[karmajunkie]

TL;DR: Dwarf Fortress fan learns about DNA from popular science articles, forms comprehensively superficial theory of life, the universe and everything, based on analogy to computer code and his estimation that nothing could be more complex than Dwarf Fortress.

I've never really thought a quote from an Adam Sandler movie was one to be repeated, but "Mr. Madison, what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul." Bonus: it does double duty summarizing the US presidential debates.

[daemonk]

That's a bit harsh. The analogy made is not an uncommon one, but that doesn't mean there isn't some merit to the idea. I appreciate that people are at least trying to learn new things and form their own ideas.

[dave_sullivan]

While I agree it's a bit harsh, some of these extrapolations had me saying, "Oh really?" to myself.

> Biology is one of the last fields of science adopting the tech revolution by switching from analog to digital analysis. DNA has only recently been discovered. DNA sequencing is in its earliest stages.

> There is not enough space to fit “software” hereditary behavioral definitions into DNA. If Dwarf Fortress comes close to encoding basic behavioral patterns requiring 10 megabytes of data, we must look for a chunk of genetic data of that size.

> Good programmers try to restrict their functions to no more than 6 parameters when writing code. Thus, a driving system with learning ability depends on over 40,000 programmatic functions. Those functions operate with only a dozen of sensors, wheels, and breaks. What if you had to write self-learning software for controlling all the muscle groups in an ant organism? Clearly it would require much more than 790mb for a human or 117mb for an ant of data space to store.

> The “software” that runs the ant must include basic instincts, sensory recognition patterns, social interactions, spacial awareness, navigation routines, some learning ability, and threat estimation in its ancestral memory in addition to all the hardware schematics. Each muscle group must work in tandem with the senses. How much data would that amount of code require? An easy way to estimate it is to simulate those behaviors on your computer. Having some familiarity with multiple programming languages, I would guess that 117mb is totally insufficient for all that.

> If complex data compression is shown to play a major role in the life of an organism, my argument could be falsified. At the same time, the field of biology would be revolutionized.

> One might object that a negative proposition of the form “x does not explain y” is empirically indefensible. The form of my argument, however, follows another pattern: “there is not enough observable x in y.” Such statements are empirically demonstrable and empirically falsifiable. For example, the statement “there are fewer than 10 goats in this wood” is empirical. Just search the wood to confirm it. By analogy, we should expect at least as many discoveries of genes controlling behaviors as we have for protein generation and regulatory genes. But we do not.

[wuschel]

The analogy is horribly flawed, especially the bio compiler metaphor. In silico automatons are primitive in complexity when compared to processes in simple organisms.

Disclaimer: Have seen both the IT/CS and biotech side of things.

[karmajunkie]

I agree that my post was a bit snarky—what can I say, I hadn't had my coffee yet. If the author is a high school kid, he has my apologies for the snark, and encouragement to dig much deeper into the subject matter as well as what is logically and rhetorically sound, and take another pass at his theory.

That said, there's an epidemic of know-it-all-ness in this industry, and this article doesn't pass even the most cursory of reviews of Real Information™. I agree that the analogy is commonplace, but the reason its an analogy and not a model is that it breaks down rapidly under scrutiny.

[ythl]

I mean, I thought it was an interesting read, although I immediately recognized it was not a scholarly publication in any way (even with his "formal theory")