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.
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If I put a blueprint for a house on a piece of land, even if the site is forested and has a copper mine etc to provide all necessary raw materials, a house will not spring up all by itself. So I think the analogy DNA:cell::blueprint:house is backed up, not refuted, by your comment.
Hi Mike,
Yes, if you take the "blueprint" things literally, a correspondence can be made. But not entirely. I was arguing about the way DNA is completely abused & misused in sci-fi, crime dramas, the works. The public perception & all.
On the flipside, you could transmit a blueprint for a house to an alien world, and they could make a model of some kind, possibly of the wrong materials or scale. I'm not sure that the genetic code has even a trace of what's needed to interpret it.
Houses are expected to be built, using tools of some familiar kind. Life is expected to just keep going. We don't give that bizarre microscopic toolkit enough credit. ;-)
Human DNA is about 750mb, slightly more than a CD. In theory this encodes the entire design of a human being, including the precise functioning of every organ, brain, reproductive system etc. Now either DNA is vastly more efficient than any computer program ever designed my man, or the assumption is false.
An alternative view is to see DNA as a kind of "access code", or "password". Which accesses information stored elsewhere, perhaps in another dimension.
This view is avoided my many scientists. It is worth looking at the work of those outside the mainstream, such a Dr Dean Radin.
Thanks for the note, OJ. There's no need to bring in "other dimensions" and malarkey, though. If DNA was running in a vacuum, there would be a mystery. But DNA doesn't run in a void, it runs in the context of cells, and cells are immensely rich in information. More than we give them credit for ... which was the point of the article.
Also, DNA doesn't need to encode the position of every cell, or even the existence of every cell in a final being. All that's needed is some finite number of operations. And it's not operating on elements, but on cells. Cells are living things that do a good job of figuring out their current options.
Maybe it's the concept of animals or humans that's flawed, and makes things appear more miraculous or impossible than they really are. We're all just colonies of cells, not so different from jellyfish.
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