Of course. Human programs are precisely analogous to DNA. That was my initial point.
Posted on 02/19/2002 2:59:38 PM PST by Cameron
Maybe, but they can revert to pure blue at any moment.
And this proves that if things were different then they wouldn't be the same. For example, if earth hadn't been shattered by asteroids at just the right intervals, wiping out just the right species and allowing just the right successors to flourish -- well then we might have two head and brains the size of peas, or something.
All this confirms the inerrancy of the King James translation, or something.
All flames and kidding aside, the absence of a complete description of reality by science neither promotes nor detracts from belief. But the argument from fine tuning says nothing. It merely affirms that one's legs are long enough to reach the ground.
Fortunately, we are not so limited unless we limit ourselves.
Shalom.
BTW, there are "genetic" computer programs whose algorithmic construction is determined by a set of "genes" that are forced to evolve through random mutations and selection. There are some problems that can't be reasonably solved any other way. The principle is real, and exists.
Isn't it true that the act of theorizing is the act of predicting? And that what we know as the most personal component of our personalities is that which we perceive as undetermined, or un-caused? So that, by definition, a theory of nature, as a description of a matrix of causes and effects, cannot by definition perceive personality?
The personal slips out of the theory, epistemologically, like water in the fist.
But, then, the hand is, afterwards, wet.
You are claiming that DNA does not have linear coding instructions (i.e., one after another along a path)?!
Of course. Human programs are precisely analogous to DNA. That was my initial point.
Ask yourself why the programmer ever does anything to his program. He is responding to the suggestions of the users, his employer, benchmarking of competitors' programs, market studies, Computer science journals, etc., etc. These are the selection pressures. He is just the guy that does for the computer code what it cannot yet do for itself (i.e., produce descendants with modification). Those codes that work and are profitable are copied and used until they are replaced by better ones. This is an evolutionary process that depends on lots of shared information from lots of sources. There is no one all knowing programmer (Bill Gates notwithstanding) directing the development of programs. Most are copycats working with simple algorithms and effecting rather unimportant changes (witness the proliferation of games).
In fact, every programmer's own brain is a kind of a computer with a program of its own. About two million years ago in human evolution the brain began to be capable of storing more information than the genome. From that point cultural evolution began its ascent leading eventually to this moment where our two brains are clearly possessed of widely divergent sets of program instructions. Both are functional but one clearly has mistakes which need correcting. Fortunately there are vast libraries of scientific literature available to effect a significant programming improvement should you be so interested.
You are confusing the storage format and the execution format. Apples and oranges.
You are confusing the definition of "random" here. Random in this case should mean "arbitrary", but you are using it as though it means "non-deterministic" (a correct definition, but not correct used here). The programmer IS an arbitrary selector (there is an infinite number of ways to write any piece of code). A programmer doesn't add any value to the process if the selection process isn't deterministic.
This is true, but the comparison isn't relevant. We find it cheaper to manufacture systems that aren't fault tolerant in most cases though we do no how. It is an economic decision. Therefore, in practice computer code is FAR more fragile than DNA which has numerous redundancies and fault tolerance mechanisms built in (once you boot up an organism, you can't shut it down or -HUP the process). The bottom line is that it serves living organisms well to have a code that functions well when subject to a high error rate. Life does not need deterministic results to function. If something non-deterministic happens in a computer system or an accidental code mutation occurs, we WANT the system to crash. The onus is on computers to give the right answer every time or they are useless for our purposes.
No, that is false with respect to the purpose of the instruction set. Clearly if you give me a sequence of three nucleotide bases I can tell you exactly which amino acid they code for. I can also identify initiator sequences and stop sequences. On the other hand, if I give any programmer an isolated sequence of 1's and 0's it would mean nothing to him. Every change to the computer code at the binary level will have consequences if it is a part of the instruction set (not the data set which may possibly be changed at will without consequence to the continued operation of the program). Generally such instruction set changes are fatal in that the intended purpose ceases to be accomplished. Whether or not the program continues to operate depends on the effectiveness of the error trapping routines. These facts are not germane to the argument.
The programmer works in an abstract coding language which is translated into binary code by a compiler which is itself a program. Having run several hundred batch jobs in Fortran with thousand card decks I know all too well what a single typing mistake can do to stop compilation or abort the run. This detail is also irrelevant to the argument that DNA codes are facile, redundant, and robust while computer codes in general are not.
The code is linear but the transfer functions are not. DNA codes for proteins. Proteins have primary through quaternary structure. Multiple combinations of multiple variants of tertiary structure peptides with enzymatic properties and extraordinary numbers of cellular, tissue, and whole organism feedback controls means that the instruction set will be expressed differently from place to place and over time.
A single gene may code for parts of a dozen or more different functional proteins. Which proteins occur in which cells is a function of the history of the cell line and environmental influences. In other words, the code produces a facultative response, tolerates a broad range of conditions and insults, and does so with very high tolerance of variation in the code itself.
No, I'm consistently referring to timing sequence in both DNA and human programs, not storage geometry.
No, there was a program before there was ever a first user. Clearly programmers can design something without an external selection process, but the same can't be said of evolutionary theory.
" ...This is an evolutionary process that depends on lots of shared information from lots of sources."
No, it is an intelligently controlled process that functions in a way that evolution would work if evolutionary theory could be applied to either human programming or DNA coding.
That's a total non-sequitor. It doesn't even matter whether or not DNA code or human programming is more fragile, as neither answer is germane to this discussion. What matters is whether useful programming can happen without any form of Intelligent Intervention (i.e. a simulated lifeless, primal, unintelligent environment).
For human programming, we know for a fact that useful programs will never form on their own in a computer, no matter how much static or noise is in the computer environment. For DNA coding, we know for a fact that we've failed to get useful DNA mutations in natural, unaided lab environments (or in the wild, for that matter).
Thus, the only tangible evidence which we have in hand are human programs formed via intelligent intervention rather than through natural, unaided events. One can speak of "possibilities" all day long, but science requires both evidence as well as repeatability. Clearly we can repeat ad nausium the intelligent creation of useful human programs, but the scientific jury is still "out" on wether useful programs can self-form without intelligent intervention.
That's incorrect to try to apply that logic here. It doesn't matter that you can give a name to any sequence of codons but can not do the same for any sequence of binary data/code. Just because you know the name of a sequence of three codons doesn't even mean that you can know from a random string of codons whether three in that series serve to code part of a gene for a finger or a toe (but hey, you can give 'em a name - chuckle).
What does matter is that DNA codons and binary code are both used to create larger subroutines (e.g., genes, API's). It also matters that rearranging codons (i.e. gene-splicing) and rearranging binary code will create new end products. Clearly both human programs as well as human life can be usefully modified by an intelligent intervention.
Yet no one can cite a single unaided, non-intelligent example of either...
That's my point entirely, thanks. DNA programming is superior to Man's current level of computer programming.
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