser5 2y ago
    At least in a specific experimental context and with specific animal models. When they mixed the embryos of a frog and an axolotl, there were no genes in their genome which could predict whether a "frogolotl" will have legs.

ben_w 2y ago

> I think mathematically this could be the missing link in evolution, where random gene modifications are just not probable enough to drive evolution. 3 billion DNA pairs cannot evolve randomly, there is not enough time and matter in the universe to randomly try successful generations of life forms This suggests you have not tried writing a simulated evolution based optimiser. They're quite easy to write, the hard part is what you mean by a "fitness function" (which doesn't matter for nature, it just is whatever it is). Such algorithms are also more than fast enough — remember that for the first 3 billion years we only had single-celled life, and that can reproduce in 20 minutes, so we had potentially 79 trillion generations (edit because "78.84 trillion" would be overselling the precision) before the first multicellular life. You get good results faster than that. The number of base pairs is also just a misleading statistic. For example: each of XXX, XXY, XYY, and Downs are found in around 0.1 of human births, each of which gets an extra copy of a chromosome. These specific changes may not be too good for us, but this kind of sudden massive increase is also found in some plants without negative repercussions. > However, bioelectric might be a much much more straightforward and fast way of driving evolution instead of randomly mutating DNA. I have no reason to expect bioelectric processes described in this article to be able to direct useful effects on the genome, for the same reasons I think it unlikely your own brain could by sheer willpower turn you into a werewolf. Wrong layer of abstraction.

thaumasiotes 2y ago
> For example: each of XXX, XXY, XYY, and Downs are found in around 0.1 of human births, each of which gets an extra copy of a chromosome. These specific changes may not be too good for us, but this kind of sudden massive increase is also found in some plants without negative repercussions. A couple notes: Downs is unlike the other defects you mentioned in that it severely impairs the patient while the various extra-sex-chromosome disorders vary from sterility through minor impairment to what basically amounts to behavioral differences. Downs is unusual, though, in that most extra chromosomes make the fetus nonviable. As far as trisomy disorders go in general, Downs is unusually benign. Plants are better known for increasing their -ploidy (number of sets of chromosomes) than the count of an individual chromosome. A triploid human, with three copies of every chromosome, would be hopelessly nonviable. Plants are different. Really different.

jhedwards 2y ago

> reproducing a different structure with the same genes This a-ha moment for me with respect to this is that some biological processes are of the type [random process -> selection -> stable result]. This means that the genetics actually _don't_ store the information for what is ultimately produced, only the information necessary to trigger a random exploratory process and to stabilize that process when it reaches a suitable target. This is one reason why animals can flexibly adapt their development to different conditions as described in the above article.

immibis 2y ago
For example, human genetics encode how to make a big ball of neurons that can learn by themselves.