View source for Informational Complexity of the Innate Knowledge of Human Beings


=Discussion=

Andreas Keller:

"The following is a very crude estimate of the informational complexity of the
innate knowledge of human beings. To be more exact, it is a crude estimate of an upper
limit to the information content of this knowledge. It might be off by an order of
magnitude or so. So, this is a “back of an envelope” or “back of a napkin” kind of
calculation. It just gives a direction into which one would have to go to try to get a
more accurate calculation. To get a more exact number, the parameters put in here as
mere estimates must be determined with more precision. This can be done by doing
some research of the relevant literature and, where the required information has not
yet been determined by science, by doing additional genetic and neurological research.

According to the human proteome project,
58 roughly 67 % of the human genes
are expressed in the brain. Most of these genes are also expressed in other parts of the
body, so they probably form part of the general biochemical machinery of all cells.
However, 1,223 genes have been found that have an elevated level of expression in the
brain. In one way or the other, the brain-specific structures must be encoded in these
genes, or mainly in these genes, or a sub-set of them. Some of these genes are probably
not directly involved in determining the distribution and connectivity of neurons and
might form part of the brain-specific cellular infrastructure underlying those
networks, but in one way or the other, the innate knowledge must be encoded in these
genes, whose combined activity somehow leads to the development of the brain. One
possible source of error might be that the study might not have looked at genes active
in the fetus or in the small child’s developing brain (I do not know), so it is possible
there are some more genes involved here; but for the sake of this estimate, I assume
that the innate information is somehow represented in these genes.

There are roughly 20,000 genes in the human genome. So, the 1,223 genes form
about 6.115 % of our genes (by number). So about 6.115 % of our genes are brain
specific. Probably, we share many of these with primates and other animals, like
rodents, so the really human-specific part of the brain-specific genes or the humanspecific part of their sequences might be much smaller. However, I am interested here only in an order of magnitude result for an upper limit.

I have no information about the total length of these brain-specific genes, hence
I will assume that they have average length. According to some sources,
59 the human genome has 3,095,693,981 base pairs.

60 According to the same source, only roughly 2% of this is coding DNA. There is also some non-coding DNA that has a regulating
function, or is involved in the production of some types of RNA, but let us assume that
the functional part of the genome is perhaps 3%. That makes something in the order
of 92 to 93 million base pairs with a function (probably less), or 30 million to 31 million
triplets (remember that base pairs are working in groups of three, each group coding
for an amino acid or acting as a start- or stop-signal for transcription). If the brain genes
have average length, 6.115 % of this would be brain specific. This makes for something
like 1.89 million triplets.

The different triplets code for 20 different amino acids. There are also start- and
stop-signals. The exact information content of a triplet would depend on how often it
appears, and they are definitely not equally distributed, but let us assume that each of
them codes for one out of 20 possibilities. Calculating the exact information content of
a triplet will require much more sophisticated reasoning and specific information
about the frequency distribution of triplets and hence of amino acids, but for our
purposes, this is enough. The information content of a triplet can then be estimated as
the dual logarithm of 20. You need 4 bits to encode 16 possibilities and 5 bits to encode
32 possibilities, so this should be between 4 and 5 bits. A more exact value for the dual
logarithm of 20 is 4.322. So, we multiply this with the number of triplets and get
8,200,549 bits. This is 1,025,069 bytes, or roughly a megabyte, comparable to the
information content of a typical book. These genes might contain a lot of redundancy
in the sense that it might be possible to compress a complete description of these
sequences (i.e., to “zip” them) to a smaller amount of information.
Hence, the information content of the brain coding genes that determine the
structure of the brain is in the order of a megabyte,
61 and possibly much smaller. 

The structure of the brain is somehow generated out of the information contained in these
genes. This is probably an overestimate, because many of these genes might not be
involved in the encoding of the connective pattern of the neurons, but instead, for
example, in the glial immune system of the brain or other brain specific, “nonneuronal” stuff, and many of them might be the same or nearly the same in apes,
monkeys and rodents, so the human-specific part could even be much smaller.

Therefore, in comparison to the complexity of our civilization, the innate part of
our knowledge is tiny. It is probably much smaller than that of some specialized
animals. What probably happened on the way from specialized animals to human
beings was that on one side, specialized innate knowledge disappeared and on the
other hand non-specialized, but “plastic” or “reworkable” parts of the brain were
expanded.

'''The cognitive development of humans, therefore, starts with the innate core, but is perhaps mostly guided by the cultural environment'''."

(https://www.cckp.space/single-post/bp-4-2021-andreas-keller-towards-a-history-and-pre-history-of-knowledge)

[[Category:Education]]
[[Category:Intelligence]]
[[Category:Statistics]]
[[Category:Complexity]]