Never Been Daunted

shaneguiter:

IBM Research is detailing its quest to find the smallest number of atoms required to store a bit, the fundamental unit of digital data. The answer is just 12, IBM says — a pretty remarkable stat considering that memory in today’s PCs has around a million atoms per bit (by our rough calculations, that’s nearly 69 quadrillion atoms for an 8GB machine). By aligning the atoms in two offset rows of six with alternating magnetic orientation, IBM figured out that it could isolate the bit so that it wouldn’t magnetically interfere with the bits around it.

oh snap, quantum computing?

sciencecenter:

lancejanders:

The evolution of lines

Someone draws a straight line. The next person’s task is to trace that line as precisely as possible. Repeat 500 times. The lines get really messy surprisingly fast:

As David said, this is a nice demonstration of evolution.

This is a “nice demonstration of evolution” but not in the way that was probably intended.  So far, all demonstrated proofs of evolution consists of mutations from a higher order to a lower—change from more information to less.  They may very well be beneficial, but still a deletion of code, not the addition.  I think it’s demonstrated here pretty well.

The bolded portion is an argument that I’ve seen twice so far today (although in a far more scientifically-illiterate context here) and I thought I would take a few paragraphs to clarify. The discussion of evolution rests on a misunderstanding of information, both in general and in the evolutionary context.

First, a bit of background. According to the New American Oxford Dictionary, information is “what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things.” Note that information is communicated by a recognition of some sort of pattern. The burden of conveying information is thus on the recipient to translate a signal into something meaningful, as opposed to the creator of the signal to create some pattern. According to the above definition, there doesn’t even have to be a creator of the information. How can that be? Here’s an easy way to conceptualize it - if you want to know what the weather is like, you can stick your hand out the door or walk outside and feel the temperature. Did all of the clouds gather together, craft a message, and then beam it down to you to receive? Of course not; you simply interpreted otherwise meaningless signals (i.e. the temperature, the arrangement of the clouds) and recognized the pattern (say, that it is sunny and warm). Thus, nobody ‘created’ anything but you still gained valuable information about the world.

There’s an important consequence of our definition of information, and that is that information exists only insofar as there is a way to interpret it. Information depends heavily on context. Hearing beeps may mean nothing to you, but would be very meaningful to a Morse Code translator or a nuclear scientist with a Geiger counter. The same goes for our DNA. Simply, DNA is a very long, highly regular strand of phosphorous, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen atoms. The molecule itself carries no information that would be obvious to you or I. Our bodies need some way of interpreting the sequence of base pairs and turning that into something useful, like proteins. This is exactly the function of ribosomes in our cells. Ribosomes take raw genetic material and translate it into a recipe for proteins. Neither the nucleic acid nor the ribosome have any agency, consciousness, or intent, but the cell still gathers information from its DNA and puts it to use.

This brings me back to the quote in the above post. What does it mean to say that we only evolve from a higher ‘order’ to lower, or that information is only deleted from our genome? First of all, it’s clearly factually inaccurate. We know that we have a more complex genome than our prokaryotic ancestors, and there exist other genomes longer than ours. But, in light of our discussion of information, it also turns out to be pretty hollow. As we know, ‘information’ is relative. There’s no way to look at two different pieces of DNA and determine which has more information - the question itself is absurd. Furthermore, in light of the Human Genome Project, we’ve discovered that more complexity doesn’t necessarily require more genes (i.e. units of genetic information). Scientists originally thought that humans had around 100,000 genes, but their prediction was off by a factor of five. With the discovery of alternative splicing, among other revelations, we now know that one section of DNA can code for multiple proteins, further complicating the question of how much information DNA holds.

I hope this was interesting, and clarified your understanding of evolution and information. I’d be happy to answer any questions you may have.

In Short: it fucks with the shit that’s supposed to make you un-awake. Yeppers.