51–60 of 218 posts
I think this could have far greater dangers in the creation of super diseases. How long until China turns this into a weapon by creating a virus with the spread of a common cold and the devastation of Ebola?
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When you release something it becomes subject to natural selection. It would evolve to target everyone. It’s still dumb.
It's also a sort of safeguard. Pathogens that are too deadly to the organisms they infect are selected out .
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Indeed. DNA is the most fucking complex and complicated programming language. We have barely any understanding of how the whole thing hangs together, let alone how it's parsed and written, and how it all translates from stem cells to whole organs, an immune system, the complex interrelation between organs, the nervous system, the whole gamut. And that's not even touching on the nature of mind and consciousness in rel…
The equivocation to programming language is misleading, it implies the “language” is context free or context sensitive when dna is probably on the order of natural language complexity (posits I).
I think this could have far greater dangers in the creation of super diseases. How long until China turns this into a weapon by creating a virus with the spread of a common cold and the devastation of Ebola?
Taking this thread straight into nationalistic flamewar is wildly off topic and outright vandalism on this site. I'm sure you didn't mean it intentionally but please don't do this again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
For me, the real scary part is altering something, which inadvertently changes something else that isn't quite as obvious and visible or noticeable. Something that might not present itself until whatever organism it is reaches maturity, or beyond. Something like "everybody will get Alzheimers by age 50" where it takes 50 years to even discover it. And in the meantime, they thought whatever they originally tweaked was a success and made other tweaks during those 50 years thinking everything was just fine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The equivocation to programming language is misleading, it implies the “language” is context free or context sensitive when dna is probably on the order of natural language complexity (posits I).
Far more complex, I would argue. The “compiler” (or perhaps the “linker”?) consists of laws of physics and chemistry that govern intra- and intermolecular bonding and protein folding with such complexity that it has been the subject of one of the largest distributed computing networks ever: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home
Compilation of DNA builds a phenotype and it gets interpreted during the phenotype's runtime resulting in epigenetics.
“”” The goals are to improve agricultural productivity, produce hardier beasts and reduce practices that are costly or considered inhumane. “””
I can’t help but think about Oryx and Crake.
I’m more interested in applying these principles and efforts and resources to plants and non-animal sources. I feel that further modifying animal agriculture is orthogonal to direction we can move civilization and is not necessary if we can essentially apply the same techniques for increasing commodity yields to non-animal ag.
(I would love counter arguments and opinions to this. Perhaps I am not seeing the whole picture or far enough.)