The ~300MB of genetic code we have is a very small amount of space to work with if you have to start specifying the function of individual cells. Whatever unpacking a functioning human from genes involves, it has to include a substantial amount of “figuring it out at runtime”.
And indeed, we find a lot of techniques that look an awful lot like something you’d expect to find in the Demoscene.
Zebra stripes aren’t directly encoded in the genome. Instead it’s more like “make stripes every 400um at X point into development, then allow them to grow with everything else”. (With X varying across species.)
(Although I am not a biochemist, so take this with a grain of salt.)
This is an awful lot like the sorts of fake-a-complex-world-by-using-an-rng-and-procedural-generation approaches often found in size-constrained demos.
The ~300MB of genetic code we have is a very small amount of space to work with if you have to start specifying the function of individual cells. Whatever unpacking a functioning human from genes involves, it has to include a substantial amount of “figuring it out at runtime”.
And indeed, we find a lot of techniques that look an awful lot like something you’d expect to find in the Demoscene.
Zebra stripes aren’t directly encoded in the genome. Instead it’s more like “make stripes every 400um at X point into development, then allow them to grow with everything else”. (With X varying across species.)
(Although I am not a biochemist, so take this with a grain of salt.)
This is an awful lot like the sorts of fake-a-complex-world-by-using-an-rng-and-procedural-generation approaches often found in size-constrained demos.