Re: Responce to Mr. Ashby

Dr.GH wrote:

[snip]

And is this notion that human DNA is more complex than "any program
ever devised" actually factual? The book by Watson was published in
1965, and the book by Gates that Ashby is misquoting was published in
1995, before the human genome project when we did not even know how
many genes humans had! At the time, Gates' statement was entirely
reasonable, even though there was no actual data to test it. But Ashby
makes a further claim, "... it is a well known fact that human DNA
contains more organized information than the largest set of
encyclopedias ever in print."

David Evans, Professor of Computer Science at the University of
Virginia has made some interesting comparisons between DNA and today's
computer software as part of his Computer Science 201: Engineering
Software course. Let's begin with his observation that complexity of
computer software has grown at an amazing rate in the last 40 years
(about since Watson's book on the gene was published). The Apollo
mission guidance programs had about 36,000 instructions, but today's
Windows XP made by Bill Gates' Microsoft has about fifty million
instructions! Professor Evans then compares this to what we now know
about genes. For example, the smallest known set of genes of an
organism belong to a bacterial parasite called Nanoarchaeum equitans
which has 522 genes representing about 40,000 bytes of information. In
other terms, it is slightly larger than the Apollo guidance system.
The human genome, or as Evans called it "The Make-Human Program," has a
total of about 3 billion base pairs, organized into about 35 thousand
genes.

I take issue with that sentence. There are indeed 3 billion base pairs,
and there would appear to be about 35,000 genes. But the two numbers
don't match up at all. Most of the base pairs are not part of any gene.

The total information content counting all of the bases is 750
megabytes, or just larger than the 650 megabytes that fit on your CDs
at home. But, we have learned that massive amounts of human DNA are
genetic "left overs," non-coding segments and duplications.

And this sentence seems to be equating non-coding DNA with junk. Most
non-coding DNA is indeed junk, and even some coding DNA is junk (the
bits that code for reverse transcriptase in LINEs, for example). But
some non-coding DNA is important. What you want to say is that a large
proportion of those 3 billion bases or 750 million bytes, is
non-functional and meaningless, so should not technically count in your
computations. 10% is a good maximum estimate of what's functional, just
on the basis that the fugu genome is 1/10 the size of the human and
still does everything a vertebrate genome needs to.

I'm sure that both of these implications are just loose wording, and not
errors in your understanding.

In short,
Human DNA has fewer working instructions than Windows software, and
even its total 3 billion bases are tiny compared to Wal-Mart's 280
terabyte database (the equivalent of 1,120,000 billion DNA bases).

The response would probably be that complexity doesn't lie in the number
of lines of code, but in the program flow. Of course DNA isn't a
program, and the whole analogy is stupid anyway.

Like most antiscience, Ashby's "well known facts" are not facts.

.

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