Ben Goertzel wrote:
I know you're just playing here but it would be easy to empirically test this.
Does junk DNA change between birth and death? Something tells me we would have
discovered something that significant a long time ago.
Terren
well, loads of mutations occur in nuclear DNA between birth and death;
this is part of how aging occurs.
There are specific DNA repair mechanisms that fix mutation errors that
occur during the cell's lifetime
It seems quite plausible that these repair mechanisms might work
differently on coding and noncoding regions of the DNA
Ah, hang on folks: what I was meaning was that the *state* of the junk
DNA was being used, not the code.
I am referring to the stuff that is dynamically interacting, as a result
of which genes are switched on and off all over the place .... so this
is a gigantic network of switches.
I wouldn't suggest that something is snipping and recombining the actual
code of the "junk" DNA, only that the state of the switches is being
used to code for something.
Question is: can the state of the switches be preserved during reproduction?
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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