🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <311FB26A.6236@bham.ac.uk> Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk> writes:
>john baez wrote:

>> So what I'm wondering is this: given the complete genome of an organism, how
>> much *additional information* would you need to give someone for them to
>> be able to build a living copy of that organism?

>This is a very interesting thread.
>Could your question be similar to say:
>Are all clones' phenotypes the same?

Vaguely similar.  If all clones' phenotypes were the same, then any
working uterus would be just the same as any other, as far as the
phenotype of the offspring were concerned, so detailed information about
the uterus would be irrelevant to the phenotype of the offspring.  
This is unlikely to be true.  

However: I was only asking about the information needed to build
*some* copy of an organism, not a copy of a *particular* organism.
So an "off-the-shelf" uterus will do.

>I *guess* that the short answer is no.

Right, I think the answer to your question is no.  

>> But the information in the genome is not enough for the aliens to
>> build a person!  I think it's possible *in principle* to figure out the
>> needed extra information someday and transmit it.  But I have little idea
>> how much more information it is.

>Do you mean, information like what? The earth magnetic field strength or
>the intensity and frequency of light per hour?, or temperature? or the
>"recipies" for molecules like water, etc? Where do we stop?

Well, since I was only interested in building a person, not a
*particular* person, I don't think the details of the magnetic field
strength of the earth will matter much.  As for the recipes for water
and the like, it's true we need to decide how much the aliens know
our language.  That's one of the vague spots I mentioned.   This is
always a touchy point with information theory.  I'd be perfectly happy
at this point to drop the aliens and say we were communicating with
human biochemists.

>> For example, say we tried to transmit intructions on how to create a
>> one-cell embryo, together with instructions on how this one-cell embryo
>> was supposed to be dealt with in order to get a baby organism.  Then
>> we'd have to give a lot of information about what the cell is like,
>> enough to be able to build a cell *from scratch*.  For all I know the
>> amount of information required for this is vastly more than the
>> information in the nuclear DNA.  After all, the nuclear DNA never builds
>> a new cell from scratch; only with the help of an existing cell.
>
>This extreme situation would require (please let me know if I am getting
>it wrong) the complete description of the environment where this is supposed
>to occur. Quite a lot of information!

It would be a huge amount if we were trying to build a *particular
individual*; less so (but perhaps still a lot) if we were just trying to
build some functioning member of the species in question.  I was
thinking about the latter.

I don't really expect an answer.... :-)