DNA and complexity: terribly sorry, cabbages might have us beat...

*not part four of the consciousness thread, but something else entirely mostly*

Astute readers 
may have picked up on the 
superficially counter-intuitive
commentary on complexity
in last [time unit]'s post:

"So, it could be something as 'simple' as a bacteria, a virus, or fruit-fly?"

The reasoning for the quotation

(aside from an acknowledgement 

that the term has a fairly loaded 

and non-universal set of connotations)

was meant to hint at the enormously challenging problem

of reconciling our views of  the "complex"

with what actually exists.

Ah, hang on now, mate, 

you've lost me with 

your seemingly pointless 

abstraction...

Well, starting with the premise that 

the use of the word "simple" in the previous post

met with no intuitive objections

(unless you're in the field and know the hook to be baited),

let's ask the question:

"Why is it that we can easily imagine [bacteria/viruses/fruit-flies] as simple?"

Ah! you're sneaking up on word-mongering...

Why are we asking this "why" question?

Given that we, 

either as a species or as a culture,

(let anthropologists decide)

seem so keen on the idea of... 

...flaunting our complexity, IE;

"Ah, but you see a monkey could never have written Shakespeare" or 

"A computer will never be able to write a great symphony!"
[or perhaps more unnervingly, the following image]

and... 

...given that this blog has

 managed to blunder about 

haphazardly

 in topics that concern

 human "human-ness",

...we'd better be damn sure what we mean when we talk about complexity or it's funny little complement, simplicity.

So, to the why question!

Yes, why is it so easy to think of these things as simple?

Well, perhaps we encode values for "complexity" 

based on the functions 

we have observed about an object...

In this case, it might be very easy to dismiss 

the microbial world as somehow simpler

 than we naked apes,

but only because we get by

by imagining them as little black boxes,

with their inner workings obscured 

nearly permanently

 from us 

throughout all our encounters with them (the microbes).

So where are we going with this?

Part of the inspiration 

for this post

was a remark by the geneticist Steve Jones

on a BBC Radio 4 program called the

"Infinite Monkey Cage", which went something like the following:

"I think the biggest question [in biology] is 'Why are there so few genes?' As everybody knows, we've sequenced the human genome, and we can now do it with extraordinary speed...
...now that we've read it off, it turns out that there are remarkably few genes
-when I was a student some years ago, around I'd say...the origin of the universe more or less, we used to believe (and we were told) that there were hundreds of thousands of genes, possibly millions of genes to make anything as beautiful and elegant and generally marvelous as, for example, me. That seems reasonable.  

It now turns out that there's only about 24,000 genes...to make a human, and that's less genes than it takes to make a cabbage."

So, at first this may strike you as an affront to our human special-ness (read: complexity) -and it may well be- but consider the question "Why are we surprised that a cabbage has a larger genome?" which ties in quite nicely into the early bit on complexity.

I suspect,

posited the blogger boldly,

that our surprise has to deal with ideas like 

intelligent design being special special-beings,

which have been particularly difficult 

to completely eradicate.

Now, I could talk about the really messy (and wonderful!) intricacies of 

DNA, information theory, and (formally defined) complexity...

...except that I am not qualified to do so.

Instead, I'll throw out leads like "junk DNA", "irreducible complexity", and "neutral evolution" 

to whet your appetites for a more thorough and rigorous treatment of the topic. 

(For those of you who protest the use of Wikipedia, sod off, it is only Wittgenstein's ladder a tool) 

If you're relatively familiar with cell biology (and even if you're not),

 Skeptic Wonder has a fantastic defense of neutral evolution that can be found here, 

which jives quite well with the following video (and quote):

"Well, many biologists will tell engineers and others, organisms have millions of years to get it right, they're spectacular, they can do everything wonderfully well. 

So the answer is biomimicry -- just copy nature directly. We know from working on animals that the truth is it's exactly what you don't want to do. 

Because evolution works on the just-good-enough principle, not on a perfecting principle. And the constraints in building any organism when you look at it are really severe. Natural technologies have incredible constraints. Think about it. 

If you were an engineer and I told you that you had to build an automobile but it had to start off to be this big, then it had to grow to be full size and had to work every step along the way. Think about the fact that if you build an automobile I'll tell you that you also inside it have to put a factory that allows you to make another automobile."

So what is this all building towards?

Consider the next hypothesis: 

Is it possible that the reason we're surprised by 

our evident lack of complexity (and things like non-coding DNA) is because

 we still cling, perhaps subconsciously, to the notion that we are exquisitely crafted for existence, 

with each bit and codon fixed perfectly for our lives, 

and not a hair more or less? 

"Left as exercise for the reader" 

For those of you protesting that we've looped back inadvertently on the debate around the anthropic principle (or similar ideas), yes, this is a possibility, but it may have been worth the ride.

See you in the future!