I've heard TMK mention 'gene swarms' in a talk or two but there is a new study that really helps me understand what he meant, and more importantly kind of blows my mind!

Terence McKenna: "If you were an extra-terrestrial in a starship in orbit around this planet, what you would see looking down is a gene swarm. The species that seem to us to be animal forms extremely stable in time, are actually highly permeable membranes over millennia and tens of millennia, with genes crossing over, moving around"

Article about the study: http://www.independent.c...scientists-10313845.html

Study: http://journals.plos.org...371/journal.pbio.1002168

Quote from the article: "The scientists estimated that there is enough data stored in the DNA molecules of every life-form alive today to occupy the processing capacity of a billion trillion of the most powerful supercomputers. Furthermore, it would require a supercomputer working at a processing rate of a trillion trillion operations every second to match the speed at which this DNA code is being continuously decoded into the living proteins of cells, the scientists said."

In the study the scientists do caveat: "We note that the approach that we propose here (and the analogy of supercomputers) does not necessarily imply a global, Gaia-like superorganism. We merely observe that ultimately all organisms interact with each other and the environment. Thus, the information being processed in the biosphere is interlinked in a large mass of organisms, however one chooses to conceptualise this. It does not have to be considered as a single, self-regulating organism. The manner in which the total information in the biosphere is processed, and the degree to which it is coordinated and interlinked in feedback processes, is another matter"

However I don't think you need to think of the genes as a Gaia-like superorganism as it is still mightily impressive. It's nice to imagine it as one organism though (which is why I posted in 'Open Discussion' and not 'Science'!)

I've got a friend who works in a lab down from mine who is working on DNA computing. The whole idea of biology as an information processing system is a fascinating one She's got some pretty intense ideas about what we could do with it.

I'm glad that the authors made a point to say that this isn't necessarily a super-organism like thing, although I imagine that many of us in the psychedelic world probably feel the Gaia hypothesis for our own reasons.

We're all computers!

Blessings
~ND

It's truly amazing isn't it. Life, nature. Truly the most powerful, most highly developed technology of all.

Very cool read! I've been thinking a lot lately about information and biology lately coincidently.
Interesting noting that plants have the largest genome size contribution in current time.

Also, picked out a cool paper from the references if anyone wants to read as well.

The Energetics of Genome Complexity