On 27/08/2013 10:28 PM, Warp wrote:
> When you really start to study how genes work, you start seeing that
> there is, in fact, no intelligent design behind it. No intelligent
> designer, no matter how incompetent, would be so sloppy and so lazy.
> A mindless process that's simply the by-product of natural laws is.
>
> On the positive side, genes are a marvelous example of emergent behavior
> in nature. Complexity arising from simple rules.

I'm sure a lot of people actually think that somewhere in your DNA is an 
encoded number that says how long your femur should be, what speed your 
heart should beat at, and various other technical data - you know, like 
a man-made blueprint would have on it. If only scientists could work out 
how do "decode" this information, we would then know everything there is 
to know about the human body. (Or, indeed, any other organism...)

What *actually* happens is that DNA encodes the instructions for 
building various different proteins, which - by a MIND-NUMBINGLY 
INDIRECT series of steps - results in something that has a recognisable 
form.

I guess it's a bit like an IFS. Take, for example, this famous example:

w 	a 	b 	c 	d 	e 	f 	p
ƒ1 	0 	0 	0 	0.16 	0 	0 	0.01
ƒ2 	0.85 	0.04 	−0.04 	0.85 	0 	1.6 	0.85
ƒ3 	0.2 	−0.26 	0.23 	0.22 	0 	1.6 	0.07
ƒ4 	−0.15 	0.28 	0.26 	0.24 	0 	0.44 	0.07

This doesn't describe any geometric shapes at all. It merely defines 
four spatial transformations. And yet, iteratively applying these 
transforms yields a strange attractor which looks strikingly like a fern 
leaf... even though there's no fern coordinates here.

It seems likely that an *actual* fern probably works the same way...

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