This is somewhat unrelated, but I once did a little research on the problem of how DNA gets translated into proteins—I (and some others) viewed DNA as a 4 letter code (nucleotides) or ‘syntax’ , while proteins were words using a 26 letter (amino acids) ‘word’ with a ‘semantics’—it meant something or had a functional use. I took what is perjoratively called a ‘fact free science’ approach (associated with SFI/complexity approach) , which meant the idea was to see if one could figure out if there were any patterns in the DNA code (using as little biochemical information as possible—experimentalists dealt with that detail) which could be used to predict which ones might be ‘coding regions’ for proteins . This is analagous to trying to figure out from some randomly selected ‘text’ whether its just a randomly generated set of (nonsensical) ‘words’ , or actually is a meaningful ‘book’ (maybe shakespeare).
It was assumed that the ‘reinforcement history’ was actually hidden in the DNA code—i.e. there were dependencies between the ‘letters’ (nucleotides) so they were not randomly distributed (any more than letters in a book are).
This is somewhat unrelated, but I once did a little research on the problem of how DNA gets translated into proteins—I (and some others) viewed DNA as a 4 letter code (nucleotides) or ‘syntax’ , while proteins were words using a 26 letter (amino acids) ‘word’ with a ‘semantics’—it meant something or had a functional use. I took what is perjoratively called a ‘fact free science’ approach (associated with SFI/complexity approach) , which meant the idea was to see if one could figure out if there were any patterns in the DNA code (using as little biochemical information as possible—experimentalists dealt with that detail) which could be used to predict which ones might be ‘coding regions’ for proteins . This is analagous to trying to figure out from some randomly selected ‘text’ whether its just a randomly generated set of (nonsensical) ‘words’ , or actually is a meaningful ‘book’ (maybe shakespeare).
It was assumed that the ‘reinforcement history’ was actually hidden in the DNA code—i.e. there were dependencies between the ‘letters’ (nucleotides) so they were not randomly distributed (any more than letters in a book are).