🚀 go-pugleaf

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.  Most
> molecular biologists tend to just define the gene as the protein-coding
> region, although regulatory regions -- which can be just as complicated
> as the gene -- tend to get called "genes" by geneticists, who w/o the
> sequence usually can't tell if their loci are in protein coding regions
> or not.

> I'm also not sure what you mean by abstraction: the amino acid sequence is
> very strongly tied to the genomic sequence; heck, in prokaryotes, where you
> don't have to worry about differential splicing and mRNA processing,
> it's absolutely tied to the genomic sequence.

> I wouldn't recommend Dennett for this basic stuff, if only because it's
> apt to be a simplification.  We know an awful lot about genes, proteins,
> and gene regulation; any recent molecular biology textbook would be a good
> source.

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.

-- 
"The distinction between mind and matter is in the mind, not in matter."
Robin Faichney -- inside information -- http://www.ii01.org/