🚀 go-pugleaf

Swarat Chaudhuri <swarat_c@lycos.com> wrote:
> May some kindred spirit shed some light on the following!

> Has there been any effort to mathematically describe the minimum  
> information content of a DNA string? For instance, in the lines of 
> Kolmogorov complexity? Note that DNA strings are not completely
> random:
> there is a certain amount of structure. Chaitin's 1977 article on 
> algorithmic information theory points to some possible (IMHO, 
> rather ambitious) directions in which information theory may be
> applied to
> biological systems. He talks about giving a quantitative
> characterization
> of the structural information contained in a living organism. 

> My question is: has there any further (concrete) work in this
> direction? If yes, can anyone supply some pointers? I checked out the
> webpage of a lab at NCI which works on applying notions of entropy to
> biosystems, but this doesn't seem to be remotely close to what
> Chaitin discusses.

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.

-- 
Robin Faichney 
"It is tempting to suppose that some concept of information could serve
eventually to unify mind, matter, and meaning in a single theory," say
Daniel Dennett and John Haugeland. The theory is here: http://www.ii01.org/