From: Dani Eder (danielravennest@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Mar 24 2004 - 08:14:39 MST
See this article:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~sciwrite/journal03/A-L/lavavej.pdf
The human genome is 3.36 billion base pairs, or
840 MBytes raw. Using an efficient compression
algorithm it can be compressed to 21% of it's raw
size, hence there is 180 MBytes of unique data in
the genome.
Assuming that a language-using tribe of paleolithic
humans has about 1000 pieces of useful knowledge
(how to make a spear, where to find a tasty root,
etc.) and each piece of knowledge is 1 Kbyte, then
the tribal database is 1 MByte. If 50% of the
knowledge is non-overlapping with other tribes, then
when you have more than 360 tribes, or about 10K
individuals, the total knowledge base exceeds that
of the genetic base. The population at the start
of the neolithic is estimated at 1-10 million,
so the crossover of non-genetic vs genetic information
transfer occurred long before books.
>
> >>There is no question that currently the
> epi-genetic information transfer
> >>from generation to generation is much larger than
> the genetic information
> >>and that prior to chipped rock it was much smaller
> >>
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