Ancient Ecocosmology - 2

A letter from Goober (c. 1404)

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I. Background

The first post of this series (year 2011) focused on the difficulties with the interpretation of ancient writings (Ancient Ecocosmology?).

Then an update within that post focused on how AI was also trying to figure it out too (ibid).

Several Dredd Blog posts have noticed that the same problem exists when trying to decipher ancient DNA, and somewhat recent DNA too for that matter (e.g. MetaSUB, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).

While I was reading about Vikings a day or so ago, there was an article about how DNA was extracted from a Viking "mummy" and the excruciating pains taken by several adventurous scientists to "read the tea leaves" of time (e.g. Cell).

Eventually, I downloaded some relevant Viking genetic material from a government repository (NCBI).

II. Today's Appendix

I did some analysis of the Viking data set forth in the government database, and then used several HTML tables to display that data (Appendix).

The articles and papers I read indicated that quite a bit of software band-aids, connectors, and insertions were used on the sampled Viking DNA, which helped me to focus on a problem in the MetaSUB sequences:

"It also specifies the percentage of those out-of-frame elements, which said percentages seem very mechanical rather than random as one would expect of random samples in random locations around the globe.

Which leads me to the suspicion that their use of software, whether AI or otherwise, is involved the their data production."

(MetaSUB - 6).  Both the Viking DNA and the MetaSUB City Dweller DNA have mechanical looking "out-of-frame" percentages (ratio of out-of-frame nucleotides to in-frame nucleotides).

They appear at the bottom of each table as:

"Out of frame base-pair
count: 5,112,554
(17.53%)"

(see appendix). In other words since "out-of-frame" nucleotides are often interpreted as "mutations", and since random genetic mutations are not mechanical to that degree, I think that the use of software (including hallucinating AI) is the cause of those mechanical looking percentages.

III. Closing Comments

I am often reminded of the professor who uses the phrase "we don't know" in circumstances where we really do not know (see video below).

It is much more honest and scientific than making things up as children do when they are playing with dolls.

The previous post in this series is here.

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