(To the List: I am re-posting my message to Karl because the original message was not distributed in it's totality; the arguments were truncated. Cheers Jerry ) Karl: I fear that I must once again disagree with your strong conclusions about the relations between mathematics and genetics. I would urge you to attempt to find exact correspondence relations between empirical evidence and your views of models based on numbers. See my comments below. Subject: [Fis] genetics: the most outstanding problem, SOLVED Dear Stan, In your last posting, you said: SS: Of course, the origin of the genetic system is arguably the most outstanding problem facing natural science. It seems that, other than the (to me) unconvincing RNA World idea, there is no compelling model of it. The model that the RNA (together with the DNA) is a sequence and that the genetic mechanism copies the information from a sequence (the dna/rna) into a nonsequenced assembly (the living organism) and from there (by means of the ovaries and the testes) back into a sequence is a quite compelling model. The term "information" has been shown in this chatroom to mean the cuts that segregate, separate and distinguish summands; The term "sequence" has been defined by Peano; The term "nonsequenced /=commutative/assembly" is indeed hairy, as there exists no definition for multidimensional partitions, although this is what it means; The term "copies" means a filter restriction on a set of entries into a database (a restricted, in optimal case, bijective map between two enumerations). I certainly will not support this view of the relationships among numbers, genetics and information. I find your post to be outside the scope of the standard theories of biochemistry and genetics. Chemical information is grounded in the list of chemical elements and the relations among them. The terms "DNA" and "RNA" etc, are chemical names of specific relationally rich bio-molecules. The information content of chemical molecules must be expressed in terms of atomic numbers and relations among the electrical particles (graphs). Biological information emerges as flows of changes of chemical relations - metabolic dynamics. In general, chemical structures / information does support transitive relations among the atomic numbers organized into graphs. Thus, if one wishes to develop a compelling argument about chemical numbers and structures and genetic information, one should start with relational algebras that keep track of changes of relations. Bijective maps are not a suitable basis for describing change of chemical relations and hence the flow on biological information. Finally, if one wishes to describe a mathematics of biological information, the suitable starting point is the fact that a single position in a DNA sequence can control the fate of the entire organism. A living system is a society of associative relations among atomic numbers. Cheers Jerry |
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