🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <59013@dime.cs.umass.edu>,
connolly@piglet.cs.umass.edu (Christopher Ian Connolly) writes:

>Wait up -- maybe you should use a more descriptive term, like 
>"transcription rate", i.e., what, specifically, do you consider to be 
>"bandwidth"?  Is it just the passage of mRNA out of the nucleus?  What 
>about RNA editing? 

Call it anything you want.  The idea I'm speculating on concerns the
mechanism by which the nucleus exerts some degree of control on the
operation of the cellular machinery.  The manufacture of protein being but
one step in the chain.

The particular question I'm asking, "Is it within the realm of possibility
that a large active cell suffers degradation in performance-resilience-etc
because of the smaller nucleus to mass ratio.

>Put another way: I could write a one-line program that would never 
>terminate -- it would represent an infinite amount of "computation", 
>yet only consist of one line's worth of program.  So the length of DNA 
>means nothing in that context (assuming more than just transcription 
>or similar processes). 

I'm afraid you've lost me here.  One of the things I'm trying to come to a
greater understanding of is the intelligence/smarts/computing-power of a
genetically controlled cell, or the genetically controlled processes of a
whole organism.  I suspect that a program of 750 megabytes (the human
genome) which has been under development for several billion years probably
represents a pretty fair chunk of intelligence no matter how you measure
it.


--
Ken Easlon
ken@holonet.net