Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

"Balls!" said the Queen

“Balls!” said the Queen, “If I had two, I’d be King.”

Today I’m laying the groundwork for some future blogs. My thesis is that we use a life model for the things we create. I’m not talking about making a baby, although that is an example worth noting. Anyone who thinks they make babies has a bit of a conceit. We enable offspring in a very minor sort of way. The clutch and grab we give to the process is analogous to EVOLUTION in development of life… ( It’s blown way out of proportion.)

What I’m referring to is that in our creative endeavors we emulate the life model. It is consciously or subconsciously the reference point from which all creation begins.

A better example is Computer Science. It is fair to say that is a creation of man, however when we look at it, what is transpiring is something very similar to a process that is much more ancient.

A computer program is written in a language. That language encodes bits of information that gives a computer, instructions on how to do something. It happens that a computer is an electro-mechanical device but the more we see it evolving ,the more it looks to have in common with the bio-machine we all have some familiarity with.

A computer might be programmed in a simple or higher level language. Our bodies are written in a bio language in a code we refer to as DNA. It is at the source a nucleic acid that is found concentrated in the nucleus of living things.

A bit in a computer program is analogous to a bit of DNA. These bits are sheathed with proteins to make chromosomes. (Is any of this sounding familiar?)

In a human being there are 46 chromosomes in most cells, two of which are very sexy and the other 44, the more mundane, are called autosomal. Autosomal chromosomes are identical in both men and woman. Any difference between the sexes lies in the X and the Y variations on the sex chromosome.. In biology class we learned that through cell reduction an egg and sperm are created. A man determines the sex of an organism by passing on a Y or X and 22 autosomal and a woman contributes an XX and the same number of autosomal.

Don’t you love this unsolicited tutorial on biology? Well the best is yet to come. Inside the DNA is something, for want of a better term, called a gene. This is a thread-like piece of tape that contains the code that enables a cell to produce a unit of protein. A protein is the basic building block of life that enables living things to operate in the environment that surrounds us all

How cool is that?

Oxford Journal of Life Sciences, Volume 9, Issue 11 Pages 2353-2358