Re: "Genes are followers not leaders". Was: Birds of feather....

From: Perplexed in Peoria (jimmenegay_at_sbcglobal.net)
Date: 12/23/04 

Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 17:51:57 +0000 (UTC)

"CNCabej" <cncabej@aol.com> wrote in message news:cqdnl7$1tsl$1@darwin.ediacara.org...
> "Perplexed in Peoria" wrote:
[snip]
> Perplexed in Peoria (aka JM):
> Mr. Cabej, you have failed to deliver what you promised by a
> factor of roughly 10^12, surely something of a record for an
> sbe crackpot. You said that you would show how the gametes
> contain 10^3 times as much non-genetic information as genetic.
> Your examples provide two bits of information, which is 10^9
> times less information than the DNA/genetic information.
>
> N.C.:
> First, I have not promised anywhere to "show how the gametes
> contain 10^3 times as much non-genetic information as genetic".
> I understand you have misunderstood me.

JM:
Well, if I did misunderstand you, here is the passage that I
misunderstood. I notice that it is just about the only thing
you snipped:

> >> N.C. (original posting):
> >> ... To show the material structure where the immense information
> >> for erecting metazoan organisms. The gene theory has clearly
> >> failed to do that too (depending on the species, the amount
> >> of genetic information in the whole genome of metazoans, in the
> >> best case, hardly would represent more than one thousandth of
> >> information for building a metazoan organism). The epigenetic
> >> theory of heredity shows where that structure is and what it
> >> consists of.

JM:
I interpreted that as a claim that the genome accounts for only a
thousandth of the required inherited information, and a promise
that your theory would explain the physical nature of the implied
non-genomic information that gets inherited.

> N.C.
> However, with a little research anyone could find such "crackpots" even
> here in sbe. But my source is from a scientific work: "The direct specification
> of an arbitrary wiring pattern of 10^4 connections between 10^10 neurons in the
> human cerebral cortex would, for instance, take more than 10^15 bits of
> information. This is to be compared to the little more than 10^9 bits in human
> genome." (von der Malsburg, in The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural
> Networks, 2002). Now imagine: this immense information is only needed for
> establishing neuronal connections in the cerebral cortex alone.

Yes, but these 10^15 bits of post-development "information" might be encoded
(i.e. compressed) in the 10^9 bits of the genome. Or perhaps they are not
really information at all - they are random connections. I suspect that both
of these hypotheses play a big part in the explanation. A third hypothesis (yours?) -
that a significant fraction of those 10^15 bits are carried by cytoplasmic
factors in the egg - is obviously inadequate. The cytoplasmic factors don't
carry anything close to the required amount of information.

[snip]
> N.C.
> The estimated number of maternal
> cytoplasmic factors in a representative metazoan egg cell is ~10^4 ...
[snip]

JM:
So I'm guessing that you realize that the amount of information that can
be carried by these factors is much, much less than the amount of information
that is carried in the genes.

[snip]
> N.C.
> There is clearly no genetic hypothesis on what determines gene imprinting in
> the meaning that no genetic information has been shown (and by definition can't
> be shown) to control the synthesis and functioning of methyltransferases.
[snip]

JM:
I must be misunderstanding you again. Quite obviously (to me), if the
methyltransferases are enzymes or ribozymes, then their synthesis and
functioning is specified by genetic information. So, by "control", you
must be talking about things like control of transcription or some kind
of allosteric control of the methyltransferase operation. My reading of
molecular biology is that these things generally involve a "switch" that
gets "turned on" when there is a steric match between a signal molecule
and something that was specified by the genome. For transcription control,
there is a "promoter" sequence. For allosteric control, there is a domain
of the enzyme. Both are specified by the genome.

I am not a professional molecular biologist - I am a control systems
engineer. Any control system consists of a program or algorithm (designed
and specified in advance) interacting with real time data (which appears
during the operation) to generate a control response. I tend to think
of the program as controlling, though I realize that there is an alternate
viewpoint that sees the data as controlling. I'm guessing that you tend to
see the data as controlling, and that is the reason why I am having such
a difficult time understanding you.

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