I Ching Genetic Code

[Shawnna Franz]

Toa casual eye, the genetic code seems very different from the I Ching. One is physical; the other is metaphysical. One is new knowledge; the other is very old. DNA codes for organic matter, but the I Ching claims to show the flow of universal mind, which ancient China called the Tao.

I worked for about 10 years on correlating those two systems, both physically and metaphysically. Fortunately, the genetic code and I Ching shorthand are two well-known scripts in historical knowledge.

I Ching hexagrams are often viewed simplistically as mere binary counting. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz recognized the binary counting aspect in 1701 when he received a woodcut of the hexagrams sent to him by Jesuit missionary Joachim Bouvet, who was living in China. Leibniz had just spent several years inventing binary numbers himself in Germany!

Taken together, all three codes offer us a Rosetta Stone with two known codes that can reveal and unlock the obscure master code of gravitational pulsing that generated and maintains our Double Bubble universe.

Such numerical dexterity is what makes our genetic code work, and also what renders the versatile I Ching math capable of shorthanding it. Its math codes for DNA, RNA, and even validates wobble in the 3rd nucleotide of a codon.

Baba Eyiogbe says"... It is indeed part of the Ifatradition that Ifa was brought to China,but in a more limited form. This is sometimes attributed to a warriorpath of Obatal, Obatal Ayaguna. This path ofObatal is the Ifa diviner for the other paths ofObatal as well (when Orunmila does not do it directly)....".

It seems to me as though Vedicdivination and Tai Shuan Ching are based on the Trialityaspect of the 256-dimensional Cl(8) Cliffordalgebra of IFA, while I Ching is basedon the 64-dimensional Cl(6) Cliffordsubalgebra of the Cl(8) of IFA.

According to two 13 February 2001 articles in TheNew York Times by Nicholas Wade: "... Dr. J. Craig Venter andcolleagues at Celera Genomics report in ...[ Science291 (16 February 2001) 1304-1351 ]... that they have identified26,588 human genes for sure, with another 12,731 candidate genes. ...Celera's rival, the publicly funded consortium of academic centers,has come to a similar conclusion. Its report in ...[ Nature409 (15 February 2001) 860-921, where they say "... Genes (or atleast their coding regions) comprise only a tiny fraction of humanDNA, but they represent the majorbiological function of the genomeand the main focus of interest by biologists. ...." ]... pegsthe probable number of human genes at 30,000 to40,000. Because the current gene-finding methods tend tooverpredict, each side prefers the lower end of its range, and 30,000seems to be the new favorite estimate. ... Most of the repetitiveDNA sequences in the 75percent of the genome that is essentially junkceased to accumulate millions of years ago, but a few of sequencesare still active and may do some good. The chromosomes themselveshave a rich archaeology. Large blocks of genes seem to have beenextensively copied from one human chromosome to another, beckoninggenetic archaeologists to figure out the order in which the copyingoccurred and thus to reconstruct the history of the animalgenome.

As the modest number of human genes became apparent, biologists inboth teams were forced to think how to account for the greatercomplexity of people, given that they seem to possess only50 percent more genes than the roundworm. It is not foolish prideto suppose there is something more to Homo sapiens thanCaenorhabditis elegans. The roundworm is a little tube of a creaturewith a body of 959 cells, of which 302 are neurons in what passes forits brain. Humans have 100 trillion cells in their body, including100 billion brain cells.

Several explanations are emerging for how to generate extracomplexity other than by adding more genes. One is the general ideaof combinatorial complexity - with just a few extra proteins onecould make a much larger number of different combinations betweenthem. ...

One comes from analysis of what are called protein domains.Proteins, the working parts of the cell, are often multipurposetools, with each role being performed by a different section ordomain of the protein. Many protein domains are very ancient.Comparing the domains of proteins made by the roundworm, the fruitfly and people, the consortium reports that only 7 percent of theprotein domains found in people were absent from worm and fly,suggesting that "few new protein domains have been invented in thevertebrate lineage." But these domains have been mixed and matched inthe vertebrate line to create more complex proteins. ...

Evolution has devised another ingenious way of increasingcomplexity, which is to divide a gene into several different segmentsand use them in different combinations to make different proteins.The protein-coding segments of a gene are known as exons and the DNAin between as introns. The initial transcript of a gene is processedby a delicate piece of cellular machinery known as a spliceosome,which strips out all the introns and joins the exons together.Sometimes, perhaps because of signals from the introns that have yetto be identified, certain exons are skipped, and a different proteinis made. The ability to make different proteins from the same gene isknown as alternative splicing. The consortium's biologists say thatalternative splicing is more common in human cells than in the fly orworm and that the full set of human proteins could be five times aslarge as the worm's.

There's a different explanation of human complexity, which issimply that the new low-ball figure of human genes derived byCelera and consortium is a gross undercount. Dr. WilliamHaseltine, president of Human Genome Sciences, has long maintainedthat there are 120,000 or so human genes. ... Dr. Haseltine ...remains unshaken in his estimate of 100,000 to 120,000 genes. He saidlast week that his company had captured and sequenced 90,000full-length genes, from which all alternative splice forms and otherusual sources of confusion have been removed. He has made and testedthe proteins from 10,000 of these genes. The consortium and Celerahave both arrived at the same low number because both are using thesame faulty methods, in his view. ... Dr. Haseltine notes that thegene-finding methods used by the two teams depend in part on lookingfor genes like those already known, a procedure that may well missradically different types of genes. His own method, capturing thegenes produced by variety of human cell types, is one that Dr. Ventersays in his paper is the ultimate method of counting human genes. ...Dr. Eric S. Lander of the Whitehead Institute last week challengedDr. Haseltine to make public all the genes he had found in a 1percent region of the genome and let others assess his claim. ... Dr.Haseltine said yesterday that he was contemplating the best way torespond and that he was "planning to do so in one form or another, inthe open literature."

Turning from genes to chromosomes, one of the most interestingdiscoveries in this week's papers concerns segmental duplications, orthe copying of whole blocks of genes from one chromosome to theother. These block transfers are so extensive that they seem to havebeen a major evolutionary factor in the genome's present size andarchitecture. They may arise because of a protective mechanism inwhich the cell reinserts broken-off fragments of DNA back into thechromosomes.

In Celera's genome article, Dr. Venter presents a table showinghow often blocks of similar genes in the same order can be foundthroughout the genome. Chromosome 19 seems the biggest borrower, ormaybe lender, with blocks of genes shared with 16 other chromosomes.... Segmental duplication is an important source of innovationbecause the copied block of genes is free to develop new functions....

Its rival, the public consortium of academic centers, felt no needfor a massive computer and assembly program because its genomedecoding strategy didn't require one. But a computational biologistat the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose supervisor hadbeen asked to help identify genes, realized the genome had to beassembled before gene identification could begin. In four weeks JimKent wrote an assembly program that put the consortium's jumble ofDNA fragments into coherent order. It was this assembled sequence onwhich most of the consortium's genome analysis is based. Mr. Kentalso wrote a browser, a program that aligns the known genes and otherinterpretive information in tracks above the actual genome sequence.Anyone wanting to take a tour of the human genome, with Mr. Kent'sbrowser as their guide, can do so at genome.ucsc.edu....

One of the most intriguing hints that new biology may bediscovered in the genome comes from an initial survey of the mousegenome, which Celera said this week it had assembled. Laying themouse genome sequence over the human sequence is extremely revealingbecause most of the DNA has diverged in the 100 million years sincemouse and man last shared a common ancestor. The DNA regions that aresimilar between the two species are those important enough to havebeen conserved. At a stroke, almost all the genes fall out asnoticeably similar. So too do many of the control regions of DNA thatprecede the genes.

And Dr. Craig Venter, president of Celera, has now stated thatthere is a third category of similar DNA regions,which are not genes but are too extensive to be control regions. Noone yet knows what the mystery regions are doing. ...".

But new evidence suggests that some RNA is not merely the intermediary between DNA and protein, but the end product. Some huge stretches of DNA that do not contain protein-coding genes and have been considered "junk" actually hold the code for some of this RNA. ...

... in addition to the DNA's containing the recipes for proteins, a lot more DNA was being copied into RNA. The recently deciphered mouse genome was found to have about twice as much in common with the human genome as could be accounted for by protein-coding genes. ... At least part of this overlap appears to be genes that produce RNA as their end product. What all of this RNA is doing is not clear ... But mounting evidence suggests that at least some RNA is involved in regulating the way genes are turned on or off. ... the most radical view: that RNA provides the command and control of cells. Proteins ... are like bricks and beams. But the RNA determines whether those bricks and beams become office buildings or houses. This RNA network ... provides the complexity that separates higher life forms from simpler ones. ...".

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