QOTD: “The explosive growth of information in our human society”
Today’s quote comes to us via Freeman Dyson:
“In the twentieth century, genomes of humans and other species were laboriously decoded and translated into sequences of letters in computer memories. The decoding and translation became cheaper and faster as time went on, the price decreasing and the speed increasing according to Moore’s Law. The first human genome took fifteen years to decode and cost about a billion dollars. Now a human genome can be decoded in a few weeks and costs a few thousand dollars. Around the year 2000, a turning point was reached, when it became cheaper to produce genetic information than to understand it. Now we can pass a piece of human DNA through a machine and rapidly read out the genetic information, but we cannot read out the meaning of the information. We shall not fully understand the information until we understand in detail the processes of embryonic development that the DNA orchestrated to make us what we are.
A similar turning point was reached about the same time in the science of astronomy. Telescopes and spacecraft have evolved slowly, but cameras and optical data processors have evolved fast. Modern sky-survey projects collect data from huge areas of sky and produce databases with accurate information about billions of objects. Astronomers without access to large instruments can make discoveries by mining the databases instead of observing the sky. Big databases have caused similar revolutions in other sciences such as biochemistry and ecology.
The explosive growth of information in our human society is a part of the slower growth of ordered structures in the evolution of life as a whole. Life has for billions of years been evolving with organisms and ecosystems embodying increasing amounts of information. The evolution of life is a part of the evolution of the universe, which also evolves with increasing amounts of information embodied in ordered structures, galaxies and stars and planetary systems. In the living and in the nonliving world, we see a growth of order, starting from the featureless and uniform gas of the early universe and producing the magnificent diversity of weird objects that we see in the sky and in the rain forest. Everywhere around us, wherever we look, we see evidence of increasing order and increasing information. The technology arising from Shannon’s discoveries is only a local acceleration of the natural growth of information.
-Freeman Dyson, How We Know, March 10, 2011
Review of James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
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March 1st, 2011 at 3:24 pm
An acquaintance recently commented to me the following:
“20th Century was the Information Age. 21st Century is the “Meaning Age”
From the Cloud of Unknowing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_of_Unknowing
“For He can well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love he can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you must step above it stoutly but deftly, with a devout and delightful stirring of love, and struggle to pierce that darkness above you; and beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and do not give up, whatever happens.”[1]
March 1st, 2011 at 3:28 pm
We may do well to ponder: “…Now we can pass a piece of human DNA through a machine and rapidly read out the genetic information, but we cannot read out the meaning of the information. We shall not fully understand the information until we understand in detail the processes of embryonic development that the DNA orchestrated to make us what we are…”
and, it, certainly, woyuldn’t hurt to keep this: “…you must step above it stoutly but deftly, with a devout and delightful stirring of love, and struggle to pierce that darkness above you; and beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and do not give up, whatever happens.”[1]”
in Mind, while doing so..
March 1st, 2011 at 3:32 pm
7, not 8, Letters in “wouldn’t”
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/letter (1.b.)
March 1st, 2011 at 3:32 pm
“Everywhere around us, wherever we look, we see evidence of increasing order and increasing information.”
Exercise for the interested reader: Reconcile the above statement with the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
March 1st, 2011 at 3:34 pm
You can use information from the Wall Street …
Much of Month’s Move Is on First Day
Journal…http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703749504576172862754957434.html
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=spy&ql=1
… or maybe not. Nice day to finally turn Bullish WSJ, whose DNA has tended toward the paleolithic lately.
March 1st, 2011 at 3:44 pm
…and use that information to play Beck, Sheen or Qadaffi
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/03/its_time_to_play_sheen_beck_or.html
March 1st, 2011 at 3:54 pm
Maybe he should have included a comment on the level of dis-information multiplying too.
Hmmm…what would be the genetic analogy to that…?
March 1st, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Tarkus,
maybe, along the lines of http://search.yippy.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&v%3Aproject=clusty&query=Genetic+Engineering+the+Fallacy+of+the+Static+Genome
March 1st, 2011 at 4:29 pm
I am not a scientist, but it was my understanding that entropy was a universal fact and that the definition of entropy was that the physical world only moves from a state of organization to a state of chaos. So how can the universe be increasing in order withing the accepted paradigm of entropy? …or perhaps its time to re-think the concept of entropy?
March 1st, 2011 at 4:59 pm
t1dude:
Any consideration of entropy has to contain the limitation, “in a closed system”, entropy always increases. Very few systems are closed. Really, there is only one–the universe, in its totality. (Or, perhaps many universes, as some string theorists illogically propose). Life is an orgy of environmental interactions. Plants create order by opening their leaves to accept the sun’s rays, soaking in the energy they will need to create organization out of chaos through photosynthesis.
Humans use the order created by plants as the energy they need to design their own organizations out of chaos.
But the total information of a closed system such as the universe, like its energy and matter, can not increase or decrease. It can only change form.
Incidentally, isn’t today March 1, 2011? How did Freeman Dyson propose this on March 11, 2011? Is he one of those time-traveling physicists?
March 1st, 2011 at 5:00 pm
Maybe the Hubble telescope can explain why I bought WMT last Tuesday at $54.
March 1st, 2011 at 5:01 pm
er, I mean March 10, 2011. Even I can’t get the typos correct when I’m complaining of them.
March 1st, 2011 at 5:42 pm
“Around the year 2000, a turning point was reached, when it became cheaper to produce genetic information than to understand it.”
This is gibberish.
Cost per “understanding” can’t be quantified in he same way as cost per bit of information. It it can’t be measured in the same units, it’s impossible to talk about its being “cheaper” or to pontificate that it became cheaper in a certain year.
It’s reminiscent of his comment: “nuclear weapons and LSD are both highly addictive… Both have destroyed many lives and are likely to destroy many more…” Try making sense out of that.
March 1st, 2011 at 6:12 pm
Interesting choice, Barry. You might enjoy this recent interview with Freeman:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/letters-to-a-heretic-an-email-conversation-with-climate-change-sceptic-professor-freeman-dyson-2224912.html
March 1st, 2011 at 6:23 pm
entropy> here’s Ilya Priogine’s Noble Prize Lecture from 1977:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1977/prigogine-lecture.pdf
March 1st, 2011 at 6:26 pm
Nobel.
March 1st, 2011 at 8:32 pm
Isn’t order just a very useful illusion that helps us understand the world?
March 2nd, 2011 at 10:10 am
Sometime the insights get lost in all that information.
March 2nd, 2011 at 10:23 am
Well, of course we do. As Aristotle noted in the 5th century BCE, humans are a naming and ordering species. That’s what we do. Sometimes, it helps. Sometimes, it doesn’t because we also tend to seen order where it really doesn’t exist and apply meaning that misses the mark entirely.
Read Richard Dawkins “The Blind Watchmaker” for a brilliant analysis of this issue.
March 2nd, 2011 at 1:43 pm
Increasing information = entropy (disorder)
The Big Picture = putting order to information entropy.