By Rudresh Pandey
It is also important to note that the amount of
knowledge handed on from generation to generation has grown enormously. This is
an information age and with internet there is an information and knowledge expulsion
in past few years.
How is this age of knowledge and information of
human race related to DNA of human beings?
The DNA in human beings contains about three
billion nucleic acids. However, much of the information coded in this sequence,
is redundant, or is inactive. So the total amount of useful information in our
genes, is probably something like a hundred million bits. One bit of
information is the answer to a yes no question (or a on or off light bulb this
is how our digital information works).
By contrast, a paperback novel might contain two
million bits of information. So interestingly a human is alike 50 Mills and
Boon romances. A major national library can contain about five million books,
or about ten trillion bits. So the amount of information handed down in books,
is a hundred thousand times as much as in DNA.
Even more important, is the fact that the information
in books, can be changed, and updated, much more rapidly. It has taken us
several million years to evolve from the apes. During that time, the useful
information in our DNA, has probably changed by only a few million bits. So the
rate of biological evolution in humans, is about a bit a year.
By contrast, there are about 50,000 new books
published in the English language each year, containing of the order of a
hundred billion bits of information. Of course, the great majority of this
information, here too, is garbage, and no use to any form of life. But, even
so, the rate at which useful information can be added is millions, if not
billions, higher than with DNA.
This has meant that we have entered a new phase
of evolution. At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random
mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years,
and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information.
In the last ten thousand years or so, we have
been in what might be called, an external transmission phase. In this, the
internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA,
has not changed significantly. But the external record, in books, and other long
lasting forms of storage, has grown enormously.
Some people would use the term, evolution, only
for the internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being applied
to information handed down externally. But that is too narrow a view. We are more
than just our genes. We may be no stronger, or inherently more intelligent,
than our cave man ancestors. But what distinguishes us from them, is the
knowledge that we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, and
particularly, over the last three hundred. It is legitimate to take a broader
view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the
evolution of the human race.
