How much behavioral information can DNA store?

[Ashles]

Does anyone know how much innate behaviour DNA can store?

We know about animals being born knowing to avoid certain smells, plants, predators etc.
We know about animals being born understanding expressions, feeding behaviours, how to grasp...

So has there been any work done that has reached any kind of tentative theories as to how much behavioral information it might theoretically be possible for an organism to be born with?

Could one be born, theoretically, understanding English?

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Each DNA base can potentially store about 2 bits of information. Now, how many bits of information is required to encode the English language?

http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Authors/Computing/Bremermann-HJ/LoGC.html

~~ Paul

 

[Jeff Corey]

Innate behaviors include reflexes and more complex fixed action patterns. Insects seem to have more of those than humans.
But there is an innate tendency to learn from experience, which rids the DNA of an obligation to provide people with a full English repetoire, which wouldn't be helpful in a lot of enviroments.

 

[Dymanic]

Originally posted by Ashles

Could one be born, theoretically, understanding English?

Not English per se, necessarily, but you might have a look here:
http://www.psy.pdx.edu/PsiCafe/KeyTheorists/Chomsky.htm

Originally posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

Each DNA base can potentially store about 2 bits of information. Now, how many bits of information is required to encode the English language?

http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Au...nn-HJ/LoGC.html

This seems to me a bit like looking at just one among the infinite number of different pictures that could be drawn with a number two pencil -- and then looking at the pencil, trying to figure out where it could be storing all that information.

Originally posted by Jeff Corey

Innate behaviors include reflexes and more complex fixed action patterns. Insects seem to have more of those than humans.

That can't be right. Insects rely more on the innate behaviors they have, surely. But I would expect to find, if anything, much more innate behavior in humans, if only by virtue of the vastly greater quantity of input processed -- overlaid, of course, with so many layers of learned behavior as to allow us to indulge notions about it being fairly insignificant.

 

[CaveDave]

The way I see it, the more complex the central nervous system, the more the organism depends on learned behavior and less on genetic wiring, so I don't think a human's DNA (unless there was massively more of it) could store a much larger fraction of the total repertoir than it does now. Just guessing.

Dave

 

[drkitten]

Each DNA base can potentially store about 2 bits of information. Now, how many bits of information is required to encode the English language?

http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Authors/Computing/Bremermann-HJ/LoGC.html

Interesting paper, although hopelessly out of date. "Linguistic notions and their denotations may be considered as unconstrained stimulus-response pairs"? Even in 1963, Chomsky knew better. "A stimulus-response pattern where all different possible response assignments are equally probable"? Even Harris or Zipf wouldn't have made this assumption.

A better estimate of the information content of English, taking both linguistic structure and probability density into account, was made by Shannon (1951) and his followers -- a good (and relatively recent) measurement was by Brown et al. (1992) in Computational Linguistics, 18:1. The conventional estimate of the information content of English is about one bit of information per letter. The human genome has about 10^10 bits available under unrealistic assumptions of maximum capacity and minimum sophistication. Under these assumptions, the human genome could store about two million pages worth of language -- but wouldn't have enough icapacity left for the organism to "know" how to digest food.

 

[Ashles]

Well when I said uderstanding English I was taking it to an extreme - but might it then be theoretically possible for a creature to be born with a fairly basic language?

 

[RichardR]

Well when I said uderstanding English I was taking it to an extreme - but might it then be theoretically possible for a creature to be born with a fairly basic language?

How would the creature evolve this feature? Learned abilities do not find they way into DNA – if someone spends all day in the gym and becomes muscular, his son is not born with big muscles because of this. Jews have been circumcising their children for millennia and yet young Jewish boys are still born with foreskins.

 

[drkitten]

Well when I said uderstanding English I was taking it to an extreme - but might it then be theoretically possible for a creature to be born with a fairly basic language?

At some level, this is what Chomsky and some of his followers have been suggesting is present as a human "language organ" (q.v.) within the mind/brain. In a BBC interview on innateness of language, Chomsky is quoted as saying

QUESTION: What are the features of language that must be, at least partly, innate?

CHOMSKY: Every feature of language, from the articulatory gestures to the meanings of words, to the ways sentences are constructed. As soon as you begin to describe accurately the way these work, you see at once that the evidence from the environment does not determine those choices. In fact, it allows those choices but allows innumerable other choices and there is no point in the whole system where you fail to find this.

Chomsky's specific claim is that humans are genetically programmed to learn language, that is, to seek for (and find) certain kinds of regularities that are hard-wired aspects of any human language. This has been taken further, for example, with Berwick and Dorr's "Principles and Parameters" approach to language acquisition, which basically suggests that we have a complete description of the syntax of all possible human languages in our head at birth (obtained genetically), but there are a few 'user-programmable' options that we need to learn from the environment. (For example, "does this language drop pronouns [like Spanish] or not [like English]?") When a child hears a sentence that answers that kind of question, he sets his mental switch appropriately and "learns" that parameter.

But if you assume that we have adjustable switches inside our heads, it's just as easy to assume we have non-adjustable settings as well.

 

[drkitten]

How would the creature evolve this feature? Learned abilities do not find they way into DNA – if someone spends all day in the gym and becomes muscular, his son is not born with big muscles because of this. Jews have been circumcising their children for millennia and yet young Jewish boys are still born with foreskins.

No, but a person whose genetics prompt him to spend more time inthe gym may pass that behavior on. If the big muscles he gets as a results of spending time in the gym are reproductively helpful, his mutant children with the genes for big muscles will also gain this advantage.

If learning something is advantageous, a mutation that gives you the behavior without learning it might be even more advantageous. Dawkins discusses this at length in the Ancestor's Tale if you're interested.

 

[Anders]

Well when I said uderstanding English I was taking it to an extreme - but might it then be theoretically possible for a creature to be born with a fairly basic language?

Are we not born with a very basic way of communication? An infant can laugh and smile to show happiness, growl or cry to show disaffection. So in a way an infant can say yes and no, which is pretty amazing. Oh, and I might be wrong here. It might be that laughing and crying are learnt abilities.

 

[Dymanic]

Originally posted by RichardR

Learned abilities do not find they way into DNA - if someone spends all day in the gym and becomes muscular, his son is not born with big muscles because of this.

A mechanism has been proposed that would permit something similar:

"The Baldwin effect was proposed by J. Mark Baldwin and independently by both Henry Fairfield Osborne & C. Lloyd Morgan just about 100 years ago. In a general way, the Baldwin effect refers to the notion that learning can change the environment for a species in such a way as to influence the selective environment for the learned behavior or some closely related character. In the example proposed by Terry Deacon, something like the Baldwin effect accounts for the relatively rapid evolution of language and mind. His suggestion is that once a few members of a population developed the ability to communicate symbolically, the great advantage of such an ability would in itself create intense selection pressure promoting its further evolution."

The way Dennett explains the idea, a hypothetical "good trick" requiring a certain threshold number of neural wirings may come with some of those wirings preset from the factory, the remainder left to be established post-natally. In such a situation, selection could favor a shift from greater plasticity (by leaving more wirings free) to earlier aqusition of the "good trick" (by completing more of the wirings 'at the factory', thereby shortening the time needed to aquire the full set).

 

[Ashles]

No, but a person whose genetics prompt him to spend more time inthe gym may pass that behavior on. If the big muscles he gets as a results of spending time in the gym are reproductively helpful, his mutant children with the genes for big muscles will also gain this advantage.

If learning something is advantageous, a mutation that gives you the behavior without learning it might be even more advantageous. Dawkins discusses this at length in the Ancestor's Tale if you're interested.

I was taught this with the blacksmith example:
A blacksmith will work a lot with heavy things and develop large muscles - these won't be passsed on to his son.
But it is likely that it will be someone with strength who becomes a blacksmith in the first place.
So a blacksmith's son will probably be born with natural strength.

 

[Art Vandelay]

The way I see it, the more complex the central nervous system, the more the organism depends on learned behavior and less on genetic wiring, so I don't think a human's DNA (unless there was massively more of it) could store a much larger fraction of the total repertoir than it does now. Just guessing.

Dave

Doesn't having more learned behavior require more genetic wiring? If an organism learns how to do X, it must have already known how to learn how to do X. Which is harder: writing a program that understands English, or writing a program that, when exposed to any language, can pick it up?

 

[CaveDave]

Doesn't having more learned behavior require more genetic wiring? If an organism learns how to do X, it must have already known how to learn how to do X. Which is harder: writing a program that understands English, or writing a program that, when exposed to any language, can pick it up?

I'm not sure I agree with that first statement. I think more along the lines of having greater flexibility to learn or acquire a wider range of behaviors, and not a fixed set of strategies for learning would be desirable.

Some of the early computers had a rather limited programmability, but RISC and microcodable systems seem to outperform them. I think the any language case would be harder to design, but better.

But I could be wrong.

Dave

 

[Soapy Sam]

The ability to suppress innate behaviour would also be a useful trick to acquire.

For instance being able to defer satisfaction of a desire, inhibit a panic reaction to run, or learn not to breathe in when dumped in cold water...

This would most advantageous to a creature which already had the intelligence to tell when suppressing innate survival mechanisms was itself pro-survival.

So-If we have a range of programmed behavioural routines
An ability to choose, enhance or suppress any of them.
Intelligence to control the selection process.
Communication to pass the results of that intelligent selection to others by language and training.

At which level should we seek "Free Will.?"

 

[hammegk]

At which level should we seek "Free Will.?"

In the gap that occurs between stimulus and response. Cramer's transactional interpretation and Feynman's sum over all paths have some things making the choice in zero wall-clock time. More complex entities need a bit more "time" to choose.

 

[Art Vandelay]

I think more along the lines of having greater flexibility to learn or acquire a wider range of behaviors, and not a fixed set of strategies for learning would be desirable.

It would not be enough to be able to learn new behaviors; one would have to be able to distinguish between behaviors one should learn and ones which one should not. For instance, if you see a bird jump out of a tree, that is a behavior that you shouldn't learn.

Some of the early computers had a rather limited programmability, but RISC and microcodable systems seem to outperform them.

And hasn't this beem accomplished, in part, by including more hard wired subroutines?

 

[CaveDave]

The ability to suppress innate behaviour would also be a useful trick to acquire.

For instance being able to defer satisfaction of a desire, inhibit a panic reaction to run, or learn not to breathe in when dumped in cold water...

Absolutely (in my humble opinion).

This would most advantageous to a creature which already had the intelligence to tell when suppressing innate survival mechanisms was itself pro-survival.

Again, flexibility.

So-If we have a range of programmed behavioural routines
An ability to choose, enhance or suppress any of them.
Intelligence to control the selection process.
Communication to pass the results of that intelligent selection to others by language and training.

And, I think, this would quickly (in evolutionary terms) prove it's survival value.

Dave

 

[CaveDave]

In the gap that occurs between stimulus and response. Cramer's transactional interpretation and Feynman's sum over all paths have some things making the choice in zero wall-clock time. More complex entities need a bit more "time" to choose.

Feynman's sum over all paths ???

zero wall-clock time???

Man, either you are WAY ahead of me, or you just make this stuff up!
What does any of that have to do with the currrent subject?

Confused...

Dave