Month: June 2025

The Inheritance of Molecular Machinery

/ erdosfan / Leave a comment

It turns out mtDNA is inherited directly from the mother to its offspring, and I just had the idea that perhaps the molecular machines responsible for replicating DNA generally, and performing other functions within cells, are also inherited directly from the mother, to its offspring, for the simple reason that females carry the young until birth in basically all mammals. I don’t know how molecular machines are encoded in our DNA, and I haven’t looked it up if I’m being perfectly honest, but the idea is not ridiculous, again, for the simple reason, that women carry the offspring. I will look this up, and revisit the idea, but I think it’s interesting, because again (if true), like mtDNA, it suggests a fundamental asymmetry between the sexes, in terms of the contribution of DNA to offspring.

In particular, molecular machines must require a lot of information to encode, as they are effectively nano-scale robots, that perform simply astonishing functions, including the production of ATP, and the transport of molecules. In contrast, the macroscopic frame of a human being is not the complicated, as it has a simple shape, organs are probably next up in terms of complexity, bones perhaps a tie, since they have to move, organelles I don’t think are much more complicated than organs themselves. But molecular machines operate at the scale of a microprocessor, transporting single digit electrons, at a scale where interference from the natural background we live in must be occurring basically constantly, which will cause acceleration, and disrupt cellular processes, in particular with respect to the transportation of electrons.

If semen becomes too complex, then it has to become either more efficient in encoding information, or larger as a molecule, there’s no way around that, since it by definition carries the information of the paternal line. And as a result, a mechanism that allows females to transmit the most complex aspects of its offspring, makes sense, because it doesn’t have to go anywhere. I note that the ATP synthase is found on the mitochondrion, which is again inherited directly from the mother.

Higher Order Relations

/ erdosfan / Leave a comment

I was reading my favorite book on mathematics, Mathematical Problems and Proofs, in particular, a section on basic Set Theory. The book discusses the transitive relation, where if A is related to B, and B is related to C, then A is related to C. In this case, A, B, and C are abstract mathematical objects, but you can assign practical meaning by e.g., making them all integers, and considering ordinal relationships between them, where e.g., A is greater than B, B is greater than C, and therefore, A is greater than C.  Note that this example of ordinal relationships has a “therefore” clause, but relations are abstract statements of fact, not consequences of logic. That is, we simply posit relations between objects, whereas I’ve phrased the concrete example in terms of a logical conclusion, which is very different. That is, this example is consistent with the stated set of relations among A, B, and C, which are simply posited to exist, whereas the integers have properties that imply that A is greater than C as a matter of logic.

With that introduction, it dawned on me that we can consider higher order sets of relations that probably don’t have names like “transitive”. One obvious such set of relations is as follows, where A is related B, B is related to C, C is related to D, and A is related to D. All I did was add an extra object D, and extend the relations analogously. Specifically, we can express this as a graph, where A through D are connected by a path, and A is connected directly to D by an extra edge, creating what would be a circuit in an undirected graph. Though note that even if A is related to B, this does not imply that B is related to A, and as such, any graph expressing relations is directed. This is probably known, given how simple it is, and I’m certain through my own studies that people express relations using graphs.

The interesting bit is the possibility of using machines to discover meaningful higher order relations that e.g., require at least four or more objects. Because it’s at least possible for these relations to arise over any number of objects, we can’t give them all special names in a human language like “transitive”, but a machine can. The point being that, most of mathematics is probably accessible only to machines or other sentient beings capable of handling that much information, which plainly do not inhabit this planet in any appreciable number.