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> it looks at that gene I think it may help to not think of genes as lookup tables. It's rather that genes act as blueprints for compound (protein/RNA) factor

> it looks at that gene I think it may help to not think of genes as lookup tables. It's rather that genes act as blueprints for compound (protein/RNA) factories (which can also be potentially turned off/on). So the compounds that is produced may interact with the compound(s) that end up resulting in the hair color, and it may also interact with the compound that results in the hair length. The problem is that any compound may in theory interact with any other compound, and there currently exists no way to 100% determine that they won't (for most compounds), which leaves open a huge space of possible chains of interactions. In practice there are many interactions for every biological compound, which is the reason why medicine is so hard to develop and usually has a risk of side-effects.

XorNot 2y ago
It's also worth remembering that a cell isn't a well structured environment - it's essentially a bag of chemicals, with some slightly smaller bags of other chemicals inside it. While there's a lot of mechanisms which are adding order and structure to what happens, it's all still just a big concentrated aqueous solution of everything in the cell, diffusion processes and mixing and all. So statements like a gene being "switched on" are very much an abstraction: whereas switching on a data line in a chip puts a very nice neat little voltage potential somewhere, switching on a gene basically just means the concentration of some "chemical" (protein) starts increasing and getting mixed into the cell (or ejected out of it by interacting with a bunch of other floating around things).
- timschmidt 2y ago
  > While there's a lot of mechanisms which are adding order and structure to what happens, it's all still just a big concentrated aqueous solution of everything in the cell, diffusion processes and mixing and all. Global variables, blegh. /s
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    Any closer look into biology completely dispels the notion of intelligent design. It’s over complicated, fragile, poorly architected and works, essentially, by side effects of all chemical reactions happening inside those bags of goo. Wouldn’t survive a code review.

XorNot 2y ago

It's also worth remembering that a cell isn't a well structured environment - it's essentially a bag of chemicals, with some slightly smaller bags of other chemicals inside it. While there's a lot of mechanisms which are adding order and structure to what happens, it's all still just a big concentrated aqueous solution of everything in the cell, diffusion processes and mixing and all. So statements like a gene being "switched on" are very much an abstraction: whereas switching on a data line in a chip puts a very nice neat little voltage potential somewhere, switching on a gene basically just means the concentration of some "chemical" (protein) starts increasing and getting mixed into the cell (or ejected out of it by interacting with a bunch of other floating around things).

timschmidt 2y ago
> While there's a lot of mechanisms which are adding order and structure to what happens, it's all still just a big concentrated aqueous solution of everything in the cell, diffusion processes and mixing and all. Global variables, blegh. /s
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Any closer look into biology completely dispels the notion of intelligent design. It’s over complicated, fragile, poorly architected and works, essentially, by side effects of all chemical reactions happening inside those bags of goo. Wouldn’t survive a code review.