Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you'll find some of the tricks that (mostly) viruses use to be interesting. Take a look at ribosomal frameshifting [1], where the viral RNA has a special structure such that at a certain point during translation in the ribosome it will skip back 1 nucleotide (a -1 frameshift; -2 and +1 frameshifts have been observed as well, more rarely), thus changing the whole reading frame. Viruses use this to encode multi…
Fuck that’s crazy. For the CS people who don’t understand what this means, a rough analogy is that HIV does something like steganography to encode two proteins in one gene.
Does DNA have the equivalent of IF-statements, WHILE loops, or function calls?
191–200 of 204 posts
Re: Does DNA have the equivalent of IF-statements, WHILE loops, or function calls?
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here, let's do some math. let's treat a base pair as 2 bits of data (4 bases, 2 bits to encode a base). The average molecular weight of a DNA base pair is twice this, approximately 660 daltons (or 660 grams/mole). So a gram of DNA is 1/660 moles, or 6.023 * 10 * 23 / 660, which means a gram of DNA is 9 * 10 * 20 base pairs, making 1.8 * 10 * 21 bits, which is around 900 exabytes which is very close to a factor of two…
Thanks for the neat estimate. It would be hard to dehydrate DNA to a significant degree, so adding some water and counterions would probably reduce your estimate by a bit. (Error correction would also reduce things by a bit.) Overall the estimate of ~500 exabytes per gram seems reasonable to me.
Re: Does DNA have the equivalent of IF-statements, WHILE loops, or function calls?
#193I'm pretty sure something this complex came from a higher order being. That whole order from chaos argument is not holding water for me with this degree of complexity.
I'm afraid your intuition about complexity misleads you here. If you'd like to learn more, spend some time with say evolutionary algorithms. It's not a big time commitment; playing around for a couple days will likely be enough. You'll find how the crap an evolution-style search comes up with is really similar to how nature works: a few beautiful core finds + a big pile of hacks of varying craziness, some of them tot…
Re: Does DNA have the equivalent of IF-statements, WHILE loops, or function calls?
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
ChatGPT is a type of intelligence just like a dog or a bird is a type of intelligence.
Yup, the world has gone mad. Flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, now ai intelligence believers.
It's definitely not human intelligence if that's what you are wondering.
Re: Does DNA have the equivalent of IF-statements, WHILE loops, or function calls?
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup, the world has gone mad. Flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, now ai intelligence believers.
Not sure why saying artificial intelligence is a type of intelligence is controversial, it's in the name... It's definitely not human intelligence if that's what you are wondering.
Re: Does DNA have the equivalent of IF-statements, WHILE loops, or function calls?
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it would be very bad if basic operations in a CPU had similar level of error rates. Given how slow evolution is, and how many times DNA is copied and/or transcribed in any one individual, my intuition is that the error rates for genetic processes are actually incredibly low.
There are numerous correction mechanisms, and other mechanisms that destroy malformed proteins and mRNA chains. Wikipedia claims one out of every 1000 to 100000 amino acids added to a forming protein is wrong. Each ribosome is proceeding to add amino acids to a chain at about 10 per second, and millions (or way more) proteins are being produced all the time.
Re: Does DNA have the equivalent of IF-statements, WHILE loops, or function calls?
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup, the world has gone mad. Flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, now ai intelligence believers.
Not sure why saying artificial intelligence is a type of intelligence is controversial, it's in the name... It's definitely not human intelligence if that's what you are wondering.
Re: Does DNA have the equivalent of IF-statements, WHILE loops, or function calls?
#198My favorite thing about mtDNA is that two separate genes overlap using separate reading frames. The end of one gene is the same as the start of another, and they are laid out in the circular mitochondrial genome to take advantage of this fact. I've also read that DNA chromosomes can under go conformal changes in response to the environment it's in, making certain reading frames more or less likely to be transcribed,…
I think you'll find some of the tricks that (mostly) viruses use to be interesting. Take a look at ribosomal frameshifting [1], where the viral RNA has a special structure such that at a certain point during translation in the ribosome it will skip back 1 nucleotide (a -1 frameshift; -2 and +1 frameshifts have been observed as well, more rarely), thus changing the whole reading frame. Viruses use this to encode multi…
Re: Does DNA have the equivalent of IF-statements, WHILE loops, or function calls?
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
That isn't how evolution works (or at least it is a gross generalization that is borderline wrong). You own cells mutate over your lifetime and the mutations may trigger genetic features across your entire body. Sometimes, these mutations cause errors that we call cancer, but not always. Evolution is when a certain genetic feature provides better fitness (which doesn't necessarily have to come from a mutation), and t…
So evolution is copying the state of a running executable (one that’s poorly memory managed and dependent on external variables) instead of the file itself, and evolution favors favors the copies that survive and maybe even run faster or are otherwise better.
An organism is a collection a billions of threads all running the same code but starting at seemingly random entry points. Before dying, each thread forks one or more threads (depending on external factors like available memory).
In order to reproduce, the “father” code sends a copy of its current code, but only the bottom word of every byte. The “mother” program combines this with the top word of every byte and then executes it in a chroot jail to make sure it will actually run. Once it is confident it will run, it “births” it onto its own machine.
Every thread in this process is running on non-ECC memory, with cosmic rays bit-flipping things, though there are threads running around making fixes to broken threads (actually, just killing them before they can fork).
The implementation of the threads isn’t relevant here (such as modeling proteins, atp pumps, and such).
In this, evolution fitness would be less cancer (fork bombs), doing usable work, successfully mating, etc. This evolution pressure might look like preventing mating until the program is a certain age or performed certain milestones and a “score” of how well it has done its work (both partners want a good “life score” but not too high — liars could exist! — to proceed with mating).
Evolution would occur naturally over many generations. From one generation to the next, they look nearly identical, but from hundreds of generations they might look identical, or not. The “not” part is evolution.
Re: Does DNA have the equivalent of IF-statements, WHILE loops, or function calls?
#200Well, DNA might not have programming structures, but it acts like a neural network. See "Gene regulatory network" > Some proteins though serve only to activate other genes, and these are the transcription factors that are the main players in regulatory networks or cascades. By binding to the promoter region at the start of other genes they turn them on, initiating the production of another protein, and so on. Some tr…
Synthetic biologist here. This is a good answer, but looking at man-made genetic programs can give us a simplified perspective. We've made significant progress engineering programs that enable human T cells to kill target (cancer) cells _conditionally_ based on their surface marker expression [1]. This is in contrast to conventional CAR-T cells which are already on the market (see Kymriah, etc.). A simple AND gate T…