Every creature starts from a single cell. At that point the only difference between a mouse and a human is the DNA, right? Isn't mRNA and tRNA is produced from DNA? It's been a long time since high school. So I don't see why it isn't 50MB.
Every creature starts from a single cell. At that point the only difference between a mouse and a human is the DNA, right?
No. That single cell is a working machine of which the DNA is just one component. The proteins which transcribe the DNA, they are in there too, but they are not the DNA. The whole point is that everything else that's in a cell, and there's a lot of "stuff" besides the DNA, has a major effect on what happens.
For embryos specifically both the egg and the sperm contribute "stuff" in addition to DNA.
The metaphor of code and compiler is a bit clunky but decent. If you think the animal as the compiled application and of DNA as its source code, it should be obvious there are millions of lines of code in the OS and compiler, which were required for the compilation of the application.
Is "Hello World" in C just the one .c file, or do we have to count the standard libraries? How about the hardware designs of the PC running it? If you look at just the .c file, it's a few lines, if you look at everything that's actually required to run it, that's a bit more complicated.
Is "Hello World" in C just the one .c file, or do we have to count the standard libraries? How about the hardware designs of the PC running it? If you look at just the .c file, it's a few lines, if you look at everything that's actually required to run it, that's a bit more complicated.
And yet nobody would ever claim that the fundamental minimum complexity of the "Hello, world!" algorithm was more than a few lines of text, because the "important stuff" in that algorithm has nothing to do with all of the irrelevant complexity in the operating system and hardware, all of which could be done in millions of different ways without changing the fundamental algorithmic insights that "Hello, World!" requires.
Yes, there are epigenetic factors that get passed along, but their effects tend to be transient, lost over a few generations at most, adding maybe a handful of tunable bits of information to the genome that can be quick-flipped as the environment demands. I don't know that anyone has ever suggested that any non-trivial amount of data is actually passed millions of generations down the line through this mechanism (keep in mind, to seriously take issue [i.e. beyond a mere factor of 2] with the estimates that you disagree with, you'd need to find more than 25 megabytes of evolutionarily-accessible data that lives somewhere other than DNA), and I'd be extremely interested to know if that was the case. Every evolutionary biologist I know focuses almost exclusively on genetic code as the evolutionary substrate because it's the only available channel that seems reliable enough for information to flow through unmolested over millions of years.
As a final question, if you hypothetically took human DNA only and put it into a frog embryo, there is no way you could pass on the parts that make up our highly advanced minds? That is what I meant by everything we do is in those 50MB.
What I am getting at is that very similar standard libraries are in stem cells in animals. There's countless examples of people taking DNA from one animal and putting it into another that is completely different, and copying the same traits.
