DNA and human brain.
 

I have a question connected with the 'technological singularity' thread.

Can we assume that DNA is sufficient for coding of a human brain? (This is one of the key claims advocated by Kurzweil.)

Imagine a big factory that can produce cars, ships etc. In order to produce something one needs to supply a set of instructions for this factory: drawings, material description, etc. Can we say that this sets of instructions are equal in complexity to the things that are produced?
To me it is not clear. Without all the machinery of the factory these instructions are useless. Complexity of produced things = complexity of instructions + complexity of factory.

may be my view is too simplistic, or even wrong, but it seems to me that DNA is probably not coding the cell machinery, it codes the modifications of the cell. (We need to insert DNA in a living cell in order to produce something usefull.) So the complexity of human brain = complexity of DNA (300Mbyte or something) + complexity of a single cell (10^n megabyte).

Does it make sense?

Re: DNA and human brain.
 

I'm not sure what your asking. However I will input by sayng you have another layer of coding called an epigenome. Your epigenome code is something that evolves over your life. Its not hard coded like DNA. New born identical twins have essentially the same epigenome code, but by the time they are 50 years old thier epigenome codes can be very different. I suspect traits like homosexuality come from your epigenome and not your DNA.

NOVA Science Now had short program about it. I'm sur you could find the episode at pbs.org

Stu

Re: DNA and human brain.
 

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I'm not sure what your asking.

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May be I can reformulate the question. Can we produce a living species by using only DNA without using a living cell, if we have a very sophisicated technology?

Re: DNA and human brain.
 

I just have a few comments. For instance, Ray Kurzweil likes to use the example of the Mandelbrot set to show how simple instructions can result in extremely complex structures. I think he claims that not only is DNA sufficient to code/create a human brain, but specifically the ~10 MB of data that humans have that is different from other primates might hold all the clues we need to mimic human intelligence on a computer. He describes the brain as having a handful of structural patterns that get repeated an enormous number of times with slightly random variations. So although the result might be billions of neurons, synaptic connections, and ion channels (heard him say this term I think), the individual pieces are not beyond our grasp to understand.

Re: DNA and human brain.
 

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I'm not sure what your asking.

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May be I can reformulate the question. Can we produce a living species by using only DNA without using a living cell, if we have a very sophisicated technology?

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It is far better to see DNA as an expression of animus.

I think the concept lacks medical or human definition, but essentially your genetic code interacts with the enviroment and defines who you are.

Consciousness seems to emerge out of bigger, denser neural constructs. Some simply do not work in expressing self-awareness. In that sense, they are not self-aware, but bioaware. Take, for instance, a forest of trees is not an individual forest, but an expression of a selected sample size of botanic DNA.

Scale as needed.

Re: DNA and human brain.
 

No. Information cannot be simplified in this way. Information is critically dependent on its context. Although there is no way to prove it (else we would be creating our own organisms with whatever traits we wanted) I guarantee the metadata behind a genome is orders of magnitude larger than the data contained within a genome itself.

To understand at greater depth, Metadata.

Re: DNA and human brain.
 

I don't think anyone's trying to argue that the human brain isn't enormously complex (unless you just define complexity by the instructions themselves -- people argue about various definitions of complexity). The point is that one can be built with relatively simple iterative instructions. So if a cell which is custom made to work with the particular chemistry of DNA efficiently does the work biologically, or humans and machines do analogous work electronically (maybe not so efficiently), the process should sill be comprehensible and iterative.

Re: DNA and human brain.
 

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Can we say that this sets of instructions are equal in complexity to the things that are produced?

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No, the info contained in DNA is far less than in a finished brain, as the other posters indicate.

Here is another way to look at it. The brain has a huge source of information beyond the DNA -- the environment. The DNA creates some basic traits, or rules for cell behavior. As these cells interact with the environment, they modify themselves according to the original rules, and input from the environment. So the outside world supplies the missing chunks of data you are looking for.