Ilya

Korsunsky COB reflection paper 4 Justin Jee 3/12/13 Justin presented his work on 2 disparate yet intimately related topics, the evolution of the genetic code and the evolution of ideas as evidenced through text corpora. One of the most interesting themes in both is the dominance of suboptimal equilibria. In the genetic code, some messages are not robust to error and therefore small mistakes in the code could lead to large mistakes in the encoded protein. In the cultureomics example, the idea that odors spread disease dominated over the less popular idea that physical contact spread disease, until more evidence for the latter appeared. He explained this in a game theoretic way. The utility of the suboptimal solution is high enough to be stable and changing the convention radically might cause more harm than good in the short term. For instance, changing the genetic code to a more optimal one now would render many proteins inactive and useless and thus render most physiological processes unviable. Thus, the suboptimal solution gets stuck and may never be replaced by the optimal one. I am curious as to what kind of conditions would allow the genetic code to optimize even further. Historically, this seemed to happen twice. However, the evolution of ideas seems to happen much more frequently. This suggests that either there is less of a barrier to change in cultureomics or that we are in a sort of Cambrian explosion of ideas. The latter suggests that this flux in ideas will cool down and we will eventually settle on a coherent understanding of the universe.

An interesting discussion came up during the talk. A participant asked why messages of longer length should be considered more favorable. In information theory, it is more desirable, after all, to pack as much information into a short a message as possible, with a bound on the distortion. On the other hand, longer messages allow for description of more complex concepts. In particular, in the genetic code, the complexity of the action, which is the length of the resulting polypeptide, is linear in the complexity of the message, which is the length of the gene. Longer polypeptides lead to a greater variety of proteins that can do different things, which is clearly evolutionarily favorable. In light of this, it makes sense to favor longer, more complex messages, as they lead to a greater behavior repertoire.