From: Russell Wallace (russell.wallace@gmail.com)
Date: Sun May 14 2006 - 21:26:04 MDT
On 5/15/06, Mike Dougherty <msd001@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Is the human genome a self-referential program code? Though I cannot seem
> to find a good example URL, I recall reading about genomics researchers
> identifying large sections of the the genome that do not appear to have any
> particular function. It seems that the popular theory is that these
> sequences once provided useful information and that they are now obsolete
> yet have not been 'deleted.' It would seem wasteful to leave the
> equivalence of developer's comments in the source code (unless we're
> currently running as un-optimized beta code) It is generally observed that
> Nature is highly efficient at managing energy/material resources. So what
> is the purpose of these apparently inactive sequences?
>
Most of it must be genuinely junk, because the mutation rate is too high and
the birth rate even in ancestral conditions too low for natural selection to
preserve 3 gigabytes of meaningful data against random mutation. (For
further explanation of this, see Eliezer's presentation in the recent
video.)
(Why's it still there, then? Partly "selfish DNA"? The rest maybe to soak up
mutagen molecules that find their way into the cell nucleus? Haven't heard
better explanations.)
Seems plausible that some of it might be instructions, though. If exons
(protein-coding DNA) are machine code, the meta-stuff might be the
equivalent of a scripting language, its purpose to decide which of the
protein-coding genes to invoke at what time.
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