spiritbear14

To answer the second question, the Central Dogma is interested in permanent changes at each stage, so the proteins can change the way DNA is expressed, but it cannot change the DNA sequence itself.

Not directly, but in a very long round about way they do. Like if I have a mutation that is evolutionarily positive, the only way that helps me pass on my DNA is through the expression of the proteins, without them I could not do anything. The proteins, and their interactions with the environment, creates new information that indirectly results in a evolutionary pressure on the DNA and at a population level can change it.

How can DNA 'get' more information if not from the proteins interactions with its environment?

Yeah, I don't think they read the whole article.

'while it's true they almost certainly do not "corrupt your DNA"' I second this

Here is an argument against the CD. We know that DNA changes overtime due indirectly from environmental conditions through evolutionary natural selection. So, why is this not an argument for the reversed direction of information?

the article argues that prions do not facilitate the flow of information in the same way the Dogma states. They simply change the way the protein is folded, but not the amino acids in the structure. I disagree with this (I have papers in this field that say the opposite), but that is the argument.

I think the idea is that this different codon sequence "may" be able to be used by the biological organism in a as yet to be discovered way. So, it wouldn't be useful in producing more proteins but may be able to affect the cell in some other way. I've never heard of anything like that though and the redundant codons is probably just the most thermodynamically efficient route to protein production. Interesting thought though

what Crick means, I believe, is that since multiple codons can code for a single amino acid the information or entropy in that set of codons is larger than the information transferred to the protein creating a many-to-one interaction. This means that you could, in principle, create an RNA sequence 'A' that codes for the same protein as another sequence 'B', but they are discretely different implying that this difference could be exploited to send different information back from proteins to this different RNA sequence. Kinda a reach in my opinion and not really important as proving you could do that doesn't bring us any closer to understanding what nature actually does. I guess the most interesting result with this research is analyzing the thermodynamics of this reverse interaction as an argument as to why nature has not evolved a way to do this.

This version makes more sense to me. When the halting problem was first explained to me in school the professor didn't get into what it actually meant in terms of computability, just that we couldn't tell if a program halted or not then we just moved on.

Probably not, there is not much on Mars, specifically water and nitrogen availability and other minerals, organic materials like amino acids in the soil, and lack of a root microbiome.

A plant would have to completely change how it operates, which is unlikely under selection processes.

or easily spy on ALL internet traffic, which they probably do anyway

I think the ether can be seen as a very primitive form of quantum field theory. It's like Newton attempting to do alchemy by turning lead into gold. We later find out that it is possible but not the way he was doing it and tremendously difficult.

But we don't know if ether or QFT or any of these theories is actually what's going on.

I think they should give it to Boeing