> I definitely agree that getting from there to a situation
> in which packages of information are being inserted into
> germ cell DNA is a long road, but this one new piece of
> research has - surprisingly - just cut the length of that
> road in half.
Half of infinity is still infinity ;-]
It's just not a possibility, which should be obvious if you look at the
quantity of information involved. Let M be a measure of the information stored
via distributed methylation patterns across some number of neurons N. The
amount of information stored by a single neuron's methylated DNA is going to be
much smaller than M (roughly M/N). A single germ cell which might conceivably
inherit the methylation pattern from some single neuron would not be able to
convey any more than a [1/N] piece of the total information that makes up M.
The real significance of this research has nothing to do with Lamarckian
inheritance. It has to do with the proposed medium of memory, as a network of
switched genes in neurons and perhaps other cells. It's a novel idea that is
generative of a whole range of new hypotheses and applications (e.g. in the
pharmaceutical space).
Terren
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agi
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