11 hours ago, exchemist said:

Random? Who says patterns in genetics are random?

The whole point about evolution is that it is anything but "random", because of natural selection. The patterns in genetic material are the ones that tend to lead towards more successful reproduction of the population of organisms concerned. So any patterns that lead to less reproductive success tend to get filtered out over the generations. What results is therefore not random at all. (It is true that creationists like to ballock on about evolution implying life is the result of "random" processes, but that is because they have a religious agenda which requires that they deliberately ignore entirely the role of natural selection.)

Beyond that, the pattern in genetics is not random; the genes that code for a particular trait aren’t random. If they were, identical twins wouldn’t have identical features

On 11/7/2026 at 7:07 AM, Trurl said:

I think that patterns in genetic information will not be random.

Nobody has suggested that genetic patterns are random. If they were random, cells would not function. The point that I (and others) have been making is that genetic patterns exist within a context governed by chemistry and biology, and that mathematical patterns that might exist do not provide sufficient context to explain such patterns.

I am a believer of the idea that the laws of physics exist for purely mathematical reasons. But going up to the next tier of physical organisation called "chemistry", though completely dependent on the laws of physics, has a much reduced reliance on mathematics. Biochemistry depends on chemistry but is its own tier of organisation because there is much more to biochemistry than just chemistry (sometimes, I wonder if it's possible to study biochemistry without knowing any chemistry, but having studied both, I'm not in a position to answer that question). And note that I mentioned "chemistry" and "biology" separately above. That's because the impact that chemistry and biology have on genetics is entirely separate. Thus, although ultimately mathematics is (I believe) responsible for everything, the nature of emergent behaviour is such that higher tiers of organisation contain fundamentally additional notions than the tiers below them.

For example, consider the following polypeptide amino-acid sequence:

Tyr-Gly-Gly-Phe-Met-Thr-Ser-Glu-Lys-Ser-Gln-Thr-Pro-Leu-Val-Thr-Leu-Phe-Lys-Asn-Ala-Ile-Ile-Lys-Asn-Ala-Tyr-Lys-Lys-Gly-Glu

Considering only the sequence itself, perhaps also including anything about the amino acids that form the sequence, but without searching for the sequence on the internet or elsewhere (that would be cheating), try to work out what function this polypeptide performs. Yes, I know what the polypeptide is and what it does, but I don't believe that such knowledge can be obtained from the sequence itself without any physiological context. That is, the amino-acid sequence only makes sense within a larger context that has not been provided. Note that one might be able to determine the three-dimensional shape of the polypeptide from the sequence. But I maintain that even the three-dimensional shape of the polypeptide would not be sufficient to determine its function outside the larger context.

Even the entire human genome is not entirely self-contained. We need nutrients from the external environment without which parts of our genome may not make sense. We interact in other ways with our environment that probably affects parts of our genome also. Each lifeform has a genome that allows it to survive in the environment, but those genomes are different, representing different solutions to essentially the same problem. But the details of any particular solution to the problem of survival depend on the specific environment, not all genomes admit survival in all environments. Again, this is beyond anything mathematics could determine.

Edited November 8Nov 8 by KJW

On 11/7/2026 at 6:42 AM, exchemist said:

Random? Who says patterns in genetics are random?

On 11/4/2026 at 8:55 AM, npts2020 said:

There are all kinds of random patterns in nature. Why do you think there is meaning behind any particular one?

On 11/7/2026 at 6:42 AM, exchemist said:

The whole point about evolution is that it is anything but "random", because of natural selection.

Well if we agree it’s not random there has to be a distinct pattern. We agree life is a special case and that it has something that is a map. Such as DNA there are patterns. The pattern is just a description of how it works. We haven’t found every pattern. I am suggesting using math like in statistics or cryptography to find new patterns.

On 11/7/2026 at 6:42 AM, exchemist said:

There is no suggestion, in the use of the term "code", of anything having been deliberately hidden, by some intelligent entity. It is just a biochemical mechanism that needs to be elucidated.

I don’t believe I talked about an entity secret code. Although DNA is one of the biological properties unique to an individual. But that is not the crypto aspect I was arguing. I am saying we have undiscovered patterns. And patterns relate to cryptography because crypto protocols are just rules to a set of functions that are based on pattern that through experimentation and mathematical we added description to a phenomenon that otherwise would be a mystery.

On 11/6/2026 at 8:22 PM, swansont said:

Coulomb’s law is >200 years old

The equation is simple because that’s what describes the behavior. You can’t “keep it simple” if the behavior doesn’t warrant it. Then it’s just wrong.

Exactly. The reason that DNA is so complex is just the amount of information. That also is what happens in cryptography. We have large data and are looking for patterns that will lessen computation.

I am not interested in a code left by an intelligent being. I am looking for a code that is hidden because it hasn’t been discovered yet.

Shout Out to Rosalind Franklin—-the real reason behind the helix model.

Just now, Trurl said:

Well if we agree it’s not random there has to be a distinct pattern. We agree life is a special case and that it has something that is a map. Such as DNA there are patterns. The pattern is just a description of how it works. We haven’t found every pattern. I am suggesting using math like in statistics or cryptography to find new patterns.

What makes you think that people are not using math to analyze genetic patterns? What difference do you expect using cryptographic techniques to make?

On 11/8/2026 at 5:17 PM, swansont said:

What makes you think that people are not using math to analyze genetic patterns? What difference do you expect using cryptographic techniques to make?

Well I think they are already using cryptographic methods as I have mentioned earlier.

To me it is like crypto because of the magnitude of the combinations of data. I tried to give examples through my posts. It wasn’t just a bunch of bs.

DNA has an original code it is communicated in RNA to form new proteins. I know that no one has made the communication and message and building into a cryptography process, but maybe they should.

I know the chemistry is hard to relate to and define mathematically, but I think if we don’t do it AI will.

I have an elementary understanding of genetics. But I believe math applies to everything. I mean I can’t think of anything we’ve encountered that doesn’t have some application of mathematics.

I am interested in cryptography in genetics because cryptography sorts one in the billions. For humans we can’t brute force trillions. We need a correlation or pattern to make sense of things.

And the pattern would have to be complex to work. I believe the more we found patterns the more patterns would present itself. Once it is found the easier we could sort more and more data.

Discoveries are often based on a need. Here the need is to understand the billions. We could rely on AI, but I would prefer humans were in the lead in genetics.

In the book Crypto by Steve Levy he describes how public key cryptography is based on the need of planes needing to define friend or foe.

Cryptography had never been used in such ways before. But information, messages, and communication all relate to cryptography. Why would we believe it can’t apply to biology?

One more reason I think cryptography applies to genetics which may sound insightful or completely absurd is that we are only looking at the result of the reproduction and formation of proteins we do not have a language.

Just as with AI training we know the information it was trained on and the output but with billions of processes no one can explain the results.

Do we look at the genetic process as a machine? Do the chemical reactions occur based on the information of RNA? And how do the reactions in the cell relate to the overall design of the organism? And how do different cells interact with each other to complete the organs and then the organism?

Again billions of processes and if cryptography cannot find patterns we are reliant on computers.

19 hours ago, Trurl said:

But information, messages, and communication all relate to cryptography. Why would we believe it can’t apply to biology?

Cryptography is about secrecy. Where is the secrecy in genetics? It is not cryptography simply because of "information, messages, and communication". To say that "information, messages, and communication all relate to cryptography" is to cast the relationship in the wrong direction.

The issue of wildly conflating different terms and concepts remains a problem. For example:

20 hours ago, Trurl said:

To me it is like crypto because of the magnitude of the combinations of data. I tried to give examples through my posts. It wasn’t just a bunch of bs.

This suggest that any multidimensional data set somehow qualifies as crypto, which is absurd and ignores whole areas of maths that deal with it without any relationship to it. In fact, I haven't seen in this thread any concise and uniformly applied definition of crypto in the first place.

An no, in biology we don't apply magic algorithm that somehow explains what is going on. Biology is largely reliant on experimental data.