Is DNA the Language of the Book of Life? | Hacker News Reader

Is DNA the Language of the Book of Life?

nautil.us

17 pointsdnetesn19 comments

> “Genes don’t carry semantic information, though. They weren’t made as part of an act of communication. So genes don’t literally represent anything, as people sometimes say,” explains Peter Godfrey-Smith, a professor of philosophy at CUNY.

Understandable that not a professor of biology.

This whole article bases on some notion of "semantics" I cannot grasp. If someone wants to hold some metaphysical notion of "meaning" which can be only in human words and symbols - then I cannot argue with this (non-scientific) statement. Words don't _literally_ represent anything - they can be interpreted by humans and, well, translated into some knowledge or action, depending on the previous state and knowledge of a person. Much alike DNA being interpreted by the cell's machinery.

As you said, one could twist a little bit of ~meaning around DNA, but only around, because to ~understand any of it, you would have to add the interpreters but I'll add your parents gametes, and your mother womb, how it emerged and evolved into the discussion.

This is a simple and direct analogy / thought experiment about trying to make sense to computers. 0x0392048 0x0982308 means nothing, even mov $ax, $cx:$dx (an implementation detail retrofitted to encode higher level desire). It only gets meaning when you look at the complete set of dimensions: use-cases, available technology, constraints, etc etc

With the same idea applied to English, "apple" also means nothing, because you need someone that can read English.

[I'm a native Spanish speaker. I was about to write automatically "manzana" instead of "apple", very strange.]

And does Google Image Search count: https://www.google.com/search?site=imghp&tbm=isch&q=apple

The issue is that, for us here, "DNA being interpreted by the cell's machinery" is pretty clear. It's like instructions being "interpreted" by a virtual machine in computer science. They are executed, and something (hopefully interesting) happens.

For a philosopher, there are millenia of debates behind him or her regarding what "meaning", "interpretation", "truth", "information" etc. actually are. Much of those debates is very interesting, for example in the 20th century a flaw was found in a 2500 year old definition of "truth".

So when the same word, "information" or "interpret", is used both by scientists in biology as well as by philosophers, it can lead to confusion. I am not saying that the philosophers are clearly the confused ones, in fact many of them are not. Their claim is a more subtle one - that the potential confusion affects scientists. In other words, that while it is clear what "DNA being interpreted" means when a scientist really thinks about it, the fact is that often scientists do not think carefully and rely on intuition, and are led astray by such metaphors.

In other words, the better philosophers are saying that some scientists are making the mistake that the worse philosophers are. As the saying goes, all scientists are armchair philosophers.

How much of an issue is this in practice? I would say little. It's interesting to philosphers, but not that much to scientists. Yes, epigenetics were only appreciated recently, but I doubt it's due to a philosophical misunderstanding. The simple fact is, the discovery of DNA was like the discovery of Newton's laws of physics - suddenly, there was a clear and powerful framework that explained massive amounts of observations coherently. Such frameworks do lead people to focus on them and to look less at alternative explanations. It took a while for physics to get past Newtonian gravity, and for biology to get past a strict understanding of DNA, because those theories are so good. That's how science has to work - when you have a great theory, you have to use it to the limit. When it stops working, that's when you start to consider alternative theories, not before.

> in the 20th century a flaw was found in a 2500 year old definition of "truth".

What are you referring to?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem

This article seems to be a jumble of ideas: information vs "semantic information", heredity vs environment, epigenetics, Shannon's information theory, and information as a metaphor. After reading this article a couple times, I still can't get a coherent point from it.

That said, epigenetics is obviously a hugely important area. Although coming from a computer background, I think biology needs to look at "state" in total - how an organism holds informational state over widely diverging time scales. (For instance, look at the brain and consider the many ways it holds information, from genes to gene expression to neuron wiring.)

Nonsense article. It calls for a revised understanding of the word "information" in genetics. The old sense is due to philosophers and could never have been taken seriously by anyone. The new sense is due to Claude Shannon and predates the work of Watson and Crick by about five years.

This reads like clickbait for smart people.

At least it doesn't contain the word "quantum".

My opinion is that a language is much more than just the "communication" of information, but I am a linguist so I'm somewhat biased.

Here is a decent argument against the idea of DNA being a language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQIWvd3LhC0

Regarding this very discussion, I highly recommend The Music Of Life by Denis Noble. It is a very small, accessible paperback that highlights many issues with the book-of-life metaphor that is so prevalent.

http://musicoflife.co.uk/

DNA is a language not in the sense of natural/human language, but in the sense of a computer language; or rather: machine language.

I don't see where's the problem ..

The article refers to "computer discs". Well, computer discs carry exactly the same kind of information that DNA carries.

This is a pretty good writeup, but doesn't give enough language to argue between the DNA-first and RNA-first camps of early life on Earth.

One or the other came first, and both sides have logical well supported arguments.

The tl;dr (combined with bad metaphor usage) of the difference between DNA and RNA is, they are both dialects of the language used to write the Book of Life.

I'm solidly persuaded by RNA before DNA in chronological order.

Can you offer a logical argument for DNA first?

Me personally? No, but I've seen them presented. Next time I see a good one I'll submit it to HN.

Did you read the article?!

Yes. And you also created your account 1 minute before creating this reply.

What on earth has that got to do with it?

The article doesn't discuss the origin of life at all and only makes one mention of RNA.

You clearly didn't read the article

The Bene Tleilax think so.

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