[Paleopsych] conserved stuff in 'junk' DNA

[HowlBloom at aol.com]

Paul--Your slow-learning alternative interpretation--slow-learning is 
reserved for potential big breakthroughs tested over aeons instead of minutes, hours, 
or days, is extremely interesting.

I've inserted another twisty comment and some pictures to illustrate it down 
below.  Howard

In a message dated 11/28/2004 7:19:15 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
paul.werbos at verizon.net writes:
If the "junk" DNA is more highly conserved than the usual DNA...
that's important. It may suggest an interpretation a bit different from what
we have been drifting into.

Two alternative views of what that datum implies --

A conservative view might be that "what you see is what you get after all,"
and that the "junk DNA"... is like the glia cells in the brain, which people
think supply metabolic support to ALLOW neurons to play the decisive role 
everyone assumes...
hb: add in Eshel Ben-Jacob's work on glia and on the foundation of gel exuded 
by some bacterial colonies.  In Eshel's view,  both are distributors of 
information that help in the parallel-processing, the emergent meta-mind, formed by 
trillions of processors working in parallel.  I've compared what Eshel 
describes to the zeitgeist of human culture--a summation of the current state of 
mind, but one pregnant with implications, pregnant with new creative solutions 
whose parts are aching to be sutured together, sutured together by a mind 
attuned to the music of their inanimate desire.
But could sequences in a linear string really take on this role?  Or should 
we stop thinking of genomes as linear strings?  Remember, genomes are twisted, 
knotted, and tangled--but not randomly--tangled in meaningful ways.  Their 
topology and topography is as important as their linear constituents.  The big 
question with both genes and with "junk dna" may be one Eshel's been raising 
with his papers on linguistic and contextual meaning.  A big part of a 
genome-sector's meaning may come from which others its rubbing cheeks with.  And there's 
a lot of cheek-rubbing in a knot.

Here are a few genomic knots--probably vastly oversimplified:






pw: could it be that the nonjunk DNA is as dominant as people have always 
thought, and that
the "junk DNA" is a kind of constant support system... evolved long,long ago 
and then frozen?
The paper you cited says the junk DNA is "highly conserved," but doesn't say
whether it is constant across all types of earth life, or just major groups.

A totally different view... "high conserved" could just mean slowly changing.
In multilayer time-lagged recurrent neural networks... we know we need to 
have slower
learning rates for stuff which is further away from direct empirical testing.
New categories of perception evolve more slowly than ... the formation
of memories using EXISTING categories, which can be "one-trial memories."





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----------
Howard Bloom
Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of 
History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 
21st Century
Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core 
Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute
www.howardbloom.net
www.bigbangtango.net
Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic 
of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The 
Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American 
Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy 
of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International 
Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive 
editor -- New Paradigm book series.
For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: 
www.paleopsych.org
for two chapters from 
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, 
see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang 
to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net
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