🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <04p40a.db1.ln@linuxsys.ii01.org>,
Robin Faichney  <robin@ii01.org> wrote:
>Titus Brown <t@chabry.caltech.edu> wrote:
>> In article <j9gtv9.tg.ln@linuxsys.ii01.org>,
>> Robin Faichney  <robin@ii01.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>Don't know about "concrete work", but a serious theoretical issue is
>>>this: genes are not DNA sequences, but are encoded in such sequences.
>>>The decoding mechanism is the cellular machinery that interacts with
>>>the DNA.  Anyone who doubts that needs to read Darwin's Dangerous Idea
>>>by Dan Dennett.  And it's the gene, actually an abstraction, that carries
>>>the information.
>
>> Actually, the concept of gene itself is a bit tough to pin down.  [munch]
>
>You miss the point.  This is a conceptual truth, with which philosophers
>like Dennett (and myself, as an amateur) deal.  Any secondary school level
>text provides all the biology we need to understand this.  DNA on its
>own is not enough.  It requires the machinery of the cell to interpret
>its code.  Thus, genes are abstractions, being encoded in the DNA,
>as decoded by the cellular machinery.  Discussion of different kinds
>of sequences is irrelevant, in this particular context -- that's just
>arguing about the form of encoding, when that point is that genetic
>information is encoded -- anyhow.

Could you point out to me a system in which information exists but no decoding
is required?

All information is conditional.  What is information to one system may be noise
to another.

At any rate, "concrete work" and this "conceptual truth" stuff don't mix ;).
Any information theoretic work that deals with a genetic system is going to
have to deal quite closely with the exact mechanism of encoding and decoding,
as well as the mechanisms of transmission and alteration.

cheers,
--titus