Year: 2022

UNEXPECTED COMBINATIONS. "A single-celled bacterium is alive, but if you separate the macromolecules that combined to create the bacterium, these units are not alive. Based on our knowledge of macromolecules, we would not have been able to predict that they could combine to form a living organism, nor could we have predicted all of the characteristics of the resulting bacterium." https://lnkd.in/epkJVpt View in LinkedIn

COULD A STRAND OF INFORMATION called code, a binary data set, ever achieve a critical mass, a higher complexity, or cooperative functionality? Even if it did, we may still not understand what occurred right before our very eyes. View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last week on this final piece about increasing genetic complexity, or not in nature. The innate world appears to be driven by entropy, the drive towards chaos, lowest energy, greatest stability. In contrast, living things build complexity, higher energy structures, and least stability. Whether there is a trend towards greater genetic complexity and information or not is an interesting question. View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION. "This work suggests that the concept of a self-replicating chemistry is closely related to the concept of a chemistry that can store information and compute." https://lnkd.in/dhc7k7H View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION TRANSFER. "It is only by clearly understanding how chemical systems can transfer and process information that we can hope to understand how self-replication and evolution can occur, and by implication, understand how life might have begun." https://lnkd.in/dhc7k7H View in LinkedIn

BITS OF INFORMATION. "For simplicity, let’s say that each gene is either suppressed, or not, in the epigenome. That would be a binary choice for each gene. Most humans have between 20,000 and 25,000 genes. Let’s say the average is about 2^22,500 more choices. Therefore human DNA genome encodes 4^(3 billion) = 2^(6 billion) choices, or 6 billion bits of information. The epigenome encodes at least 2^22,500 choices, or 22,500 bits. The total information is 6,000,022,500 bits, or approximately 6 Gb (gigabits)." https://lnkd.in/eq-g674 View in LinkedIn

TOTAL BITS. "So that is a total information of 4,392,322,500 bits including the epigenome. In ASCII code, that would be 627,474,642 MB (megabytes). https://lnkd.in/eq-g674 View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION INCREASE. "If we express this complexity in terms of its improbability, defining the amount of genetic information as the negative logarithm of its probability of occurrence by chance, we may say that genetic information is increased in the course of progressive evolution, guided by natural selection of random mutations." https://lnkd.in/eGfBzxS View in LinkedIn

DATA INCREASE. "Since the genetic information is transformed into phenotypic information in ontogeny, this figure (10(8) bits) must represent the amount of information which corresponds to the improved organization of higher animals as compared to their ancestors 500 million years back." https://lnkd.in/eGfBzxS View in LinkedIn

UNIT OF EVOLUTION? "Individuals are merely disposable vehicles for the replicating information contained in the genes. As long as the genes survive (that is, are replicated in offspring before the individual dies), the survival or death of the individual is not very important." https://lnkd.in/ecMXQ_u View in LinkedIn