

Is An Alien Message Embedded In Our Genetic Code? - evo_9
http://news.discovery.com/space/alien-life-exoplanets/could-an-alien-message-be-embedded-in-our-genetic-code-130401.htm

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eksith
The Star Trek TNG episode, "The Chase" presented an eerily similar concept.
<http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_Chase>

"Picard tries to finish his old archaeology teacher's monumental last mission:
solving a puzzle that leads Humans, Romulans, Klingons and Cardassians to the
secret of life in this galaxy, revealing the origin of humanoid life."

~~~
waps
Well, frankly, looking at actual genetic code, one can't help but find it
rather ... organised. You know, being produced by a randomized search
algorithm and all, one doesn't really expect so many features.

Everybody knows about telomeres, the "death clock". But there's more. Every
gene has a preamble, most of which is not understood. Some of it is known to
encode parameters along the lines of "if you detect substance X, copy this
gene", with hundreds of variations and parameters in there (like the
concentration to be detected for example). It is also known that it is
possible to have AND and OR relations in these preambles, and one preamble can
refer to another, by name (not by position in genes). This is followed by a
small set of instructions meant for the ribosome (the easiest of which is
along the lines of "stop after X number of basepair-triples are processed, do
not continue to the end of the gene"), then the start codon "ATG" (for all
plants and animals, bacteria and organella use others), and then the gene
itself, the thing that contains actual instructions to build proteins,
followed by a stop codon, of which many variations exist. Then there is a
post-amble of the gene also meant for the ribosome (instructions like "export
this resulting protein to the outside of the cell", as opposed to releasing it
inside the cell, and this contains a wait timer, and a death timer).

So what our DNA does is send programs to ribosomes that are generally along
the following lines :

    
    
      1) n = 0; stop_after_codons = $X; modifiers = $Y
      2) transcribe (taking modifiers and stop_after_codons into account) until you hit the stop codon
      3) while $TIMER, hold on and do nothing
      4) if $EXPORT request a cell membrane to envelop the protein and make it leave the cell (and a hundred more of these modifiers)
      5) n+=1; if n < $X goto 1 (by releasing the RNA chain. it'll quickly get picked up again by this ribosome or another and restart the program), else destroy the RNA chain by making it's central half-helix collapse
    

Note that this is the very lowest level of structure that is inside the DNA.
There is very distinct highlevel organisation as well, we just don't
understand it at all. This is also not the lowest level of structure inside an
eukaryot cell, as the ribisomes/mitochondria/... also have internal DNA and
are executing complex programs themselves, and our DNA is just one of the
parameters they work with.

This is, frankly, not at all how I'd expect the result of a genetic algorithm
to look like (referring to the AI concept of genetic algorithm). Genetic
algorithm outputs/programs can be generally summarized as working as follows :

    
    
      1) poewuiqfawer;awe;rj;l // Non-sense, but usually a NOP that jumps to position 2
      2) take the data xor with some weird value
      3) jump to random location in the gene on some condition
      4) jump to random location in the gene on some condition
      5) result = value and 2309823141
      6) op8uqwerawe;jkasdfaser // Non-sense
      7) jump to random location in the gene on some condition
      8) q[3452345g23421dad // Non-sense
      9) jump to random location in the gene on some condition
      10) take position 3+8*n-5 in the data, add 5, and xor the value at the resulting location with 290138472134
    

Let's call it "horror-basic". Spaghetti code doesn't quite cover just how much
spaghetti there is here. You'd think there'd be a lot of difference between
programs that implement different functions, but when you don't understand
what the hell it's doing all programs look alike. While I have seen once or
twice things that looked like a basic structure in the result of a genetic
algorithm, it's extremely rare, and certainly nothing as pervasive as you see
in the human genome.

Programs like this example then somehow manage to calculate uncalculatable
functions, or find something in an image, or they produce instructions that
you can send to robot legs that make them go forward.

This could, of course, be a difference in complexity. Nobody's ever run a
genetic algorithm for more than a few months, and the genetic algorithm we
think operates life has been operating for ~4 billion years. Still, our DNA,
frankly, looks like a medium-size (certainly no more than 10k-50k lines of
code _) program that has been compiled from a much higher level programming
language. I'm not saying it's not written by a genetic algorithm, and genetic
algorithms are famous for taking bloody long to do even the most basic things,
but ... I'd like to see this genetic algorithm's implementation, because it's
a lot more complex than just duplicate, mutate, evaluate fitness. And it's
output is remarkably better than anything I've ever come up with. It looks
very LISPy in the sense that the DNA's basic operating principle is to rewrite
a highlevel program into a slightly lower level program, and then rewrite the
lower level program, and then rewrite it again into a protein (and then let
physics "rewrite" those proteins into things like human beings).

_ not including all the organelle programs it depends on

~~~
eksith
Now that is an HN worthy post! :D

My feeling is that this is indeed a genetic algorithm, however it's prone to
mutation (I.E. polymorphism which diverge further to form different species)
via duplication errors and/or cosmic ray triggered changes.

This gives the algorithm branching and versioning properties in which multiple
versions run in parallel thread execution where certain threads die out
through natural selection while others continue as more threads are spawned
via the above polymorphism.

Naturally, this process is quite messy and you end up with a multitude of
different functions that aren't immediately obvious in function. This may also
lead to a lot of inactive functions that don't return or are never called
(I.E. "Junk DNA").

------
miralabs
see the date: APR 1, 2013 11:27 AM ET // BY RAY VILLARD

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phyalow
Discovery have really let themselves go.

~~~
ryanhuff
All of these supposed science/history/nature related channels have been
resorting to carnival style attractions to raise ratings. Ghost hunting,
Bigfoot hunting, ancient aliens, pawning.

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artursapek
No.

~~~
nreece
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines>

------
WordSkill
Yes.

It gives our individual price in Bitcoin.

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rayiner
What is this shit... I don't even...

