Linus Says It's In Our DNA

Simon Willison has picked up a nice quotation from Linus he made a few years back, but what really interests me are some other things he said in the same post:

think about how you and me actually came about - not through any complex design.

Right. "sheer luck".

Well, sheer luck, AND:
- free availability and _crosspollination_ through sharing of "source code", although biologists call it DNA.
- a rather unforgiving user environment, that happily replaces bad versions of us with better working versions and thus culls the herd (biologists often call this "survival of the fittest")
- massive undirected parallel development ("trial and error")

In other words, the open source methodology is hard-wired into us - right down at the level of DNA.

Enter the Bio-Hackers

Let's hope there are some white hat bio-hackers working on this too....

Dangerous (Open) Knowledge

Of course, open genomics is not entirely unproblematic:

A new era of genetic testing would leave those who test positive for common serious illnesses open to discrimination from insurers, academics are warning.

A catalogue of genetic markers for common illnesses have been revealed in recent weeks after a breakthrough in genomic scanning techniques. Scientists expect genetic testing for people's risk of diseases such as breast cancer, heart disease and bi-polar disorders to follow.

Open Genomics, Closed Minds

One of the great things about open genomics - or bioinformatics if you prefer its traditional name - is that it provides a completely objective resolution of all sorts of emotional disputes.

For example, by feeding genomic sequences of various organisms into a computer program, you can produce a tree of life that is remarkably similar to the ones proposed by traditional evolutionary biology. But in this case, there is no subjective judgement: just pure number crunching (although it's worth noting that the trees vary according to the depth of the calculations, so this is not absolute knowledge, only an ever-closer approximation thereto).

Another case in point is the closeness of the relationship between the great apes and humans. Indeed, it is only human arrogance that allows that kind of distinction to be made: a computer would lump them all together on the basis of their DNA.

Against this background, it's surprising how much we naked apes cling to our difference from the hairy kinds: perhaps it makes us feel a little better in the face of the genocide that we are waging against them. However, it looks like things here might be changing at last:

He recognises himself in the mirror, plays hide-and-seek and breaks into fits of giggles when tickled. He is also our closest evolutionary cousin.

A group of world leading primatologists argue that this is proof enough that Hiasl, a 26-year-old chimpanzee, deserves to be treated like a human. In a test case in Austria, campaigners are seeking to ditch the 'species barrier' and have taken Hiasl's case to court. If Hiasl is granted human status - and the rights that go with it - it will signal a victory for other primate species and unleash a wave of similar cases.

...

One of their central arguments will be that a chimpanzee's DNA is 96-98.4 per cent similar to that of humans - closer than the relationship between donkeys and horses.

Sadly, there's a terrible race here: which will we see first - apes recognised as near-equals, or apes razed from the face of the earth? (Via Slashdot.)

Novartis Does Open Genomics

It's happening, slowly:

Novartis, the Basel, Switzerland, drug giant, has helped uncover which of the 20,000 genes identified by the Human Genome Project are likely to be associated with diabetes. But rather than hoard this information, as drug firms have traditionally done, it is making it available for free on the World Wide Web.

"It will take the entire world to interpret these data," says Novartis research head Mark Fishman. "We figure we will benefit more by having a lot of companies look at these data than by holding it secret."

The data and more information is available from the Diabetics Genetics Initiative site at the Broad Institute. (Via Slashdot.)

On the Categorisation of Peer Production

Kant would have loved this one.

Here's a remarkable wiki from the P2P Foundation that seeks to explore and categorise the efflorescence of peer production that's going on these days. It's remarkable for its range, and for the fact that it includes just about every key word and concept used in this blog - with the exception of "open genomics" - complete with links to further wiki pages on topics like the Genome Commons. Amazing. (Via On The Commons.)