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DNA Goes Binary
Anonymous Coward writes "Chemists in the United States have constructed the simplest possible genetic language. Like Morse or binary code, it has only two letters - but it can orchestrate some of the basic molecular reactions needed for life to evolve."
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It's a synchronous protocol. It is also a binary protocol. The line is either high or nominally zero. A dit is a short interval of current. A dah is an interval of current about three times as long as a dit. A dit length pause represents a space between characters, a three dit pause between words, and a seven dit length pause represents a space between sentences.
How long a dit is depends on the skill of the operator(s).
My only qualifications are that 1. I look at a portrait of S. Morse all day* and 2. I can STFW.
-Peter
*Really. I'm currently weathering the tech job crunch as a security guard at First Data Corp, of which Western Union is a subsidiary.
The problem is one of line noise. In binary computing, your lines are either conveying a 1 (voltage high) or a zero (voltage nil).
If you were to go to four states, now instead of having +0V and +5V, you now also have +1.5V and +3.5V representing different states of the quad-bit.
Fluxuations in the system's power do not easily switch a line from +5 to 0, or vice versa, but could easily switch 3.5 to 5. The more signals you try to carry on a given line, the more suceptible that line is to noise. Obviously, by increasing your max voltage, you could separate your signals more, and take care of it that way, but that's not a solution; you'd be less power-efficient, you'd generate a lot more heat, and all sorts of bad things would happen.
In short, binary is Simple. And that's why it works. Once you start trying to get into multiple voltage levels, you make things far trickier.
It would allow for for faster computers
Not likely. The complexity increase would slow things down alot. Especially since fact in every circuit you'd have to have something measure the voltage at every gate...
Not only would they be slower, they'd be far more unreliable, consume vastly more power, and the circuits would be enormous.
-
I'll be taking a look at Pernutation City. Thanks for the sugestion...
I first read about the concept of this language in Wired 10.12. They go on in the article talking about how all life is information and how all living matter computes in some way or another.
Ya ya, who cares. I'm a biology minor, and computer science major, and this article wasn't particullarly interesting to me even. ;)
a phb.htm
You wanna see something cool... how about DNA having a parity bit?? Take a peek....
http://www.academicpress.com/inscight/09112002/gr
The Yijing has Yin and Yang. It comes up with 64 permutations, of which Hexagram # 24 [ Standard Sequence ] corresponds to Codon UAA, which just happens to be a representation of "stop". The most common english word for Hexagram # 24 is return.
For more on that topic go read Johnson F Yan DNA and the I Ching, Martin Schonberger The I Ching and the Genetic Code and Kayta Walter Tao of Chaos. Go hunt for them at Powell's yourself.
So all you need is Yin and Yang. Binary.
That which is, is not.
That which is not, is.
Actually, none of these is an example of the anthropic principle. The anthropic principle is kind of a reverse causality; it says that X is true because if it were false, intelligent life in the universe (or on Earth, or in South Boston, or whatever your reference frame may be) could not exist. The fact that intelligent life does exist in that reference frame necessarily dictates (post hoc) that X be true.
For example, one might ask the question, "Why is gravity not an inverse cube relation instead of an inverse square relation?" Application of the weak anthropic principle would result in the conclusion that a universe in which gravity works along the inverse cube would be unable to support intelligent life, so if that were the case there would be no beings around to observe the fact. The fact that we are here making observations about gravity necessarily means-- though purely in an after-the-fact kind of way-- that gravity couldn't have acted along the inverse cube.
The question of particle decay can't be addressed by the anthropic principle. Whether the particle decayed today or yesterday would have no bearing on the existence of intelligent life in the universe, so it could have gone either way. We don't know why it happened yesterday and not today, but there's no evidence that it had to happen one way or the other.
The one about snowflakes actually has an answer. The structure of a snowflake is governed by its environment: air currents, particulate matter, instantaneous pressure and temperature on the microscopic scale: all of these things affect crystal formation. A snowflake looks just that way because of the sum of all the forces acting on it during its formation. Again, the anthropic principle doesn't apply.
As to why we have 10 fingers, the answer is even simpler: we have 10 fingers because our ancestors had 10 fingers, and they managed to live long enough to pass on their genes to us. If some outside force had made life hard for the 10-fingered among them, then some other group with a different number of fingers would have been better able to pass their genes on to their offspring, and as a result we'd have a different number of fingers today. It is, in fact, entirely possible that this may have happened at some point in the distant past, although I don't think the fossil record has anything to say on the subject.
The anthropic principle doesn't apply here because if having 10 fingers had been a liability in the past, there would still be somebody here to have this discussion. Having 10 fingers is not, as far as we know, a necessity for the existence of intelligent life.
Really, the weak anthropic principle by itself isn't terribly insightful. If you combine it with Everett's work in branching time and parallel universes, though, it starts to make a sort of sense. See, there is a universe out there for every possible state. There's a universe where gravity is an inverse cube relation. There's a universe where there is no gravity at all. There's a universe where gravity repels rather than attracts. The question arises, then, as to why we're in this universe and not any of those. The weak anthropic principle says that we exist in this universe because none of those other universes could have developed intelligent life. They're all possible in the absolute sense, but it's not possible for us to exist in them, so from our frame of reference, they're impossible.
Ultimately, this is navel-gazing. But it's entertaining navel-gazing.
I write in my journal