91–100 of 125 posts
These kinds of strange findings are going to keep occurring because these researchers are too far invested into a mode of research (genetics) that won't actually find the determinism they desire. It's the environment not the genes.
There has been what I think is direct evidence of the possibility of this in the digital world. Adrian Thompson's work[1] in evolving an FPGA circuit to tell the difference between the spoken words "stop" and "go" (yes .. digital circuit design with an analogue task) threw many surprises. The evolved circuit was highly economical with gates and didn't use a clock. It had also started exploiting the specific physics o…
It reminds me of the halting problem and modern semantic analysis methods for programs. IE some things you can determine without running the code (static analysis of code or dna), and to determine other things you have to run the the code and see (determine if a program will ever end or see if a trait is expressed).
There has been what I think is direct evidence of the possibility of this in the digital world. Adrian Thompson's work[1] in evolving an FPGA circuit to tell the difference between the spoken words "stop" and "go" (yes .. digital circuit design with an analogue task) threw many surprises. The evolved circuit was highly economical with gates and didn't use a clock. It had also started exploiting the specific physics o…
What do you mean with "quantum level"? All of biochemistry is best described by quantum mechanics. Do you mean large scale entanglement and coherence as would be required for quantum computation? That seems a bit unlikely in a warm soup like our bodies. We haven't been able to achieve it on a useful scale even in the controlled environments of physics labs.
There has been what I think is direct evidence of the possibility of this in the digital world. Adrian Thompson's work[1] in evolving an FPGA circuit to tell the difference between the spoken words "stop" and "go" (yes .. digital circuit design with an analogue task) threw many surprises. The evolved circuit was highly economical with gates and didn't use a clock. It had also started exploiting the specific physics o…
What do you mean with "quantum level"? All of biochemistry is best described by quantum mechanics. Do you mean large scale entanglement and coherence as would be required for quantum computation? That seems a bit unlikely in a warm soup like our bodies. We haven't been able to achieve it on a useful scale even in the controlled environments of physics labs.
.. much the same as all of what the FPGA does is captured by electromagnetism + material physics. Nevertheless, the encoding of the FPGA circuit, while it describes a digital process, can hack into the features of a level below. Similar to that, while gene sequences may encode protein production, I'm wondering whether the resultant system could similarly make explicit use of below-the-protein-level features. Our inability to achieve that yet is not an argument, much the same as a digital circuit designer will be at a loss to make a "stop" versus "go" detector and that too one without a clock.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh I disagree. It's been known for a while that you need something other than just DNA to get the heterogeneity of cellular phenotypes. Remember that your Iris and toenails have the same DNA, yet wildly different gene expression profiles. Without cellular memory that would be impossible and we would all still be single celled organisms :)
I think the interesting discovery has been that epigenetic traits can be inherited to some degree.
There's a couple of things that are slowly changing in the thinking of biologists related to this: 1. Genes are not loci. The "one gene = one protein" dogma of molecular biology (expanded: "one trait selectable in breeding experiments = one compact locus of the chromosome") was a priori wrong, but it's taken us decades to undo the damage. We were led astray because there are traits that do map to a single locus, or s…
This reminds me of systems theory; anyone else? It makes intuitive sense if I think of traits as one outcome of a system. Rather than converging to a single particle-like "cause," such as a gene, it seems that the wider system is the basis for the trait--the objective appearance of the trait is an expression of the system. It seems it should follow that you can continue tracing the trait from the individual level up…
There's a couple of things that are slowly changing in the thinking of biologists related to this: 1. Genes are not loci. The "one gene = one protein" dogma of molecular biology (expanded: "one trait selectable in breeding experiments = one compact locus of the chromosome") was a priori wrong, but it's taken us decades to undo the damage. We were led astray because there are traits that do map to a single locus, or s…
Point 1 draws parallels with machine learning's pixel attacks. That one pixel doesn't define the image, but it happens that changing it changes the classification of the whole
Two things: 1. The theory of "junk DNA" of which the authors received Nobel Price is increasingly looking like...well...junk. 2. The recent discovery of Epigenetics adds a whole other dimension for understanding traits and genetics. Lots of biological science needs to be rewritten/updated in the years to come.
The term junk was intended to convey something apparently worth keeping (perhaps in the attic), as opposed to garbage, which is thrown away.