Paul,
So wonderful to see you here. Peaceful Science is a fruitful place to test out ideas.
As I pondered Ontogenetic Depth in your video, I thought more in terms of Ontogenetic VOLUME.
The Hayflick limit is about 60 cell divisions (generations) or so, that is somewhat a good measure of “depth” of the cell lineage, although some cell lines keep going – I think skin cell lines.
If we imagine a vertical line through various X-coordinates in the picture, each line shows how many cell divisions away from the ancestor.
The Hayflic limit may not seem like a lot, but unlike the ocean diagram above the “siblings” of the cell lines have to interact. That is to say skeleton cells have to cooperate with muscle cells. Nerve cells in the eye have to cooperate with the eye parts like cornea.
Ontogenetic volume is roughly then the count of cells. This may seem crude, but lets just consider the brain. Each cell is unique and has to be addressable so we can think and remember, not just ideas, but smells, sights, sounds. The brain cells in their respective cell linages have to interact with other brain cells, in fact other nerve cells. Here is a diagram of just some of the specialized types of nerve cells, and these are only some of the mouse ganglion cells:
Within the ontogenic volume of a creature, these cells have to hookup the right way, and that’s a lot of connections. For example, within the ontogenic volume of the human brain of 100 billion cells, it is estimated there are more connections than all the switches and routers in the world wide web. So not only is the ontogenic volume immense in terms of the different number of cells, but also the number of connections that have to be properly managed between a literal sea of cells.
If every neuron in the brain is unique, then the ontogenic volume is roughly 100 billion cells, even though the ontogenic depth (in terms of generations from ancestor) is somewhat shallow (say 60 generations ).
A measure of the ontogenetic volume probably corresponds to the total information capacity of a cell, especially the glycome.
But I need to point something out regarding the protein interactome. The interactome diagrams totally UNDERSATE the complexity of the interactome. For example, Histones/Nucleosome complexes might be listed as having about 42 bits of memory in post translational modifications. However, if we multiply the number of nucleosomes times the number of bits in a single nucleosome I get 80 megabytes of memory. If we then multiply 80 megabytes times the number of cells in a human, it some absurdly high number.
At a talk I gave, Dr. Sanford was skittish that I was citing such gigantic numbers for a presentation. A couple years later, I found an article that independently confirmed my calculation of 80 megabytes for the Histones/Nucleosome complex alone in a single cell, which translates to something on the order of Sextillion bytes of memory.
But the histones are only 1 set of proteins among the 20,000 or so out there! So in terms of the post translational modifications alone, the amount of memory is staggering. And the glycome dwarfs what is stored in protein post-translational modifications.
So the Designer has to have foresight of all 100 trillion cells, the glycome of the cells, the post translational modifications through stages of development.
One indicator of Ontogenetic Volume is described by Robert Tjian in his 2 videos on protein regulation where he talks about combinatoric regulation, go to about 4 minutes in and you can see him comparing the difference in combinatoric regulation.
So, someone might think, the polymerase complex in bacteria has only 6-7 units, and the Eukarytotic mahcinery has 85 units and say, “Big deal.”
But if we are talking combinatorics, this is like saying 1,000,000 (one followed by 6 zeros) is not really a big difference of 1 followed by 85 zeros! This suggests to me the complexes Tjian describes are an combinatoric indication of the difference in ontogenic volume between a simple organism (which really has no ontogenic volume since it is single celled) to a multi cellular Eukaryote.
Tjian also was suggesting the cannoical 200 or cell types is just an arbitrary classification, he talks about thousands of cell types in the human. Given that each brain cell is uniquely addressible, it seems the Designer is giving each brain cells the capacity to almost be a cell type of its own.
I believe God made yeast to have way more combinatorial capacity than the yeast cell needs to give us insight into how the combinatorial system in humans works.
We study C Elegans to understand the human brain because it’s combinatorially prohibitive to study something as complex as the human brain. God gave us C Elegans to help us understand ourselves. The video relating to the Nobel Prize work you cited at the start is consistent with the intuition that God made these creatures similar to us for our benefit.
