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 12 hours ago12 hr by KJW