This may be of only marginal interest to many of you. It will certainly be of
no interest to Lars (I've suggested to him to put anything with my name in it
automatically into his killfile :-), but I thought that the following was
particularly interesting.

Just a day ago I watched the University of Washington, Seattle's 26th (2002)
Faculty Lecture by Maynard V. Olson on UWTV (University of Washington,
Seattle television network). I'd not heard of Olson before, but he is
apparently very well regarded. He is the Director of the Human Genome Project
at UW. He is also an adjunct professor in UW's Computer Science and
Engineering Department. Although I watched and recorded his lecture off of
satellite TV in bright and shining color, fortunately it's also available on
the web at, albeit at significantly less quality:

     http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.asp?rid=1258

The lecture is presented in Windows Media's television-like format, but you
can watch it at almost any bandwidth and enjoy it simply because he only has
one slide for his hour-long talk, a page-long listing of a string of codons
(e.g., GATTACAAATATAAC...). If you wish to get to the meat of his comments
more quickly, between the playback at about 11 minutes 30 seconds.

Of particular interest to me, Olson says virtually the same things that I
tend to say, and even uses the same examples: the collapse of information
borne in any code is inevitable when infinitely copyied on a xerox machine,
the size of the mammalian genome fitting on an audio CD, etc. But most
important perhaps, he states that the most relevant paper in biology may be
one that most biologists have never read and most likely never heard of:
Shannon's 1948 initital paper on information theory.

Of greatest interest however, his comments about the deep kinship between
computers and modern biology are worth listening to. When Luigi Galvini
discovered in the middle 1770's, at just about the same time as the American
Revolution, that electricity could make frogs's legs move, the notion that we
had stumbled onto the "life force" rumbled through Europe with great force.
In fact, that idea, along with the idea that Man was on the verge of playing
God, was the basis of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" novel.

Olson makes the very profound comment during his talk that for all of the
prior work in modern biology (the biology conducted during his lifetime) on
energy metabolism, anatomy, etc., we were missing the central point. Life is
a digital information transforming process where evolution is the
trial-and-error process that transforms that information into knowledge. It's
possible that we're missing the point still, as much as the idea that
electricity was the life force, but I don't think so and I'm sure that he
doesn't think so either.

Olson and I may be twins separated at birth. I wrote virtually the same thing
here on HP3000-L a couple of years ago, following the death of Claude
Shannon, a posting which eventually became a short article in the Bulletin of
the Ecological Society of America, which you can read if you wish at:

     http://aics-research.com/research/esa-shannon.pdf

If you know computers, and you think about them abstractly, you very rapidly
come to find that know much more about a number of broader subjects than you
may initially think you do.

Wirt Atmar

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