DNA and Information

Question from Koalanu:
If the DNA structure is simply an illusion, is it possible for the monkey theorem to be true?

Could this also mean that the structure of reason, creativity, and emotion – could these all be illusions within our head?

Can we compare the complexity of DNA and Microsoft together?

Thank you guys soo much, I’ve been tryna look for an answer, but these questions have been bugging me a lot.

Answer by SmartLX:
The structure of DNA is not an illusion, unless you get all philosophical and suppose that the whole world could be an illusion. DNA is as real as anything else, and it’s really arranged in spiralling combinations of the four basic components: adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine or A, C, G and T.

For DNA to allow for the monkey theorem, by which I reckon you mean the theory of evolution, it only has to do one thing: produce copies of itself, either directly or by the roundabout route of building a life form which then produces more DNA. It also has to do this imperfectly, so that the copies are not exactly the same as the original. (If it worked perfectly, there would be little or no change between generations.) Fortunately, this is exactly what DNA does, so the process of natural selection has all the raw material it needs.

Reasoning, creativity and emotion are products of the bio-electrical activity in our brains. We can be pretty sure of this because they can all be crippled if your brain is physically damaged. This doesn’t mean they’re illusions; it just means that we have abstract representations of the information we all process, because it’s easier to think that way.

DNA contains information of a very specific kind, namely strings of chemicals represented as, for example, ATCGGCGGTACTATCA. Microsoft products run on computers which store information as a series of bits, for example 0100100101010111. Both of these simple forms of information can, with a long enough series, represent just about anything. The difference is that the information in DNA has arisen naturally over a very long time, while most of the information at Microsoft was directly programmed in, or else generated by deliberately designed programs, very recently. (The rest is the result of data corruption.)

Hope that helps.