loremaster wrote:Shameless self bump, but i noticed what Terimikitirmasu (sp?) said about only reading six pages and figured, if im on the seventh, i have no chance!loremaster wrote:I actually thought one plausible hypothesis was going to be a "time protein" aspect of genetics.
Gibberish? but when you look at how mutation occurs, it is quite conceivable that any sort of protein structure which manipulated time to the tiniest degree would be the basis of the whole books.
By then taking commonly known mechanisms in genetics (such as copy number or expression) you could vary strength. Translocation of the time-bending coding region into other proteins would generate many new proteins which might have new abilities. Mutation would generate similar, non/semi functional proteins a la Siona.
In much the same way as i once wanted to explain OM via oscillations in molecules, i think time-proteins might explain prescience AND om.
Imagine that one somehow quantumly unstable protein could come about, which had implications for time. If that protein could oscillate in such a way as to generate a signal, where everything occuring around it could subtly alter the frequency/variation of the many-dimensional wave it generated, then potentially another receptive protein might be able to pick up and decode that signal, which might have come from the past or the future in time. Interference would also explain how prescients were shielded from other prescients. Guildsmen might be poor recievers but good transmitters, Or it might be the converse (not transmitting therefore unable to be seen.) Someone like Leto would probably be both good at recieving AND transmitting. I dont know, its a method, not a mechanism :p .
Being biological would instantly validate any and all breeding/hereditary links too, since thats the whole basis for biology.
On the other hand my understanding of physics is cack, so signals which travel in time much like others travel in 3 might be total bollocks. But to me, any wave which DID travel in time would explain lots, especially if that wave had the ability to "collapse" any quantum uncertainties, thus "Locking" the future in place.
Feel free to pick that apart at your leisure. I'll be dissapointed if i dont provoke a reaction in at least 'Chig and Phaedrus.
Sadistic - epigenetics is a fascinating field, but it never encodes anything new, it only modifies pre-existing genes. methylation can reduce expression etc but it will almost never, due to it's massive resetting during meiosis and embyrogenesis, produce novel ideas. Errors in epigenetics (for example, imprinting[/] in prada-willis/angelmann syndrome) modify expression of existing sequences, they dont have any potential to recombine.
Cellular memory does NOT have to be DNA based. There are dozens of examples of cells remembering "simple" past which can then be transmitted to decended cells. Cells have mechanisms for remembering recent bouts of oxidative stress, of damage. RNA, Proteins and hundreds of other messenger molecules can remain in/around cells for years. Cells contains lots of marks and signals showing their history.
Interesting. Yeah, about epigenetics, I simply don't like deterministic explanations of things. I'll admit to a bias, I really like quantum weirdness and it gets a lot of it from indeterminacy and some sort of strange 'wholeness' to it. And consequently, the possibility of a protein interacting in the way you described has my love solely on the basis of how cool it sounds, never mind how beautiful the maths might be.
You would love the experiment where you fire single photons at a half-silvered mirror so that the photon has a 50% chance of taking the short path to a detector (right through the mirror) or taking a longer path by bouncing off the partially silvered mirror to another proper mirror then reaching the detector. Apparently you still achieve an interference pattern. This implies the photon interferes with it's own potential temporaly. I think Roger Penrose also has some stuff on consciousness and quantum physics but I haven't got a chance to read his book yet (I have it reserved).
Anyway, a possible problem with storing the information anywhere other than DNA is that what else other than DNA is transmitted to offspring? Only the sex cells, as far as I understand.