I made a program to implement some of my theories.
You’re welcome to try it. cycell2d.com
My pet theory — morphogenic fields — is described in their on one of the pages.
(Caveat: I’m neither a biologist nor a ‘real’ programmer. But, I was able to come up with a system to ‘grow’ certain animals and found it a fun way to spend the lockdown... almost as much fun as posting ‘Covid is a hoax’ comments on HackerNews... ahhh... those were the days.)
[1] https://www.the-scientist.com/features/how-groups-of-cells-c...
Neuronal Signaling and Sodium-Potassium Pump (from PDB-101)
Any specific examples of how it hindered our understanding? Like maybe some grants or something? Because as a synthetic biologist, I've never seen a heavy emphasis on genetics take away from other causes of cellular dynamics - in fact, exactly the opposite, because genetic engineering has allowed tinkering of those cellular dynamics (for example, cardio tissue surface physics).
I don't know of any serious biologist that (even historically) disregarded the importance of other physical factors in favor of DNA, but I would love to know compelling counter examples.
I doubt many people would agree that computer hardware is a small part of the picture of modern computation.
They're the foundations that everything else is built on, and with.
I'm not sure what the conclusion of biologists is today, but I have a feeling a lot of important mechanisms aren't encoded in the DNA - or, at least, not anymore. The key insight here is that cell reproduction doesn't happen out of nothing, it's always an existing mechanism working on a new mechanism.
The seminal paper of Ken Thompson, "Reflections on Trusting Trust" (1984)[0], demonstrates how you can encode a backdoor in a compiler in such a way that the compiler embeds this backdoor in every program it builds, and embeds the backdoor-embedding machinery in every new compiler binary it builds. You can use it to build a "vanilla" compiler and make it backdoor-embedding, even though the source code doesn't have backdoor-embedding instructions in it.
I suspect similar things happen in biology - there is computationally relevant information embedded in the runtime state, that's not explicitly encoded in the DNA - but it carries on, because every new living cell is built by a previous living cell.
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[0] - https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
I would suspect really basic things like replication would be stored somehow in DNA (nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA, etc) as they must be highly conserved and mutation resistant in order for organisms to survive and reproduce.
My point was that there is only so much information capacity in the cell if you exclude DNA, surely much less than needed to store electrical fields patterns for a whole embryo.
Like the difference between a silicon microchip and just a silicon block. Same stuff, bit the microchip one has intricate patterns.
https://asunow.asu.edu/20200806-dragon-dna-sequencing-genome...
https://phys.org/news/2020-08-dinosaur-relative-genome-linke...
I really recommend Anton's segment on the Tuatara, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWywZyzmBDE MindBlown!
Those blocks are very small, less than 20 Atoms.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenine
They’re working on using it for storage. (very slow read write times). Duplicating shouldn’t be a problem.
More realistically, the simplest atom- one proton, one electron- has 3 integer numbers associated with the state of the electron. You need more than a bit to describe the state of that system, so yeah.
In our more limited experience, certain levels of complexity mean unpredictable outcomes.
As for why-not-DNA, I think about it in terms of "If there were some way that was faster able to adapt organisms than DNA changes, wouldn't most organisms accumulate substantial functionality via that pathway over time?"
Is this true, given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle ?
However it is not clear if quantum effects are relevant at a biomolecular scale. Some experts[1] suggest so but these ideas are considered fringe by the mainstream.
1. Sir Roger Penrose
However it seems to me the deterministic vs randomness debate is of the same order as the existence of god(s) : we will never be able to prove or disprove it and we aren't able to make useful predictions out of the information one way or the other so we might as well just agree to disagree and move on.
They definitely didn't get 100% of it right, buts its quite uncanny how the ancient texts were so accurate at predicting certain things that are only becoming evident in morphogensis research.