If a spy slips a piece of paper to his handler, and then the counter-espionage officer arrests them and gets the piece of paper, and the piece of paper just says “85”, then I don’t know wtf that means, but I do learn something like “the spy is not communicating all that much information that his superiors don’t already know”.
By the same token, if you say that humans have 25,000 genes (or whatever), that says something important about how many specific things the genome designed in the human brain and body. For example, there’s something in the brain that says “if I’m malnourished, then reduce the rate of the (highly-energy-consuming) nonshivering thermogenesis process”. It’s a specific innate (not learned) connection between two specific neuron groups in different parts of the brain, I think one in the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus, the other in the periaqueductal gray of the brainstem (two of many hundreds or low-thousands of little idiosyncratic cell groups in the hypothalamus and brainstem). There’s nothing in the central dogma of molecular biology, and there’s nothing in the chemical nature of proteins, that makes this particular connection especially prone to occurring, compared to the huge number of superficially-similar connections that would be maladaptive (“if I’m malnourished, then get goosebumps” or whatever). So this connection must be occupying some number of bits of DNA—perhaps not a whole dedicated protein, but perhaps some part of some protein, or whatever. And there can only be so many of that type of thing, given a mere 25,000 genes for the whole body and everything in it.
That’s an important thing that you can learn from the size of the genome. We can learn it without expecting aliens to be able to decode DNA or anything like that. And Archimedes’s comment above doesn’t undermine it—it’s a conclusion that’s robust to the “procedural generation” complexities of how the embryonic development process unfolds.
If a spy slips a piece of paper to his handler, and then the counter-espionage officer arrests them and gets the piece of paper, and the piece of paper just says “85”, then I don’t know wtf that means, but I do learn something like “the spy is not communicating all that much information that his superiors don’t already know”.
By the same token, if you say that humans have 25,000 genes (or whatever), that says something important about how many specific things the genome designed in the human brain and body. For example, there’s something in the brain that says “if I’m malnourished, then reduce the rate of the (highly-energy-consuming) nonshivering thermogenesis process”. It’s a specific innate (not learned) connection between two specific neuron groups in different parts of the brain, I think one in the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus, the other in the periaqueductal gray of the brainstem (two of many hundreds or low-thousands of little idiosyncratic cell groups in the hypothalamus and brainstem). There’s nothing in the central dogma of molecular biology, and there’s nothing in the chemical nature of proteins, that makes this particular connection especially prone to occurring, compared to the huge number of superficially-similar connections that would be maladaptive (“if I’m malnourished, then get goosebumps” or whatever). So this connection must be occupying some number of bits of DNA—perhaps not a whole dedicated protein, but perhaps some part of some protein, or whatever. And there can only be so many of that type of thing, given a mere 25,000 genes for the whole body and everything in it.
That’s an important thing that you can learn from the size of the genome. We can learn it without expecting aliens to be able to decode DNA or anything like that. And Archimedes’s comment above doesn’t undermine it—it’s a conclusion that’s robust to the “procedural generation” complexities of how the embryonic development process unfolds.