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Sub-Atomic similarities
As
previously stated, the I Ching is
based upon the polar aspects of Yin and Yang, DNA is based upon
the plus and minus threads of the double helix. The two
three-line hexagrams of the I Ching have the same tri-part
structure as the DNA codons. Further, in the sub-particle realms of
chromadyamics, there is a quark model called the Gell-Martin
theory. It uses quarks with masses that appear to be built of
+/- 1/3 or +/-2/3 of an electron charge. This is remarkably
similar to the triplet hexagrams and the 12 part system of the I
Ching, including the hexagrams of chance. These Gell-Martin quarks produce
bewildering properties such as time running backwards and the
simultaneous existence of contradictory states, qualities
 mirrored in the template structure of the I Ching. The
subtleties of the I Ching then can be as complex and profound as
the modern Gell-Mann theory of chromadynamics.
The I Ching then has been created as a
mirror of hexagrams which can be held up to the purity of the
Tao, so that they can reflect the hidden realms of consciousness
without the medium of the intervening cave wall. The I Ching
also is a sacred tablet of remembrance, a mandala of images to
nurture insight, so that we can eventually gain the psychic
power to turn the focus of our attention towards the creating
light and the unseen quantum information fields that surround. The I Ching of China describes the
universe in a similar way to modern western science with its
study of DNA, the atomic structure and the quantum light fields.
We can but marvel at the extraordinary minds which put these
three ancient creation models together.
Modern physics suggests that time does not
exist or is an illusion on a fundamental level. Put more precisely, an object in 3D
over time is the same object, while in 4D, the perceived object is a
different entity at different points along the time-line. Time can
only be experienced from the perspective of a perceiver. It follows
then that DNA would possess past, present & future aspects of our
object in question as the mechanism of the differentiation.
DNA is the means whereby an organism (perceiver) changes (evolves)
over time, while maintaining organic continuity. The ancient I-Ching appears to be a
sophisticated model of the tendencies of evolution, as generated by
DNA. Given the apparent ability for time running backward on the
sub-atomic level, the possibility of accessing or "triggering" DNA
information at a "perceived" future point along the timeline may not
be out of the question.
- based in part on the works of Steve Krakowski,
Robert Bast
&
Martin Schonberger.
I
think that DNA is an intelligent entity, more
intelligent than any of us - it designed all of us.
And I think that DNA has a definite project in mind
- that is to say, immortality. I think that what
it's been working on all along is to produce
immortal organisms which are capable of traveling
off the planet - transcending the mammalian
condition, the struggle for existence, and so on.
And actually, to be blunt about it, become God-like
beings.
- Robert Anton Wilson
Is the DNA code a constant
in Universe?
A
recent mathematical analysis says that life as we know it is
written into the laws of reality. DNA is built from a set
of twenty amino acids - the first ten of those can create
simple prebiotic life, and now it seems that those ten are
thermodynamically destined to occur wherever they can.
For those unfamiliar with
thermodynamics, it's the Big Brother of all energy equations
and science itself. You can apply quantum mechanics at
certain scales, and Newtonian mechanics work at the right
speeds, but if Thermodynamics says something then everyone
listens. An energy analysis by Professors Pudritz and Higgs
of McMaster University shows that the first ten amino acids
are likely to form at relatively low temperatures and
pressures, and the calculated odds of formation match the
concentrations of these life-chemicals found in meteorite
samples. They also match those in simulations of early
Earth, and most critically, those simulations were performed
by other people. The implications are staggering: good news
for anyone worried about how we're alone, and bad news for
anyone who demands some kind of "Designer" to put life
together - it seems that physics can assemble the organic
jigsaw all by itself, thank you very much, and has probably
done so throughout space since the beginning of everything.
The study indicates that you don't
need a miracle to arrive at the chemical cocktail for early
life, just a decently large asteroid with the right
components. That's all. The entire universe could be
stuffed with life, from the earliest prebiotic
protein-a-likes to fully DNAed descendants. The path from
one to the other is long, but we've had thirteen and a half
billion years so far and it's happened at least once. The
other ten amino acids aren't as easy to form, but they'll
still turn up - and the process of "stepwise evolution"
means that once the simpler systems work, they can grab the
rarer "epic drops" of more sophisticated chemicals as they
occur - kind of a World of Lifecraft except you literally
get a life when you play. And once even the most
sophisticated structure is part of a replicating organism,
there's plenty to go round.
It's no accident that we see stars
in the sky, says famed Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins:
they are a vital part of any universe capable of generating
us. But, as Dawkins emphasizes, that does not mean that
stars exists in order to make us. "It is just that without
stars there would be no atoms heavier than lithium in the
periodic table," Dawkins writes in The Ancestors Tale -A
Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, "and a chemistry of
only three elements is too impoverished to support life.
Seeing is the kind of activity that can go on only in the
kind of universe where what you see is stars." A fascinating
corollary according to both Dawkins and astrophysicist Neil
deGrasse Tyson, is whether DNA is inevitable as the
foundation for the coding of life, or has life started with
DNA in only one place in the solar system and then spread
among the livable habitats through panspermia. Microbial
life can land on and seed another planet, thereby not
requiring that you have to create life from scratch multiple
times and in multiple places.
Another totally intriguing
possibility, one of many that deGrasse Tyson Director of the
Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History
describes in Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic
Evolution, is that there is life that has encoding that has
nothing to do with DNA. It is the relentless shifting and
mutating of DNA, says Dennis Overbye in a
brilliant essay in
The New York Times, that
generates the raw material for evolution to act on and
ensures the success of life on Earth (and perhaps beyond).
Dr. Paul Davies, co-director of the Arizona State University
Cosmology Initiative said that he had been encouraged by the
discovery a few years ago "that some sections of junk DNA
seem to be markedly resistant to change, and have remained
identical in humans, rats, mice, chickens and dogs for at
least 300 million years."
But Dr. Gill Bejerano, Assistant Professor of Developmental
Biology and of Computer Science at Stanford, one of the
discoverers of these “ultraconserved” strings of the genome,
said that many of them had turned out to be playing
important command and control functions. “Why they need to
be so conserved remains a mystery,” Berjerano said, noting
that even regular genes with known functions undergo more
change over time. Most junk bits of DNA that neither help
nor annoy an organism mutate even more rapidly, Overbye
points out.
Encrypting Messages In Our
"How-to-Make-a-Human" DNA Instruction Manual
DNA
isn't just a code, it's the ultimate information - the data
without which the ability to perceive data wouldn't exist.
We now have the ability to write our own messages into this
biological blueprint, but there are important factors to
consider before you start scribbling cellular graffiti. The
human genome contains about three quarters of a gigabyte of
data, and it's pretty unflattering to find out that the "How
to make YOU" instruction manual is less than a quarter of
the size of the "Avatar" DVD. (But don't worry - the real
"you" in your head is, even by the simplest estimate, at
least seventy terabytes). Scientists have so far inserted
the equation of relativity, their own names and even Latin
poetry into the "junk" DNA of bacteria and plants.
Which leads us to an extremely
dangerous concept: the idea of "junk" DNA. This is an
extremely popular misconception which leaps from "we don't
know what it does" to "it doesn't do anything." Research
teams are continually discovering regions of "junk" which
turned out to do something vital after all, almost as if it
was unlikely we'd be saddled with 97% of our genomes doing
nothing. We can confirm that regions of it don't seem to
code for proteins or instructions, but until someone builds
an organism without all the extra code we'll have to assume
it's doing something. Or even better, try using the "extra"
storage space for something else and let us know what
happens.
The idea of encoding information in
DNA is so spectacularly sci-fi that people can't help but
come up with crazy applications - which is awesome. That's
exactly what science should do! People want to record
evolutionary archives of our innovations, coding cockroaches
to carry our knowledge past any future catastrophes, while
others only want to trademark their genetic innovations (an
unsettling and unfortunately far more likely outcome), but
the fact remains that DNA is still a terrible place to put
information - if only because any species which could
extract it knows at least as much as we do anyway.
Some say we should search our own
selves for messages from extra-terrestrials, encoded
messages from the alien creators of the human race. But the
facts are:
1) Beware
any idea that was actually used as a Star Trek plot
once.
2) The
"aliens made us" theory is better suited to late-night
radio talk shows.
3) It
could still be true, but if it is we'll find any such
messages in the course of regular, real research into
the code instead of hunting for a message.
In fact, it's essential we don't
start searching for scrawls inside our cells, because with
seven hundred and fifty megabytes of data there'll be such a
fantastic Nostradamus factor (finding messages in
random garbage once you've already decided to) that anything
identified will be an artifact of the observer.
A real application of genetic
information is the idea of genetic computation - the idea of
encoding a problem in DNA and evolving a solution. Obviously
there's an immense amount of work in setting up such a
computation (not only encoding the information, but
designing a situation in which solving the problem is
beneficial to the organism), but that's okay because it's
only intended for use in otherwise "insoluble" problems -
quandaries where the analytic methods fail and the
computation time is longer than the expected endurance of
the sun.
Evolution, after all, came up with
things butterflies, pilot fish and duck-billed platypii - if
anyone can come up with unexpected answers, it's nature. The
great unkown is: will DNA and the ability to encrypt
communication prove to be a constant throughout the
Universe?
-
Luke McKinney
The Unsolved Mystery of
DNA's Telepathic Communication
DNA has been
found to have a
bizarre ability
to put itself
together, even
at a distance,
when according
to known science
it shouldn't be
able to. The
explanation:
None, at least
not yet.
Scientists report
evidence that contrary
to our current beliefs
about what is possible,
intact double-stranded
DNA has the “amazing”
ability to recognize
similarities in other
DNA strands from a
distance. Somehow they
are able to identify one
another, and the tiny
bits of genetic material
tend to congregate with
similar DNA. The
recognition of similar
sequences in DNA’s
chemical subunits,
occurs in a way
unrecognized by science.
There is no known reason
why the DNA is able to
combine the way it does,
and from a current
theoretical standpoint
this feat should be
chemically impossible.
Even so, research
published in ACS’
Journal of Physical
Chemistry B, shows very
clearly that homology
recognition between
sequences of several
hundred nucleotides
occurs without physical
contact or presence of
proteins. Double helixes
of DNA can recognize
matching molecules from
a distance and then
gather together, all
seemingly without help
from any other molecules
or chemical signals.
In the study,
scientists observed the
behavior of
fluorescently tagged DNA
strands placed in water
that contained no
proteins or other
material that could
interfere with the
experiment. Strands with
identical nucleotide
sequences were about
twice as likely to
gather together as DNA
strands with different
sequences. No one knows
how individual DNA
strands could possibly
be communicating in this
way, yet somehow they
do. The “telepathic”
effect is a source of
wonder and amazement for
scientists.
“Amazingly, the
forces responsible for
the sequence recognition
can reach across more
than one nanometer of
water separating the
surfaces of the nearest
neighbor DNA,” said the
authors Geoff S.
Baldwin, Sergey Leikin,
John M. Seddon, and
Alexei A. Kornyshev and
colleagues.
This recognition
effect may help increase
the accuracy and
efficiency of the
homologous recombination
of genes, which is a
process responsible for
DNA repair, evolution,
and genetic diversity.
The new findings may
also shed light on ways
to avoid recombination
errors, which are
factors in cancer,
aging, and other health
issues.
Source: ACS’ Journal of
Physical Chemistry B
- from the
Daily Galaxy
CRISPR Gene
Editing CRISPR gene
editing is a genetic engineering technique in molecular biology by
which the genomes of living organisms may be modified. It is based
on a simplified version of the bacterial CRISPR-Cas9 antiviral
defense system. By delivering the Cas9 nuclease complexed with a
synthetic guide RNA (gRNA) into a cell, the cell's genome can be cut
at a desired location, allowing existing genes to be removed and/or
new ones added in vivo (in living organisms).
The technique is considered highly significant in
biotechnology and medicine as it allows for the genomes to be edited
in vivo with extremely high precision, cheaply and with ease. It can
be used in the creation of new medicines, agricultural products, and
genetically modified organisms, or as a means of controlling
pathogens and pests. It also has possibilities in the treatment of
inherited genetic diseases as well as diseases arising from somatic
mutations such as cancer. However, its use in human germline genetic
modification is highly controversial, for obvious reasons.
Policy regulations for the CRISPR-Cas9 system vary
around the globe. In February 2016, British scientists were given
permission by regulators to genetically modify human embryos by
using CRISPR-Cas9 and related techniques. However, researchers were
forbidden from implanting the embryos and the embryos were to be
destroyed after seven days.
The US has an elaborate, interdepartmental regulatory system to
evaluate new genetically modified foods and crops. For example, the
Agriculture Risk Protection Act of 2000 gives the United States
Department of Agriculture the authority to oversee the detection,
control, eradication, suppression, prevention, or retardation of the
spread of plant pests or noxious weeds to protect the agriculture,
environment, and economy of the US. The act regulates any
genetically modified organism that utilizes the genome of a
predefined "plant pest" or any plant not previously categorized.
Manipulating the Dormant
Information within our DNA
Lausanne,
Switzerland
Viral
"squatters" comprise nearly half of our genetic code.
Millions of years ago, genomic invaders inserted their DNA
into our own when they infected our ancestors. But how we
keep them quiet and prevent them from attack was a mystery.
The reason we survive the presence of these endogenous
retroviruses (ERVs)... viruses that attack and are passed on
through germ cells, the cells that give rise to eggs and
sperm... is because something keeps the killers silent. ERVs
are transcriptionally silenced during early embryogenesis by
histone and DNA methylation, but the initiators of this
process are largely unknown.
The actions of related genes
can
be coordinated by a master regulatory protein that
recognizes a group of similar but not identical DNA
sequences, while ignoring more distantly related sequences.
The work yields insights into evolution and gene
expression/silencing, as well as potential new therapies for
treating other retrovirus-based maladies (e.g., HIV). The
researchers also demonstrated that a master regulatory
protein called KAP1 appears to orchestrate these inhibitory
proteins in silencing would-be viruses. When KAP1 is
removed, for example, the viral DNA "wakes up," multiplies
and induces innumerable mutations.
Because retroviruses tend to mutate
their host's DNA, they have an immense power and potential
to alter genes. Some distant ancestors silenced the
retrovirus during ancient pandemics, then passed on their
ability. Great waves of endogenous retrovirus coincide with
the times evolution seemed to leap ahead. "In our genome
we find traces of the last two major waves. The first took
place 100 million years ago, at the time when mammals
started to develop, and the second about fifty million years
ago, just before the first anthropoid primates," he
says.
Discovery of the KAP1 mechanism
could stimulate the search for new therapeutic approaches
for AIDS.
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DNA is composed of
chromosomes and genes that, in addition to being an individual human
blueprint, carry ancestral and cultural imprints and codes for every
conceivable human trait from our evolutionary past. Although the
human embryo developing in the womb may not literally
pass through stages of its evolutionary ancestry, human
DNA has reproduced itself with incredible accuracy
throughout human evolution.
