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by penteract
1031 days ago
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Including code for the proteins that read DNA to produce proteins. You might hit similar problems trying to understand C given the source code for a C compiler - a non-standard environment could reproduce itself given the source code, meaning the code alone doesn't strictly determine the output. |
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Epigenetics is missing in this discussion about reproducing a human from just the DNA. These are superficial modifications (e.g. methylation, histone modification, repressor factors) to a strand of DNA that can drastically alter how specific regions get expressed into proteins. These mechanisms essentially work by either hiding or unhiding DNA from RNA polymerases and other parts of the transcription complex. These mechanisms can change throughout your lifetime because of environmental factors and can be inherited.
So it's like reading C source code, except there so many of these inscrutable C preprocessor directives strewn all throughout. You won't get a successful compilation by turning on or off all the directives. Instead, you need to get this similarly inscrutable configuration blob that tells you how to set each directive.
I guess in a way, it's like the weights for an ML model. It just works, you can't explain why it works, and changing this weight here produces a program that crashes prematurely, and changing a weight there produces a program with allergic reactions to everything.