Food for thought: DNA is not the whole story

DNA is not the blueprint for life. Sorry. If you put a piece of DNA in a jar, it will do nothing. It's only part of the picture. In order to function, DNA needs to be in a compatible living cell where all the required chemicals are available. But if you take a fertile living cell and put it in a jar, under most conditions it will die. Each cell can only survive in a certain range of temperature, pH, gravity and pressure, and needs just the right nutrients to survive.

Does DNA contain the information to create its own optimum environment? No. It is only part of the blueprint of life, and it has a lot of dependencies. It is certainly where most of the information is stored, but there's a bigger picture to ponder.

DNA is badly misused in science fiction, especially in TV and movies where everything has to happen in a hurry. If we beamed a human genome to an alien civilization, would they be able to make human? No. But if we beamed them a complete scan of a cell, and how to nurture it, maybe (just maybe) there would be a chance of success.

Food for Thought: Sex and mutations

Sexual reproduction is a line of defense against mutations. If one parent has a damaged gene, the other parent (hopefully) has an undamaged gene. If all genes had equal weight, there would be a 50/50 chance of the offspring getting the undamaged gene. In reality, genes can be dominant or recessive, and other factors are probably at work.

The natural next question is how creatures started shooting genetic material at each other in the first place.

There are many events in the ocean of massive releases of genetic material. That some creatures found ways to get up close and make a more personal delivery does not surprise me.

I have seen pine trees release clouds of pollen at the touch of the wind. It boggles my mind that some of those spores might land on a receptive cone and start the long process that makes a seed. It seems like such a waste to have the rest of the cloud fall dead somewhere. It is also pretty wild that I can pick up seeds when I walk in the woods, and hold entire potential trees in my hand.

---

Note: "Food for thought" is going to be an ongoing series of speculations and science commentary.

Musing of music

I woke up this morning from an odd dream ... Mulder was running around in a business park where everyone was jacked in to a crazy computer.  He was looking for a plug he could yank out to get the people back to reality, but it was a wireless network.  Just as he was jumping off a third floor balcony to get away from the angry mob, I woke up.  The song in my head was a real throwback: "Cities on Flame with Rock n Roll" by Blue Oyster Cult.  Funny wiring, huh.

There's something unique about the way music is remembered.  It's stronger than almost any other form of memory (except for things like "Fire is Bad!"), and oddly sequential.  It boggles my mind sometimes that I know the words and all the musical parts of hundreds of songs.  Right now I can recall and replay them, and replay just the bass & drums if I choose, or focus on the guitar.  Yet they seem to have definite access points, where my brain naturally hooks into them, and it's not always at the beginning.  It's more often the chorus that gets recalled first, which is no surprise, since the more we hear something the stronger the memory gets.  And it's hard to say, "Verse 3 line 2" and have the words pop right up ... we usually have to play through part of the song to get to the right spot, or start at the beginning and work up to it.

Now, being able to track individual instruments may be the result of having played guitar for 20 years and being recording engineer on many projects.  When I hear a song, I listen to all the parts.  I know some people who apparently don't LISTEN to music -- it's just on and they talk over it, unaffected.  Weird.

Anyway ... how do brain cells remember so much music?  It's one of the big mysteries of life.  And a nice one, too.  It's quite possible that the earliest literature and teachings were done in song.  Well, let's start with the first verse then ...

#

2024 note: this was the intro to my newsletter Dark Windows #37, but since that since has been gone for years, I have added it to the flow of this blog.

Also, I clearly remember than when I was younger, music was just a blur, but in my early teens the instruments began to separate out and I could hear all the details clearly.  I have no idea if that's a normal progression, but I do run into people from time to time who swear they cannot separate the notes and it's all just noise.