The story of DNA keeps becoming curiouser and curiouser.  On the one hand the story of DNA might be viewed as sort of the ultimate triumph of the reductionist Western scientific approach.  The stuff of life is parsed into smaller and smaller pieces until at last the fundamental molecule is found and the clockwork method by which this imparts the generational traits of life is deduced through observation and experimentation.  The “central dogma” then of DNA –> RNA –> protein is enshrined as a comfortable, secular, mechanistic explanation of life.  There are some, shall we say “loose ends” though with the DNA story that are not so easily pigeon holed.  Science as it is presented to society almost always takes the position that things are 90% wrapped up, there are just a few outliers here or there, or unexplained findings which could politely modify the prevailing wisdom.  When one delves into such topics, it often seems that instead there is a small portion of experience where there is perhaps a 1% understanding, while underneath and around this boils a seething cauldron of mystery.  It may be less comfortable but it is more exciting. 

As we have detailed on this site previously the public story of DNA is common knowledge and we are seemingly now only left dealing with the societal consequences of the application of this well understood field. From Gregor Mendel and his pea plants to Oswald Avery determining that ribonucleic acid not proteins was the stuff of generational inheritance of traits, to Watson and Crick’s double helix and complimentary base pairs, to the deciphered codons translated into amino acid sequences, the story is certainly a fantastic one, though now a mature science with only tweaks here and there in techniques and applications, right?  There is of course still the 90% of DNA that does not code for proteins, we don’t know what it does, if anything.  So being not understood, scientists rather arrogantly term it, “junk DNA,” leftover garbage from evolutionary dead-ends and random viral infections.

Crazy Russian scientists say the darnedest things.  Sometimes, I have to wonder if they don’t get together over a bottle of Vodka and joke amongst themselves, “I wonder if we can get anyone in the West to actually take this seriously, no no, thats not out there enough, let tell them this!”  See for instance, Dr. Yevgeny Podkletnov’s peer-reviewed published papers on the anti-gravity effects of rotating super conducting magnets as just one of many examples.  Perhaps Mary Poppin’s umbrella is real after all.  Actually, I suspect, the “backward” Russians are quite often decades ahead of the US and Europe in many basic science areas.  Certainly they bring a creativity and willingness to challenge mainstream scientific views that often appears lacking in the United States.

So in the 1990s a team of Russian scientists at the Russian Academy of Sciences led by Dr. Pjotr Garjajev took a long and hard look at DNA.  The findings they reported on many different fronts are … mind bending I guess is the word that comes to mind.

First off, the Russian scientific team took a more holistic approach in their DNA research than that done in the West.  Part of this involved having experts in linguistics analyze the DNA sequences.  Using statistical methods to look for universal patterns of syntax, semantics and grammar present in all languages, the scientists found that DNA codons were non-randomly organized along these same linguistic principles, in both coding and non-coding areas of the genome.  This work was also reproduced at Boston University and Harvard in 1994, (Linguistic Features of Noncoding DNA Sequences).

    “We extend the Zipf approach to analyzing linguistic texts to the statistical study of DNA base pair sequences and find that the noncoding regions are more similar to natural languages than the coding regions. We also adapt the Shannon approach to quantifying the “redundancy” of a linguistic text in terms of a measurable entropy function, and demonstrate that noncoding regions in eukaryotes display a smaller entropy and larger redundancy than coding regions, supporting the possibility that noncoding regions of DNA may carry biological information.”

The findings in this paper were subsequently criticized in a further paper in 1996 in Nucleic Acids Research, see here.  I’m not going to pretend to be able to sort this out, least of all without spending weeks trying to get a bit of a handle on such a complex topic.  However, just to think of applying linguistic analysis to the DNA code strikes me as both quite rational and quite outside the box thinking at the same time.  If the findings of the Russian National Academy of Sciences and Harvard scientists are verified it would raise some interesting corollaries.  First off, why is non-coding DNA organized along linguistic principles?  Even more general, perhaps “language” is not a super imposed add-on of higher life forms in describing and communicating reality, maybe it is an organizational component of all life, something itself woven into reality.  I am tempted to mention the two words “intelligent design” here, however, there is so much vitriol that seems to have surrounded them that for some they no longer have meaning and have become more a Pavlovian cue to begin frothing.

While this is strange enough, from here things get weirder, much, much weirder.  As the post is getting a bit long will stop here and definitely try and get back to this tomorrow, would just say to whet your appetite that just one part of what we’ll talk about might bring to mind the bit in Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland where describing the Chesire cat Alice comments, “I’ve often seen a cat without a grin but never a grin without a cat.”

Ciao,

Paul

Had to throw in one more music video, Groovy Baby, Yeah!