6 ms·

The increase of genetic complexity follows Moore’s law (2013) [pdf]

49 points by dgudkov 12y ago

tomaskazemekas 12y ago
One of the most interesting points of the article is that humans are likely the most intelligent species in the universe and that even if there is another life form out there it is of similar intelligence.
- givan 12y ago
  Making such assumptions about life in the universe based on our knowledge or more specific, lack of it, is like saying earth is flat because that is how we see it from here.
  - zxcdw 12y ago
    Why so? Of course it is fair to make an assumption -- it would be a different story if there was a claim made based on that assumption, as in your comparison. In other words, you made up a silly case and attacked against it to argue against the original point -- you constructed a straw man argument.
    - givan 12y ago
      Is silly to make bold statements about something we know nothing about, I was trying to make a comparison, from here we don't even know life exists some place else in the universe, we are still in the flat earth stage about this one. There is no point there, I see no logic in that statement, as I said we know nothing about the subject, this is pure speculation.
  - swalsh 12y ago
    But we concluded it was round based on how we see it from here.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
yohanatan 12y ago
Ray Kurzweil has been predicting this result for years.
sytelus 12y ago
This is very interesting and readable paper with astonishing consequences. Here's summary: - Genetic complexity roughly increases 10X every billion year. - This implies life started about 9 billion years ago. - Adjusting for potential hyperexponential effects, origin of life could close to start of universe itself. - It took 5 billion years to get to the complexity of bacteria. - Life had started long before Earth came in existence but it was very primitive (aka panspermia). - If you follow this theory it means, there were no intelligent species in universe that had existed before us. This means, Earth wasn't seeded by another intelligent aliens. There are some sweeping propositions that Kurzweil is wrong on whole singularity concept. There is also a mention that Drake's equation is likely wrong to calculate number of civilizations in galaxy based on this theory. In a way, I think this paper actually points to many more possible places with intelligent life because it proposes primitive life had been floating in universe long before and planets like Earth got seeded with them. Unless we assume Earth as having the best possible conditions in entire galaxy, this means intelligent life has to exist somewhere else in large enough sample of planets. The only problem is that this life isn't going to be far more super superior (or more accurately exceed us in genetic complexity).
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
Surprising and intriguing and therefore requiring extraordinary evidence. It doesn't quite help that Sharov is citing himself all over the place, but then again, most lines of research do that. >Thus we stick to the suggestion to measure genetic complexity by the length of functional and non-redundant DNA sequence rather than by total DNA length (Adami, et al. , 2000; Sharov, 2006). Please God tell me they've at least tried compressing the DNA to account for actual fundamental string complexity rather than just length. >There is no consens us among biologists on the question how variable are the rates of evolution. Well yes, I don't see that their model isn't blindly averaging over punctuated equilibria. Overall, a nice line of research to pursue, though. Deducing how much time evolution actually takes to optimize from lifeless particulate soup to the first life-forms to animals to people would certainly be an achievement.
- ssdfsdf 12y ago
  Why would you want to be compressing the string? For this to be useful you would need to be searching for the algorithmic complexity of the string, not merely how compressible it happens to be with, say, huffman encoding. Finding the algorithmic complexity of the string will be intractable. I would consider reasoning in the following way: There is selective pressure to reduce the length of the dna within an organism, since maintaining dna is costly for the organism. So one might suppose that on the average, over time that an organism will only contain the length of dna which is necessary, give or take. Of course it might be that the encoding of the information changes over time, so that the organism is able to store more information in a the same length. Or possibly less information in the same length, for reasons of benefit to the organism. This needs careful reasoning, I am not convinced either my approach, or yours is enough.
  - rgejman 12y ago
    The idea that DNA length is costly to the organism is a venerable, but increasingly controversial theory. The existence of disproportionally huge genomes belies the hypothesis. While it's possible that some organisms derive benefit from having larger genomes, it's also reasonable to infer that most eukaryotic cells are not limited by energy. So much of eukaryotic cellular activity seems energetically "wasteful," yet cells just don't seem to care.
dekhn 12y ago
OK, this paper is bunk for many reasons. First: Moore's law is just exponential growth (with a doubling time t). Drop the Moore's Law terminology from the paper. Second: C-value paradox isn't. It's based on false assumptions. Given there are frogs and trees with genomes 100X the size of their nearest species neighbors (this is likely due to some completely boring mistakes), and that data is just copies and copies of the same DNA over (inlcuding duplications of genes, duplication of regulatory regions, and duplications of hanger-on DNA. Calling it an enigma (in the cited paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19216716 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19216716) is a bit better, because if we understood how genomes can tolerate this sort of expansion it owuld be great. In short: the authors recognize some of the important problems, but go off in the wrong direction with it.
- rational-future 12y ago
  Your two arguments are extremely weak and bunk ;-) You are only objecting names and have nothing to say about the content. I'm not an expert in biology and have no idea how good this paper is. I was getting a PhD in math from West Virginia Uni in early 90s. Sharov was visiting at the time and had build a reputation of a pure genius.
  - dekhn 12y ago
    it's not worth the time to write a full rebuttal to the paper. It doesn't even pass basic tetss.
- ssdfsdf 12y ago
  Reminds me of this: "Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."
hyp0 12y ago
I really like this - what would RNA world be like? What would even simpler life be like? (It probably can't exist here now, because other life will eat it). Some interesting comments from last year (mostly critical): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5580334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5580334, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552381
gwern 12y ago
This was heavily criticized back when it came out, and the criticisms struck me as valid and the paper not useful.

49 points by dgudkov 12y ago

One of the most interesting points of the article is that humans are likely the most intelligent species in the universe and that even if there is another life form out there it is of similar intelligence.

givan 12y ago
Making such assumptions about life in the universe based on our knowledge or more specific, lack of it, is like saying earth is flat because that is how we see it from here.
- zxcdw 12y ago
  Why so? Of course it is fair to make an assumption -- it would be a different story if there was a claim made based on that assumption, as in your comparison. In other words, you made up a silly case and attacked against it to argue against the original point -- you constructed a straw man argument.
  - givan 12y ago
    Is silly to make bold statements about something we know nothing about, I was trying to make a comparison, from here we don't even know life exists some place else in the universe, we are still in the flat earth stage about this one. There is no point there, I see no logic in that statement, as I said we know nothing about the subject, this is pure speculation.
- swalsh 12y ago
  But we concluded it was round based on how we see it from here.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

yohanatan 12y ago

Ray Kurzweil has been predicting this result for years.

sytelus 12y ago

This is very interesting and readable paper with astonishing consequences. Here's summary: - Genetic complexity roughly increases 10X every billion year. - This implies life started about 9 billion years ago. - Adjusting for potential hyperexponential effects, origin of life could close to start of universe itself. - It took 5 billion years to get to the complexity of bacteria. - Life had started long before Earth came in existence but it was very primitive (aka panspermia). - If you follow this theory it means, there were no intelligent species in universe that had existed before us. This means, Earth wasn't seeded by another intelligent aliens. There are some sweeping propositions that Kurzweil is wrong on whole singularity concept. There is also a mention that Drake's equation is likely wrong to calculate number of civilizations in galaxy based on this theory. In a way, I think this paper actually points to many more possible places with intelligent life because it proposes primitive life had been floating in universe long before and planets like Earth got seeded with them. Unless we assume Earth as having the best possible conditions in entire galaxy, this means intelligent life has to exist somewhere else in large enough sample of planets. The only problem is that this life isn't going to be far more super superior (or more accurately exceed us in genetic complexity).

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

Surprising and intriguing and therefore requiring extraordinary evidence. It doesn't quite help that Sharov is citing himself all over the place, but then again, most lines of research do that. >Thus we stick to the suggestion to measure genetic complexity by the length of functional and non-redundant DNA sequence rather than by total DNA length (Adami, et al. , 2000; Sharov, 2006). Please God tell me they've at least tried compressing the DNA to account for actual fundamental string complexity rather than just length. >There is no consens us among biologists on the question how variable are the rates of evolution. Well yes, I don't see that their model isn't blindly averaging over punctuated equilibria. Overall, a nice line of research to pursue, though. Deducing how much time evolution actually takes to optimize from lifeless particulate soup to the first life-forms to animals to people would certainly be an achievement.

ssdfsdf 12y ago
Why would you want to be compressing the string? For this to be useful you would need to be searching for the algorithmic complexity of the string, not merely how compressible it happens to be with, say, huffman encoding. Finding the algorithmic complexity of the string will be intractable. I would consider reasoning in the following way: There is selective pressure to reduce the length of the dna within an organism, since maintaining dna is costly for the organism. So one might suppose that on the average, over time that an organism will only contain the length of dna which is necessary, give or take. Of course it might be that the encoding of the information changes over time, so that the organism is able to store more information in a the same length. Or possibly less information in the same length, for reasons of benefit to the organism. This needs careful reasoning, I am not convinced either my approach, or yours is enough.
- rgejman 12y ago
  The idea that DNA length is costly to the organism is a venerable, but increasingly controversial theory. The existence of disproportionally huge genomes belies the hypothesis. While it's possible that some organisms derive benefit from having larger genomes, it's also reasonable to infer that most eukaryotic cells are not limited by energy. So much of eukaryotic cellular activity seems energetically "wasteful," yet cells just don't seem to care.

dekhn 12y ago

OK, this paper is bunk for many reasons. First: Moore's law is just exponential growth (with a doubling time t). Drop the Moore's Law terminology from the paper. Second: C-value paradox isn't. It's based on false assumptions. Given there are frogs and trees with genomes 100X the size of their nearest species neighbors (this is likely due to some completely boring mistakes), and that data is just copies and copies of the same DNA over (inlcuding duplications of genes, duplication of regulatory regions, and duplications of hanger-on DNA. Calling it an enigma (in the cited paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19216716 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19216716) is a bit better, because if we understood how genomes can tolerate this sort of expansion it owuld be great. In short: the authors recognize some of the important problems, but go off in the wrong direction with it.

rational-future 12y ago
Your two arguments are extremely weak and bunk ;-) You are only objecting names and have nothing to say about the content. I'm not an expert in biology and have no idea how good this paper is. I was getting a PhD in math from West Virginia Uni in early 90s. Sharov was visiting at the time and had build a reputation of a pure genius.
- dekhn 12y ago
  it's not worth the time to write a full rebuttal to the paper. It doesn't even pass basic tetss.
ssdfsdf 12y ago
Reminds me of this: "Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."

hyp0 12y ago

I really like this - what would RNA world be like? What would even simpler life be like? (It probably can't exist here now, because other life will eat it). Some interesting comments from last year (mostly critical): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5580334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5580334, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552381

gwern 12y ago

This was heavily criticized back when it came out, and the criticisms struck me as valid and the paper not useful.