How (if at all) does DNA employ math that is not a part of it's own chemistry?

I think that you are over anthropomorphizing DNA. It is just a chemical. It doesn’t ‘know’ anything.

People are not just DNA. If you wanted to base your analysis of what a person is purely on chemistry it would be better to say that people are just water rather than DNA. DNA is used to hold the ‘plans’ for building other chemicals that form part of the complex matrix that makes up a living organism (not just people). Just like the plans for a building is not the real building, DNA is not the organism. I don’t think anything else on Earth but people know about pi, so I would think that human DNA has no better understanding of pi than the DNA of a worm.

This happens to me all the time so maybe I should just adjust… I use hyperboly to express my impatience and general arrogance. I may have completely missed the definition of the word chemistry though.

I asked about DNA in general but I suppose I mean relatively complex lifeforms like plants and animals. In order for DNA to create the things it does it needs to create circles of various sizes, bear with me here. Mathematically speaking all this requires is the formula for drawing a circle (including pi, and the intended size which is variable). My question is what DNA’s building blocks for a circle are (pi). And how this process is augmented for different sizes. If indeed that is how DNA creates all these circles I see everywhere.

Everyone clear? because I’m still not.

I think you are misunderstanding DNA. DNA is not a blueprint, it’s more like a recipe.

@Zyx No need for explanations. I thought your question was very intriging, and took it to be figurative and not literal. Of course, DNA doesn’t even know it is DNA. @markferg is exactly right that DNA primarily codes for the release of chemicals such as proteins and RNA molecules, along with replication of itself. These other chemicals, first supplied by the mother along with amino acids, hormones, lipids, get the whole process of life going. As fun a movie as Jurassic Park was, it would not be remotely possible to clone a dinosaur just from DNA. You would have to have all the chemical soup the mother’s body supplies and it would have to be released at exactly the right schedule and in the right amounts, or all you would get is a useless mass of protoplasm.

DNA certainly doesn’t “know” what a Mandelbrot set is. But Mandelbrot sets are written into the very fabric of the Universe at scales from the infinitely small to the infinitely large. We see them in the tiny veins and neurons of a human brain and in the endless sand dunes with ever tinier ripples on them and in the orderly spin of spiral galaxies.

It happens I was thinking about this very thing today. In fact, I actually wrote up a question about it, but when I searched I realized I had already asked something so close to it that I couldn’t post the new one. But I was wondering how fractal math underlies and brings self organization to all the apparent stochastic chaos of the Universe. Look at the list of naturally occurring fractals. from a Google image search.

Water molecules don’t “know” how to crystallize in the intricate, uniform patterns snowflakes assume, each infinitely beautiful and totally unique. But something, some math hard-coded into the fabric of everything here, “knows” how to tell them to crystallize this way.

It is infinitely awe inspiring, the sense of the divine that comes from reality and hard facts instead of myth and superstition.

I recommend that you read an introductory book on genetics and pay attention to how DNA functions.

I don’t think we yet know how DNA works. We know some of it, but there’s a lot left to find out. DNA expresses itself differently depending on the conditions it finds itself in. For example, if a person stresses their arms by trying to lift weights, the DNA will roll out the program that builds more muscle tissue.

How, exactly, does that work? Well, we have to identify the genes associated with that activity, and identify the way the environment triggers that specific response, and on and on.

Math is a language. DNA doesn’t use language. It uses chemistry. So math is not used by DNA.

@wundayatta I work in a genetic field and I think you would be very impressed by the level of detail we do know about those pathways. Agreed, not all is known, but far more than I’m guessing you are assuming.

Agreed about math being a language. One can use math to model the behavior of DNA, and then generate hypotheses from these models (depending on how accurate the model is), but math is a way to describe things.

Think of it like DNA obeying laws of physics/chemistry, and math is the language in which those fields are “spoken.” Otherwise the concepts would be too difficult to discuss in words without terrible misinterpretations creeping in.

You may find Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field model interesting, since Sheldrake argues DNA does not, in fact, contain anywhere near enough information to account for the complexity and behaviours we see.

That is an interesting theory, but unfortunately I find it unconvincing. There is no mathematical rigor behind it. Not to say I know it to be untrue, there just isn’t anything there to convince me to stand behind it.

@cockswain Would I be impressed? I am the carrier of some genes that have had some rather unfortunate effects on my health. One of my medical providers is a major researcher in the genetics of one of these conditions. I see how not close they are to knowing anything useful to testing my condition.

For God’s sake! They are using statistics to find the genes involved. Statistics! You know what that means, don’t you? That means you are… we are never going to know much for sure about how our genes do their job. It’ll always be something of a crap shoot. The meds they make may or may not do the job we hope they will do. There is always a chance that with any particular person there could be some very unfortunate side effects.

Well, I guess how one defines usefulness in this case is relative. I do get what you’re saying, but without knowing how they are applying stats in your case, I can’t fairly comment. I suppose I’m impressed by the level of detail we know about the tiny minutia in some biopathways (like change this atom here in the ribosomal subunit and you get this significant effect on the shape of this protein). But I totally get the whole “so what, where’s a useful drug” attitude as well.

The problem with genetic-based medicine is getting it into right area of the affected cells to have an effect.

But there are probably many cases where the interactions between tens, if not hundreds or thousands of genes are responsible for various outcomes. At best, you might be able to identify types of outcomes, but it seems like the individual outcomes could be infinite, or close to it. Even with quantum computers, I am skeptical that we model even enough of the interactions to be able to have even a small level of confidence that any meddling we do will result in the outcome we desire.

Like I say, we may be able to know categories of outcomes, but I don’t think we’ll ever be able to be very specific, except in cases where only one or two genes are involved. Although, even then, to identify all the ways that gene… or shit, how about the alleles? I don’t know how complex they are. My knowledge of genetics is not that great. My understanding is the the alleles are where the action really takes place.

You say we can get down to the atomic level in understanding what they do. I say that’s fine and wonderful, but it isn’t sufficient, even if we map every piece of genetic material in a human body to an atomic level, it won’t be sufficient because there are too many possible interactions. I doubt if the probabilities of any particular outcome from an interaction or set of interactions will be very high.

So we’re going to be left playing craps, and that won’t be good enough. People will need to have much more confidence than that in order to allow themselves to be messed with, genetically.

Of course, there will be animal experiments, and we’ll see how close we hit the mark. My guess is that it won’t be very close much of the time. It’s just an intuition I have based on what I do know about statistics. Biostats is a big field these days. All I know is where there are stats, there is uncertainty, and where there is uncertainty, people are not going to want to take chances on their health. Only those who are about to die will be willing to take those kinds of chances.

So I remain skeptical about the promises our fantasies about genetics have given us. We believe our power is much greater than I think it is. I hope I’m proven wrong, but I really think that the power of genetics is being oversold, both in the popular understanding, and even amongst, or perhaps mostly amongst true believers—those who work in the field.

I hope I’m wrong.

I guess I’m getting off the subject here.