Any reasonable typist should be able to convey information as fast on average as if they were typing, because you can almost type that fast, and you can be typing while somebody else is typing...
But you can't be playing while you're typing, and these are games where seconds matter.
But, you know, congratulations on reducing the entire issue to "lazy people." Sure, I'm sure that's it. Dumbass.
If you get together a few people in a random dungeon spelunking group, you'll find out way more about those few than you will ever find out about 300 of your closest guild-mates.
Yeah. Usually what I find out about the people in the random dungeon group is "man, I don't ever want to run a dungeon with these dumbasses ever again."
Relaying complex strategy, even if via text. It works.
It doesn't, though. By the time you've typed your complex strategy, the opportunity to use it has passed. Almost nobody can type as fast as they talk, and the "message-not-sent-until-completed" architecture doesn't transmit information as fast as the "message-conclusion-can-be-anticipated-from-its-be ginning" feature of spoken communication.
The reason that people use voice chat software is because text chat doesn't work for those groups. You have to take your hands off the movement/action keys to talk, so you can't talk at the same time that you're taking actions. Voice chat obviates that problem.
Also: not all games involve "raids".
Not all games involve talking to another person. What's your point?
With text chat you can maintain and follow several lines of conversation at a single time.
The problem is, with text chat that's all you can do. You have to stop controlling your character to relay anything but the simplest and fastest of 1-letter instructions.
As long as you don't need to carry on multiple lines of conversation, but you can't afford to have everybody stop and stand still while you communicate complex strategy, voice chat is the way to go. That's why it's de facto for raids; it's a necessity for commanding 40 people.
GM foods aren't actually the products they are labeled as being.
But that's clearly nonsense. GM corn is corn. If flint corn, dent corn, sweet corn, popcorn, and all the rest of the hundreds of varietals of corn are all corn, then corn with a bred resistance to glyphosphate or with the Bt protein is corn as well. There are dozens of varieties of just sweet and super-sweet corn alone; do you know which one you're getting when you buy "sweet corn" at the grocery store? Do you care?
There should be some way that the consumer can determine which are the foods that occur in nature and which were created in a laboratory.
They all occur in nature - and they all were created by humans. Don't make the idiotic fallacy of assuming there's a difference. There's absolutely no food you can buy - could ever buy - that wasn't fundamentally altered on the genetic level according to human specifications. It's what we do; it's what we've been doing for thousands of years. It doesn't matter whether or not we do it with selective breeding over a long time or genetic engineering techniques instantly. It's the same genetics being changed, either way. There's no more or less "natural" way to mess around with the genes of an organism. Genes are genes.
That is what I am mouthing off about.
About your own ignorance of where your foods come from. I know. Stop wasting time on Slashdot and open a book if you really want to know.
If you have a lot of "useless" DNA, it can act as a target, so any mutation will hit nothing much important 97% of the time.
Mutations tend to occur at a constant rate per number of base pairs, so increasing the total sequence length doesn't really reduce the probability of a mutation knocking out a "real" gene. It actually increases the number of mutations proportional to the length increase of the genome.
What it does do is increase the probability that a retrotransposon, or a retrovirus, will insert itself into the middle of an intron, which means that it gets spliced out along with the rest of the introns after RNA transcription.
Actually it depends on whether you ask competent statisticians or "the general climatological community" whoever that is.
The only M&M objection that was sustained by competent statisticians was a methodological error that had, ultimately, no effect on the results.
Unless, by "competent", you mean to say "reject the scientific consensus on global climate change."
It's not a decision to be made on the basis of popularity but on expertise, and the "general climatological community" doesn't have a clue.
Because they disagree with you? Even if we reject the Mann et al. model, there's a dozen other, independent models that show the same anomalous warming; and even if we reject deep-time reconstructions it's clear from other evidence that we're in an anomalous warming period that has nothing to do with either increased insolation or magic cosmic rays from space.
Perhaps you'd like to consider that none of those reconstructions is independent of each other, as they were all co-authors with Mann, Bradley or Hughes.
That's absolutely false. I'm looking at several models right now where none of those figures appear as co-authors. These are the kinds of looney conspiracy theories I was talking about - somehow, the invisible hand of Mann is everywhere!
Only a group-reinforced belief.
It's actually a data-reinforced belief, but thanks for playing. I see that after several posts you still have no argument against the data - only against the credibility of scientists you don't even name.
The problem is, I don't consider you an authority on the subject.
I'm not asking you to. But you might consider doing a little legitimate scientific research about these issues before you mouth off.
I have no reason to believe anyone who is crazy enough to debate this for over a week on Slashdot with somebody who obviously isn't interested in your opinion.
You act like it's at all difficult to rebut your paranoid nonsense.
And it's a little rich of you to complain about me carrying this on for a week when here you are, right along side me. If that makes me crazy, what does it make you?
Whatever your motive is, it's interesting how you're as passionate about this as the bible thumpers are about their religion.
I'm passionate about educating the ignorant. Seemed like you needed a lot of help, is all.
I don't know why being passionate about an issue makes someone untrustworthy. People don't become experts in fields they're not really interested in.
Not only was the method incorrect, but the data was corrupt and some proxies had been secretly extended, which wholly altered the result.
Or... they weren't. It really depends on whether you're asking M&M or the general climatological community.
All of those other studies either used the Mann PC1 as a proxy or used the same dubious proxies including the Magic Bristlecones of Colorado that Michael Mann says do not record the local temperature but by some mystical method can reflect the Global Mean Temperature. (I'm being a little flippant, but not as much as you think)
You're telling me that eleven different climatological reconstructions are all based on pinecones?
I don't believe you. And since I'm a skeptic, I looked up the references. What a surprise! They don't all use either the Mann PC1 or bristlecone data.
And the idea that they're all bullshit is essentially destroyed by their convergence. Haven't you ever played telephone? The introduction of error, or deliberate fiction, drives down convergence, it doesn't increase it. The convergence of models is considerable evidence in their favor. How do your guys explain the convergence, except for loony conspiracy theories?
What you mean like comparing some scientists to Holocaust Deniers?
Who said Holocaust? Nobody but you.
Actually they are fakers and they've been exposed.
Or, they haven't. Again it depends on whether or not you're talking to M&M or whether you're talking to the vast community of climatological scientists who believe that their objections are invalid and spurious at worst and essentially irrelevant to the conclusion at best.
The debunkers (and I assume you're referring to McIntyre and McKitrick) have not been debunked. Every criticism of the Hockey Stick that they made has been upheld.
From what I can read it seems like the reverse is true. The only valid criticism M&M made was a methodological issue that, when corrected, had no effect on the outcome of the model.
There are more than a dozen climate reconstructions that uphold the original "Hockey Stick", and to my knowledge, M&M have offered no objections to any of them. For a "debunked model" it's been featured prominently in materials as recent as the IPCC TAR Summary for Policymakers, so the scientific consensus clearly has not come down on the side of M&M's objections.
Because those fakers are still writing on RealClimate.
It's really easy to toss around ad hominem attacks like they mean something in science, but that seems to be all the climate change deniers really have to offer.
The issue of global warming has been so extremely politicized that there's little room left for dissent against the popular points.
Well, that's just nonsense. There's plenty of room for discussion about dissent from the accepted climate models, but the dissenters have refused to voice their ideas anywhere but the popular media and the internet.
When all the climate change "skeptics" are doing everything they can to keep their ideas from peer-review by the qualified researchers, it's pretty obvious what's going on. There's no conspiracy to keep "dissenting viewpoints" out of the journals, the deniers are doing that all on their own. Because that's what you do when you know your ideas are bullshit.
how predictably people label things they don't understand as "junk"?
We don't call it "junk DNA" because we don't understand it. (In fact we rarely call it "junk DNA" at all. That's something the crappy science writers came up with.)
What we call it is "introns", and their defining characteristic is that these are very long, highly-repetitive sequences with no promoters that are cut out of the mRNA transcription product and discarded. I mean, think about that for a second. In the vast majority of cases that we've looked at, these sequences can be discarded or mutated freely with no effect on the organism. This article notwithstanding - to be honest, it looks like what it usually looks like when programmers talk about DNA, a bunch of jargon-laden gibberish - that's still true. The vast majority of our genome consists of sequences that either are never involved in protein production, or, when they are involved, are nearly immediately excised before protein translation occurs.
None of that stuff is our ignorance about what that stuff does. We're finding out that some of those sequences have structural functions. The ablation of repetitive sequences at the ends of DNA called "telomeres" represents a planned obsolescence of a cell lineage that prevents genetic damage from accruing to dangerous levels for the organism. Sequences in the middle provide something for the centromeres to latch onto.
So learn a thing or two about the field of genetics before you open your mouth. Your experience coding webpages in PHP doesn't represent a graduate-level understanding of genetic biochemistry, I'm sorry to inform you.
I see life, and am at awe of its complexity. I have to conclude something designed it. Jehovah - Yahweh - the name as I understand it is Hebrew meaning "to cause to be". The name of God. Fair enough.
If complexity requires God to design, then who designed God, who surely must be quite complex?
DNA doesn't have any pretty icons and we don't know how to read the metadata - if it exists - to identify the boundaries of an element and its function.
I'd like to introduce you to two of my little friends: Mr Start Codon (TAC) and Mr. Stop Codon (ATT, ATC, and ACT.) They define the boundaries of protein-coding sequences.
But, you know, go on pretending like biologists are as ignorant of genetics as you appear to be. And you think Dawkins is the overclaiming one? I love when biology articles pop up on Slashdot because it's a great opportunity for idiot programmers to get together and say hilariously inaccurate things about genetics that any biology freshman could correct.
Did I say that? Or did I tell you that BGH had been subjected to intense, rigourous testing; and that there was nearly no BGH found in the milk of BGH-dosed cows; and that BGH as a molecule can't survive human digestion?
I'm pretty sure that's what I've been telling you, but feel free to ignore any inconvinient facts, I guess.
No, it's really not. Consider two hunters being chased by a bear. The optimized solution is to run faster than the bear. The evolutionary solution is to run faster than your buddy. Evolution doesn't optimize.
(Does it have to make a protein to be useful?)
No, and I didn't say that it did. What we're finding out is that DNA sequences have structural functions, sometimes, in addition to storing the "schematics" for proteins.
Don't be too quick to dismiss those, they could be crucial! Plenty of other possibilities. Like, maybe that's like empty disk space that's been low level formatted?
DNA isn't a hard disk, so there's no need for it to "format." Functional genes are indicated by their promoter sequences; not by the kind of file system tables that computers use.
DNA is not a computer, a programming language, a program, or anything like that. It's a macromolecule formed from nucleotide bases. Analogies are helpful but it's important not to overextend them.
Probably, yes, but it sure doesn't work that way for compressed data.
DNA isn't "compressed", except for the physical "compression" that winds the molecule up on histones to make it physically more dense and compressed. There's nothing going on like file compression in the DNA molecule.
The proteins I tried to compress were among the first to be sequenced. I forget which ones, but something like E Coli, and H Influenza. They couldn't really be compressed.
Well, no shit, buddy. By the time you're looking at protein sequences all the repetitious introns have been spliced out. The same protein that constitutes (say) 100 residues and therefore 300 bases in RNA form is as long as 3000-10,000 base pairs long in nuclear DNA. If anything is happening in DNA it's the opposite of compression; sequences in DNA are 60%-90% longer than they have to be to store the same protein product.
How about something wooly like finding genes that influence personality traits?
Well, we have to know that something is hereditary before it's worth the time to go looking in the DNA for genes. Why don't you pick a personality trait that the research suggests is heritable, and then see if somebody's found the gene for it? I think you're going to have a harder time with the first than with the second. Once we know what to look for it's fairly easy to find.
Ah, right. We haven't always known everything - therefor, we know nothing at all. How do you get by in our society hating science and knowledge as much as you do?
Just buy organic already; that scam's basically a tax on paranoid delusionals like you, but at least you'll stop posting this nonsense.
On the serious note, does it mean we are trap wired ? An error in positioning could activate viral DNA and start "insider" infection, anywhere in the tissue.
A reasonable question. You're forgetting, though, that these inactive endogenous retroviruses have no selection pressure against mutations, so over millions of years they're rendered essentially inoperable by accruing genetic errors.
There's only one known endogenous retrovirus ever known to cause disease, according to my phylogenetics text; MMTV has been known to cause "mammary carcinomas" in mice. (Mouse breast cancer, I guess? I'm no doctor.)
Whenever I read something like this, I get a reminder how poor is biologists' comprehension of Computer Science, Information Theory, and languages.
Like Ghost Rider I walk in both worlds, so I hear you. Computer skills aren't as prominent among biologists as they could be, despite how helpful that would be a lot of the time.
But computer scientists haven't taken very great efforts to educate themselves about biology, as your post shows. It's been my experience that computer scientists consider bioinformatics as a field to be beneath their notice; few have any interest in developing new computational tools for genetics research. I guess Craig Venter was kind of the exception; but most of the progress in genetics (like florescent dye chain-termination sequencing) has been driven by biochemists.
First, evolution would weed that sort of thing out in a hurry.
No, it wouldn't. Evolution doesn't optimize, it finds locally-advantageous solutions. And there's nearly no survival detriment to eukaryotes for carrying around as much as 90% to 95% non-coding or non-regulatory DNA. It's simply spliced out when those sequences are transcribed to RNA.
Second, ever tried compressing a DNA sequence? They don't compress very well! Meaning, they don't have much redundancy.
Shows what you know, I guess. In fact nearly 60% of the genome of D. melanogaster (the "fruit" or "vinegar" fly) is comprised of highly repetitious elements called "satellites", and there's reason to believe that's not unique to flies.
Defects could indeed be expected to have no context, but for the rest-- which genes determine a person's blood type?
The 29 genes of the human blood group system control the expression of human blood phenotype. In particular, the popularly-known blood type complex (A, B, AB, or O) is controlled by a single gene (called "ABO", oddly enough) with three known alleles.
Eye color?
Two genes working together to determine the level and distribution of blue and hazel pigment in the iris - "bey2" and "gey".
Skin color?
Well, that's a little trickier. About 100 different genes have been implicated at one time or another, but recent research seems to indicate that a gene called SLC24A5 is, for the most part, the largest single determinant of skin color differences.
Going about that task by trying to find the magic gene for something like that is like a person who never learned to read trying to figure out the plot of a book by trying to recognize patterns of letters.
Well, it's really not. DNA doesn't encode information so much as it catalyzes RNA macromolecules, which in turn catalyze the formation of proteins - all in response to cues from the environment of the cell. So it's not like reading a book; it's more like following origami instructions written in Japanese. We follow along from the diagrams and we learn what protein the gene is supposed to make. Or we knock the gene out and see what the resulting organism is missing and what fails to function; if we knock out a gene and the resulting organism has no legs, then we know we're looking at a gene that's related to the formation of legs.
To anyone who does know something about the aforementioned topics, duh!
Who are you talking about, exactly? If you understand the Central Dogma of genetics - that DNA encodes genes, which are transcribed to RNA which is then translated into proteins in the ribosomes - then it's hard to believe that any useful protein is manufactured by a sequence that essentially consists of "AT" repeated literally millions of times.
That's what comprises most of the sequences we're talking about - indeed, stuff like that is about 90% of the human genome - which makes it clear that while "junk" may or may not be the best term, their function has little do to with DNA's job of protein synthesis, and are probably structural elements involved with things like the attachment of centromeres during mitosis.
Pretty good, actually; I'm not really a programmer so its hard for me to imagine that analogies using programming languages make anything clearer, but if it worked for you, that's fine.
I didn't know that about Multiple Sclerosis. Clearly you did a great deal of research to explain something that took me 2 lines to say.
I don't think evolution would be very kind to unneeded material.
There's really almost no selection pressure against extra DNA sequences, particularly ones with no associated promoter. One of the proofs of this is the fact that the human genome is comprised more of endogenous retroviruses than actual functional sequences.
Slashdot Mirror
Any reasonable typist should be able to convey information as fast on average as if they were typing, because you can almost type that fast, and you can be typing while somebody else is typing...
But you can't be playing while you're typing, and these are games where seconds matter.
But, you know, congratulations on reducing the entire issue to "lazy people." Sure, I'm sure that's it. Dumbass.
If you get together a few people in a random dungeon spelunking group, you'll find out way more about those few than you will ever find out about 300 of your closest guild-mates.
Yeah. Usually what I find out about the people in the random dungeon group is "man, I don't ever want to run a dungeon with these dumbasses ever again."
Why do MMOs have to be about competition?
Conflict is the soul of narrative.
Relaying complex strategy, even if via text. It works.
e ginning" feature of spoken communication.
It doesn't, though. By the time you've typed your complex strategy, the opportunity to use it has passed. Almost nobody can type as fast as they talk, and the "message-not-sent-until-completed" architecture doesn't transmit information as fast as the "message-conclusion-can-be-anticipated-from-its-b
The reason that people use voice chat software is because text chat doesn't work for those groups. You have to take your hands off the movement/action keys to talk, so you can't talk at the same time that you're taking actions. Voice chat obviates that problem.
Also: not all games involve "raids".
Not all games involve talking to another person. What's your point?
With text chat you can maintain and follow several lines of conversation at a single time.
The problem is, with text chat that's all you can do. You have to stop controlling your character to relay anything but the simplest and fastest of 1-letter instructions.
As long as you don't need to carry on multiple lines of conversation, but you can't afford to have everybody stop and stand still while you communicate complex strategy, voice chat is the way to go. That's why it's de facto for raids; it's a necessity for commanding 40 people.
Now you're just repeating yourself? Very mature. Again - "a great expense with no benefit except to assuage your paranoia."
A great expense with no conceivable benefit except to assuage your paranoia.
GM foods aren't actually the products they are labeled as being.
But that's clearly nonsense. GM corn is corn. If flint corn, dent corn, sweet corn, popcorn, and all the rest of the hundreds of varietals of corn are all corn, then corn with a bred resistance to glyphosphate or with the Bt protein is corn as well. There are dozens of varieties of just sweet and super-sweet corn alone; do you know which one you're getting when you buy "sweet corn" at the grocery store? Do you care?
There should be some way that the consumer can determine which are the foods that occur in nature and which were created in a laboratory.
They all occur in nature - and they all were created by humans. Don't make the idiotic fallacy of assuming there's a difference. There's absolutely no food you can buy - could ever buy - that wasn't fundamentally altered on the genetic level according to human specifications. It's what we do; it's what we've been doing for thousands of years. It doesn't matter whether or not we do it with selective breeding over a long time or genetic engineering techniques instantly. It's the same genetics being changed, either way. There's no more or less "natural" way to mess around with the genes of an organism. Genes are genes.
That is what I am mouthing off about.
About your own ignorance of where your foods come from. I know. Stop wasting time on Slashdot and open a book if you really want to know.
If you have a lot of "useless" DNA, it can act as a target, so any mutation will hit nothing much important 97% of the time.
Mutations tend to occur at a constant rate per number of base pairs, so increasing the total sequence length doesn't really reduce the probability of a mutation knocking out a "real" gene. It actually increases the number of mutations proportional to the length increase of the genome.
What it does do is increase the probability that a retrotransposon, or a retrovirus, will insert itself into the middle of an intron, which means that it gets spliced out along with the rest of the introns after RNA transcription.
Actually it depends on whether you ask competent statisticians or "the general climatological community" whoever that is.
The only M&M objection that was sustained by competent statisticians was a methodological error that had, ultimately, no effect on the results.
Unless, by "competent", you mean to say "reject the scientific consensus on global climate change."
It's not a decision to be made on the basis of popularity but on expertise, and the "general climatological community" doesn't have a clue.
Because they disagree with you? Even if we reject the Mann et al. model, there's a dozen other, independent models that show the same anomalous warming; and even if we reject deep-time reconstructions it's clear from other evidence that we're in an anomalous warming period that has nothing to do with either increased insolation or magic cosmic rays from space.
Perhaps you'd like to consider that none of those reconstructions is independent of each other, as they were all co-authors with Mann, Bradley or Hughes.
That's absolutely false. I'm looking at several models right now where none of those figures appear as co-authors. These are the kinds of looney conspiracy theories I was talking about - somehow, the invisible hand of Mann is everywhere!
Only a group-reinforced belief.
It's actually a data-reinforced belief, but thanks for playing. I see that after several posts you still have no argument against the data - only against the credibility of scientists you don't even name.
The problem is, I don't consider you an authority on the subject.
I'm not asking you to. But you might consider doing a little legitimate scientific research about these issues before you mouth off.
I have no reason to believe anyone who is crazy enough to debate this for over a week on Slashdot with somebody who obviously isn't interested in your opinion.
You act like it's at all difficult to rebut your paranoid nonsense.
And it's a little rich of you to complain about me carrying this on for a week when here you are, right along side me. If that makes me crazy, what does it make you?
Whatever your motive is, it's interesting how you're as passionate about this as the bible thumpers are about their religion.
I'm passionate about educating the ignorant. Seemed like you needed a lot of help, is all.
I don't know why being passionate about an issue makes someone untrustworthy. People don't become experts in fields they're not really interested in.
Not only was the method incorrect, but the data was corrupt and some proxies had been secretly extended, which wholly altered the result.
Or... they weren't. It really depends on whether you're asking M&M or the general climatological community.
All of those other studies either used the Mann PC1 as a proxy or used the same dubious proxies including the Magic Bristlecones of Colorado that Michael Mann says do not record the local temperature but by some mystical method can reflect the Global Mean Temperature. (I'm being a little flippant, but not as much as you think)
You're telling me that eleven different climatological reconstructions are all based on pinecones?
I don't believe you. And since I'm a skeptic, I looked up the references. What a surprise! They don't all use either the Mann PC1 or bristlecone data.
And the idea that they're all bullshit is essentially destroyed by their convergence. Haven't you ever played telephone? The introduction of error, or deliberate fiction, drives down convergence, it doesn't increase it. The convergence of models is considerable evidence in their favor. How do your guys explain the convergence, except for loony conspiracy theories?
What you mean like comparing some scientists to Holocaust Deniers?
Who said Holocaust? Nobody but you.
Actually they are fakers and they've been exposed.
Or, they haven't. Again it depends on whether or not you're talking to M&M or whether you're talking to the vast community of climatological scientists who believe that their objections are invalid and spurious at worst and essentially irrelevant to the conclusion at best.
The debunkers (and I assume you're referring to McIntyre and McKitrick) have not been debunked. Every criticism of the Hockey Stick that they made has been upheld.
From what I can read it seems like the reverse is true. The only valid criticism M&M made was a methodological issue that, when corrected, had no effect on the outcome of the model.
There are more than a dozen climate reconstructions that uphold the original "Hockey Stick", and to my knowledge, M&M have offered no objections to any of them. For a "debunked model" it's been featured prominently in materials as recent as the IPCC TAR Summary for Policymakers, so the scientific consensus clearly has not come down on the side of M&M's objections.
Because those fakers are still writing on RealClimate.
It's really easy to toss around ad hominem attacks like they mean something in science, but that seems to be all the climate change deniers really have to offer.
The issue of global warming has been so extremely politicized that there's little room left for dissent against the popular points.
Well, that's just nonsense. There's plenty of room for discussion about dissent from the accepted climate models, but the dissenters have refused to voice their ideas anywhere but the popular media and the internet.
When all the climate change "skeptics" are doing everything they can to keep their ideas from peer-review by the qualified researchers, it's pretty obvious what's going on. There's no conspiracy to keep "dissenting viewpoints" out of the journals, the deniers are doing that all on their own. Because that's what you do when you know your ideas are bullshit.
how predictably people label things they don't understand as "junk"?
We don't call it "junk DNA" because we don't understand it. (In fact we rarely call it "junk DNA" at all. That's something the crappy science writers came up with.)
What we call it is "introns", and their defining characteristic is that these are very long, highly-repetitive sequences with no promoters that are cut out of the mRNA transcription product and discarded. I mean, think about that for a second. In the vast majority of cases that we've looked at, these sequences can be discarded or mutated freely with no effect on the organism. This article notwithstanding - to be honest, it looks like what it usually looks like when programmers talk about DNA, a bunch of jargon-laden gibberish - that's still true. The vast majority of our genome consists of sequences that either are never involved in protein production, or, when they are involved, are nearly immediately excised before protein translation occurs.
None of that stuff is our ignorance about what that stuff does. We're finding out that some of those sequences have structural functions. The ablation of repetitive sequences at the ends of DNA called "telomeres" represents a planned obsolescence of a cell lineage that prevents genetic damage from accruing to dangerous levels for the organism. Sequences in the middle provide something for the centromeres to latch onto.
So learn a thing or two about the field of genetics before you open your mouth. Your experience coding webpages in PHP doesn't represent a graduate-level understanding of genetic biochemistry, I'm sorry to inform you.
I see life, and am at awe of its complexity. I have to conclude something designed it. Jehovah - Yahweh - the name as I understand it is Hebrew meaning "to cause to be". The name of God. Fair enough.
If complexity requires God to design, then who designed God, who surely must be quite complex?
DNA doesn't have any pretty icons and we don't know how to read the metadata - if it exists - to identify the boundaries of an element and its function.
I'd like to introduce you to two of my little friends: Mr Start Codon (TAC) and Mr. Stop Codon (ATT, ATC, and ACT.) They define the boundaries of protein-coding sequences.
But, you know, go on pretending like biologists are as ignorant of genetics as you appear to be. And you think Dawkins is the overclaiming one? I love when biology articles pop up on Slashdot because it's a great opportunity for idiot programmers to get together and say hilariously inaccurate things about genetics that any biology freshman could correct.
So you figure we know everything now?
Did I say that? Or did I tell you that BGH had been subjected to intense, rigourous testing; and that there was nearly no BGH found in the milk of BGH-dosed cows; and that BGH as a molecule can't survive human digestion?
I'm pretty sure that's what I've been telling you, but feel free to ignore any inconvinient facts, I guess.
Finding locally advantageous solutions _is_ optimizing!
No, it's really not. Consider two hunters being chased by a bear. The optimized solution is to run faster than the bear. The evolutionary solution is to run faster than your buddy. Evolution doesn't optimize.
(Does it have to make a protein to be useful?)
No, and I didn't say that it did. What we're finding out is that DNA sequences have structural functions, sometimes, in addition to storing the "schematics" for proteins.
Don't be too quick to dismiss those, they could be crucial! Plenty of other possibilities. Like, maybe that's like empty disk space that's been low level formatted?
DNA isn't a hard disk, so there's no need for it to "format." Functional genes are indicated by their promoter sequences; not by the kind of file system tables that computers use.
DNA is not a computer, a programming language, a program, or anything like that. It's a macromolecule formed from nucleotide bases. Analogies are helpful but it's important not to overextend them.
Probably, yes, but it sure doesn't work that way for compressed data.
DNA isn't "compressed", except for the physical "compression" that winds the molecule up on histones to make it physically more dense and compressed. There's nothing going on like file compression in the DNA molecule.
The proteins I tried to compress were among the first to be sequenced. I forget which ones, but something like E Coli, and H Influenza. They couldn't really be compressed.
Well, no shit, buddy. By the time you're looking at protein sequences all the repetitious introns have been spliced out. The same protein that constitutes (say) 100 residues and therefore 300 bases in RNA form is as long as 3000-10,000 base pairs long in nuclear DNA. If anything is happening in DNA it's the opposite of compression; sequences in DNA are 60%-90% longer than they have to be to store the same protein product.
How about something wooly like finding genes that influence personality traits?
Well, we have to know that something is hereditary before it's worth the time to go looking in the DNA for genes. Why don't you pick a personality trait that the research suggests is heritable, and then see if somebody's found the gene for it? I think you're going to have a harder time with the first than with the second. Once we know what to look for it's fairly easy to find.
Thalidomide underwent safety testing too.
Ah, right. We haven't always known everything - therefor, we know nothing at all. How do you get by in our society hating science and knowledge as much as you do?
Just buy organic already; that scam's basically a tax on paranoid delusionals like you, but at least you'll stop posting this nonsense.
On the serious note, does it mean we are trap wired ? An error in positioning could activate viral DNA and start "insider" infection, anywhere in the tissue.
A reasonable question. You're forgetting, though, that these inactive endogenous retroviruses have no selection pressure against mutations, so over millions of years they're rendered essentially inoperable by accruing genetic errors.
There's only one known endogenous retrovirus ever known to cause disease, according to my phylogenetics text; MMTV has been known to cause "mammary carcinomas" in mice. (Mouse breast cancer, I guess? I'm no doctor.)
Whenever I read something like this, I get a reminder how poor is biologists' comprehension of Computer Science, Information Theory, and languages.
Like Ghost Rider I walk in both worlds, so I hear you. Computer skills aren't as prominent among biologists as they could be, despite how helpful that would be a lot of the time.
But computer scientists haven't taken very great efforts to educate themselves about biology, as your post shows. It's been my experience that computer scientists consider bioinformatics as a field to be beneath their notice; few have any interest in developing new computational tools for genetics research. I guess Craig Venter was kind of the exception; but most of the progress in genetics (like florescent dye chain-termination sequencing) has been driven by biochemists.
First, evolution would weed that sort of thing out in a hurry.
No, it wouldn't. Evolution doesn't optimize, it finds locally-advantageous solutions. And there's nearly no survival detriment to eukaryotes for carrying around as much as 90% to 95% non-coding or non-regulatory DNA. It's simply spliced out when those sequences are transcribed to RNA.
Second, ever tried compressing a DNA sequence? They don't compress very well! Meaning, they don't have much redundancy.
Shows what you know, I guess. In fact nearly 60% of the genome of D. melanogaster (the "fruit" or "vinegar" fly) is comprised of highly repetitious elements called "satellites", and there's reason to believe that's not unique to flies.
Defects could indeed be expected to have no context, but for the rest-- which genes determine a person's blood type?
The 29 genes of the human blood group system control the expression of human blood phenotype. In particular, the popularly-known blood type complex (A, B, AB, or O) is controlled by a single gene (called "ABO", oddly enough) with three known alleles.
Eye color?
Two genes working together to determine the level and distribution of blue and hazel pigment in the iris - "bey2" and "gey".
Skin color?
Well, that's a little trickier. About 100 different genes have been implicated at one time or another, but recent research seems to indicate that a gene called SLC24A5 is, for the most part, the largest single determinant of skin color differences.
Going about that task by trying to find the magic gene for something like that is like a person who never learned to read trying to figure out the plot of a book by trying to recognize patterns of letters.
Well, it's really not. DNA doesn't encode information so much as it catalyzes RNA macromolecules, which in turn catalyze the formation of proteins - all in response to cues from the environment of the cell. So it's not like reading a book; it's more like following origami instructions written in Japanese. We follow along from the diagrams and we learn what protein the gene is supposed to make. Or we knock the gene out and see what the resulting organism is missing and what fails to function; if we knock out a gene and the resulting organism has no legs, then we know we're looking at a gene that's related to the formation of legs.
To anyone who does know something about the aforementioned topics, duh!
Who are you talking about, exactly? If you understand the Central Dogma of genetics - that DNA encodes genes, which are transcribed to RNA which is then translated into proteins in the ribosomes - then it's hard to believe that any useful protein is manufactured by a sequence that essentially consists of "AT" repeated literally millions of times.
That's what comprises most of the sequences we're talking about - indeed, stuff like that is about 90% of the human genome - which makes it clear that while "junk" may or may not be the best term, their function has little do to with DNA's job of protein synthesis, and are probably structural elements involved with things like the attachment of centromeres during mitosis.
How'd I do at explaining that?
Pretty good, actually; I'm not really a programmer so its hard for me to imagine that analogies using programming languages make anything clearer, but if it worked for you, that's fine.
I didn't know that about Multiple Sclerosis. Clearly you did a great deal of research to explain something that took me 2 lines to say.
I don't think evolution would be very kind to unneeded material.
There's really almost no selection pressure against extra DNA sequences, particularly ones with no associated promoter. One of the proofs of this is the fact that the human genome is comprised more of endogenous retroviruses than actual functional sequences.
You're confused already?
No, but I think you are, if you think its introduction into dairy production was the first time BGH treatments underwent safety testing.
I'm not interested in participating in this particular experiment.
What experiment? "Put BGH in an acid and see if the protein denatures." Oh, guess what, it does. You're an idiot.
Once upon a time my government had very strict rules about product labeling. Somehow or other the system has failed recently.
Do you have some evidence of that? Or just the circular reasoning of your paranoid fantasies?