Please note: This is very much a work in progress! Please read, enjoy, and then write me some feedback to BG2006 @ whiteworld. com. I'm particularly interested in which parts you find interesting and which parts you find confusing. Both are things I want to know to make this better. Thanks --Roger
One way to look upon the DNA of life is as a library. The DNA of all the various organisms alive today is a library of successful ideas at the art of living. It is also important to keep in mind that what is alive today is the library of currently successful ideas. The fossil records shows ideas that were successful in the past, while life living today shows ideas that are "in vogue" now.
This is a library that gets refined with each generation of an organism. As pointed out earlier, evolution adds changes with each generation, so lots and lots of experiements are constantly being tried. But the process of updating is neither quick nor efficient. Evolution is not "smart" about it's experimenting, but over the billions of years life has been on Earth, it has had billions and trillions of tries to "get things right", so a lot of ground has been covered.
This library is truly a library in the sense that it is a collection of information. It is the basic collection of information on how to live on Earth. But as evolution has produced more and more complex organsims, other ways of filling the library of life with information have also been developed. When an organism get complex enough to develop a brain, that brain also contains information that helps in the art of living. Brains and DNA are both parts of the library of life.
There are two basic ways that an organism can decide to take action: acting in response to changing stress and acting according to some preprogrammed clock. The first of these ways of acting I will define as stress/response action. The second I will define as instinct.
Stress/response actions tend to be straight-forward responses to a change in the environment around or within an organism. If an organism is stressed by growing hunger, it seeks food. If an organism is stressed by the presence of a hungry preditor, it runs way, or hides, or kicks in some other protective response.
Stress/response actions have another important characteristic: they are learned activities. The organims learns how to respond to the stress, so it can respond in a better fashion if the stress comes back.
Instinct is an action that an organism takes without any learning. Instincts can be triggered by stress, but the subsequent action is taken without any prior training. Many instincts are triggered by time, by growing older, but there are many other triggers for instincts as well.
Instincts can initiate an activity and then stress/response can take over and guide it. The big difference is that when instinct is involved, activity is taken and guided without requiring an immediate stress to provoke the action, or the action taken seems inappropriate to the triggering stress.
One result of this difference is how actions look to the external viewer of the actions. Stress/response actions tend to look "rational" to the external viewer while instinctive reactions tend to look "crazy." Given this definition, which category does falling in love fit into?
There are differences in the Living Library between stress/response thinking and instinct thinking. The ability to act in a stress/response fashion is programmed into DNA, but the actions taken and what is learned from tackling the stress many times is not. But instincts are different. Instincts are programmed directly into DNA. The instinct expresses itself as specific directions to the organism.
What happens, given enough time (which is a lot of time), is that consistently successful stress/response actions eventually become instincts -- the actions become "hardwired" into the organism. What happens over time is that Brain Memory (stress response learning) becomes DNA Memory (instinct learning), and the organism can then use Brain Memory to tackle new problems.
This conversion of stress/response learning into instinct learning is a slow, slow process, but it is going on steadily, and has been for billions of years.
Human-level language skill is a "high technology" solution to the problem of adding information to the Library of Life.
Human level language skill is an astounding breakthrough in life's biggest billion-year old problem: how to move successful stress/response solutions to new generations of life. Stress/reponse can find good solutions to everyday living problems, but those good solutions have to be reinvented with each generation until DNA figures out how to make the solution an instinct. With human-level language skill, the older generation can teach the younger generation directly.
In the words of Mother Nature, "This is incredible! This is astounding! What normally takes me millions or billions of years to permanentize by developing an instinct can now be done in one generation with teaching! This is a mindbogglingly good solution! Why didn't I think of this a billion years ago!"
This is what teaching does for homo sapiens. It allows us to pass on good information directly from one generation to the next. The increase in size and quality of information in the Library of Life since humans developed current language skill can't be easily explained... because... It is simply... HUGE! Much of what we consider today to be the human condition is based on humans' distinctive langauge skill.
For billions of years Mother Nature has been looking for faster and more efficient ways of moving successful strategies that brains figure out into good instincts that subsequent generations can use. Good instincts can save an organism from a lot of trial and error failures. Mother Nature is still looking for that, but the surprise result of good language skill is that language can bypass that need. With good language skill one generation can teach the next, instead of having to "hardwire" a good solution into instinct. Teaching is much faster and more subtle than instinct building.
Imagine Mother Nature talking with her Parts Engineer salesman. She says something like, "What have you got for me today. I hope you've finally come up with a better solution to this Brains-to-Instinct problem I have. I'm tired of having it take a thousand generations to get a good brain idea into instinctual hardwiring."
The parts man replies, "Nothing for that yet, but, I've got this new communication technique called language. With it, one member of the species can tell another member things like, where a good water hole is...."
Mother Nature says, "Yeah, I like that. I'll add some of this 'hopped up language' to humans see what happens... by Golly... look what they've found out! If an older generation talks to a younger generation, they can pass on the same kind of information I was using instinct to pass on... and even MORE! This language skill is HOT!"
Language skill allowed humans to pass information directly from one generation to the next. This was a huge advantage, but it turned out to be an incomplete concept. What completed The Language Revolution was writing. Language could move ideas efficiently, but the human brain was imperfect as a memory medium -- lots that was passed on was either forgotten completely or changed a bit. Writing fixed this problem, as well as adding a new channel of communication, the printed word.
Mankind knew about this problem of mutable memories long before the writing solution was developed, and many other memory aids were developed. Poetry was orginally developed as a memory aid. The structure of poetry made it easier to spot when something was misremembered. Here is an example of "practical poetry"
A pint is a pound, the world around.
This verse describes a volume/weight relation which is handy to know. If you have forgotten the relation and say, "A quart is a pound, the world around." or "A pint is a stone, the world around." You know something isn't right because what you are saying is not rhyming well. Early poetry was very practical as a memory aid, and it wasn't the only one. When I visited Ayre's Rock in central Australia, I was told about another pre-writing memory aid: mixing songs and landmarks. The guide that showed us around Ayre's Rock explained that many Australian aboriginal people used songs to preserve their important tribal memories. Not only did they use songs, but they cross-checked those songs against geographical landmarks. They would sing and walk, and check for landmarks as they walked, and Ayre's Rock featured prominently in many of the "songlines" of central Australia. When western Europeans first came to Australia, they thought these "walkabouts" were aimless wanderings.
As writing developed, it proved far superior to these earlier pre-literate solutions in the task of remembering correctly, and these other memory aid systems either faded away or became art forms instead of archive forms.
Painting, photos, movies and computers have all added to this revolution. The full impact of computers and The Internet remains to be seen, but all of these have added significantly to human ability to create, move and store ideas.
What this means is that the "living library" of information that life is has been enormously extended... extended not just in the quantity of information that it contains, but also in the kind of information that it contains. For billions of years the library consisted of the DNA's of successful organisms plus the transient information that each organism was adding to its brain as it lived. As humans developed language skill that basic library was supplimented by the sum of human knowledge that could be passed on from one generation to the next through teaching. Now it is further supplimented by that knowlege which is stored in writing, pictures and other human works, such as buildings.
This represents a huge jump in both the quantity and quality of knowlege that is Earth's Living Library. And, all the changes that humanity has made to our Earth -- the farms, fields, cities and pollution -- are the "surprise result" of this new information storage innovation.
Earth's Living Library is now growing furiously fast in a totally new direction. While that part of the library which is DNA knowledge is changing at about the same pace that it always has, humanity's contribution in the form of human knowledge is growing a million-fold faster.
Many interesting things are going to happen to the living library in the future: one is that Earth's living library is going to set up "branch offices" in other places in the Solar System, and perhaps on other star systems as well. Because those environments will be different, the "right" answers to survival will be different, but they will all be recognizably "earthly."
Computer systems will contribute more and more to the library. While science fiction writers and movie makers love to grapple with the issues of "can robots have emotions?" and "should a robot with emotion be defined as human?", these issues are likely to be non-issues in our real world future. Computers and robots will add more and more to the living library, but their "emotions" and "humaness" are likely to mimic human emotions and humanness as much as an airplane mimics a duck -- airplanes and ducks both fly, but that's about all they have in common.
The surprise result will be that as human understanding of genetic engineering improves, human science is going to feedback and start adding new information directly to the DNA library. The information that humans add to the DNA library will always be just a tiny part of what is being added by standard evolution because standard evolution is always doing billions of experiments a day, but what humans add will be a very interesting part. It will be interesting because the experiments humans do will be "intelligent", and because they will ultimately include many kinds of experiments that evolution can't perform. For instance, at this stage Evolution is no longer experimenting with using four codons instead of three, and it is not doing much experimenting with amino acids beyond the twenty or so that are the basic building blocks of life. Humans will ultimately run experiments dealing with both these issues.
Keep in mind that "genetic engineering" is an ancient human skill, probably as old as dentistry. When humans selected the seeds of certain plants to sow for the next generation of their crops, they were doing genetic engineering. The difference between historic genetic engineering and modern genetic engineering is only in the potency of our tools and the depth of our understanding.
The more humans do their own experimenting, the more they will become impressed with how skillful Mother Nature has been in her work. Mother Nature has made some marvelous innovations, and as humans try to improve on them or replace them, just how marvelous those innovations are will become clearer.
Life on Earth can be looked at as a library of information. It is Earth's living library, and most of the information contained in the library is stored in the DNA of currently living organisms.
A second form of information in the library is what is stored in the brains of living organisms, but that information is transient, it dies with the organism.
When mankind developed strong language skill, a new form of long term storage became possible: brain information could be transmitted from generation to generation. This was a huge innovation to the living library.
Writing and computers have amplified the ability to store brain derived information, so the revolution in the living library continues.
When brain derived information feeds back directly on the DNA library, this is called breeding and genetic engineering.
The ways information is stored in the living library will continue to diversify, and the ways information is created to be added to the library will diversity as well.
Soon the living library is going to spread beyond Earth: first, to other places in the Solar System, and then, perhaps, to other star systems.