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Originally Posted by HydrogenBond
I am of the opinion the DNA is hardware and firmware, with the firmware giving broad based capacity that is then differentiated at the level of the brain. For example, the DNA makes us hungry and has related firmware to rough in the needed actions. But whether I gather chocolate or vanilla is at the level of software. There is not a chocolate gene but rather that is learned and wired by opportunity based on the underlying flexibility designed in the firmware and the capacity to create software.
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I don't mean to pick this apart as it is a very nice post and I enjoy reading you. But I have a couple of concerns here. First, I'm compleatly ignorant of the term
firmware and am confused about how it differentiates from software.
DNA is software, a stream of coded data. It's not the nucleic acids that interest us, it's the code. It contains instructions for growing hardware, and for growing on-board running programs that reside in the hardware. The nature of the programs is articulated by the structure of the hardware.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HydrogenBond
I am going to shift directions and talk about some firmware that is unique to humans. One thing that was already mentioned and well understood, is the human baby requires longer term care by parents, than other animals. Although most animals care for their young using instinct, their DNA and firmware loops have a finite duration because their young develop faster to autonomy. With humans, although we may have the same basic DNA and firmware, the human firmware loop appears to be left open ended for the needs of the longer term care.
For example, the mother cat will care for her kittens, just as the mother human does. This is very similar at the DNA and firmware level. At the software level, the specific care is different since humans read books and will get verbal help from their own mother to differentiate the behavior. The cat does not do either of these things but can do it all on its own. The cat will wind down the maternal behavior earlier as the kittens get more autonomous. But the similar firmware loop in humans, can often extend for decades or even a lifetime, with mothers being mothers even when the child is an adult. This minor genetic tweak to the duration of the animal firmware, to keep the loop more open changes the way the species interacts with the young.
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Books, and in fact spoken language, entered the scene too recently for selection to have had time to work on it. All our instincts were in place by the time of this invention - all were selected in Africa, on the savanna, between 8 and 1 million years ago. Remove one zero from this time scale and we can talk about the human story of tool use, story telling, and computer programming, but this is too fine a grain for selection to work sith in designing adaptive software.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HydrogenBond
One way to look at this firmware change within human parents, are the parents become a more permanent feature of the human baby's environment, with the selective advantage of human babies, based on the ability of the human baby (evolutionary terms) to genetically adapt to this long term environment. To put this into perspective, if a river was part of an animal's environment, selective advantage would go to animals that develop the genes that can make the best use of the river. In the case of generations of human babies, instead of the river, we substitute the perpetual landscape features called mom and dad.
Relative to evolutionary changes within human babies, selective advantage will go to those who can find advantage in this situation. If a baby was more like an animal, wishing to go out on its own as soon as it could walk and feed itself, it would not survive in the wild. But if it developed firmware that allowed it to remain within the context of mom and dad, for continuing supplemental software assistance, this would lead to selective advantage. In culture, this evolutionary firmware within humans allows the continued adaptability for sequential programming from parents and symbolic parents such as the supplemental parents called teachers, mother-father country, mother nature, heavenly father, etc.
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I think parents as a permenant feature in the lives of their offspring is thoroghly explained by kinship altruism, or biological altruism in social animals. The idea that, from a
gene's eye perspective, it's adaptive to perpetuate instincts for careing for your adult children and grandchilderen, and even neices and nephews (because one-quarter of their genes are identical copies of yours).
Here is good article on this:
Biological Altruism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
All that being said, I think you're on a good track. I feel computer science has much to add to this topic. It's very informative to approach human behavior and instincs with this language.
