On 3/23/2014 11:30 PM, LizR wrote:
On 24 March 2014 17:41, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 3/23/2014 8:57 PM, LizR wrote:
/Is/ DNA a universal programming language?
I'm not sure what a "universal programming language" means. Just 1s and 0s
are
enough language. I think you probably mean to ask is whether a cell is a
universal
computer with DNA as the program. I don't know if there's been a formal
proof but
it almost certainly is. Making a universal computer is pretty easy.
Wolfram's rule
110 produces a universal computer in one dimension with only two colors and
nearest
neighbor rules.
I'm quoting the paper at http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~
<http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/%7E>*chaitin*/*darwin*.pdf
(See section 9)
Presumably DNA is a universal programming language, but how sophisticated can mutations
be in actual biological organisms?
That seems like a strange question. Mutations are "errors" by definition and are random.
So what does it mean to ask how sophisticated they can be? Obviously they can accumulate
as errors in DNA copying without doing anything and then be "activated" by one more error.
In this connection, note that evo-devo views DNA as software for constructing the
embryo, and that the change from single-celled to multicellular organisms is roughly
like taking a main program and making it into a subroutine, which is a fairly high-level
mutation. Could this be the reason that it took so long|on the order of 109 years|for
this to happen
Sure, although 1e9yr seems pretty quick to me. The eukaryote cell is already tremendously
complicated, just becoming multicellular doesn't seem like such a big step to me.
Brent
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
