Jellyfish Genome Hints That Complexity Isn’t Genetically Complex
nautil.us
nautil.us
Some people thought of it as an attack on natural selection, but it really wasn't. It was a fascinating look at how the inherent properties of matter could lead to patterns (such as spiral arrangement of leaves or zebra stripes) without intervention from natural selection
https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Leopard-Changed-Its-Spots/dp/07...
I bring this up in threads about diet/nutrition (and always get down voted).
But the idea is humans have about 20,000 protein coding genes and something as simple as wheat has estimated 150,000 to 334,000.
Where I get downvotes is the concept/hypothesis (not mine) that the explaination rests with the microbiome (which we have and something like wheat doesn’t).
I’d be interested in learning if complex creatures like jellyfish with simple genomes have a complex microbiome.
just add what insight you have and then the crowd decides if they care, like or dislike
Almost any comment in a discussion about diet/nutrition is bound to get downvoted (at least on HN). People are probably bound to downvote anything about the microbiome for the same reasons. Yet we know the microbiome is responsible for turning (at least some) genes on/off, and otherwise our study of the microbiome is in its infancy.
I’d rather have someone reply about the jelly fish microbiome, if any, than explaination of HN social norms. The cool thing about HN is you might get some expert, in this case a marine biologist lurking, not the social norms.
Just because something uses a broader variety of building blocks, doesn't mean the resultant structure is necessarily more complex than a structure built with less building block variety.
You seem to have taken something interesting and then leapt to a conclusion.
It could be that. Or it could be that not all of the protein coding genes in wheat are active, it could be that ours overlap and interact in more information-dense ways. It could be that the internal processes of wheat are very (perhaps needlessly) complex to come to simpler outcomes. It could be a lot of different reasons, without evidence for something in particular, all we really have there is speculation.
https://genome.cshlp.org/content/11/1/55.full
Does the figure you quote for wheat take that into account?
While the digits in Pi appear like white noise, fractals have a very distinct sense of orderliness, but with infinite detail. The latter tends to be more fascinating for most people.
Technically, the first is called disorganized complexity and the second organized complexity.
Sorry, but can you point any source please supporting your statement?
The humble C. elegans (roundworm) has ~20000 genes, similar to humans.
The complexity comes with the regulation of these genes, which are in the noncoding regions of DNA.
You can regulate the genes to "disable" the complexity, but those genes need to be there in the first place....
Functional diversity of the same gene can be generated through context-specific regulator-to-promoter interactions.
1) The amount of DNA does not determine the complexity of an organism.
2) Also, the number of protein-coding genes does not determine the complexity of an organism.
You may have meant (2), and only (2). If so, this is clearly true, as much of the complexity comes from non-protein DNA.
Still, (1) is also true, but one could argue, more due to random inefficiencies, or alternatively if you rank degree of complexity based only on phenotypes.
My preferred definition of complexity, or rather of irreducible complexity, is to say that complexity is determined by the minimum number of bits of information that is needed to create an equivalent output. (where, naturally, the definition of equivalence needs to be supplied for a given domain)
By this definition, DNA length (not number of genes) places an upper bound on complexity an organism can have.
To take the NN example:
Clearly it applies to species, like humans, with a significant cultural and learning element to our being. Much of our complexity is learned socially or by interacting with our environment. In fact, this is done by training the NN in our brains.
Edit: Note that our brains can store much more information than our DNA, making the upper bound on complexity for a human the sum of storage capacity in the DNA + the sum of storage capacity in the brain.
But for species with little ability to learn, like jellyfish, wouldn't it be more appropriate to say that the "training of the NN" is analogous to evolution optimizing the DNA? That would mean that, for a given individual, their complexity is all included in their DNA at birth?
In that case, one could argue that the length of the DNA string does create an upper bound on how much complexity it can contain. I suppose that is the case for the NN, too. The total number of bits in the weights of the network is an upper bound on the complexity a given, already trained, network can have. (Of course, the possible complexity of the network is way, way higher than that of the program that creates it.)
>Scholars in various fields, such as computer science, physics, biology, biochemistry, economics, mathematics, philosophy, and generative sciences have made use of the way that complex patterns can emerge from the implementation of the game's simple rules
Jellyfish aren't that fancy, right? From what I understood they're like a stomach and some kind of "muscle" that make them go up or down. They've got some poisonous chemicals and other things, but plants do have this too. Jellyfish remind me of the 2-neuron "neural network" that can play flappy bird :-)