3 ms·

I heard about this "98% of DNA is junk" claim a while ago. http://www.livescience.com/31939-junk-dna-mystery-solved.html http://www.livescience.com/31939-junk-

I heard about this "98% of DNA is junk" claim a while ago. http://www.livescience.com/31939-junk-dna-mystery-solved.html http://www.livescience.com/31939-junk-dna-mystery-solved.htm... Right, because a single cell transforms into a whole animal (horse, giraffe, whatever) and that takes zero information. Really? Somehow I doubt it. A multicellular organism is a really big, complicated state machine and the "junk" DNA is what's needed in order to go from a single cell to many billions of cells organized in the particular fashion that they are. To suppose that everything that doesn't directly code for a protein is "junk" is incredibly arrogant; just because you don't currently understand something doesn't mean that it cannot be. As an engineer I'm guilty of this all the time; something I don't know how to do is impossible but once someone explains to me how to do it, it's trivial. I've had this happen enough times that I can now recognize that my "impossible" isn't necessarily actually impossible, just that it might be impossible to me right now.

jhallenworld 12y ago
Don't underestimate the creative capacity of small (to encode) algorithms. Perhaps development uses something like simulated annealing to create structures which match required properties. If it works like this, an exact template is not required to be encoded in the genes. In other words, the ultimate source of the design is thermal randomness, but guided by constraints encoded in the genes.
- msandford 12y ago
  Well we're starting to see Turing vindicated on the way that a lot of biological stuff happens. http://genomebiology.com/2013/14/1/101 http://genomebiology.com/2013/14/1/101 Sure it doesn't have an exact template of _precisely_ how to do everything, but there's a lot of information there. Maybe it's not huge relative to the amount of theoretical information DNA contains, but I strongly suspect that the 98% is junk claim will eventually be found to be laughably wrong.
collyw 12y ago
At the same time Pine tree genomes are 20 times the size of our own, but have a similar number of coding genes. Do we really think all of the extra DNA is needed?

jhallenworld 12y ago

Don't underestimate the creative capacity of small (to encode) algorithms. Perhaps development uses something like simulated annealing to create structures which match required properties. If it works like this, an exact template is not required to be encoded in the genes. In other words, the ultimate source of the design is thermal randomness, but guided by constraints encoded in the genes.

msandford 12y ago
Well we're starting to see Turing vindicated on the way that a lot of biological stuff happens. http://genomebiology.com/2013/14/1/101 http://genomebiology.com/2013/14/1/101 Sure it doesn't have an exact template of _precisely_ how to do everything, but there's a lot of information there. Maybe it's not huge relative to the amount of theoretical information DNA contains, but I strongly suspect that the 98% is junk claim will eventually be found to be laughably wrong.

collyw 12y ago

At the same time Pine tree genomes are 20 times the size of our own, but have a similar number of coding genes. Do we really think all of the extra DNA is needed?