You are in error my friend. You come to this conclusion only because you
make the first erroneous assumption that there is "natural selection"
occuring. Nothing can me more unsupported than this speculation.
As I've mentioned, Natural Selection does not occur at the cellular or DNA
level. There is no arbiter within the cell that tells which changes are to
be retained and which are to be discarded.
Jojo
----- Original Message -----
From: "Abd ul-Rahman Lomax" <a...@lomaxdesign.com>
To: <vortex-l@eskimo.com>; <vortex-l@eskimo.com>
Sent: Friday, December 28, 2012 10:17 AM
Subject: Re: [Vo]:Digital information storage in DNA
At 08:26 PM 12/27/2012, Jojo Jaro wrote:
Well, Jed's story says that we can "store" exabytes of data.
Yes, but only if we don't mind that it's exabytes of copies of about 1.5
gigabytes of data.
Nowadays, we only use the "coding" part of DNA to figure out the amount of
"information". Scientists erroneously assume the non-coding parts are
"junk DNA" that have no information. That is not true. The non-coding
parts are not Junk. Newer research are indicating that all of our DNA
have functions we still do not know or understand. If they have function,
they contain information we don't know about yet.
That's an exaggeration of "new research." Some functions are being found
for some "noncoding" DNA. I've understood "noncoding DNA" to refer to
sequences that are not used to create proteins. There can be a few other
functions, for example, telomeres are noncoding, but serve to protect
chromosomes from copying errors at the ends.
There is an interesting piece of evidence. Noncoding DNA much more rapidly
mutates because of lack of selection pressure. Noncoding DNA gives a
measure of time since organisms diverged. If this DNA were serving a
critical biological function, it would be under selection pressure.
(Most mutations of critical genes kill the cell or the organism, babies
spontaneously abort, etc.)
