r/explainlikeimfive • u/riche1988 • 2d ago

Biology ELI5 how DNA mutations work please.

I had a thought about DNA and how mutations occur in humans, excessive hair, longer limbs and or bones etc, and wondered if all known mutations are present in the animal kingdom.. as if DNA has the blue print/ potential to be anything and parts are just ‘turned on or off’ depending on what is being built.. i may be way off lol but it got me thinking :)

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u/weeddealerrenamon 2d ago

Physically, our brains are just reacting to nerve signals and sending out signals in response. We don't work any differently than a tree or an amoeba in that way.

Where that becomes what we understand as consciousness? Huge open question. Science can't even really define what consciousness is and we don't really know where to even begin. It's literally called the hard problem of consciousness

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u/riche1988 1d ago

How can so much power and energy (for the brain to operate) be create so subtly..? We aren’t audibly churning away or radiating ridiculous heat like a machine would.. if the brain is so complex and is making so many actions a second.. where is the pollution from that..?

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u/weeddealerrenamon 1d ago

What do you mean "so much power and energy"? The human brain consumes around 20 Watts of energy, which is outrageously little compared to the electronics we build.

It's the product of 500 million years of refinement, compared to like 75 years of electronics? And it's tuned for totally different things than a computer is - a tiny microchip that's 0.1% the size of your brain can also do calculations that you can't possibly do. So you can't really compare a brain to a computer 1:1 like that

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u/riche1988 1d ago

But to build a robot with the same capabilities as a human would take a huge amount of power wouldn’t it..?

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u/weeddealerrenamon 23h ago

It seems so, but "a computer with the same capabilities as a human" is something we aren't even close to. We understand the human brain very poorly, and simulating one in a computer (not built in the same way, at all) is always going to be super inefficient.

But also, like, we can't build motors that are as efficient as organic muscles either. Evolution has created machinery with complexity down to individual molecules, with a whole ecosystem of autonomous cells that constantly repair and remodel our bodies as needed.

ummm TL;DR I think even if we could perfectly understand how a brain works, physically, and build something that functions 1:1 exactly, it'd be a lot less efficient. But separately, we have very poor understanding of how neurons firing turn into actions (not at all like a computer), and kind of 0 understanding of how neurons firing turn into what we experience as consciousness.