[Doctor Stochastic]

To clarify a little: we can easily compute the "channel capacity" of DNA. This tells us how many messeges can be sent. It does not tell us what a given message may mean.

[Nebullis]

To clarify a little: we can easily compute the "channel capacity" of DNA. This tells us how many messeges can be sent.

There, again, I'm not so sure this is easy. We can calculate the channel capacity of a specific state. We know how many errors can kill the interaction between a sequence of DNA and another molecule in a specific environment. Such an interaction is kinetic and the downstream effect of errors are not binary. That is, the "message" doesn't arrive either whole and readable or with too much noise to be read at the destination, but, instead, a reduced message or a message with noise becomes a different, yet readable, message.

Maybe this is all simple for those who love their differential equations, but I don't think it's a simple matter to compute either the information content or the channel capacity of a DNA sequence, per se.

[Nebullis]

I guess one can look at information content independently of meaning or phenotype.

It doesn't seem to be very useful, does it?

Thanks for your posts, Doctor Stochastic.