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Author
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Topic: ID and Engineering Principles
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Irving
Member
Member # 535
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posted 21. January 2003 15:51
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The issue of nature of assembly instruction is, IMO, an interesting one. My statement was "In the terminology used here, complex assembly requires instructions that are adaptable or dynamic and teleological rather than instructions that are static, unchanging or permanent and universal."
I think we need a clearer deliniation between design and assembly. When you refer to dynamic assembly instructions are you referring to changable assembly instructions that result in the same design, or design changes reflected through the assembly instructions that result in a differently designed end-product?
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In simplest form, this means the assembly instructions can and are modified to adjust for environmental conditions. The assembly instructions are based not on ‘what to do’ but ‘what is to be accomplished’. There is a lot of engineering examples of the use of assembly instructions which use environmental information (feedback) to achieve goals or objectives. Many biological assembly processes are clearly modifiable, adaptable, or dynamic and goal-oriented.
How does this differ from Lamarckism? Or does it?
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warren_bergerson
Member
Member # 262
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posted 22. January 2003 07:36
Irving,
Quote: I think we need a clearer deliniation between design and assembly. When you refer to dynamic assembly instructions are you referring to changable assembly instructions that result in the same design, or design changes reflected through the assembly instructions that result in a differently designed end-product?
Both. The assembly instructions associated with biological systems are clearly capable of both types of adaptive change. The assembly instructions can be modified to adjust for environmental conditions and still produce the same result (repair mechanisms) and the assembly instructions are modifiable to produce different results when different results are required by environmental conditions (seasonal modifications for example). Biological assembly instructions are even capable of creative assembly as in the case of adaptation to new viruses.
The term design is sometimes used to mean a ‘a simplified description or model’. A blue print, for example might be thought of as representing a design. The assumption underlying this terminology is that the essential logical features are captured in the logical representation or design. The design or model contains the same essential ‘information’ as the real world object.
Using this logic it is argued that genetic code contains or codes the information for the design of the organism. I am saying that this is not true with respect to genetic code. I am saying that the assembly instructions by their nature generate information (or extract information from the environment). The living organism is far more complex, contains far more information than the original genetic design or code.
Biological assembly instructions, because they are dynamic and teleological, don’t just express a design represented in the genetic code, but these assembly instructions (and the associated assembly processes) in large measure design or redesign the organism. The assembly instruction and/or assembly process extracts from the environment most of the information needed to design the multi-cellular organism.
To understand this counter-intuitive concept, you need to understand the mathematics of biological information processing. Specifically, you need to understand 1)that biological systems involve/require very, very large volumes of information(far more than the information contained in genetic code), and 2)biological systems can and have evolved the capacity to generate/extract very, very large volumes of information within an organisms lifetime.
I am discussing the volume of information in biological systems in another thread, so I will limit the discussion here to the ‘evolution of biological information processing capacity’.
As a starting point, it may be useful to start by considering the development or evolution electronic computers. Two features are worth noting. First, the growth in information processing capacity of computers is exponential not linear. If as I suggest the underlying theme of biological evolution has been the evolution of information processing capacity, then it is reasonable to expect that the growth would have been exponential. If biological information processing had on average doubled every million years, then we could explain a very large within lifetime information processing capacity. [ As an interesting aside, the evolution of biological information processing capacity seems to have evolved in spurts rather than gradually. Two of the better documented ‘spurts’, I propose, are the ‘Cambrian explosion’ associated with the development of neurons and nervous systems and the current ‘human explosion’.]
The second feature to be observed from the evolution of computers is that increases in computing capacity arise not only from increase in size, but from a variety of types of changes in technology. If you have ever worked with complex computer programs, you are also aware that ‘processing capacity’ can be increased dramatically by the use of different types of programming techniques.
Quote: How does this differ from Lamarckism? Or does it?
My view is probably a bit more radical that Lamarck. I am suggesting that biological systems in large part evolved the ability or information processing capacity to essentially re-evolve, or redesign complex organisms starting with a minimal level of initial information. Interesting? Note that although the ideas I propose are radical, they could be subjected to laboratory testing once you develop techniques for actually modeling and simulating biological information processing.
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