Dennis Hackethal’s Blog
My blog about philosophy, coding, and anything else that interests me.
History of post ‘Why Do Humans Have Fewer Genes than Flies?’
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Revision 3 · · View this (the most recent) version (v4)
Be more specific about which mutations creativity can make up for; distinguish between different meanings of the word ‘gene’. h/t Ante Skugor
@@ -1,49 +1,49 @@ # Discussions Revisited Today's websites "enabling" discussions are mostly awful. First, conversations are typically modeled as a linear exchange. You say something, I say something. But that's not how real conversations work. Anything we say can be rich in consequences and merits exploring, which may deserve dedicated attention separate from the rest of the thread. Sometimes, we state several ideas at once, and addressing them one by one in a linear fashion is cumbersome, especially when each idea requires further conversation. So in reality, conversations are like trees. There are some platforms like Reddit and Twitter where you can comment on comments, but it isn't always clear which part of a comment you are responding to, unless you take the trouble to manually copy the original text and quote it --- that is, if you know markdown. And Twitter is generally bad for discussions because it enforces a character limit on each tweet, which makes discussing larger ideas cumbersome if not virtually impossible. Second, current social networks are built around the concept-of *approval*.+of *approval*. It incentivizes people to make unargued assertions, since those that are going to agree with a statement are going to agree with it without an explanation for why it is true. But to those who do not already agree with the idea, unargued assertions are invitations to disagree. This is why social networks are polarizing: they are not built to learn, but to agree and disagree. We don't learn from either of those. We-learn *through+learn *through constructive criticism*. As the great philosopher Karl Popper said, "I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth." People worry about fake news and the election coverage for fear of voter manipulation, so they remind us to "check our sources". That does not help, because a false idea does not become true when uttered by someone else, and vice versa. An idea is-an *impersonal* thing.+an *impersonal* thing. It is either true or false, and we can only find out which through conjecture and criticism. But since today's platforms do not provide a good experience and discourage real discussions in favor of agreeing or disagreeing with each other, we have no good place to discuss online. Learning how to discuss is important because it teaches-you *how+you *how to think*. When you ponder an idea the same thing happens in your mind as when you discuss it with someone else. Many different ideas come up and collide, and you want to get closer to the truth. Whether this is with yourself or someone else does not really matter. Medium is a refreshing platform because it encourages people to post longer pieces. And its editing tools are better than what else I've seen online. They still are not really conducive to critical discussions, though. What are we left with? Believe it or not, it's email. It's the only tool we have that really allows you to do what you want to do. You can quote others, comment precisely on the quotes you want inline, and conversations can carry on in long form in a tree shape. Alas, emails are boring, they are visually nude, they do not provide any tools to make discussions easier, and longer email threads are notoriously hard to maintain and reference. This isn't to mention that oddly enough, commenting is usually-done *above* a+done *above* a quote, and unless everyone agrees that this should be avoided because it disrupts the order in which you read naturally, there is no way to enforce this standard. What is needed is nothing less than a new discussion platform; a new approach which gives you long form posts, great commenting and editing tools, tree shaped conversations, and precise quoting. When you write a piece, people should be able to comment inline on the parts that matter, and you should see which comments you have not addressed yet at a glance. This matters because an idea is true if all its known refutations are false. In other words, the whole thing would roughly mirror how critical discussions work in real life. It could be used to evaluate new ideas. Indeed, way down the road, scientists and philosophers --- or anyone with an idea, really --- can post a conjecture and then ask for criticism. If, at any given time, there is at least one outstanding criticism, the idea is considered refuted, or at least its truth value is "unknown", and it can be marked as such. That way, others know what the current status of an idea is. Over time, such a platform could become a (fallible!) "source" of ideas and their truth status. I figured it might be fun to work on such a platform. The first snapshot is available-here: <https://web.archive.org/web/20191208201736/https://diskussion.herokuapp.com/>+here: <https://web.archive.org/web/20191208201736/https://diskussion.herokuapp.com/> I'll keep working on it for as long as it's fun. Who knows where that will take me. So far, the website only displays a static text; it's only a mockup of what an actual implementation might look like:  You can comment on a passage by highlighting it:  The button on the left appears, and you can click it to expand a form:  After you submit the comment, the corresponding passage stays highlighted:  The idea of highlighting text to comment on it is inspired by the Medium website. But on Medium, highlights are rather limited. For example, you cannot highlight passages across paragraphs. But why not? I'm guessing this is because getting the selected +text from many different HTML elements can be a bit tricky. On my site, you can select across any HTML elements within the post. You can even select-text *around* the+text *around* the comment form, assuming you already have it open, to correct your selection. It won't quote anything you typed into the comment form and it will place the comment form correctly. When a second comment is made, its corresponding passage can overlap with another passage that has been commented on:  Note how the green is slightly darker in the middle, around the word "button", indicating that this word is perhaps a bit controversial. The comments below first indicate-their *range* ---+their *range* --- the index of the first and last letter of the passage relative to the rest of the text. Then the quote is shown, indicated by a blue bar on the left, followed by the comment itself. Next up, I'd like to make it so that you can link from a passage to its corresponding comments, so you can always quickly see what people are saying about a particular passage, and vice versa, so that if you're scrolling through the comments, you can see what passage they belong to-and+if the quote does not provide enough context. *If you enjoyed this-article, [follow+article, [follow me on-Twitter](https://twitter.com/dchackethal) for+Twitter](https://twitter.com/dchackethal) for more content like it.*
Revision 2 · · View this version (v3)
Elaborate on junk DNA a bit more
@@ -33,7 +33,9 @@ Creativity explains this, too. Let’s take the example of walking again. Some o In other words, the junk in our DNA is evidence of the fact that, for humans, error correction has largely shifted from biological evolution to the evolution of ideas inside human minds. A key Popperian insight (after philosopher Karl Popper) is that, when you want to know which of two processes creates more knowledge, you compare their error-correction rates.-So+From a cursory search online, biologists disagree about just how much of our DNA is “junk”. I’m no biologist, but to the extent that it does exist, junk DNA is not a mystery – on the contrary, epistemology predicts it. It also predicts that humans should have a greater percentage of junk in their DNA than all other species. +In any case, the answer to both questions is essentially the same. Teslo raises these two questions in the wider context of figuring out why medicine and biology aren’t progressing faster. As you can see above, epistemology can solve biological questions. Maybe we need more epistemology.
Revision 1 · · View this version (v2)
@@ -29,9 +29,9 @@ Teslo also asks: Well, maybe the central dogma is wrong. But let’s assume for a moment it’s correct. Creativity explains this, too. Let’s take the example of walking again. Some of our creative ancestors presumably knew how to walk from birth: some of their genes-‘pre-installed’+pre-installed this knowledge in them. Then an erroneous mutation broke those genes, and with them, the +inborn ability to walk. In any non-creative species, such a mutation would almost certainly lead to death, but in a creative species, it doesn’t have to: again, a creative organism can simply *learn* to walk. So error correction shifted from biological evolution to the organism itself. What had now become “junk DNA” could remain junk, and even grow and devolve further, without posing any serious risk to the remaining intact genes’ ability to spread. This process has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, so our DNA has had plenty of time to accumulate junk. In other words, the junk in our DNA is evidence of the fact that, for humans, error correction has largely shifted from biological evolution to the evolution of ideas inside human minds. A key Popperian insight (after philosopher Karl Popper) is that, when you want to know which of two processes creates more knowledge, +you compare their error-correction rates. So the answer to both questions is essentially the same.
Original · · View this version (v1)
# Why Do Humans Have Fewer Genes than Flies?
Genomics PhD Ruxandra Teslo [asks](https://x.com/RuxandraTeslo/status/1809653900628074954):
> [H]umans have only about 30,000-35,000 genes, two times less than a fly. Yet we are clearly more complex than a fly. How [is] that possible?
Creativity. That is, the ability to create new knowledge.
Put simply, organisms are computers that can move; their genes are the software. (That’s not a metaphor – it’s literally true.) In any non-creative organism, the onus is on genes to provide ~100% of the knowledge the organism requires to survive. But a creative organism, by definition, can come up with new knowledge *during its lifetime*.
Since a fly cannot create new knowledge ‘on the fly’ (pun intended), it needs ~all the knowledge it requires – flight, walking, etc – preinstalled in its genes. Likewise, a baby giraffe walks only a few hours after birth. Ducklings can walk and swim shortly after birth.[^1]
To put it in the context of my [Neo-Darwinian approach](/posts/the-neo-darwinian-theory-of-the-mind) to the mind: one of our ancestors had a genetic mutation causing ideas to start replicating imperfectly inside his mind. This caused *more* evolution of knowledge to occur *during this ancestor’s lifetime* and took some of the onus off his genes. If an organism can create some knowledge itself then biological evolution doesn’t have to create that same knowledge anymore. Many species come out the womb ready to walk, but humans learn to walk themselves. So humans don’t need genes that would otherwise enable them to walk automatically.
Consider also that unfavorable genetic mutations are more numerous than favorable ones. Since creativity can make up for many unfavorable mutations, there was unprecedented selection pressure favoring creativity *at roughly the rate at which unfavorable mutations occur*. Creativity is a *big deal* from an evolutionary perspective. (Well, from ~any perspective, but especially from an evolutionary one.)
On top of that, using their creativity, humans create *additional* knowledge that genes wouldn’t have given them to begin with. Genes don’t code for nuclear reactors and spaceships, say. When a human comes up with a new idea, his knowledge has increased, but his genome has stayed the same.
Specifically, it’s the property physicist David Deutsch calls *reach* that is responsible for this big difference between the human genome and the genomes of all other species. The human genome codes for creativity, and creativity has more than enough reach to cover the knowledge of any other gene the genome *could* have contained (and even of all those it presumably could *not* have contained).
A multiplication table takes up more space on a piece of paper than a simple multiplication algorithm. Yet the algorithm gives you more results: it has greater reach. Comparing the number of genes is like comparing the number of lines of code: just because a program is longer doesn’t mean it does more. You need to compare reach instead.
Humans are [the only](/posts/animal-sentience-faq) creative animal. The human genome installs the basics, most importantly the creative algorithm, and then humans figure out the rest (and then some) during their lifetime.
So it’s not strange that humans have fewer genes than a fly. It’d be weird if they had *more*.
Teslo also asks:
> Another perplexing finding was that most of the human genome was composed of so-called “junk DNA” — that is, DNA that did not code for any protein. The central dogma of Biology says that DNA codes for RNA, which in turn codes proteins, the molecules that carry out most of our cell’s functions. So what was all the DNA that was not coding for any protein doing there?
Well, maybe the central dogma is wrong. But let’s assume for a moment it’s correct.
Creativity explains this, too. Let’s take the example of walking again. Some of our creative ancestors presumably knew how to walk from birth: some of their genes ‘pre-installed’ this knowledge in them. Then an erroneous mutation broke those genes, and with them, the ability to walk. In any non-creative species, such a mutation would almost certainly lead to death, but in a creative species, it doesn’t have to: again, a creative organism can simply *learn* to walk. So error correction shifted from biological evolution to the organism itself. What had now become “junk DNA” could remain junk, and even grow and devolve further, without posing any serious risk to the remaining intact genes’ ability to spread. This process has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, so our DNA has had plenty of time to accumulate junk.
In other words, the junk in our DNA is evidence of the fact that, for humans, error correction has largely shifted from biological evolution to the evolution of ideas inside human minds. A key Popperian insight (after philosopher Karl Popper) is that, when you want to know which of two processes creates more knowledge, compare their error-correction rates.
So the answer to both questions is essentially the same.
Teslo raises these two questions in the wider context of figuring out why medicine and biology aren’t progressing faster. As you can see above, epistemology can solve biological questions. Maybe we need more epistemology.
[^1]: Some animals require a certain level of physical maturing first, eg a fly larva cannot fly yet. But when an animal *can* do something ~immediately after birth, it means the knowledge for doing it is definitely inborn.
Some animals display more flexibility by having so-called ‘learning’ algorithms driven by rewards and punishment, causing them to exhibit *new* behaviors not explicitly pre-installed. But those algorithms are different from creativity. New behaviors are not by themselves evidence of creativity.
Then there are animals which have fairly sophisticated imitation algorithms. For example, I understand kittens are not born with the ability to groom themselves and instead imitate their parents. But it’s still the *imitation* algorithm that’s inborn and ultimately responsible for the behavior. (It’s also worth noting that those imitation algorithms are often fairly indiscriminate and copy useless behavior – for example, I’ve seen videos of kittens that try to ‘bark’ because they were raised with dogs.)
One way to verify that some behavior is inborn and not ‘learned’ is by ‘raising’ an animal in isolation, ie without exposure to any members of the same species. For example, raise a fly larva by itself so it never sees any other flies. If it still flies once it has physically matured, then you know the behavior must be inborn and cannot be due to imitation algorithms, say. You can also rule out other types of ‘learning’ like play by physically restraining the larva. I suspect that a larva raised in isolation and restrained until maturity would fly immediately upon being released.