From: Mikko Särelä (msarela@cc.hut.fi)
Date: Wed Feb 22 2006 - 18:12:18 MST
On Wed, 22 Feb 2006, Keith Henson wrote:
> If you consider natural intelligence, it can't be all that complicated.
> Genes particularly involved with the brain are some fraction of the 30k
> or so known. Between genes and fMRI, research is moving right along.
I wish to remind that the 30k (20k-25k according to Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome) is the number of genes that
encode proteins. In addition there are portions in the DNA that code RNA
and some portions that may have additional functionality not yet
understood.
I was recently in a bioinformatics seminar, where a speaker mentioned that
(at least/around) half of the human genes code for brain structure. And
one gene can, depending on circumstances code for different proteins. So
the amount of data put into creating a human brain, while not huge, is not
small nor simple.
A quote from Wikipedia:
"Comparative genomics studies of mammalian genomes suggest that
approximately 5% of the human genome has been conserved by evolution since
the divergence of those species approximately 200 million years ago,
containing the vast majority of genes and regulatory sequences.
Intriguingly, since genes and known regulatory sequences probably comprise
less than 2% of the genome, this suggests that there may be more unknown
functional sequence than known functional sequence. A smaller, but large,
fraction of human genes seem to be shared among most known vertebrates."
--
Mikko Särelä http://thoughtsfromid.blogspot.com/
"Happiness is not a destination, but a way of travelling." Aristotle
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:55 MDT