In a current article in Nature called “The dark side of the human genome,” Kelly Rae Chi describes how the genome is 99% comprised of dark (not yet understood) regulatory functions — as distinct from the 1% that we have sequenced and discovered in their association with proteins.
One of the key points of my book, If DNA is Software, Who Wrote The Code?: The Profound Significance of Life’s Programming Language, is that there can be no code without meaning — and no meaning without Mind.
If we compare DNA code to software code, one thing becomes clear:
They work identically.
Both convey meaning, but the logical point to be made is that there can be no meaning without mind. All of our own software has layers of meaning, and it has been devised by some of the great programming minds in computer science.
In this article, Chi writes: “Scientists are uncovering the hidden switches in our genome that dial gene expression up and down, but much work lies ahead to peel back the many layers of regulation.”
So within the dark 99% of uncharted DNA are the means to regulate the rest — to make judgments and determinations as we can also make with software. We can compare this, for example, to a form on a web page that uses an If/Then statement to determine whether you will receive a credit card by declaring “variable” to hold information (value).
Apparently within the encoded patterns of DNA there are similar value judgments going on.
From the same Nature article: “Cancer is essentially a regulatory or epigenetic program that is superimposed on a cell, and the result of that program is the development of genetic and genomic instability,” says Stamatoyannopoulos. “As we’ve analysed lots of cancer genomes, all of these patterns now are starting to come out that were previously not imagined to exist.”
In other words, there are mathematical formulas that determine environmental factors (epigenetics), some of which, for example, maintain stability within our cells as we interact with the environment (eat certain foods, ingest toxins, etc.), that are based upon mathematical logic.
This is not human mathematical logic — this is within reality. It is akin to the notion that “we did not invent geometry — we discovered it.”
(The mathematics of Pythagoras were correct before Pythagoras came on the scene. The sum of the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle ALWAYS equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides, with or without scientists understanding it to be so.)
Now, with our current and relatively recent experience with software and apps, which are written with rigorous logic according to the rules of our own programming languages, can we finally recognize DNA for what it is — an organic programming language?
We refer to the programming languages we have created, and the programs we derive therefrom, as intellectual property — “mind stuff” — and we give it legal protection.
Now we have discovered that the organic code that runs our own bodies and all of life works the same way, and is far more complex and sophisticated. We have “decoded” the tip of its iceberg.
We know enough now to switch certain genes on and off with proteins according to the sequence of symbols we have assigned to the proteins being activated (A, C, T, and G).
But instead of that opening our science up to the obvious reality of an immensely higher intelligence at work within “Nature,” we simply take this fact for granted and continue tinkering with the program without recognizing a far greater operating system — the immense mental power behind the code — Consciousness.
via Collective - Evolution