How do you figure that DNA/RNA isn’t language? It’s a system of abstract symbols that carry information, it uses highly complex syntaxes, there are even different dialects, large parts of it is higher level than Assembly Languages, and it can carry context between organisms.
Limiting your definition to organisms is shortsighted. Fully sapient organelles, computers, crystals, superorganisms, or whatever else could could create vast galaxy spanning civilizations with dizzyingly deep culture and art, and you’d argue that they don’t use language because they’re not specifically a certain kind of individual?
Hm, interesting point regarding not limiting the definition of language to individuals only. Maybe I should have said entities? And my point is still valid, just because everyone of us carries DNA with us, we still cannot “talk” DNA. I meant this mismatch in various levels of the complex multicellular entities we are.
Does DNA/RNA really pose an example of complex communication? It certainly is some highly specialized form of storing and transferring information. Calling it dialects sounds more like anthropomorphizing it to make it sound more like a language. Not sure if it is my human bias accustomed to human-style languages, but it somehow doesn’t feel like a language to me when the information is just past further down the line and there is no real back-and-forth?
But even if I’d agree that DNA was a language, it would be something fundamentally different to what we commonly understand as language. So what is it worth? We probably need different categories of language then. And on the level of individuals, DNA would be an unintelligible form of language while humanlike language would be unintelligible on cellular level.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m not set on rejecting DNA as a language. I just try to explore the opposite position to yours ;)
I think the advantage of thinking of DNA as some kind of program code is that we can draw inspiration about what can/can’t be done from IT. And the other way around, nature’s DNA code might give inspiration to computer language development.
But thinking of DNA as code is pretty different than thinking of it as a language, isn’t it? That’s why I brought up the example of binary code in the first place. And sure, I completely agree that DNA is very much like binary code (just more complex). But code written in a human readable form is again different to that because we need language to understand machine readable code. There needs to be some kind of translation for us. Because language is a form of abstraction that is not present in neither code nor DNA.
How would you define entity them? Why not have the state of fitness communicating with possible future states, or evolutionary processes communicating with themselves, like a massive comment thread unbroken over 3+ billion years?
Calling it dialects sounds more like anthropomorphizing it to make it sound more like a language
Anthropomorphization? Kinda, sure. But different brances of life do use DNA/RNA differently, like us with separate chromosomes and one-way genes, prokaryotes with circular chromosomes that can be read in both directions, and viruses with free genes to hijack other DNA/RNA systems. We don’t understand all the ins and outs of genes yet, and I’m certainly not an expert in the topic, so maybe it would be more accurate to call these variations “language groups” and instead use the compatability of the proteome and metabolome to define languages, with genes simply being the words and some syntax.
it somehow doesn’t feel like a language to me when the information is just past further down the line and there is no real back-and-forth?
different categories of language
This I can almost agree on. A technical manual or a journal is definitely a form of language, but you can’t have a conversation with it. A category of languages that can be used for conversations would exclude most genetic languages, as well as all programming languages. Both could still be used to define a communication protocol though, which might still be considered a conversational language. For example neurotransmitters or HDMI. The depth of this communication could be quite shallow though, even if they carry greater meaning in a different format.
Going further than this we could define a catergory that has enough communication depth and mutability to directly transmit arbitrary ideas, which would pretty much cover only primate, corvid, and cetacean language. At this point we’ve moved beyond the details of grammar and vocabulary and into the methods and capabilities which generate and use grammar and vocabulary. Certainly an interesting category to define and explore the limits of, but definitely not what most people think of when you say “language”. Perhaps “laguability” would be a better term for this?
In my opinion, there’s definitely a huge amount of difference between our conversation and what bacteria do with and between themselves, but language probably isn’t the right word to differentiate them. It’s the difference between a die cast toy car, a pickup truck, an ICBM, and a novel; vastly different yet all called vehicles.
Hm, I think I start to see your point. I guess the thought of language as something like human language is biasing a lot what we consider language. It feels kinda weird, but if I shake off this narrow view on what a language is, all sorts of alternative ways to look at it come to mind.
I think it helped that you mentioned a technical manual that is a form of language but that doesn’t count as a conversation. And having a conversation in itself is very much biased by our human form of language.
And now that you mention the proteome and metabolome, it really seems like a much richer form of information and that much more back-and-forth is happening. I guess epigenetics have shown that the DNA/RNAs are much more plastic than we thought, too.
Thanks for this conversation, it did actually help me get to explore this much more and change my mind :)
I think part of this confusion comes from the general usage of language to mean specifically human art and culture, like “Language Arts” or “Vernacular Language”. Thinking about language as the simple components and systems that carry information might seem disrespectful to the totality of human expression, but I think it helps to see just how unique our flavour is, and how much we could grow.
Well I’m glad to have expanded your horizons! And also glad I got to use “proteome” in a conversation. It’s such a cool concept that most people won’t appreciate. :D
Haha yes, it is sometimes sad when other people around cannot really appreciate certain thoughts or concepts of one’s own.
One book that really got me excited about studying biology well over a decade ago was Evolution in four dimensions, which touches on some similar topics as in our conversation. Or maybe even in reverse, how language is actually some dimension of evolution in itself. Since then my knowledge on evolution and genetics got a bit rusty because I specialized in ecology. But I find it deeply fascinating how evolution works and what mind-boggling stuff it came up with.
How do you figure that DNA/RNA isn’t language? It’s a system of abstract symbols that carry information, it uses highly complex syntaxes, there are even different dialects, large parts of it is higher level than Assembly Languages, and it can carry context between organisms.
Limiting your definition to organisms is shortsighted. Fully sapient organelles, computers, crystals, superorganisms, or whatever else could could create vast galaxy spanning civilizations with dizzyingly deep culture and art, and you’d argue that they don’t use language because they’re not specifically a certain kind of individual?
Hm, interesting point regarding not limiting the definition of language to individuals only. Maybe I should have said entities? And my point is still valid, just because everyone of us carries DNA with us, we still cannot “talk” DNA. I meant this mismatch in various levels of the complex multicellular entities we are.
Does DNA/RNA really pose an example of complex communication? It certainly is some highly specialized form of storing and transferring information. Calling it dialects sounds more like anthropomorphizing it to make it sound more like a language. Not sure if it is my human bias accustomed to human-style languages, but it somehow doesn’t feel like a language to me when the information is just past further down the line and there is no real back-and-forth?
But even if I’d agree that DNA was a language, it would be something fundamentally different to what we commonly understand as language. So what is it worth? We probably need different categories of language then. And on the level of individuals, DNA would be an unintelligible form of language while humanlike language would be unintelligible on cellular level.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m not set on rejecting DNA as a language. I just try to explore the opposite position to yours ;)
I think the advantage of thinking of DNA as some kind of program code is that we can draw inspiration about what can/can’t be done from IT. And the other way around, nature’s DNA code might give inspiration to computer language development.
But thinking of DNA as code is pretty different than thinking of it as a language, isn’t it? That’s why I brought up the example of binary code in the first place. And sure, I completely agree that DNA is very much like binary code (just more complex). But code written in a human readable form is again different to that because we need language to understand machine readable code. There needs to be some kind of translation for us. Because language is a form of abstraction that is not present in neither code nor DNA.
Well, there is people that write assembly language code directly.
How would you define entity them? Why not have the state of fitness communicating with possible future states, or evolutionary processes communicating with themselves, like a massive comment thread unbroken over 3+ billion years?
Anthropomorphization? Kinda, sure. But different brances of life do use DNA/RNA differently, like us with separate chromosomes and one-way genes, prokaryotes with circular chromosomes that can be read in both directions, and viruses with free genes to hijack other DNA/RNA systems. We don’t understand all the ins and outs of genes yet, and I’m certainly not an expert in the topic, so maybe it would be more accurate to call these variations “language groups” and instead use the compatability of the proteome and metabolome to define languages, with genes simply being the words and some syntax.
This I can almost agree on. A technical manual or a journal is definitely a form of language, but you can’t have a conversation with it. A category of languages that can be used for conversations would exclude most genetic languages, as well as all programming languages. Both could still be used to define a communication protocol though, which might still be considered a conversational language. For example neurotransmitters or HDMI. The depth of this communication could be quite shallow though, even if they carry greater meaning in a different format.
Going further than this we could define a catergory that has enough communication depth and mutability to directly transmit arbitrary ideas, which would pretty much cover only primate, corvid, and cetacean language. At this point we’ve moved beyond the details of grammar and vocabulary and into the methods and capabilities which generate and use grammar and vocabulary. Certainly an interesting category to define and explore the limits of, but definitely not what most people think of when you say “language”. Perhaps “laguability” would be a better term for this?
In my opinion, there’s definitely a huge amount of difference between our conversation and what bacteria do with and between themselves, but language probably isn’t the right word to differentiate them. It’s the difference between a die cast toy car, a pickup truck, an ICBM, and a novel; vastly different yet all called vehicles.
Hm, I think I start to see your point. I guess the thought of language as something like human language is biasing a lot what we consider language. It feels kinda weird, but if I shake off this narrow view on what a language is, all sorts of alternative ways to look at it come to mind.
I think it helped that you mentioned a technical manual that is a form of language but that doesn’t count as a conversation. And having a conversation in itself is very much biased by our human form of language.
And now that you mention the proteome and metabolome, it really seems like a much richer form of information and that much more back-and-forth is happening. I guess epigenetics have shown that the DNA/RNAs are much more plastic than we thought, too.
Thanks for this conversation, it did actually help me get to explore this much more and change my mind :)
I think part of this confusion comes from the general usage of language to mean specifically human art and culture, like “Language Arts” or “Vernacular Language”. Thinking about language as the simple components and systems that carry information might seem disrespectful to the totality of human expression, but I think it helps to see just how unique our flavour is, and how much we could grow.
Well I’m glad to have expanded your horizons! And also glad I got to use “proteome” in a conversation. It’s such a cool concept that most people won’t appreciate. :D
Haha yes, it is sometimes sad when other people around cannot really appreciate certain thoughts or concepts of one’s own.
One book that really got me excited about studying biology well over a decade ago was Evolution in four dimensions, which touches on some similar topics as in our conversation. Or maybe even in reverse, how language is actually some dimension of evolution in itself. Since then my knowledge on evolution and genetics got a bit rusty because I specialized in ecology. But I find it deeply fascinating how evolution works and what mind-boggling stuff it came up with.