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reginaldo | 2 years ago

Also interested in the answer, and I thought a bit about this and have a hypothesis that DNA does not encode everything, instead it depends on implicit assumptions about the environment.

To give an example, gravity is likely not encoded in the DNA, but instead, there are many encoded behaviors that would make sense only on an environment where gravity is present. The same for the presence of predators, wind, solar radiation, etc., i.e. many of the things that we take for granted.

That's how you would get more than 750MB of behavior on 750MB of DNA data [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome#Information_conte...

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captainclam|2 years ago

Interesting! I like that thought. I enjoy thinking about how surprisingly good we are at predicting trajectories, good enough that we can throw, catch, and dodge small objects with remarkable accuracy. I wonder if our internal calculations of acceleration due to gravity is purely learned, or future space-faring infants will be surprised by how their block castles react when they knock them over.

mensetmanusman|2 years ago

When we duck away from low flying birds, it’s probably because they used to hunt us a million years ago.