
Brainless Embryos Suggest Bioelectricity Guides Growth - Erlangolem
https://www.quantamagazine.org/brainless-embryos-suggest-bioelectricity-guides-growth-20180313/
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maxander
Everything in biological systems depends on everything else; all variables are
global, all methods are public, and all definitions are recursive. It's all
spaghetti code- there is nothing like the separation of functionality that we
impose on our designed artefacts for the sake of our limited minds. A signal
needed to be sent from one place to another, and the brain has the machinery
for endocrine functions already, so why not have it handle it? So while this
is a quite valid and interesting result, it's not nearly as exciting as the
popular press is going to make it out to be.

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jessaustin
I appreciate the code architecture observations, but this result is exciting
as hell. I am fascinated by ontogeny. Who knows? A century from now, lots of
currently unimaginable things could be traced back to this.

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dandare
> “Where does shape come from? What makes an elephant different from a snake?”
> he asked. DNA can make proteins inside cells, he said, but “there is nothing
> in the genome that directly specifies anatomy.” To develop properly, he
> maintains, tissues need spatial cues that must come from other sources in
> the embryo. At least some of that guidance, he and his team believe, is
> electrical.

I don't get it. Where does that electrical guidance came from? The brain.
Where did the brain came from? The DNA.

If DNA is the ony information that makes it from a parent to offspring (and we
can grow organisms in a petri dish from fertilized eggs) is the DNA, then
whatever electrical guidance or other abstraction must have been encoded in
the DNA first. (Plus some constants encoded in the enviroment.)

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titzer
> If DNA is the ony information that makes it from a parent to offspring

I don't think this assumption is warranted. Human embryos develop in utero,
not in eggs like amphibians. They are connected to the mother through an
umbilical and immersed in amniotic fluid. Both the umbilical and the amniotic
fluid are full of chemical signals in many forms, not just hormones. Human
embryos (and all mammals, really) develop in symbiosis with their mother.

What you are saying is another one of these CS-centric views of the world that
only focus on where the information for development comes from; that the
development of the brain is somehow encoded in DNA, and that the entire
development of a human is therefore also encoded in the DNA.

I've come to doubt this view, not only because of mammal development, but the
fact that immune systems and digestion (the microbiome of the GI) develops _in
response to_ the available biodiversity of food and encountered pathogens.

So the view that we just put the little DNA program in a dish and feed it raw
materials and energy and out pops a fully-formed human is just _false_.

Humans develop in cooperation with, and in response to, the environment.

It's a bit like staring at the code of a machine learning model and expecting
to figure out how it works. The system (a human) contains a lot of code (DNA)
but also responds to data (training set)--much more so than we ever realized.

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titzer
> It's a bit like staring at the code of a machine learning model and
> expecting to figure out how it works. The system (a human) contains a lot of
> code (DNA) but also responds to data (training set)--much more so than we
> ever realized.

Or like a Smalltalk programming environment, which consists of an image with
live, editable objects, not just a static text program.

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tcj_phx
Everything old is new again. Early 20th-century biologists were exploring the
role of fields in the development of embryos. This line of inquiry was snuffed
out when DNA came along. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphogenetic_field#Historical...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphogenetic_field#Historical_development)

From the article:

> The rationale [...] was that “since DNA is what is inherited, information
> stored in the genes must specify all that is needed to develop.”

> The extreme form of this view is “to explain everything by saying ‘it is in
> the genes,’ or DNA, and this trend has been reinforced by the increasingly
> powerful and affordable DNA sequencing technologies,” Huang said. “But we
> need to zoom out: _Before molecular biology imposed our myopic tunnel
> vision, biologists were much more open to organism-level principles.”_

> The tide now seems to be turning, according to Herrera-Rincon and others. “
> _It’s too simplistic to consider the genome as the only source of biological
> information,”_ she said.

(emphasis added)

If genes are all-powerful, there is no hope for those who begin to
deteriorate. But if our bio-electric fields are more important than our genes,
there is much greater possibility for improving our health than the
geneticists have led us to believe.

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daemonk
I think any sane biologist will agree that there are layers upon layers of
complexity on top of genotype. But the first layer is still DNA. There is a
difference between gene-centric and gene-only. The former gives biologist an
anchor point to begin their research, the latter is ridiculous.

~~~
tcj_phx
> But the first layer is still DNA.

This would be one hypothesis. The article is about how the competing field of
inquiry ("bioelectricity") has been mistakenly ignored for the past 60+ years.

What if the field is more important than the genes?

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maxander
Your idea of "morphogenetic fields" is fundamentally incorrect; re-read the
wikipedia article you linked to, the word "electricity" doesn't appear in it
_at all_. It's talking about "fields" of _chemical gradients_ which control
the development of tissues; that kind of idea has been established
developmental biology for over a century.

Meanwhile, in terms of the parent article, yes- it turns out that
"bioelectricity" is an important part of the embryonic development. But this
is not at all serving the same role as DNA; DNA stores durable information,
whereas these fields are being used for, essentially, intercellular
communication. I would think that the fact that the researchers successfully
replace a frog's _entire brain_ , for developmental purposes, with a simple
tweak to an ion channel, pretty clearly demonstrates that the amount of vital
information being carried this way is minimal.

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Para2016
Nice. I assumed NGF interactions with other developmental signalers like SHH,
BMP, etc was the mechanism of action in this anyways.

It's been a while since I was in a devo lab, but I've watched a few
presentations regarding wound healing and denervation such as seen in
paraplegics with sacral ulcers. The hypothesis was that the nerves were gone
and therefore NGF and other trophic factors were gone leading to impaired
healing. I'm assuming healing and development are nearly synonymous in some
tissues. Like you said, it's not the electrical signals that necessarily
matter that much, it's the chemicals produced by the nerves.

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EamonnMR
> there is nothing in the genome that directly specifies anatomy

What about HOX genes?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hox_gene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hox_gene)

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mrfusion
Don’t homeotic genes* explain anatomical development pretty well?

* [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeotic_gene](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeotic_gene)

~~~
parrellel
Yeah, but, that's the instruction manual. This seems more like identifying
part of the toolkit.

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reubenswartz
For anyone interested in this subject, I highly suggest Life Unfolding: How
the human body creates itself[1], by Jamie Davies. No one really knows the
full story, but what we do know or suspect is pretty amazing.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Life-Unfolding-human-creates-
itself-e...](https://www.amazon.com/Life-Unfolding-human-creates-itself-
ebook/dp/B00HSJ8KFI/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=)

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daemonk
There are some interesting studies by Michael Levine at Tufts that looks at
bioelectric field's effect on flatworm regeneration. And there are some cool
experiments done in salamanders that looks at nerve dependent regeneration
(aneurogenic limb).

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objdodo
Is it possible that some forms of cancer may be a result of something going
wrong with bioelectric signaling, causing abnormal tissue growth?

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russdill
I think cancers are always associated with a genetic mutation within the
cancerous cells. But that break down occurs due to damage or a failure in
repair mechanisms. The plausible causes for either are legion. There's a lot
of woo out there though with the words bio and electrical combined, heck Brent
Farve is even hyping it in late night infomercials.

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aijoe
Thoughtful suggestion, brainless embryos.

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toisanji
i wonder if this is true for neurons in the brain as well.

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etiam
Highly likely. Some years ago I listened to a lecture by a woman who was
researching electrical waves in the retina (which is in practice a specialized
extension of the brain).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinal_waves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinal_waves)

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orasis
Interesting, but can you mine BitCoins with it?

~~~
basementcat
Totally off topic, but maybe the machines in the Matrix needed human brains to
solve a proof-of-work puzzle that was more efficiently computed with a human
neurocortex. Morpheus just used a battery because it would have taken too long
to explain blockchains and ICO's to Neo.

~~~
mortenjorck
I'm not generally one for the concept of "head-canon," but I think this is now
my head-canon for The Matrix.

You see, the Matrix itself _is_ the proof-of-work puzzle, formatted for
compatibility with the neocortex. The simulation of a circa-1999 metropolis is
not just something to keep the humans' brains occupied while they power the
machines; its very substance is a cryptographic hashing process in the form of
a simulated world, which also explains why everyone has to be in the same
Matrix rather than instanced versions. Agent Smith's real job was just to
prevent 51% attacks!

~~~
boxfire
This might work but then what is Neo's power?

~~~
inteleng
ASICBOOST?

