• DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    5 hours ago

    DNA is not meant to be stable, it is meant to mutate and evolve, also it wasn’t invented, it manifested itself out of chaos. One reason why understanding it is so hard. It is not made like a machine, it doesn’t have neat parts with clear roles or categories. It’s sort of pure chaos all sort of working together in a giant orchestra without categories or bounds.

    • SmokeyDope@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      To be more precice the universe appears driven to expand and maximize its potential for representing or becoming new distinct states, using the least possible input. This is relates to complexity, microstate phase space, and computational cost to turn entropy into order.

      This theme runs from the Big Bang and the formation of the first particles, to stars creating complex atoms, to our planet forming and RNA assembling from a primordial soup. Its the expansion of potential and possibility.

      The universe’s ontology is one of maximizing the paths it can explore while minimizing the resources needed to make any specific outcome stable. This is the principle of least action, viewed through information theory and the expansion of phase space.

      RNA and DNA are perfect examples. They require very little matter to form. They are just complex enough to bootstrap life and create endless variation through mutation, which preserves a vast space of possibility. Yet they are not so complex that they could not arise from random chance in a primordial soup. They are seeds for unique actualization and complexity stratification at relatively little energy and matter cost paid while also keeping the door open to further new stated of becoming in the next iteration. It is an information-theoretic optimization tradeoff on which order and entropy interact, where their meeting boundaries create novel complex phenomenon.