From: "Terry Blanton" <
Damn. I was so engrossed trying to figure out how much to pay Jonesee that I left off my DNA quote (you noticed he was born the year Crick, Watson, et.al. determined the double helix structure, right?):
Excellent quote. Plus this query caused a blinding flash of remembrance about a prior & typically long-winded & probably boring posting (boring to the non-Illuminated, shall we say) - which was actually a DNA obit (or is that orbit):
From the elephantine memory of my new 160 gig HD, which I willone-day incorporate into my new alter ego, the son-of-Xbox massively parallel new-me, when the time arrives for the final transmogrification:
[count zero; start word count]
Since posting an off-the-wall idea yesterday, inspired by a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory news release about "DNA information transfer," a little bit of synchronicity struck.
Well, maybe it wasn't really that unusual since the original poster of the following thread on Slashdot and myself undoubtedly were inspired by the same story, but anyway an avalanche of input followed on that forum (several hundred posts in one day) that can be read at:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/06/0229223&mode=thread&tid=126
Some of the following commentary is inspired from this ongoing thread.
In typical surfer fashion, from one of these posts I was led to a long-forgotten reminiscence of Douglas Adams, whose writing went way beyond far-out humor and inspired many things that once seemed terribly bizarre then, but are more commonplace today - almost taken for granted. William Gibson and Robert Forward were Sci-Fi visionaries similarly gifted with extraordinary foresight, but lacking Adams humor. Thankfully Gibson is still alive and even has his own internet blog these days.
In Douglas Adams' (Douglas Noel Adams=DNA) "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", a race of intelligent beings from an advanced civilization build a supercomputer, "Deep Thought" in order to answer the question, "What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?" DT computed for 7.5 million years, and finally produced the answer, which is "42".
Adams died in May, 2001 but long before, pundits had tried to find some hidden meaning in "42." I wonder if it had any connection to decoding the information in (artificial) DNA strands using the four amino acids known as GATC and their positions as 4-base words.
I'll look to see if this question is answered on Slashdot later, as that thread seems to have struck a giant nerve - a meme nerve, so to speak. Adams was also an internet pioneer and an "info junkie" who believed something extraordinary was created when people pooled experiences and information over the internet. He said part of the internet's extraordinary power was the fact that it "evolved as an organic entity, a bottom-up design rather than being hierarchically controlled from above".
The idea that hat humans could have even been "created" to carry a message across time in DNA, was definitely an implication of D.N.A.'s work but others have expressed the sentiment in more detail.
And for those who want to get really crazy with modern prophecy that derives from ancient prophecy, and realizing that many ancient civilizations, especially the ancient Egyptians, believed that humans came from Orion, consider "42" in that context. M-42 or Messier object 42, is a nebulae in the Orion constellation. http://www.m-42.com/images/orionmos.png
Was this very spot the remnant of a long lost star in Orion - our "ancestral" home, or is it all just the further reverberations of some deeply ingrained meme?
What is a meme? First coined by Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene," a meme is the extrasensory counterpart to a gene - a idea, behavior or skill that can be transferred from one person to another by imitation: stories, religions, inventions, even music.
Many consider the meme to be the most important explanatory concept since DNA or the gene. The key to appreciating the wide impact of memes, and what separates them from the traditional theories of cultural evolution, is *continuity* over time - the meme is a replicator. The first replicator is of course the gene. The second replicator is the meme and it exists now NOT for human culture nor for any more immediate reason than its own survival. It can work with or even against the gene, because it has crossed over a "complexity barrier" to become its own self-sustaining entity.
Coincidentally or not, Dawkins was a big fan of Adams - and RD's wife, Lalla Ward, is the former Dr. Who sidekick, the lovely Romana. They met at a party held by Douglas Adams, who himself was a former Dr. Who scriptwriter.
Also mentioned in the numerous Slashdot threads is a Star Trek episode "The Chase " in which Dr. Galen, Captain Picards old Archaeology professor, found genetic data-blocks from various species around the galaxy stored in the junk portion of each species DNA, including our own. When a sufficient number of these data blocks were put together it completed a stellar map, identifying the precise location of the original origin of life.
The jury is still out on whether it was M-42, and even on the Panspermia Theory [panspermia.org], but many of us believe that there must be lots of intelligence out there - vastly older and vastly more advance than we are.
From other posts on Slashdot: "The idea of storing andtransmitting information via DNA was also proposed by Jaron Lanier in the Y2K issue of the NYT magazine. The NYT was running a contest to come up with a "time capsule" that would last till Y3K and asked various prominent scientists, architects etc. how they would make something that would last and would be easily found by future generations. Lanier proposed encoding a message in the DNA of cockroaches and then letting them reproduce naturally in the wild. In a thousand years they'd be everywhere! (His idea didn't win, a more conventional capsule with physical records was selected). Also in various science fiction books (Greg Bear) messages were encoded in people's DNA.
This info transfer idea was also proposed by David E.H. Jones in his Daedalus column (which now appears in Nature). His article on 31 January, 1985, entitled "Archival Junk" discusses the use of DNA to encode the essence of human culture in case of another Dark Age. The article also appears in his compendium, The Further Inventions of Daedalus (Oxford University Press, 1999)."
I love it when synchronicity strikes!
Jones
