October 27, 2017 Friday
Bedtime Story
Craig Venter and Richard Dawkins on Life being Digital Information
The closer the geneticists and computer
scientists look at life, the more they find that it resembles information
technology.
If there remains any doubt, it should go
away simply by the fact how the length of human genome is described.
Human genome is described in base pairs and
is over 3 billion base pair long where the base refers to DNA nucleotides.
Here at this point I can’t help myself
quoting some sentences from the book “Life at the Speed of Light” by Craig
Venter that is to some extent based on the lecture that he delivered at the
Trinity College, Dublin on July 12, 2012 – some seven decades after Erwin Schrödinger
had given his classical oration on life.
“Over the next sixty minutes I explained
how life ultimately consists of DNA-driven biological machines.
All living cells run on DNA software, which
directs hundreds to thousands of protein robots.
We have been digitizing life for decades,
since we first figured out how to read the software of life by sequencing DNA.
Now we can go in the other direction by
starting with the computerized digital code, designing a new form of life,
chemically synthesizing it DNA, and then booting it up to produce the actual
organism.
And because the information is now digital
we can send it anywhere at the speed of light and re-create the DNA and life at
the other end.
In the span of a single lifetime, we have
advanced from Schrödinger’s “aperiodic crystal” to an understanding of genetic
code to the proof, through construction of a synthetic chromosome and hence a
synthetic cell, that DNA is the software of life.”
It is a book that was strongly recommended
by Mon Ami to me, and hence not only does it lie in my collection of book shelf
but it has a special attribute of having been read twice by ours truly.
If Craig Venter does not impress you that
much, then I would recommend you my hero Richard Dawkins.
Any book of his will do but here in our
case we shall take the recourse to The Blind Watchmaker.
The evolutionary biologist in his 1986 book
– The Blind Watchmaker (a must read!) wrote this following lines:
“What lies at the heart of every living
thing is not a fire, warm breath nor ‘a spark of life’.
It is information, words, instructions…
Think of a billion discrete digital
characters…
If you want to understand life think about
digital technology.”
To many, Dawkins is controversial,
spiteful, venomous and even dangerous.
I will read out just one of the benign hate
mail that he received in the nights to come to give a demonstration of how much
he is reviled in some circles (and I think he sedretly enjoys it as it is a
vital contributory factor to his “popularity”).
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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