Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Laboratory >

Junk DNA & Zipf's Law

18:54 / 19.10.05

Can't say I was hugely surprised by the discovery that Junk DNA, which accounts for 97% of our DNA, may not be redundant junk. Recent studies show the junk follows Zipf's Law strongly suggesting that there is information contained within.

This Link gives a brief rundown of how Zipf's Law was applied to the junk DNA

I'm interested in the possible function of this fairly large part of our genetic make-up. My first reaction was the junk may be coding for consciousness, however, the junk appears to be found in all forms of life and I'm back to the problem of deciding if all life is conscious or not.

Listening to a talk by Mr Graham Hancock yesterday evening brought this back to my attention. He appears to be convinced that this DNA is the cause of striking similarities in experiences involving mind altering drugs reported by people with huge cultural differences. He also mentioned a little about this DNA possibly being apparatus to explore the spiritual realm - something I reckon Richard Dawkins might have one or two objections to.

Just wondering if anyone out there had any more testable ideas concerning this and how this may affect the human genome project

sdv (non-human)

20:48 / 19.10.05

The actual issue is rather more complicated than this - as it's been reasonably well tested, long after being originally proposed, that living beings inherit charecteristics not just from DNA but also from RNA and possibly from prot'ns as well...

03:38 / 20.10.05

As with so many things, the "junk" part is our understanding of what's going on. The more we know, the less junk-y the DNA looks. The last firm data I've seen shows that considerable parts of the "junk" are involved in regulatory functions, usually in ways that aren't yet completely understood.

It's worth remembering that a lot (80%? more?) of regulation is regulating development, not day-to-day functions in adult organisms. They're finding that much DNA has brief and critical roles in embryos, and then spends the rest of its time doing nothing.

As for the spiritual aspects, that looks like a long reach to me. Convoluted guesses about DNA of unknown function don't seem necessary. The fundamental similarity of human brains and neurology is a much simpler explanation for similar reactions to drugs.

02:34 / 02.11.05

I'd second that.

Also, the fact that Zipf's Law obtains in junk DNA doesn't suggest as much as it might in other situations, for the simple reason that "junk" DNA probably comes in several flavors:

1) Stuff that's not really junk, but actually codes for some protein in a non-standard process (that is, RNA is transcribed from it even though that stretch of DNA is not in a reading frame).

2) Stuff that's a full or partial copy of another gene, transposed from its original location, and not at all active. This would still retain many or all of the informational statistics of the source DNA, with omissions or insertions.

3) DNA which modifies transcription or RNA splicing, but does not code for protein.

4) DNA with other fundtions.

08:14 / 02.11.05

There was a New Scientist feature last year which suggested that one of the primary reasons for junk DNA was that it spreads out the valid DNA sequences and makes it less likely that they will be subjected to one of the hundreds of thousands of damage "events" that occur to our genetic structure on a molecular level daily. If they're all grouped together then the chances of radiation hitting a critical sequence and causing dangerous mutations are increased.