Of Men and Machines

While navigating through the interwebs and dodging those paths leading to cute cat videos, I stumbled upon some remarkable lectures by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and biologist Richard Dawkins. Even more remarkable was one involving both of them :


In the course of the lecture they discuss about evolution and how almost all life on earth is made up of the same 4 amino acids - A,C,G,T. Also how the vastly more intelligent homosapien shares ~98% of the DNA with the relatively dumb primates. What really caught my attention was the Dawkins comment on how intelligence is not merely because of the extra 2% unique DNA but rather the sequence in which the other other common DNA line themselves up. Blame me for being a geek, but I can't help drawing similarities to how computers are designed and how they have evolved.

The binary designation of 0/1 (Ground/rail voltage) are akin to the 4 basic DNA components (a quaternary system). The 98% common sequences are the microinstructions : the ADD, SUB, MOV, LOAD etc. These are the things which are necessary to make anything work. I'd like to think of the unique 2% as the proprietary instructions which speed up a processing : MMX of Intel, SSE of AMD. But what ties it up all together is the sequence in which these instructions are carried out : the program, the source code!

Software is evolving by permuting these sequences. Hardware evolution is necessitated by new software requirements.It really doesn't matter if you have a Core i7 or a Pentium III if all you are running is Windows 3.1(probably similar to motor functions, sight, senses). But in order to run our DotA, NFS, CoD games we do require that extra which a Pentium III cannot offer.I'd like to think that how we evolve things around us is influenced by how we yourselves have evolved in nature.

I'm sure this thought has popped up in others' heads as well. Probably the Wachowski brothers
thought on similar lines when they came up with the story line for the Matrix trilogy.

You may think there's hardly any sense in what I'm saying here, probably it is all hogwash. But I urge you to hear the lecture and how they put across their ideas.

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