From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Aug 11 2003 - 07:47:18 MDT
On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 05:56:36AM -0700, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
> The implication is that evolution found a way to produce a
> greater amount of information from a lesser amount of
> information. If one thinks about this for a while I think
> it has significant "information theory" consequences.
You don't really get more information. The data processing theorem
of information theory shows that you will always lose information
in every step of processing, you will not be able to increase it.
In the RNA case, the insertion of inosiol is a function of the
neighbouring bases, so you could replace it by a more complex
ribosome instead - the base is correlated with the surroundings,
it does not have any extra uncorrelated information.
But biology may cheat a bit: the conformation that apparently
guides where replacement happens could add a bit of environmental
information. If the conformation is dependent on temperature or
the presence of other chemicals, environmental information would
enter the rewriting and you would have a small amount of extra
information added before the ribosome. If the conformation is
independent, then there is not really any new information, but it
still could act as a nonlocal information transfer along the gene
that affects the resulting protein.
The question is how the inositol affects the amino acids. Anybody
knows?
In any case, it is way cool.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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