[HN Gopher] DNA is maybe 60-750MB of data
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DNA is maybe 60-750MB of data
Author : MattSayar
Score : 25 points
Date : 2025-05-08 15:48 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dynomight.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (dynomight.net)
| E_Evan wrote:
| https://github.com/samtools/htslib/blob/develop/sam_internal...
| biomcgary wrote:
| Your genome only needs to store the information necessary for the
| lineage leading to you to survive and compete in the range of
| environmental variation that actually happened.
|
| Consequently, your DNA has less information about how to survive
| on Jupiter or in the absence of oxygen.
|
| However, your genome contains a fair amount of data on how to
| identify a mate that will maximize your reproductive success in
| an environment similar to the one your lineage experienced, e.g.,
| a preference for symmetrical faces.
|
| Until we can measure the environment of humans accurately, all
| the algorithmic complexity measures applied to the genome are
| going to be missing the relevant context.
| boshalfoshal wrote:
| The way I think about it, DNA is just a metaprogram. The
| "programs" this metaprogram create (brain, gut, other organs,
| etc). can be far more information dense and complex than the
| actual metaprogram that initially created them.
|
| The real interesting part is _how_ this small metaprogram can
| generate something like a brain, which is ostensibly multiples
| more complex than the DNA that produced it, since obviously DNA
| cannot possibly encode the data for every possible synaptic
| connection or protein or whatever losslessly. I think this is
| more of a testament to how complex the human body is, that it
| has such complex seemingly emergent behavior from a very sparse
| set of initial conditions.
| hulitu wrote:
| > DNA is maybe 60-750MB of data
|
| maybe
| jiggawatts wrote:
| For a long time now, a thought has been repeating in my mind:
| _How_ exactly are high level behaviours like sexual attraction
| encoded in our genes!?
|
| It such a subtle thing too! We're attracted (or not) to the
| _tiniest_ differences in physiology. If you doubt this, try this
| exercise: Pretend you 've just met green aliens and have to
| explain to them how to reliably tell the difference between men
| and women from appearance alone! Now explain why _that_
| particular girl (or boy) is very pretty /handsome, but not _that_
| one.
|
| It's one of those topics where the more you know, the more freaky
| it is.
|
| DNA does not -- to our knowledge -- directly encode the "weights"
| of our neurons! It can't _possibly_ because there are far more
| synapses than there bits of information in our genes. Also, most
| of those genes are dedicated to non-brain parts of the body plan
| and to the low-level machinery of our cellular biochemistry.
|
| Secondly, DNA has only an indirect effect of our development: it
| encodes for proteins, which then provide chemical signals such as
| concentration gradients that guide cell division. It's a bit like
| playing SimCity, where the players' control is limited to zoning
| and road topology. The individual Sims are not directly
| controllable and behave stochastically.
|
| Solving this problem is so freakishly difficult for even the
| incredible brute force of parallel search of evolution only
| managed to discover a solution a few times in a billion years.
|
| Our attraction to our partners is a genetic heritage shared with
| _all_ mammals, going back hundreds of millions of years. That 's
| why Furry is a thing, but not Featherry. Birds are a different
| _class_ from us mammals and don 't share the same "partner
| attraction wiring" genes. (This is closely related to why all
| mammal babies are cute to humans, but baby bird chicks are
| generally repulsive.)
|
| Because this is a hard problem to solve, the few solutions that
| were discovered had to be reused by entire classes of Animalia. I
| would hazard a guess that _this_ is precisely what defines a
| "class" in taxonomy! If there were intelligent birds, their
| equivalent of Furry would be Featherry, and their crimes of
| bestiality would be with other non-intelligent birds, not
| mammals.
|
| With LLMs, we got to see a glimpse into the possible mechanisms
| of intelligence, and what it might take to design or evolve one.
|
| The LLM equivalent of this kind of encoding would be to design a
| model architecture that falls in love with a specific, narrowly
| selected, subset of its users. Keep in mind that I'm not talking
| about a learned or specifically tuned set of model weights! The
| _architecture_ is where the attraction is encoded, such as
| selecting some complex variant or combination of Transformers,
| Mamba, or CNNs that just "so happen" to result in the model
| preferentially learning to be attracted to certain styles of
| conversation, _but not others_.
|
| Worse still, the direct equivalent to what genes do is that you
| can't even choose an architecture directly, instead you can only
| contribute to PyTorch. You have to design its API such that naive
| developers using it stochastically tend towards the desired
| architecture of their own accord by simply tab-completing often.
|
| That's essentially what evolution figured out, at least five or
| six times, but _tunable_ , so that individual species can be
| attracted to each other but much less to even very closely
| related species.
|
| _And then_ , evolution found a way to add a "notch filter" such
| that despite increased attraction to closely related individuals,
| most animals (including humans) are _repulsed_ sexually by their
| parents and siblings.
|
| That's mind-blowing to me.
| motrm wrote:
| DNA makes me think of ASN.1 in that a short sequence of bits can
| convey rather a lot of information - but it makes no sense
| without knowing which message those bits represent. Only with
| that knowledge can you turn those bits into something useful.
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