Insect Has Gears in Its Legs (2013)
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
Something that is impressive to me is how insects manage energy, tiny things moving or flying around and processing information for hours with I don't know what source and storage for it.
I am obviously a total ignorant in physics and biology.
It is a protein that has a stator like in a motor that rotates in phases when it combines ADP and phosphate to make ATP.
Amazing.
Plus human bodies aren't all that terrible: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Persistence_hunting
Humans are long distance champions (ymmv).
As long as we can track an animal, we can run run them down to exhaustion.
As in, is there a field of study similar to computer science/information theory on certain fundamental biological "laws of transformation"?
Say, we have six billion or so pairs in the DNA. How could a series of transformations from those pairs with other proteins produce this complexity especially ones that requires a particular 3d shape, time based mechanisms and reactions all tied together efficiently and passed from generation to generation?
Obviously perhaps not a "designed by some magical entity", but six billion pairs/nibbles seem quite magical to encode this complexity... It is certainly hard to study this even over many decades, but I wonder if there are certain fundamental laws or units or theories that help provide pathways to understand such transformations.
Think about demoscene or 80s video game programming, tight little assembly routines by developers that did not care anywhere near as much about simple and clear code, security, portability, or anything else as they did about raw performance. Analyzing some of these after the fact (not that I've done it, but I've read the stories of people doing it) seems to be every bit as difficult as being able to do it in the first place. And this is something that _is_ the product of intelligent design; when raw evolution is responsible for the work, it's even less liable to make some kind of logical sense when viewed at the lowest level. The emergent effect of random change (and its impact on reproductive fitness) is the only thing that matters.
Now, consider this: scientists analyzing a simple processor can't even tell you how it works, using modern equipment:
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...
> we take a classical microprocessor as a model organism, and use our ability to perform arbitrary experiments on it to see if popular data analysis methods from neuroscience can elucidate the way it processes information. Microprocessors are among those artificial information processing systems that are both complex and that we understand at all levels, from the overall logical flow, via logical gates, to the dynamics of transistors. We show that the approaches reveal interesting structure in the data but do not meaningfully describe the hierarchy of information processing in the microprocessor. This suggests current analytic approaches in neuroscience may fall short of producing meaningful understanding of neural systems, regardless of the amount of data.
What do we take from that? It seems to me that our current understanding of DNA is extremely crude, and that we're still a few breakthroughs away from understanding any moderate to large scale 'logical structure' in it.
Agree that our current understanding is very crude.
I was thinking a mapping between the information theory world to the biology world: say if N DNA pairs can be theoretically shown to only encode a pattern of "blah" complexity (time/space) regardless of future protein interactions, then could a model progressively apply that to find limits to prove/disprove/discover old or new ideas that are correct/incorrect?
We have had a cop out of "it's a magical world that we don't fully understand" for such a long time,so wondering if fundamental laws can help pave the way. Probably very amaterish/arrogant coming from computer science people such as myself, but one couldn't help but be in awe of these gears or octopuses or even basic flower patterns emerging out of DNA.
I don't think it's going to end up this simple. You're going to end up in the Godelian trap with this one. Consider how simple a Turing machine is, or a tiny cellular atomaton, and yet there's no limit to the complexity that they can produce chaotically from any established starting position.
The fundamental laws are going to come from simulating what the DNA does in practice, like running code in an emulator. It needs to be 'decompiled' and 'decompressed', in a sense; our current approach is like trying to understand why a REST endpoint gives a certain response by staring at gates within the processor. It might be doable but it's not going to be the most fruitful approach.
This is very cool, helps the young bugs coordinate both legs for jumping before letting them lose the bumps and graduate to precision jumping.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curl-up [1]: https://www.instructables.com/Articulated-MC-Escher-Curl-up-...
[1] https://ciechanow.ski/gears/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22310813
The "gears" on this insect are basically intersecting teeth on two otherwise normal leg parts. Evolving an axle or any other free spinning part would require disconnected parts. The external parts would be cut off from any metabolic functions of the main body. Nothing remotely like that has ever evolved before so it would be nigh impossible.
Colonial animals are the edge case here. Most would be hesitant to say an ant colony is "an animal", but are happy to refer to a Portuguese Man 'o' War as such, despite also being a colony.
Man o Wars are also not disjoint. They have specialized cells, but I believe share nutrition among the non-feeding cells. A truly disjoint creature would need a metabolic system on both sides of the disjoint, a separate nervous system, and perhaps most difficult, a way to pass messages across the disjoint quickly enough to be useful (aka electric impulse).
At a certain point, I think it starts becoming dubious whether it's a single creature. Even if they're genetically identical, they start to look more like twins than a colonial creature.
Nothing will ever change if we keep rewarding this kind of behavior.
Fuck this site, it should be fined.