[ExI] Tim May and DNA

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of
Keith Henson
Sent: Saturday, January 26, 2019 10:34 PM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: [ExI] Tim May and DNA

In talking to Vernor Vinge after Tim May died, he mentioned

>..."Way back, I had a long chat with him at a mutual friends' place. He had
many cool ideas. ...
that the complexity of biology is underestimated because things like DNA are
essentially jump-threaded code."

>...Jump threaded is also known as spaghetti code...
Keith
_______________________________________________


Even the notion of spaghetti code analogy vastly understates the complexity
of how DNA creates a cell.  Spaghetti code jumps all over the place and is
crazy-hard to debug, but that is mostly cosmetic.  The code behaves
consistently.  There are so many chance events in embryo development, it is
astonishing that identical twins look alike.  They are born with different
fingerprints but similar features.  This is analogous to two bell curves
created by the same test using a different set of students.  If you get
enough students, the curves look similar, but the details of how it formed
differ.

If you look back as recently as 15 years ago at what was commonly written
about all the stuff we could learn if we could read our DNA, it is
laughable: we thought that whole system was far simpler than it turned out
to be.  We are still finding new complications.

spike