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That's not what I said. The "tools" were also created from DNA, i.e. the mother. Or are you saying that there's essentially undocumented-code that exists insid

by ars 2y ago

That's not what I said. The "tools" were also created from DNA, i.e. the mother. Or are you saying that there's essentially undocumented-code that exists inside a living organisim and is transmitted mother to daughter, by virtue of being gestated, but is not in DNA?

tsimionescu 2y ago
I'm sort of saying that, yes. Some of this is actually very well known - at the cellular level, when a cell divides, the nuclear DNA doesn't uniquely determine every aspect of the new cells, certain organelles divide separately and by their own mechanisms. So, it's trivial to observe that you can't recreate a cell fully knowing just its DNA, you also need the mitochondrial DNA but also other bits. But there is even more than that. Imagine you had a program that explained exactly how to build a PC that can run this same program, starting from raw sand and ending up with a fully powered PC. So, if you boot a PC and give it access to a smart factory, this program will create a new smart factory from scratch that is a near perfect copy of the original smart factory. The question is: if you don't have a smart factory at all, you just found this program on printed paper, would you be able to use it to build a smart factory? Most likely, no, because the program can easily depend on certain details of the original smart factory that it was used to copy. Let's say, it could have instructions like "measure the length of original.robot_arm_7 and cut this piece of metal to the same length", or, "combine the liquid in original.vat3 with two parts "water" and 1 part liquid from original.vat7, and pour the result in copy.vat3". This is how life works: it uses DNA to build copies of itself, but DNA can't help you build the original base cell, that was arrived at by an entirely different process. Edit: for another simple example, consider that, if some ultra-advanced alien species found a population of living mammals, but they were all female, they would be fully able to create more females of the same species. But, it would be completely impossible for them to create a male of the original species, because there is no DNA whatsoever in a female mammal that explains how to build a testicle or a sperm cell. They could build artificial males, but they couldn't ever know if those males resemble the originals or not. So again, the DNA of an organism doesn't encode all the information necessary to create the species, that is transmitted through a more complex mechanism.
- sho 2y ago
  Thanks for your well-informed contributions to this thread. Food for thought. I must admit that I hadn't known the "factory environment" made such a big difference in outcomes. In your opinion then, do we need to add a 3rd "variable" to the nature/nurture question? "Nature" is generally understood to be DNA, "Nurture" is generally accepted to be the post-birth development environment. If the "embyronic toolkit" at hand is so important, surely this popular concept needs a 3rd leg. I'd also be interested in your thoughts on surrogacy. I had naively assumed that, so long as the surrogate mother was well-nourished, the baby would likely be fine. But it seems it's a lot more complicated than that, and I feel like a lot of people are underinformed about this.
  - pas 2y ago
    Nature is the heritable part nurture is the "seems easiest to change" part. Of course turns out that gene-environment interactions are common and complicated, so most of the things are mixed. Brain development takes about 20 years, driven by genes, but the environment is extremely important to help people to learn how to get most out of that setup they got. This is most evident in learning disabilities, for example stimulants are regularly described as life-changing by ADHD folks.

by ars 2y ago

tsimionescu 2y ago

I'm sort of saying that, yes. Some of this is actually very well known - at the cellular level, when a cell divides, the nuclear DNA doesn't uniquely determine every aspect of the new cells, certain organelles divide separately and by their own mechanisms. So, it's trivial to observe that you can't recreate a cell fully knowing just its DNA, you also need the mitochondrial DNA but also other bits. But there is even more than that. Imagine you had a program that explained exactly how to build a PC that can run this same program, starting from raw sand and ending up with a fully powered PC. So, if you boot a PC and give it access to a smart factory, this program will create a new smart factory from scratch that is a near perfect copy of the original smart factory. The question is: if you don't have a smart factory at all, you just found this program on printed paper, would you be able to use it to build a smart factory? Most likely, no, because the program can easily depend on certain details of the original smart factory that it was used to copy. Let's say, it could have instructions like "measure the length of original.robot_arm_7 and cut this piece of metal to the same length", or, "combine the liquid in original.vat3 with two parts "water" and 1 part liquid from original.vat7, and pour the result in copy.vat3". This is how life works: it uses DNA to build copies of itself, but DNA can't help you build the original base cell, that was arrived at by an entirely different process. Edit: for another simple example, consider that, if some ultra-advanced alien species found a population of living mammals, but they were all female, they would be fully able to create more females of the same species. But, it would be completely impossible for them to create a male of the original species, because there is no DNA whatsoever in a female mammal that explains how to build a testicle or a sperm cell. They could build artificial males, but they couldn't ever know if those males resemble the originals or not. So again, the DNA of an organism doesn't encode all the information necessary to create the species, that is transmitted through a more complex mechanism.

sho 2y ago
Thanks for your well-informed contributions to this thread. Food for thought. I must admit that I hadn't known the "factory environment" made such a big difference in outcomes. In your opinion then, do we need to add a 3rd "variable" to the nature/nurture question? "Nature" is generally understood to be DNA, "Nurture" is generally accepted to be the post-birth development environment. If the "embyronic toolkit" at hand is so important, surely this popular concept needs a 3rd leg. I'd also be interested in your thoughts on surrogacy. I had naively assumed that, so long as the surrogate mother was well-nourished, the baby would likely be fine. But it seems it's a lot more complicated than that, and I feel like a lot of people are underinformed about this.
- pas 2y ago
  Nature is the heritable part nurture is the "seems easiest to change" part. Of course turns out that gene-environment interactions are common and complicated, so most of the things are mixed. Brain development takes about 20 years, driven by genes, but the environment is extremely important to help people to learn how to get most out of that setup they got. This is most evident in learning disabilities, for example stimulants are regularly described as life-changing by ADHD folks.