[adamgravitis]

This is the furthest thing from the truth. That a human has a certain capability does not in the slightest imply that “DNA”, at least as commonly understood, encodes that capability, at all.

A bunch of molecular recipes encoded in a few gigs of nucleotides with some crude feedback loops do not a human make.

Quite apart from epigenetics as it’s commonly presented (methylation, and all sorts of histone antics), you might recall that DNA itself doesn’t magically grow up: you do need a cell.

It’s somewhat (and only poorly) analogous to being handed the source code to a C compiler written in C, without knowing C. Does the C code really encode C? Well, not without the compiler it doesn’t....

There’s then a very interesting discussion around how it’s even possible for a mammalian nervous system to bootstrap itself. Figuring out walking seems perhaps emergent: it’s a learnable technique based on not falling. But how do dog breeds retain intrinsic high-level behaviours even if they’ve never observed them? What makes a Shepherd so concerned when his assumed flock becomes dispersed?

We are a tremendously long way from answering these questions, but I would caution anyone who thinks it just “in the DNA”.

[SirHound]

Our lad was making a joke