6 ms·

How much information is in DNA?

89 points by crescit_eundo 1y ago

rhelz 1y ago
In any case, 6.2 billion bits (interestingly enough, almost exactly as much information which is on an audio CD which you used for your romantic mixtapes) is an upper bound. This rules out pretty much every nutty theory which evolutionary psychologists propose. Such as we evolved for altruism, we evolved to believe in religion, etc etc. Complete B.S. Exactly how much information would you need to specify a behavior like being predisposed to a belief in religion??? There's less than 80 minutes worth of music's worth of information in our genomes, and most of that is concerned with just keeping us alive. You are not predisposed to be anything. Go create the kind of person you want to be.
- ruuda 1y ago
  > There's less than 80 minutes worth of music's worth of information in our genomes That’s a very misleading take, this is lossless audio and the majority of the bits are spent encoding noise. You can encode way more audio at perceptually but not technically lossless level in that space.
- guilbep 1y ago
  There is no logic behind your argument
- out_of_protocol 1y ago
  > There's less than 80 minutes worth of music's worth of information Or awful lot of text information (state of art compressors can do up to 1:10 ratio for plain text, decoder itself is rather small, 750MB compressed could potentially contain like 7GB of text data). Also, look at demoscene. 4k (4 kB is the size of executable) can do crazy things, and 64kB can fit a lot of nice 3D objects, music, text, complex effects etc. weight less than any screenshot of any moment of running demo. In 95kB you can have full game (google kkringer) P.S. better example: full snake game in 56 BYTES https://github.com/donno2048/snake https://github.com/donno2048/snake For comparation the link above is 34 bytes, whole sentence is 83 bytes. It's possible to do a lot if we're talking about code
  - Valgrim 1y ago
    There's an interesting implication to this. We assume that evolution happens when random mutations (similar to random bit flips, removal or injection?) occur and when the random result has an advantage, the mutation tends to remain in the gene pool. Yet at the same time the result of this random code is extremely compressed, to the point we compare it to procedural generative code. Not sure what we can do with this but it certainly seems like we can once again get inspired by nature on this one.
  - robviren 1y ago
    I'd argue you could even take that one step further. Limiting it to the data encoded by DNA does not take into account what it is interacting with. DNA interacts with an ocean of protein leading to untold numbers of interactions. The DNA could just be the operating system in all this calling upon RNA and other "devices" to execute functions. To expand upon your compression idea, the index it is using exists outside the DNA encoding itself which means it could be holding an absolute ton of data. Bonus: https://xkcd.com/3056/ https://xkcd.com/3056/
    - bossyTeacher 1y ago
      Indeed. Chances are that the DNA itself is but one part of the puzzle. The protein soup the DNA interacts with is partially random and partially a consequence of the DNA itself and that interplay is likely a complexity space several orders of magnitude bigger than the DNA itself
    - EvanAnderson 1y ago
      > The DNA could just be the operating system... I am fond of the analogy of DNA to procedural generation. The "operating system", as I see it, is physics. Everything else is primitives built on top of that. Our brains can't begin to comprehend the untold multitudes of interactions occurring at a molecular scale over geologic time.
    - rhelz 1y ago
      Saying that the information doesn't come from the DNA, but from the environment--well that is just conceding my point. Sure, environment is way, way, more important to the formation of who you are than genetics is.
- chromatin 1y ago
  > There's less than 80 minutes worth of music's worth of information in our genomes What an insanely bad take. Not only did you not read and/or comprehend the article, the article itself undersells the information content of the genome (I'll post on this at the top level). > You are not predisposed to be anything. This does not logically follow your preceding statement, even if we were to accept the foregoing limited information content as factual
  - rhelz 1y ago
    no matter how much information you think is stored in DNA, the information stored in your brain is at least 5 orders of magnitude more. In comparison with what you have learned, your DNA is a rounding error. What you can learn will just swamp any predispositions you have.
- nurettin 1y ago
  You are predisposed to acting like your closest social circle.
- nathan_compton 1y ago
  This isn't a great argument - simple rules can produce complicated behavior and, at any rate, I don't think any evpsych people believe that evolution inescapably predisposes people to the things you talked about, only that evolution has produced biases in our behavior which manifest (at certain times and in certain circumstances) as those phenomena.
- GuB-42 1y ago
  An audio CD is a very inefficient way of storing information. I think a more apt comparison would be that of a LLM of that size. qwen:0.5b is about 400MB, its abilities are laughable compared to the likes of ChatGPT, but it can write coherently about general topics. For instance. >>> why would people be altruistic People are likely to be altruistic because they believe that helping others is better for everyone involved. People may also believe in the power of compassion and empathy towards others, which can contribute to greater altruism. Overall, people are likely to be altruistic because they believe that helping others is better for everyone involved. It is not a statement about LLMs, more about what you can achieve with "just" 400MB for storage. The other similarity is that LLMs are also "messy", if you want to see the results of finely crafted work in a really small amount of space, look at what sizecoders can do with a few kB of code or less.
- rhelz 1y ago
  chuckle hello dissenters, downvotes, and doubters :-) Seems like a lot of the objections stem from a few misconceptions: 1. You can dramatically increase the amount of information stored by compression. Uh, no. Information content is measured, as it were, "post-compression". There is a limit to how much information you can store in a gigabyte, and that limit is--a gigabyte. 2. Information content is not just stored in the DNA, but also in all of the ancillary proteins, etc. Well, the the information on how to create the proteins themselves are stored in DNA. Any additional information, then, has to be contributed by the environment. But that is exactly my point--environment matters way more than the information stored in the DNA. 3. "you are wrong", "you are a mathematical ignoramus" etc etc is ad hom. It is not a valid argument, contributes nothing to the conversation, and is not a good look. If you disagree let's see some math. 4. No matter how much information you think is stored in DNA, the amount of information stored in your brain is at least 5 orders of magnitude larger. The information you can learn swamps out any predispositions you might have. Go become the kind of person you want to be.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tetris11 1y ago
I thought the main advantage of DNA storage was the physical size of it, and how many different genomes you could have stacked next to each other in the same -70degree space. Millions of chimeric cells on the same petri dish? That's 1PB on a single glass slide. Depending on the sequencing tech paired with the rise of Spatial data, the read speed could be formidable. Needlessly complex setup though. Let's just stick with metals for now.
- out_of_protocol 1y ago
  DNA self-desintegrate very fast. It only works in living cells because it is being repaired non-stop
  - throwanem 1y ago
    Even reading is a destructive process, and the physics involved are incomprehensibly complex by comparison with anything in the digital domain.
    - kjkjadksj 1y ago
      There are ways to read it nondestructively. One way does trade resolution but once prepped the DNA itself can be imaged to be read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_banding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_banding
      - throwanem 1y ago
        That does not read DNA. A chromosome is not a strand and a karyotype is not a sequence. In any case, I described what a ribosome does.
  - shishironline 1y ago
    Sorry, it is one of the most stable organic molecules and can stay intact for thousands of years. That is why the Jurassic Park like fantasies are based on a truth and many extinct species have been brought to life through DNA in reality too.
roxolotl 1y ago
Discussion from earlier this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927321 Pretty sure the substack and main site are the same. First paragraph is at least.
nuc1e0n 1y ago
The article says that DNA is designed to keep working despite mutations occuring. What evidence does the author put forward to suppose it was designed rather than evolved? There's plenty of evidence to support it evolved BTW.
- iamtheworstdev 1y ago
  you might be reading a little too much into that word
  - hsshhshshjk 1y ago
    And likely on purpose too
- decremental 1y ago
  [dead]
vintermann 1y ago
Information can only be defined with respect to states where you 1. Can tell (or could in theory tell) the difference and 2. Care about the difference between states. The differences you care about, and the ones you don't, are baked in whenever you use any definition of information. It doesn't matter much, unless you use it to sneak in what you think we should care about, or use it to make philosophical arguments whose circularity is carefully hidden.
- tringuyen_cse 1y ago
  I have a similar view. The question of how much infomation by itself does not matter without some context/application.
chromatin 1y ago
The article massively undersells the information content of the genome in several key ways. A non-comprehensive list of these (before my morning coffee forgive me) includes: - DNA methylation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_methylation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_methylation) - Interactions of alleles (what article refers to as the "two versions of each base pair") - Duplications, deletions, inversions, and other structural variations (https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Structural-Variation https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Structural-Variatio...) - Physical proximity interactions in 3-dimensional space (https://cmbl.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s11658-023-00428-x https://cmbl.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s11658-023-0...) - Combinatorial effect (massive) of different alleles in complex systems Overall, it's not sensible to compare a linear sequence of bits, like a CD (sibling comment) or DVD (the article), to the linear sequence of the genome and conclude that their information content, based on length alone, is in any way comparable.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- deng 1y ago
  He does mention structual interactions as well as duplications/deletions/inversions. I would argue methylation is more like an annotation of DNA and not part of the DNA itself, but that's a matter of opinion. In the end, the author literally says: "nobody knows". Yes, you cannot compare a linear sequence of bits to a macromolecule that interacts structurally with its environment, and the author does not make that claim. The question he tries to answer is: how much data is needed to re-create a similar macromolecule that interacts in a similar way. His main point, in which you both agree: only the exons are surely not enough because the encoded proteins are just a (small?) part of how DNA interacts.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    Exons are almost like functions where as a gene is almost like a class definition. In different tissues in the body a gene might be alternatively spliced to lead to different protein isoforms. In effect, making use of only a subset of available functions in the class depending on certain input parameters or how the class is called.
RainbowcityKun 1y ago
- Cells work like this because DNA is under constant attack from mutations. - Mutations most commonly arise during cell replication. It's fascinating to realize that the "messiness" of DNA isn't a bug, but a feature—a side effect of evolution's raw material supply chain. Mutations, repeats, transposons, and imperfect repairs all contribute to a noisy genomic landscape. But it's exactly this noise that enables biological diversity. No mutations, no variation. No variation, no selection. No selection, no evolution. The genome is not a blueprint—it's a living, adapting scratchpad. Messiness is the canvas on which nature paints diversity.
- esafak 1y ago
  Don't forget sexual reproduction.
- nickpsecurity 1y ago
  Let me add to that. It requires a universe with specific laws that remain stable and encourage optimization. Then, a planet hospitible to life. Then, specific creatures with biological machinery more complex than anything humans have created. The machinery has plenty of reliability and adaptation baked in. Godless evolution suggests randomness produced all of it overtime. Yet, that's never worked in anything we've built. Even our GA's required laws, an environment, a computer, software, and fine-tuning. Pre-existing or by intelligent design (human inventors). Without these, it produced no results. So, I'll correct you by saying empirical data suggests evolution didnt produce this. We're seeing God's design skills in adaptive, resilient, complex, self-replicating systems. His work is truly beautiful to behold. Humans still can't produce something similar from scratch. Actually, they can't even be sure how the existing design works.
  - kaibee 1y ago
    > Godless evolution suggests randomness produced all of it overtime. Nope. Randomness _and_ a selection function. Natural selection, ie: surviving to create the next generation. > Yet, that's never worked in anything we've built. It works completely fine in things we've built. We don't have the processing power to simulate something on the scale of computational complexity happening a small tide pond though. But you can see 'evolution by natural selection' in a rule set as simple as Game of Life. > Even our GA's required laws, an environment, a computer, software, and fine-tuning. Pre-existing or by intelligent design (human inventors). Without these, it produced no results. The laws/environment/computer are the equivalent of having a universe with physical laws. If you want to claim that god created the universe and tuned the constants of the universe, well, maybe. Or maybe every possible universe exists and we're just not around in the ones that don't lead to conscious life, in the same way that Game of Life universe is too simple/constrained to evolve conscious life on the scales we can simulate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHb07ynsPgo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHb07ynsPgo
amelius 1y ago
Another question is: How much information can you __store__ in DNA without affecting the organism too much?
- timewizard 1y ago
  Very little. The base pairs have specific electrochemical properties. The content of DNA controls it's structure.
stenl 1y ago
A much more detailed and thoughtful (and peer reviewed) take on the same question from my colleague Jussi Taipale: https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/embj.201696114 https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/embj.201696114
metalman 1y ago
DNA contains all of the actualy relevant information that exists, including whatever sequence gives rise to the very conceptualisation of information, so in fact everything else that could be considered "information" is derived from DNA.
gitroom 1y ago
Man, the back and forth here before coffee is actually kinda hilarious - I get all worked up before caffeine too, but honestly, DNA being this messy scratchpad feels way more interesting than treating it like a tidy CD. The messiness kinda rules, if you ask me.
- sgt 1y ago
  Exactly why I prefer organizing my windows (on my computer) in a chaotic way, rather than a tiling manager. That's the DNA way of doing it ;)
gfalcao 1y ago
I would like to get a reasonably good intuition in regards to the total amount of compound DNA from human bodies at different biochemical states, in different locations around the world (different climates). By "compound DNA" I mean, including DNA of bacterium, fungi and viruses living within one's body. For instance, gut bacteria acquired and maintained based on food intake and environmental influence.
- gfalcao 1y ago
  In other words, how much the perception of DNA data in gigabytes grow by in different circumstances? Would it grow by a few more gigabytes ?
frshOffTheBoat 1y ago
[dead]
timewizard 1y ago
> But mitochondrial DNA is tiny so I won’t mention it again. Which is a bummer because it is circular. There is also a point on the strand where two separate genes overlap. The end of one has the same code as the beginning of another. So even DNA has it's own native compression scheme.
xvilka 1y ago
If we add more nucleotides[1] than standard 4, we could encode much more. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeno_nucleic_acid https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeno_nucleic_acid

89 points by crescit_eundo 1y ago

In any case, 6.2 billion bits (interestingly enough, almost exactly as much information which is on an audio CD which you used for your romantic mixtapes) is an upper bound. This rules out pretty much every nutty theory which evolutionary psychologists propose. Such as we evolved for altruism, we evolved to believe in religion, etc etc. Complete B.S. Exactly how much information would you need to specify a behavior like being predisposed to a belief in religion??? There's less than 80 minutes worth of music's worth of information in our genomes, and most of that is concerned with just keeping us alive. You are not predisposed to be anything. Go create the kind of person you want to be.

ruuda 1y ago
> There's less than 80 minutes worth of music's worth of information in our genomes That’s a very misleading take, this is lossless audio and the majority of the bits are spent encoding noise. You can encode way more audio at perceptually but not technically lossless level in that space.
guilbep 1y ago
There is no logic behind your argument
out_of_protocol 1y ago
> There's less than 80 minutes worth of music's worth of information Or awful lot of text information (state of art compressors can do up to 1:10 ratio for plain text, decoder itself is rather small, 750MB compressed could potentially contain like 7GB of text data). Also, look at demoscene. 4k (4 kB is the size of executable) can do crazy things, and 64kB can fit a lot of nice 3D objects, music, text, complex effects etc. weight less than any screenshot of any moment of running demo. In 95kB you can have full game (google kkringer) P.S. better example: full snake game in 56 BYTES https://github.com/donno2048/snake https://github.com/donno2048/snake For comparation the link above is 34 bytes, whole sentence is 83 bytes. It's possible to do a lot if we're talking about code
- Valgrim 1y ago
  There's an interesting implication to this. We assume that evolution happens when random mutations (similar to random bit flips, removal or injection?) occur and when the random result has an advantage, the mutation tends to remain in the gene pool. Yet at the same time the result of this random code is extremely compressed, to the point we compare it to procedural generative code. Not sure what we can do with this but it certainly seems like we can once again get inspired by nature on this one.
- robviren 1y ago
  I'd argue you could even take that one step further. Limiting it to the data encoded by DNA does not take into account what it is interacting with. DNA interacts with an ocean of protein leading to untold numbers of interactions. The DNA could just be the operating system in all this calling upon RNA and other "devices" to execute functions. To expand upon your compression idea, the index it is using exists outside the DNA encoding itself which means it could be holding an absolute ton of data. Bonus: https://xkcd.com/3056/ https://xkcd.com/3056/
  - bossyTeacher 1y ago
    Indeed. Chances are that the DNA itself is but one part of the puzzle. The protein soup the DNA interacts with is partially random and partially a consequence of the DNA itself and that interplay is likely a complexity space several orders of magnitude bigger than the DNA itself
  - EvanAnderson 1y ago
    > The DNA could just be the operating system... I am fond of the analogy of DNA to procedural generation. The "operating system", as I see it, is physics. Everything else is primitives built on top of that. Our brains can't begin to comprehend the untold multitudes of interactions occurring at a molecular scale over geologic time.
  - rhelz 1y ago
    Saying that the information doesn't come from the DNA, but from the environment--well that is just conceding my point. Sure, environment is way, way, more important to the formation of who you are than genetics is.
chromatin 1y ago
> There's less than 80 minutes worth of music's worth of information in our genomes What an insanely bad take. Not only did you not read and/or comprehend the article, the article itself undersells the information content of the genome (I'll post on this at the top level). > You are not predisposed to be anything. This does not logically follow your preceding statement, even if we were to accept the foregoing limited information content as factual
- rhelz 1y ago
  no matter how much information you think is stored in DNA, the information stored in your brain is at least 5 orders of magnitude more. In comparison with what you have learned, your DNA is a rounding error. What you can learn will just swamp any predispositions you have.
nurettin 1y ago
You are predisposed to acting like your closest social circle.
nathan_compton 1y ago
This isn't a great argument - simple rules can produce complicated behavior and, at any rate, I don't think any evpsych people believe that evolution inescapably predisposes people to the things you talked about, only that evolution has produced biases in our behavior which manifest (at certain times and in certain circumstances) as those phenomena.
GuB-42 1y ago
An audio CD is a very inefficient way of storing information. I think a more apt comparison would be that of a LLM of that size. qwen:0.5b is about 400MB, its abilities are laughable compared to the likes of ChatGPT, but it can write coherently about general topics. For instance. >>> why would people be altruistic People are likely to be altruistic because they believe that helping others is better for everyone involved. People may also believe in the power of compassion and empathy towards others, which can contribute to greater altruism. Overall, people are likely to be altruistic because they believe that helping others is better for everyone involved. It is not a statement about LLMs, more about what you can achieve with "just" 400MB for storage. The other similarity is that LLMs are also "messy", if you want to see the results of finely crafted work in a really small amount of space, look at what sizecoders can do with a few kB of code or less.
rhelz 1y ago
chuckle hello dissenters, downvotes, and doubters :-) Seems like a lot of the objections stem from a few misconceptions: 1. You can dramatically increase the amount of information stored by compression. Uh, no. Information content is measured, as it were, "post-compression". There is a limit to how much information you can store in a gigabyte, and that limit is--a gigabyte. 2. Information content is not just stored in the DNA, but also in all of the ancillary proteins, etc. Well, the the information on how to create the proteins themselves are stored in DNA. Any additional information, then, has to be contributed by the environment. But that is exactly my point--environment matters way more than the information stored in the DNA. 3. "you are wrong", "you are a mathematical ignoramus" etc etc is ad hom. It is not a valid argument, contributes nothing to the conversation, and is not a good look. If you disagree let's see some math. 4. No matter how much information you think is stored in DNA, the amount of information stored in your brain is at least 5 orders of magnitude larger. The information you can learn swamps out any predispositions you might have. Go become the kind of person you want to be.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

tetris11 1y ago

I thought the main advantage of DNA storage was the physical size of it, and how many different genomes you could have stacked next to each other in the same -70degree space. Millions of chimeric cells on the same petri dish? That's 1PB on a single glass slide. Depending on the sequencing tech paired with the rise of Spatial data, the read speed could be formidable. Needlessly complex setup though. Let's just stick with metals for now.

out_of_protocol 1y ago
DNA self-desintegrate very fast. It only works in living cells because it is being repaired non-stop
- throwanem 1y ago
  Even reading is a destructive process, and the physics involved are incomprehensibly complex by comparison with anything in the digital domain.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    There are ways to read it nondestructively. One way does trade resolution but once prepped the DNA itself can be imaged to be read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_banding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_banding
    - throwanem 1y ago
      That does not read DNA. A chromosome is not a strand and a karyotype is not a sequence. In any case, I described what a ribosome does.
- shishironline 1y ago
  Sorry, it is one of the most stable organic molecules and can stay intact for thousands of years. That is why the Jurassic Park like fantasies are based on a truth and many extinct species have been brought to life through DNA in reality too.

roxolotl 1y ago

Discussion from earlier this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927321 Pretty sure the substack and main site are the same. First paragraph is at least.

nuc1e0n 1y ago

The article says that DNA is designed to keep working despite mutations occuring. What evidence does the author put forward to suppose it was designed rather than evolved? There's plenty of evidence to support it evolved BTW.

iamtheworstdev 1y ago
you might be reading a little too much into that word
- hsshhshshjk 1y ago
  And likely on purpose too
decremental 1y ago
[dead]

vintermann 1y ago

Information can only be defined with respect to states where you 1. Can tell (or could in theory tell) the difference and 2. Care about the difference between states. The differences you care about, and the ones you don't, are baked in whenever you use any definition of information. It doesn't matter much, unless you use it to sneak in what you think we should care about, or use it to make philosophical arguments whose circularity is carefully hidden.

tringuyen_cse 1y ago
I have a similar view. The question of how much infomation by itself does not matter without some context/application.

chromatin 1y ago

The article massively undersells the information content of the genome in several key ways. A non-comprehensive list of these (before my morning coffee forgive me) includes: - DNA methylation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_methylation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_methylation) - Interactions of alleles (what article refers to as the "two versions of each base pair") - Duplications, deletions, inversions, and other structural variations (https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Structural-Variation https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Structural-Variatio...) - Physical proximity interactions in 3-dimensional space (https://cmbl.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s11658-023-00428-x https://cmbl.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s11658-023-0...) - Combinatorial effect (massive) of different alleles in complex systems Overall, it's not sensible to compare a linear sequence of bits, like a CD (sibling comment) or DVD (the article), to the linear sequence of the genome and conclude that their information content, based on length alone, is in any way comparable.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
deng 1y ago
He does mention structual interactions as well as duplications/deletions/inversions. I would argue methylation is more like an annotation of DNA and not part of the DNA itself, but that's a matter of opinion. In the end, the author literally says: "nobody knows". Yes, you cannot compare a linear sequence of bits to a macromolecule that interacts structurally with its environment, and the author does not make that claim. The question he tries to answer is: how much data is needed to re-create a similar macromolecule that interacts in a similar way. His main point, in which you both agree: only the exons are surely not enough because the encoded proteins are just a (small?) part of how DNA interacts.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  Exons are almost like functions where as a gene is almost like a class definition. In different tissues in the body a gene might be alternatively spliced to lead to different protein isoforms. In effect, making use of only a subset of available functions in the class depending on certain input parameters or how the class is called.

RainbowcityKun 1y ago

- Cells work like this because DNA is under constant attack from mutations. - Mutations most commonly arise during cell replication. It's fascinating to realize that the "messiness" of DNA isn't a bug, but a feature—a side effect of evolution's raw material supply chain. Mutations, repeats, transposons, and imperfect repairs all contribute to a noisy genomic landscape. But it's exactly this noise that enables biological diversity. No mutations, no variation. No variation, no selection. No selection, no evolution. The genome is not a blueprint—it's a living, adapting scratchpad. Messiness is the canvas on which nature paints diversity.

esafak 1y ago
Don't forget sexual reproduction.
nickpsecurity 1y ago
Let me add to that. It requires a universe with specific laws that remain stable and encourage optimization. Then, a planet hospitible to life. Then, specific creatures with biological machinery more complex than anything humans have created. The machinery has plenty of reliability and adaptation baked in. Godless evolution suggests randomness produced all of it overtime. Yet, that's never worked in anything we've built. Even our GA's required laws, an environment, a computer, software, and fine-tuning. Pre-existing or by intelligent design (human inventors). Without these, it produced no results. So, I'll correct you by saying empirical data suggests evolution didnt produce this. We're seeing God's design skills in adaptive, resilient, complex, self-replicating systems. His work is truly beautiful to behold. Humans still can't produce something similar from scratch. Actually, they can't even be sure how the existing design works.
- kaibee 1y ago
  > Godless evolution suggests randomness produced all of it overtime. Nope. Randomness _and_ a selection function. Natural selection, ie: surviving to create the next generation. > Yet, that's never worked in anything we've built. It works completely fine in things we've built. We don't have the processing power to simulate something on the scale of computational complexity happening a small tide pond though. But you can see 'evolution by natural selection' in a rule set as simple as Game of Life. > Even our GA's required laws, an environment, a computer, software, and fine-tuning. Pre-existing or by intelligent design (human inventors). Without these, it produced no results. The laws/environment/computer are the equivalent of having a universe with physical laws. If you want to claim that god created the universe and tuned the constants of the universe, well, maybe. Or maybe every possible universe exists and we're just not around in the ones that don't lead to conscious life, in the same way that Game of Life universe is too simple/constrained to evolve conscious life on the scales we can simulate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHb07ynsPgo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHb07ynsPgo

amelius 1y ago

Another question is: How much information can you __store__ in DNA without affecting the organism too much?

timewizard 1y ago
Very little. The base pairs have specific electrochemical properties. The content of DNA controls it's structure.

stenl 1y ago

A much more detailed and thoughtful (and peer reviewed) take on the same question from my colleague Jussi Taipale: https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/embj.201696114 https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/embj.201696114

metalman 1y ago

DNA contains all of the actualy relevant information that exists, including whatever sequence gives rise to the very conceptualisation of information, so in fact everything else that could be considered "information" is derived from DNA.

gitroom 1y ago

Man, the back and forth here before coffee is actually kinda hilarious - I get all worked up before caffeine too, but honestly, DNA being this messy scratchpad feels way more interesting than treating it like a tidy CD. The messiness kinda rules, if you ask me.

sgt 1y ago
Exactly why I prefer organizing my windows (on my computer) in a chaotic way, rather than a tiling manager. That's the DNA way of doing it ;)

gfalcao 1y ago

I would like to get a reasonably good intuition in regards to the total amount of compound DNA from human bodies at different biochemical states, in different locations around the world (different climates). By "compound DNA" I mean, including DNA of bacterium, fungi and viruses living within one's body. For instance, gut bacteria acquired and maintained based on food intake and environmental influence.

gfalcao 1y ago
In other words, how much the perception of DNA data in gigabytes grow by in different circumstances? Would it grow by a few more gigabytes ?

frshOffTheBoat 1y ago

[dead]

timewizard 1y ago

> But mitochondrial DNA is tiny so I won’t mention it again. Which is a bummer because it is circular. There is also a point on the strand where two separate genes overlap. The end of one has the same code as the beginning of another. So even DNA has it's own native compression scheme.

xvilka 1y ago

If we add more nucleotides[1] than standard 4, we could encode much more. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeno_nucleic_acid https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeno_nucleic_acid