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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

Hooray! Finally the inevitable happened! I guess this will turn biology upside down, everybody assumed DNA/RNA were static (with the exception of some primitive viruses).

Now how to reverse engineer "machine code"?

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this doesn't turn biology upside down in any way.

This amuses me. When was the last time any major finding turned an entire mature field of study on its head?

I don't understand. Are you implying this paper is a "major finding"?

Many things that happen in biology occur without any real meaning or utility.

No, I'm agreeing with you. I think it rare that any mature field these days is "turned on its head". I doubt most of the examples given by other comments would qualify if you dig into them.

A good example would be induced pluripotent stem cells nobody thought that that can happen but once it was obvious that you just needed a few transcription factors to move cells from state-to-state. Completely trans formed a field that was already mature

Another example would be the discovery that the ECM (extracellular matrix) plays a huge role in cellular development. Completely unrecognized until experiments done by Mina Bissel's lab opened up an entirely new field in cellular biology.

Superresolution microscopy. It blew through a long-standing limitation- the best resolution was determined by the wavelength of light passing through a lens. That and other recent discoveries in microscopy like light-sheet microscopy have turned microscopy on its head.

By using lambda calculus, interaction nets, something equivalent, is my guess.

For what exactly? What specifically do you mean by "computation", above?

I mean by that a model of computation in the TCS sense. (Some) molecules, be them DNA, RNA or other, are akin to lambda terms (or graphs), beta reduction (or other graph rewrites) are akin to chemical reactions. The algorithm of reduction has to be random, local (i.e. no higher point of view criteria for interaction are used), performed by Nature. All in all, to be able to prove that some part of the biochemistry can be seen, as a concrete asynchronous graph rewrite automaton (capable of universal computation) would be a great advance in biology.

I'm not sure why that would be the case. First, I think most smart people already recognize that sufficiently complex biochemical systems can in fact perform computation as well as other abstract operations. Second, there is already a ton of literature in this area, it's often very helpful to analyze biological data from the perspective of various graph and sequence rewrite automata, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the underlying biology is explicitly exploiting matter at that level. Third, I don't see why having any such "proof" (to the extent that you can prove anything about biological systems anyway) would be an advance. What new predictions would you be able make?

This and the references https://figshare.com/articles/Chemlambda_strings/5751318

The DNA is changing real-time, i.e. there is a periodic process we usually call algorithm. Algorithm might imply some sort of computation going on; while it's pretty common to see computations being performed via neurons and protein interactions, seeing it directly in DNA is much more interesting. Instead of assuming genes are static, there actually could be some DNA-level computation going on, potentially invalidating significant portions of our knowledge of genetics.

> The DNA is changing real-time

We already knew this. DNA is a highly dynamic molecule, and it’s changing constantly, as it’s involved in biochemical processes in the cell. i-motifs aren’t special or new in this sense.

No, there is no reason to conclude any of this from this paper.

BTW, if this blows your mind, then the mating type switch of yeast is really gonna blow the stack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mating_of_yeast#Mating_type_sw...

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