🚀 go-pugleaf

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.

The same is true of computer programs!  Remember the old amusement
of writing a program that would be valid in N languages and would
print the name of the language it was compiled as when run?

Quite a few mavericks (yes, I admit to being one) have been saying
for some time that the engineering models of computer programming
match what is actually going on less well than the biological ones
of breeding and so on.  That is the converse of the question that
was being asked, but has its relevance.

One of the consequences is that, as with English text, what you
regard as the information content depends very much on at what
level you are analysing it.  This is very true of DNA, but we do 
not yet know enough about how it works to know what levels of    
analysis are meaningful.

So I don't think that there is a simple answer, and all answers
will be pretty fair hand waving for a long time yet - probably
half a century or so, though progress may speed up.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren,
University of Cambridge Computing Service,
New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB2 3QH, England.
Email:  nmm1@cam.ac.uk
Tel.:  +44 1223 334761    Fax:  +44 1223 334679