
How Nature Manages Its Information - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/48/chaos/nature-the-it-wizard-rp
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eli_gottlieb
Well, information entropy is isomorphic to thermodynamic entropy. To waste
information capacity is to emit energy as waste-heat which could have done
useful work.

Of course Nature "tries" to pack in as much meaningful signal as possible!

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EGreg
_" DNA stores information at a density per unit volume exceeding any other
known medium, from hard disks to quantum holography. It’s so dense that all
the world’s digital data could be stored in a dot of DNA the weight of eight
paper clips"_

What???

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samuell
Well ... it seems you might be right. Another estimation states:

"Capable of storing 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) in a single gram of
DNA, the system could, in principle, store every bit of datum ever recorded by
humans in a container about the size and weight of a couple of pickup trucks."

[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/dna-could-store-
all-w...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/dna-could-store-all-worlds-
data-one-room)

Not sure what they base it on though. Perhaps we'll have to do a more proper
calculation ourselves ...

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samuell
Perhaps they include the weight of stuff like histones [1], which DNA is wound
up upon in order not to get entangled. That could add some considerable
weight. Also there are various epigenetic modifications on top of that,
further adding weight, in DNA in its biological form.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histone)

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samuell
For a recent book / set of papers on the topic of understanding biological
information, I can recommend having a look at the BINP book:
[http://www.binp.org](http://www.binp.org) (Biological Information, New
Perspectives).

It is a collection of papers from a symposium on the topic at Cornell
University.

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samuell
I maintain that it takes utter foolishness to not acknowledge the screaming
intelligent design behind nature. Seldom does it get clearer than when we as
information systems designers study the information systems in nature, and
find basically all our "inventions" all there already, in an uber-elegant,
uber-effective, uber-smart version.

Heck, even the TCP/IP protocol has its counterpart with the addresstags (post
translational modifications), for sorting in the biological router called
"golgi apparatus" [1].

We never observed a process creating these structures that doesn't start from
already existing such structures, and it's not like we see these structures
popping up spontaneously everywhere in the universe. No, we didn't find them
elsewhere than on this very planet, out of the hundreds we can observe.

The combination of such ingenuity on every level -- physical and abstract --
with such an astonishing beauty and such purposefullness, also on every level,
makes me cringe when the cred for all of this is given to this unobserved idea
of evolution _.

_ No, I'm not talking about the changes we do observe in nature today which
also go under this term, but on the origin of these solutions and structures.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golgi_apparatus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golgi_apparatus)

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Terr_
Or maybe you've got the causality backwards: We humans are the _results_ of a
designer-less stochastic evolution, and we internalize its operating
principles, which come back out again when we look for "intelligence".

In other words, it's the anthropic principle again: If the universe operated
differently, and different patterns were evolved and led to us, then we would
consider different patterns to look intelligent.

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samuell
... and then trust that this designer- and intention-less stochastic, random,
evolution brought us brains that tell us the ultimate truth?

Given the heavy biases of the anthropic principle, odds don't look good (...
when we can't take back on some intentionality towards anything, behind
anything).

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mort96
Who is talking about ultimate truths? Science is about doing observations and
trying to figure out what models explain the observations best, not finding
some mystical ultimate truth.

