melodies by assigning harmonious notes to the amino acids that popped up most often, and found that this produced more complex and euphonious sounds. This second method reinforces the ideathat, much like music, DNA is only partly a strict sequence of “notes.” It’s also defined by motifs and themes, by how often certain sequences occur and how well they work together. One biologist has even argued that music is a natural medium for studying how genetic bits combine, since humans have a keen ear for how phrases “chunk together” in music.
Something even more interesting happened when two scientists, instead of turning DNA into music, inverted the process and translated the notes from a Chopin nocturne into DNA. They discovered a sequence “strikingly similar” to part of the gene for RNA polymerase. This polymerase, a protein universal throughout life, is what builds RNA from DNA. Which means, if you look closer, that the nocturne actually encodes an entire life cycle. Consider: Polymerase uses DNA to build RNA. RNA in turn builds complicated proteins. These proteins in turn build cells, which in turn build people, like Chopin. He in turn composed harmonious music—which completed the cycle by encoding the DNA to build polymerase. (Musicology recapitulates ontology.)
So was this discovery a fluke? Not entirely. Some scientists argue that when genes first appeared in DNA, they didn’t arise randomly, along any old stretch of chromosome. They began instead as repetitive phrases, a dozen or two dozen DNA bases duplicated over and over. These stretches function like a basic musical theme that a composer tweaks and tunes (i.e., mutates) to create pleasing variations on the original. In this sense, then, genes had melody built into them from the start.
Humans have long wanted to link music to deeper, grander themes in nature. Most notably astronomers from ancient Greece right through to Kepler believed that, as the planets ran their course through the heavens, they created an achingly beautiful
musica universalis,
a hymn in praise of Creation. It turns out thatuniversal music does exist, only it’s closer than we ever imagined, in our DNA.
Genetics and linguistics have deeper ties beyond Zipf’s law. Mendel himself dabbled in linguistics in his older, fatter days, including an attempt to derive a precise mathematical law for how the suffixes of German surnames (like
-mann
and
-bauer
) hybridized with other names and reproduced themselves each generation. (Sounds familiar.) And heck, nowadays, geneticists couldn’t even talk about their work without all the terms they’ve lifted from the study of languages. DNA has synonyms, translations, punctuation, prefixes, and suffixes. Missense mutations (substituting amino acids) and nonsense mutations (interfering with stop codons) are basically typos, while frameshift mutations (screwing up how triplets get read) are old-fashioned typesetting mistakes. Genetics even has grammar and syntax—rules for combining amino acid “words” and clauses into protein “sentences” that cells can read.
More specifically, genetic grammar and syntax outline the rules for how a cell should fold a chain of amino acids into a working protein. (Proteins must be folded into compact shapes before they’ll work, and they generally don’t work if their shape is wrong.) Proper syntactical and grammatical folding is a crucial part of communicating in the DNA language. However, communication does require more than proper syntax and grammar; a protein sentence has to
mean
something to a cell, too. And, strangely, protein sentences can be syntactically and grammatically perfect, yet have no biological meaning. To understand what on earth that means, it helps to look at something linguist Noam Chomsky once said. He was trying to demonstrate the independence of syntax and meaning in human speech.His example was “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Whatever you think of Chomsky, that
Something even more interesting happened when two scientists, instead of turning DNA into music, inverted the process and translated the notes from a Chopin nocturne into DNA. They discovered a sequence “strikingly similar” to part of the gene for RNA polymerase. This polymerase, a protein universal throughout life, is what builds RNA from DNA. Which means, if you look closer, that the nocturne actually encodes an entire life cycle. Consider: Polymerase uses DNA to build RNA. RNA in turn builds complicated proteins. These proteins in turn build cells, which in turn build people, like Chopin. He in turn composed harmonious music—which completed the cycle by encoding the DNA to build polymerase. (Musicology recapitulates ontology.)
So was this discovery a fluke? Not entirely. Some scientists argue that when genes first appeared in DNA, they didn’t arise randomly, along any old stretch of chromosome. They began instead as repetitive phrases, a dozen or two dozen DNA bases duplicated over and over. These stretches function like a basic musical theme that a composer tweaks and tunes (i.e., mutates) to create pleasing variations on the original. In this sense, then, genes had melody built into them from the start.
Humans have long wanted to link music to deeper, grander themes in nature. Most notably astronomers from ancient Greece right through to Kepler believed that, as the planets ran their course through the heavens, they created an achingly beautiful
musica universalis,
a hymn in praise of Creation. It turns out thatuniversal music does exist, only it’s closer than we ever imagined, in our DNA.
Genetics and linguistics have deeper ties beyond Zipf’s law. Mendel himself dabbled in linguistics in his older, fatter days, including an attempt to derive a precise mathematical law for how the suffixes of German surnames (like
-mann
and
-bauer
) hybridized with other names and reproduced themselves each generation. (Sounds familiar.) And heck, nowadays, geneticists couldn’t even talk about their work without all the terms they’ve lifted from the study of languages. DNA has synonyms, translations, punctuation, prefixes, and suffixes. Missense mutations (substituting amino acids) and nonsense mutations (interfering with stop codons) are basically typos, while frameshift mutations (screwing up how triplets get read) are old-fashioned typesetting mistakes. Genetics even has grammar and syntax—rules for combining amino acid “words” and clauses into protein “sentences” that cells can read.
More specifically, genetic grammar and syntax outline the rules for how a cell should fold a chain of amino acids into a working protein. (Proteins must be folded into compact shapes before they’ll work, and they generally don’t work if their shape is wrong.) Proper syntactical and grammatical folding is a crucial part of communicating in the DNA language. However, communication does require more than proper syntax and grammar; a protein sentence has to
mean
something to a cell, too. And, strangely, protein sentences can be syntactically and grammatically perfect, yet have no biological meaning. To understand what on earth that means, it helps to look at something linguist Noam Chomsky once said. He was trying to demonstrate the independence of syntax and meaning in human speech.His example was “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Whatever you think of Chomsky, that
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