3 ms·

You put my reaction to this in much more educated terms. I’ve always felt that thinking of DNA as bits was a bit simplistic. Just because we store information a

You put my reaction to this in much more educated terms. I’ve always felt that thinking of DNA as bits was a bit simplistic. Just because we store information as bits it doesn’t mean that nature does. Not that it means they can’t be right, but the author also doesn’t seem to have any particular expertise in genetics. Their ideas need to survive a lot more criticism by people who know what they’re talking about before you could start to see them as convincing.

ses1984 1y ago
T he raw bits of the base pairs is just one component of the information, but it’s like a maximally compressed version of the info. The laws of physics are another component. From there you would need to simulate nature to be able to decompress all the data, like how computer programs can use procedural generation. Imagine a game like Minecraft. You can generate practically infinitely many screenshots of Minecraft worlds, but all that data can be derived from the game code and the jvm.
- jampekka 1y ago
  > T he raw bits of the base pairs is just one component of the information, but it’s like a maximally compressed version of the info. This sounds a bit suspect. Maximally compressed version would be very sensitive to mutations which wouldn't be great for adaptation via mutations. My understanding is that only a small fraction of mutations lead to unviable phenotypes. Also AFAIK the current understanding is that majority of DNA is "junk", i.e don't seem to affect the phenotype. Which would be a partial explanation for the above. The process of genetic expression is indeed something like procedual generation, but if maximal compression is about something like Kolmorogov complexity, the produced phenotype doesn't contain more information than the genetic information.

3 ms·

You put my reaction to this in much more educated terms. I’ve always felt that thinking of DNA as bits was a bit simplistic. Just because we store information a

by clickety_clack 1y ago

ses1984 1y ago
T he raw bits of the base pairs is just one component of the information, but it’s like a maximally compressed version of the info. The laws of physics are another component. From there you would need to simulate nature to be able to decompress all the data, like how computer programs can use procedural generation. Imagine a game like Minecraft. You can generate practically infinitely many screenshots of Minecraft worlds, but all that data can be derived from the game code and the jvm.
- jampekka 1y ago
  > T he raw bits of the base pairs is just one component of the information, but it’s like a maximally compressed version of the info. This sounds a bit suspect. Maximally compressed version would be very sensitive to mutations which wouldn't be great for adaptation via mutations. My understanding is that only a small fraction of mutations lead to unviable phenotypes. Also AFAIK the current understanding is that majority of DNA is "junk", i.e don't seem to affect the phenotype. Which would be a partial explanation for the above. The process of genetic expression is indeed something like procedual generation, but if maximal compression is about something like Kolmorogov complexity, the produced phenotype doesn't contain more information than the genetic information.