Hypnagogia

My dozing thoughts the other night must have been sparked by The Ancestor's Tale. I was thinking about how the organization of cells in the body reflects the early coming together of single-celled creatures to form bodies. I always found Volvox fascinating and from the pictures this is the start of colonial life. they look so much like the early stages of embryonic development in more complex animals.

Dawkins' description of how the Genes in cell nuclei use a collection of repeating subroutines to create the diversity of life started me on this way of thinking. He talks about a library of functions which all life uses to some extent. The fact that Human and Chimpanzee DNA is nearly identical shows that the library must be the greater part of life. Large numbers of the sub-routines must simply not be used which makes me guiltily think of many of my software efforts. The bits of DNA which differ between animals are the Sub Main so-to-speak which calls the library routines in the order required to build the organism in question. Obviously you could extend this analogy far too far but it seems useful for illustration. And remember that Banana plants share a large portion of the same subroutines. Great swathes of the library functions must be related to chemical processes; indeed genes don't actually cause the creation of anything other than chemicals which are used to determine how something works inside an organism.

It seems obvious to me that there is great potential for the existence of many times the number of species that have existed. There must be many library routines and the ways in which these could be used to create valid (well-formed you could say) organisms must be up in the factorial-using mathematics of the stratosphere. As the Human genome project already has the sequences available, it may not be too long before we are able to understand how to put those functions together to create un-heard-of living things. I hear that Craig Venter is resurrecting his idea to create a synthetic Bacterium, not it appears from any desire to increase human knowledge but because he hopes to engineer the bacteria to create useful things. I don't want to stifle his creativity but I can imagine that the idea will seem very dangerous to most people. Me as well I suppose. Just because we can do a thing doesn't mean we should. It'll be out of the lab and playing the stock markets before you know it - deducing the existence of income tax and rice pudding even.

I have noticed in my spell-checks of these entries (using Word), that I am rarely getting the long green underlines which indicate some problem with the grammar. I used to be bothered about these but soon realised that Microsoft Word does not have much artistry about what it considers good grammar. Many times it rejected perfectly good constructs which I left in as I considered them OK. The question is, have I subconsciously taken in what it was telling me? I must have. On another note, you will of course realise that it does not pick up the useless errors I put in where the word is spelled perfectly but is just the wrong word. My wife tries to catch them but usually I don't bother correcting them.

Probably Grauniad standard today. See you.