It's incredible that the information necessary to create a human is just about 750 MB uncompressed. For example the very specific shape of the scapula bone or fear of spiders...
Well, some would say if you took 10 identical fertilised eggs and put them in the same human in serial you'd get 10 different humans. Some would say there's no such thing as 10 identical fertilised eggs, or 10 identical anything.
The question is how different? 10 identical eggs in 10 well-nourished, healthy people and the results should be pretty similar, no?
Sure, "identical" is a strong word for anything biological.
> The question is how different? 10 identical eggs in 10 well-nourished, healthy people and the results should be pretty similar, no?
My understanding is that they would be less similar than "identical" twins, more similar than regular siblings.
Of course, certain aspects of appearance are known to be almost exclusively genetically determined, such as eye, hair, and skin color. Some fine details are known from identical twin studies to not be fully determined, such as fingerprints (twins have slightly different fingerprints). For the majority of other fine details, it's actually pretty unclear.
To start, in the 99% of the times this question can be answered with: no.
I bet that the man being promoted here as the best thing since the invention of Banjo, didn't discovered the effect of chemical gradients in Embryology. (I don't know everything, and I could be wrong. I'm open to discuss his published scientific articles in the field).
That the same process that makes your arm will be repeated later to build each one of your fingers is known since many decades ago (count the number of articulations, is always car, car plus a cdr). See the video of U2 "Even better than the real thing" for a graphic representation of the idea. Yes, this is how it works basically.
> Take 10 identical fertilized eggs and put them in 10 different people and you'll get 10 different humans
You can bet it. This big claims always worry me. They either reveal a basic lack of understanding about biology, or are predatory and directed to select people that don't understand even the most basic concepts on Biology.
An spermatozoa can be used just one or zero times. Period.
There is not such thing as "10 identically fertilized eggs put in the same woman will get exactly the same human ten times", because is impossible to find 10 genetically identical spermatozoans and 10 genetically identical ovules to match them. Each time meiosis happens what you have is a similar but genetically different cell
Which means this ability to usefully vary the final product is also included in the 750MB! If anything that makes it even more astonishing, not less.
Or are you saying that there's essentially undocumented-code that exists inside a living organisim and is transmitted mother to daughter, by virtue of being gestated, but is not in DNA?
Some of this is actually very well known - at the cellular level, when a cell divides, the nuclear DNA doesn't uniquely determine every aspect of the new cells, certain organelles divide separately and by their own mechanisms. So, it's trivial to observe that you can't recreate a cell fully knowing just its DNA, you also need the mitochondrial DNA but also other bits.
But there is even more than that. Imagine you had a program that explained exactly how to build a PC that can run this same program, starting from raw sand and ending up with a fully powered PC. So, if you boot a PC and give it access to a smart factory, this program will create a new smart factory from scratch that is a near perfect copy of the original smart factory. The question is: if you don't have a smart factory at all, you just found this program on printed paper, would you be able to use it to build a smart factory?
Most likely, no, because the program can easily depend on certain details of the original smart factory that it was used to copy. Let's say, it could have instructions like "measure the length of original.robot_arm_7 and cut this piece of metal to the same length", or, "combine the liquid in original.vat3 with two parts "water" and 1 part liquid from original.vat7, and pour the result in copy.vat3". This is how life works: it uses DNA to build copies of itself, but DNA can't help you build the original base cell, that was arrived at by an entirely different process.
Edit: for another simple example, consider that, if some ultra-advanced alien species found a population of living mammals, but they were all female, they would be fully able to create more females of the same species. But, it would be completely impossible for them to create a male of the original species, because there is no DNA whatsoever in a female mammal that explains how to build a testicle or a sperm cell. They could build artificial males, but they couldn't ever know if those males resemble the originals or not. So again, the DNA of an organism doesn't encode all the information necessary to create the species, that is transmitted through a more complex mechanism.
In your opinion then, do we need to add a 3rd "variable" to the nature/nurture question? "Nature" is generally understood to be DNA, "Nurture" is generally accepted to be the post-birth development environment. If the "embyronic toolkit" at hand is so important, surely this popular concept needs a 3rd leg.
I'd also be interested in your thoughts on surrogacy. I had naively assumed that, so long as the surrogate mother was well-nourished, the baby would likely be fine. But it seems it's a lot more complicated than that, and I feel like a lot of people are underinformed about this.
Of course turns out that gene-environment interactions are common and complicated, so most of the things are mixed.
Brain development takes about 20 years, driven by genes, but the environment is extremely important to help people to learn how to get most out of that setup they got.
This is most evident in learning disabilities, for example stimulants are regularly described as life-changing by ADHD folks.
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[0] - https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
We don't know how much data is required to fully describe a living cell, but it's not just the DNA since you can't turn that into a cell without using an existing cell
Don’t get me started on the unauthorized use of proprietary code!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
We keep getting asked about “checksums” and “reproducible builds” and if the BDFL is going to implement them, to which they say: “already landed in upstream,” “works on my machine,” “notabug,” and/or “wontfix” sometimes in the same reply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism
That's what Dualism posits: The rest of the info is elsewhere, and joins with the physical body. Dualism is usually discussed in regards to sapience, but it doesn't have to, it can also include the behavior of animals.
You might note that this information is also contained in the same notional 750MB bundle.
Imagine a piece of software that works poorly the first time you run it, but modifies its environment so that it will work better in future runs.
There was an experiment in birds related to this. Someone had the question of whether birdsong was genetically or culturally determined.
The cultural side noted that, for whatever species of bird was under investigation, birds raised without parents produced abnormal song.
But upon continuing the experiment, the genetic side noted that the children of those birds, exposed only to the abnormal song of their parents, produced normal song.
Raising one bird in isolation isn't enough to express the information contained in that species' DNA, but the information is there anyway.
Not necessarily, that's the point. It's uncertain if you can recreate a human being from genome alone even with perfect technology. Some crucial information could be passed from one female to another without being present in the genome at all.
> There was an experiment in birds related to this.
I suspect none of these birds were rebuilt in a laboratory from their genome alone. The experiment proves that information is passed inside the egg but it doesn't specify via which medium.
Hard to know, but two interesting corner cases:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion (but they have their own DNA...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centriole (but it looks like they can grow again "However, [...] cells whose centrioles have been removed via laser ablation [...] centrioles can be synthesized later in a de novo fashion."
How far you'd get using DNA to create some organism from scratch is unclear, but it's certainly not very far at all. You certainly can't create a whole eukaryotic cell just from DNA, even with all put current knowledge of organic chemistry plus our ability to study how current cells actually work (no one has come even slightly close to building a self-replicating prokaryotic cell).
Edit: imagine source code for a compiler that is allowed to strcpy() bits of the currently running compiler. It's a legitimate way to create a running compiler, but it's not what we'd normally consider "source code".
Hold up, isn't the point of this article that genes do not have all the information?
The, er, bootup environment of a freshly-fertilized human egg normally provides a lot more than merely protection and raw materials for nine months. Likely a lot of required parameters, and definitely a lot of important tuning optimizations.
> For example the very specific shape of the scapula bone or fear of spiders...
There were some studies a decade back about mice inheriting fears of certain smells from the father, I wonder if anyone discovered the mechanism (or disproved the effect) by now.
Should be very interesting to quantify what's needed for a "clean bootstrap" of a minimal model organism that can reproduce.
Yeah it is. The informational aspect (and the precision level) Levin and his friends are looking for is the main factor here. Cells are not just tissue building blocks, they're agents, limited but still, themselves with a lot more capabilities than we generally assume.
I believe multiple fields are mature enough (biology, computational biology, optics) to care and analyse this and make a new step in our understanding of complex organisms.
Have you not been playing with LLM's in the last year or so ?
They seem to compress a sizable chunk of human knowledge in about 7 Gig
And, when they find a gap, they lie through their teeth to provide a reasonable answer.
I wonder if there's some sort of similar process (hallucination) going on when the final human is rebuilt from the 750MB.