Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Dawkins, Richard (1986), The blind watchmaker, W. W. Norton & Company, Retrieved on 2012-04-23Source Material [books.google.com]
Folksonomies: science Memes
23 APR 2012
It's Raining DNA Outside
It is raining DNA outside. On the bank of the Oxford canal at the bottom of my garden is a large willow tree, and it is pumping downy seeds into the air. ... [spreading] DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow trees that will shed a new generation of downy seeds. … It is raining instructions out there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any plainer...
1 There is DNA everywhere, in seeds in bacterium, it's all around us, this programming for life.
23 APR 2012
The Lifetime of DNA
The messages that DNA molecules contain are all but eternal when seen against the time scale of individual lifetimes. The lifetimes of DNA messages (give or take a few mutations) are measured in units ranging from millions of years to hundreds of millions of years; or, in other words, ranging from 10,000 individual lifetimes to a trillion individual lifetimes. Each individual organism should be seen as a temporary vehicle, in which DNA messages spend a tiny fraction of their geological lifeti... 1 
notes
notesIt exists in living messengers for brief periods of their lifetimes, but communicates across millions of years throughout all life.
