Re: <nettime> The Age of Spiritual Machines (Review)

[Roberto Verzola <rverzola@phil.gn.apc.org>]

 >otoh, junk dna might in fact, be junk, but it's purpose might be
 >precisely *to be junk*:
 >
 >http://www.bioresearchonline.com/content/news/article.asp?DocID={187E78E6-8FC5-11D4-8C63-009027DE0829}&Bucket=Latest+Headlines&VNETCOOKIE=NO
 >
 >"A hypothesis formulated by Adam Heller, who holds the Ernest Cockrell
 >Sr. Chair in Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin,
 >suggests that genes are cathodically protected against oxidation by
 >long stretches of non-coding DNA, sometimes referred to as junk DNA."
 >
 >found it at http://www.nodalpoint.org/
 >

If you decompile (or disassemble) the object code of a computer
program - assuming of course you are familiar with the source language
(either assembly or a high-level one), you'd find stretches of code
that make sense, and other stretches that don't make sense. They look
like junk. The latter are usually data, not instructions. Some of the
data sections don't change, but others might be scratchpad memory,
stack, etc. which dynamically change.

It is easy to imagine DNA containing similar sections. They are not
instructions for making proteins and will therefore look like junk.
But they'd have an equally important role to play in the overall
genetic scheme.

Roberto Verzola

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