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A passionate young couple can make love several times a night, every night. Nature does not care about recreational sex; the reason that men and women romanticize about each other and are attracted and fall in love, is so that they will be fooled into having children, even if they think they are trying to avoid conception! They’re actually trying very hard to transmit information from the male to the female. Every time a man ejaculates inside a woman he loves, an enormous number of sperm cells, each with half the DNA software for a complete individual, try to fertilize an egg.
Jacob Schwartz once surprised a computer science class by calculating the bandwidth of human sexual intercourse, the rate of information transmission achieved in human love-making. I’m too much of a theoretician to care about the exact answer, which anyway depends on details like how you measure the amount of time that’s involved, but his class was impressed that the bandwidth that’s achieved is quite respectable!
What is this software like? It isn’t written in 0/1 binary like computer software. Instead DNA is written in a 4-letter alphabet, the 4 bases that can be each rung of the twisted double-helix ladder that is a DNA molecule.Adenine, A, thymine, T, guanine, G, and cytosine, C, are those four letters. Individual genes, which code for a single protein, are kilobases of information. And an entire human genome is measured in gigabases, so that’s sort of like gigabytes of computer software.
Each cell in the body has the same DNA software, the complete genome, but depending on the kind of tissue or the organ that it’s in, it runs different portions of this software, while using many basic subroutines that are common to all cells.
And this software is highly conservative, much of it is quite ancient: Many common subroutines are shared among fruitflies, invertebrates, mice and humans, so they have to have originated in an ancient common ancestor. In fact, there is surprisingly little difference between a chimp and a human, or even between a mouse and human.
We are not that unique; Nature likes to re-use good ideas. Instead of starting afresh each time, Nature “solves” new problems by patching—that is, slightly modifying or mutating—the solutions to old problems, as the need arises. Nature is a cobbler, a tinkerer. It’s much too much work, it’s much too expensive, to start over again each time. Our DNA software accumulates by accretion, it’s a beautiful patch-work quilt! And our DNA software also includes all those frozen accidents, those mutations due to DNA copying errors or ionizing radiation, which is a possible pathway for quantum uncertainty to be incorporated in the evolutionary record. In a sense this is an amplification mechanism, one that magnifies quantum uncertainty into an effect that is macroscopically visible.
In that sense, one could also think of DNA as a software for life.
The passages are taken from a book entitled "Meta Math!: The Quest for Omega," by Gregory Chaitin, in which the author talks algorithmic information theory and also about life and evolution according to a computational view of the universe. This is a topic which falls under the study of digital philosophy which, in essence, views that all mental and physical activities are digitized information processing, and likewise, this is also true for the cells and DNA in our bodies because they process information in a systematic manner.
