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It's incredible that the information necessary to create a human is just about 750 MB uncompressed. For example the very specific shape of the scapula bone or f

It's incredible that the information necessary to create a human is just about 750 MB uncompressed. For example the very specific shape of the scapula bone or fear of spiders...

sameoldtune 2y ago
To be fair that’s just the size of the installer
- B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago
  That's a good comeback, especially if you can say something about the site where the rest of the info is pulled from ;-)
  - Angostura 2y ago
    Well, the egg’s cytoplasm contains quite a few of the frameworks
  - aspenmayer 2y ago
    DNA has been in development hell for billions of years, and yet compile/install times still vary widely between platforms and is not ABI compatible cross-platform. Don’t get me started on the unauthorized use of proprietary code! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer We keep getting asked about “checksums” and “reproducible builds” and if the BDFL is going to implement them, to which they say: “already landed in upstream,” “works on my machine,” “notabug,” and/or “wontfix” sometimes in the same reply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3730912/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3730912/ https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2016.106 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2016.106
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - sameoldtune 2y ago
    I know you were joking, but what I was thinking of was that our DNA creates cells, but I don’t think that we would grow into proper humans without interacting with the rest of the earths environment. And there’s a lot more than 750 MB of information out there
    - B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago
      I was thinking only of the hardware - call it a feral human, as in raised by wolves - of course otherwise you get the "it takes a village" line.
  - ars 2y ago
    > about the site where the rest of the info is pulled from That's what Dualism posits: The rest of the info is elsewhere, and joins with the physical body. Dualism is usually discussed in regards to sapience, but it doesn't have to, it can also include the behavior of animals.
- seydor 2y ago
  but if i pirate it, i have a full copy
Terr_ 2y ago
> It's incredible that the information necessary to create a human is just about 750 MB uncompressed Hold up, isn't the point of this article that genes do not have all the information? The, er, bootup environment of a freshly-fertilized human egg normally provides a lot more than merely protection and raw materials for nine months. Likely a lot of required parameters, and definitely a lot of important tuning optimizations. > For example the very specific shape of the scapula bone or fear of spiders... There were some studies a decade back about mice inheriting fears of certain smells from the father, I wonder if anyone discovered the mechanism (or disproved the effect) by now.
- abecedarius 2y ago
  To a programmer it's reminiscent of a self-hosting compiler that comes with working source and binary, but not the sequence of bootstraps. "Trusting trust" makes a nice example of the hastiness in taking the source to be all you really need to know. Similarly, metacircular interpreters that leave evaluation order ambiguous. Should be very interesting to quantify what's needed for a "clean bootstrap" of a minimal model organism that can reproduce.
- agumonkey 2y ago
  > Hold up, isn't the point of this article that genes do not have all the information? Yeah it is. The informational aspect (and the precision level) Levin and his friends are looking for is the main factor here. Cells are not just tissue building blocks, they're agents, limited but still, themselves with a lot more capabilities than we generally assume. I believe multiple fields are mature enough (biology, computational biology, optics) to care and analyse this and make a new step in our understanding of complex organisms.
1auralynn 2y ago
Well until they succeed in creating artificial wombs it's technically a much larger amount of information (e.g. the cellular composition of the womb, how many and what kinds of nutrients that flow through, etc). We are still scratching the surface of epigenetics too.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > Well until they succeed in creating artificial wombs it's technically a much larger amount of information (e.g. the cellular composition of the womb, how many and what kinds of nutrients that flow through, etc). You might note that this information is also contained in the same notional 750MB bundle. Imagine a piece of software that works poorly the first time you run it, but modifies its environment so that it will work better in future runs. There was an experiment in birds related to this. Someone had the question of whether birdsong was genetically or culturally determined. The cultural side noted that, for whatever species of bird was under investigation, birds raised without parents produced abnormal song. But upon continuing the experiment, the genetic side noted that the children of those birds, exposed only to the abnormal song of their parents, produced normal song. Raising one bird in isolation isn't enough to express the information contained in that species' DNA, but the information is there anyway.
  - klipt 2y ago
    Or the bird's DNA contained some objective function, and the song gradually converged to maximize that function? :-)
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      That would be an example of the song being specified in the DNA.
  - alexey-salmin 2y ago
    > You might note that this information is also contained in the same notional 750MB bundle. Not necessarily, that's the point. It's uncertain if you can recreate a human being from genome alone even with perfect technology. Some crucial information could be passed from one female to another without being present in the genome at all. > There was an experiment in birds related to this. I suspect none of these birds were rebuilt in a laboratory from their genome alone. The experiment proves that information is passed inside the egg but it doesn't specify via which medium.
tsimionescu 2y ago
It's really not. If nothing else, conditions in the uterus, especially in the first few months, are extremely crucial. Take 10 identical fertilized eggs and put them in 10 different people and you'll get 10 different humans, not 10 clones as people generally assume. And this is not just genetics of the mother, differences in diet and lifestyle will also significantly (not to mention history) impact the development of the fetus, especially in the early months.
- sho 2y ago
  > Take 10 identical fertilized eggs and put them in 10 different people and you'll get 10 different humans Well, some would say if you took 10 identical fertilised eggs and put them in the same human in serial you'd get 10 different humans. Some would say there's no such thing as 10 identical fertilised eggs, or 10 identical anything. The question is how different? 10 identical eggs in 10 well-nourished, healthy people and the results should be pretty similar, no?
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    > Some would say there's no such thing as 10 identical fertilised eggs, or 10 identical anything. Sure, "identical" is a strong word for anything biological. > The question is how different? 10 identical eggs in 10 well-nourished, healthy people and the results should be pretty similar, no? My understanding is that they would be less similar than "identical" twins, more similar than regular siblings.
    - calf 2y ago
      But wouldn't "surrogate clones" as the category be closer to twins than siblings? They would be closer to twins than fraternal twins.
      - tsimionescu 2y ago
        Honestly I don't think it's very clear. The practicalities of cloning processes make it so that we are very far from exploring what's in principle possible. All of the cloned mammals so far have died pretty young even when the original organism lived a long and healthy life, so in that sense they are technically way more different than even siblings. Of course, this is almost certainly just a limitation of our currently imperfect cloning technology, so it's hard to judge what a perfected cloning tech would do. Of course, certain aspects of appearance are known to be almost exclusively genetically determined, such as eye, hair, and skin color. Some fine details are known from identical twin studies to not be fully determined, such as fingerprints (twins have slightly different fingerprints). For the majority of other fine details, it's actually pretty unclear.
goodpoint 2y ago
> create a human *body*
hejdufufjrj 2y ago
In compression contests you count the size of both the compressed data (DNA) and the decompressor binary (egg cell). We don't know how much data is required to fully describe a living cell, but it's not just the DNA since you can't turn that into a cell without using an existing cell
- taylorius 2y ago
  It could be argued that the "decompressor binary" is actually a female human, which sounds a bit like the old "store large parts of the compressed data in the decoder to get a smaller file size" trick. :-) Maybe the sperm / egg are deltas? I wonder if there has been any research done with parental similarity with gestation using surrogacy vs. natural mother.
grishka 2y ago
It's the initial state for a self-replicating hardware procedural generator.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ur-whale 2y ago
> It's incredible that the information necessary to create a human is just about 750 MB Have you not been playing with LLM's in the last year or so ? They seem to compress a sizable chunk of human knowledge in about 7 Gig And, when they find a gap, they lie through their teeth to provide a reasonable answer. I wonder if there's some sort of similar process (hallucination) going on when the final human is rebuilt from the 750MB.
Geee 2y ago
DNA is just a "program", and a living cell is basically an advanced programmable nanorobot. When cells divide or reproduce, the whole nanorobot is cloned with some modifications. The DNA tells how to modify the cloned nanorobot, and it is also possible to reprogram any cell back to the original state. Nobody knows how to make a cell i.e the nanorobot from stratch. The information is not in the DNA, like a computer program doesn't contain the instructions to build a computer.
wallon_brux 2y ago
I guess that's without considering epigenetics which have some heritable marks. We are very far from knowing how much epigenetics contribute to the making of an organism and as a whole it is controversial. But one of the great lessons of the human genome project is that DNA coding does not account for all of the biologic information and that epigenetics may have a bigger part to play than what was previously thought. If we were somehow able to model every epigenetic marker the uncompressed information would be quite heavier

It's incredible that the information necessary to create a human is just about 750 MB uncompressed. For example the very specific shape of the scapula bone or fear of spiders...

sameoldtune 2y ago

To be fair that’s just the size of the installer

B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago
That's a good comeback, especially if you can say something about the site where the rest of the info is pulled from ;-)
- Angostura 2y ago
  Well, the egg’s cytoplasm contains quite a few of the frameworks
- aspenmayer 2y ago
  DNA has been in development hell for billions of years, and yet compile/install times still vary widely between platforms and is not ABI compatible cross-platform. Don’t get me started on the unauthorized use of proprietary code! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer We keep getting asked about “checksums” and “reproducible builds” and if the BDFL is going to implement them, to which they say: “already landed in upstream,” “works on my machine,” “notabug,” and/or “wontfix” sometimes in the same reply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3730912/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3730912/ https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2016.106 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2016.106
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- sameoldtune 2y ago
  I know you were joking, but what I was thinking of was that our DNA creates cells, but I don’t think that we would grow into proper humans without interacting with the rest of the earths environment. And there’s a lot more than 750 MB of information out there
  - B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago
    I was thinking only of the hardware - call it a feral human, as in raised by wolves - of course otherwise you get the "it takes a village" line.
- ars 2y ago
  > about the site where the rest of the info is pulled from That's what Dualism posits: The rest of the info is elsewhere, and joins with the physical body. Dualism is usually discussed in regards to sapience, but it doesn't have to, it can also include the behavior of animals.
seydor 2y ago
but if i pirate it, i have a full copy

Terr_ 2y ago

> It's incredible that the information necessary to create a human is just about 750 MB uncompressed Hold up, isn't the point of this article that genes do not have all the information? The, er, bootup environment of a freshly-fertilized human egg normally provides a lot more than merely protection and raw materials for nine months. Likely a lot of required parameters, and definitely a lot of important tuning optimizations. > For example the very specific shape of the scapula bone or fear of spiders... There were some studies a decade back about mice inheriting fears of certain smells from the father, I wonder if anyone discovered the mechanism (or disproved the effect) by now.

abecedarius 2y ago
To a programmer it's reminiscent of a self-hosting compiler that comes with working source and binary, but not the sequence of bootstraps. "Trusting trust" makes a nice example of the hastiness in taking the source to be all you really need to know. Similarly, metacircular interpreters that leave evaluation order ambiguous. Should be very interesting to quantify what's needed for a "clean bootstrap" of a minimal model organism that can reproduce.
agumonkey 2y ago
> Hold up, isn't the point of this article that genes do not have all the information? Yeah it is. The informational aspect (and the precision level) Levin and his friends are looking for is the main factor here. Cells are not just tissue building blocks, they're agents, limited but still, themselves with a lot more capabilities than we generally assume. I believe multiple fields are mature enough (biology, computational biology, optics) to care and analyse this and make a new step in our understanding of complex organisms.

1auralynn 2y ago

Well until they succeed in creating artificial wombs it's technically a much larger amount of information (e.g. the cellular composition of the womb, how many and what kinds of nutrients that flow through, etc). We are still scratching the surface of epigenetics too.

thaumasiotes 2y ago
> Well until they succeed in creating artificial wombs it's technically a much larger amount of information (e.g. the cellular composition of the womb, how many and what kinds of nutrients that flow through, etc). You might note that this information is also contained in the same notional 750MB bundle. Imagine a piece of software that works poorly the first time you run it, but modifies its environment so that it will work better in future runs. There was an experiment in birds related to this. Someone had the question of whether birdsong was genetically or culturally determined. The cultural side noted that, for whatever species of bird was under investigation, birds raised without parents produced abnormal song. But upon continuing the experiment, the genetic side noted that the children of those birds, exposed only to the abnormal song of their parents, produced normal song. Raising one bird in isolation isn't enough to express the information contained in that species' DNA, but the information is there anyway.
- klipt 2y ago
  Or the bird's DNA contained some objective function, and the song gradually converged to maximize that function? :-)
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    That would be an example of the song being specified in the DNA.
- alexey-salmin 2y ago
  > You might note that this information is also contained in the same notional 750MB bundle. Not necessarily, that's the point. It's uncertain if you can recreate a human being from genome alone even with perfect technology. Some crucial information could be passed from one female to another without being present in the genome at all. > There was an experiment in birds related to this. I suspect none of these birds were rebuilt in a laboratory from their genome alone. The experiment proves that information is passed inside the egg but it doesn't specify via which medium.

tsimionescu 2y ago

It's really not. If nothing else, conditions in the uterus, especially in the first few months, are extremely crucial. Take 10 identical fertilized eggs and put them in 10 different people and you'll get 10 different humans, not 10 clones as people generally assume. And this is not just genetics of the mother, differences in diet and lifestyle will also significantly (not to mention history) impact the development of the fetus, especially in the early months.

sho 2y ago
> Take 10 identical fertilized eggs and put them in 10 different people and you'll get 10 different humans Well, some would say if you took 10 identical fertilised eggs and put them in the same human in serial you'd get 10 different humans. Some would say there's no such thing as 10 identical fertilised eggs, or 10 identical anything. The question is how different? 10 identical eggs in 10 well-nourished, healthy people and the results should be pretty similar, no?
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  > Some would say there's no such thing as 10 identical fertilised eggs, or 10 identical anything. Sure, "identical" is a strong word for anything biological. > The question is how different? 10 identical eggs in 10 well-nourished, healthy people and the results should be pretty similar, no? My understanding is that they would be less similar than "identical" twins, more similar than regular siblings.
  - calf 2y ago
    But wouldn't "surrogate clones" as the category be closer to twins than siblings? They would be closer to twins than fraternal twins.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      Honestly I don't think it's very clear. The practicalities of cloning processes make it so that we are very far from exploring what's in principle possible. All of the cloned mammals so far have died pretty young even when the original organism lived a long and healthy life, so in that sense they are technically way more different than even siblings. Of course, this is almost certainly just a limitation of our currently imperfect cloning technology, so it's hard to judge what a perfected cloning tech would do. Of course, certain aspects of appearance are known to be almost exclusively genetically determined, such as eye, hair, and skin color. Some fine details are known from identical twin studies to not be fully determined, such as fingerprints (twins have slightly different fingerprints). For the majority of other fine details, it's actually pretty unclear.

goodpoint 2y ago

> create a human *body*

hejdufufjrj 2y ago

In compression contests you count the size of both the compressed data (DNA) and the decompressor binary (egg cell). We don't know how much data is required to fully describe a living cell, but it's not just the DNA since you can't turn that into a cell without using an existing cell

taylorius 2y ago
It could be argued that the "decompressor binary" is actually a female human, which sounds a bit like the old "store large parts of the compressed data in the decoder to get a smaller file size" trick. :-) Maybe the sperm / egg are deltas? I wonder if there has been any research done with parental similarity with gestation using surrogacy vs. natural mother.

grishka 2y ago

It's the initial state for a self-replicating hardware procedural generator.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ur-whale 2y ago

> It's incredible that the information necessary to create a human is just about 750 MB Have you not been playing with LLM's in the last year or so ? They seem to compress a sizable chunk of human knowledge in about 7 Gig And, when they find a gap, they lie through their teeth to provide a reasonable answer. I wonder if there's some sort of similar process (hallucination) going on when the final human is rebuilt from the 750MB.

Geee 2y ago

DNA is just a "program", and a living cell is basically an advanced programmable nanorobot. When cells divide or reproduce, the whole nanorobot is cloned with some modifications. The DNA tells how to modify the cloned nanorobot, and it is also possible to reprogram any cell back to the original state. Nobody knows how to make a cell i.e the nanorobot from stratch. The information is not in the DNA, like a computer program doesn't contain the instructions to build a computer.

wallon_brux 2y ago

I guess that's without considering epigenetics which have some heritable marks. We are very far from knowing how much epigenetics contribute to the making of an organism and as a whole it is controversial. But one of the great lessons of the human genome project is that DNA coding does not account for all of the biologic information and that epigenetics may have a bigger part to play than what was previously thought. If we were somehow able to model every epigenetic marker the uncompressed information would be quite heavier