A great introduction on the nature of DNA, and the evolution of species. It was a fascinating insight to find out how digital the genetic system actually is. In essence, we are all survival machines programmed to propagate the digital database which did the programming.
#Things to consider
- Genes don’t care about suffering.
- Nature’s only interest is in the survival of DNA.
- The cell is put together by a consortium of hundreds of genes.
#The digital river
Genes are digital, otherwise the signal they produce would fade over distance and time. The machine code of genes look uncannily computerlike. Molecular biology and computer engineering starts looking very much the same. When analog information is recopied it loses its quality over time. 1953 was the year the double helix was discovered. Darwinians see it as the year when their subject went digital. A device is brittle if it must be perfect in order to function at all. An airplane is not brittle. Escalators are also not brittle, even when failing they still work.
#Don’t forget the intermediates
There is always a gradual scale between being fooled to not being fooled. It’s not just one way or the other. Distance for instance provides a gradient of visibility. The end product of evolution seems so complex and far removed from anything we would ordinarily expect, which makes it hard to imagine all the intermediate steps it had to take to evolve.
#Reverse engineering
Reverse engineering is a technique of reasoning. When you are confronted by an object you don’t understand, you make the working assumption that it was designed for some purpose. You analyze the object by working out what problem it would be good at solving. Reverse-engineering the behavior of a country’s government, you may conclude that what is being maximized is employment and universal welfare. Homo sapiens is a deeply “purpose ridden”-species.
#Utility functions in nature
The true utility function of life, which is being maximized in the natural world, is the survival of DNA. There are also other forms of utility functions like for example, aesthetic beauty. It may not seem to make a straightforward economic sense, but genes making males attractive to females automatically finds themselves passed down the digital river to the future. Nature’s utility function never values longevity for its own sake, but only for the sake of future reproduction.
#Inheritance of the common
Everybody is descended from an unbroken line of ancestors who were all young, but many of whom were not old. So we tend to inherit what it takes to be young, but not necessarily what it takes to be old.
#Replication bombs
A replication bomb is when a solar system starts spilling over its information to neighboring solar systems. It’s been taking our solar system a few billion years to create an organism complex enough to establish radio communication, and shower other solar systems with pulses of meaning. These “information explosions” probably passes through a series of thresholds.