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i_love_limestoday at 10:09 AM2 repliesview on HN

Great question! It maybe can be, but what is the maxima that is being solved for exactly? There are usually tradeoffs, the most common and prevalent is our body's immune response. If it's under-active, we might die from an infection. If it's over-active, we get diabetes, lupus, chron's, and (probably) lots of mental health disorders.

So, it's a bit context dependent, and definitely dependent on other mutations that have occurred in other parts of your DNA. Most complex diseases are "polygenic", meaning it's a culmination of quite a few factors that would contribute to a specific good or bad outcome.

So, yes, it could be modeled as a sort very context dependent with a lot of highly correlated non-independent covariates. We do use quite a lot of statistical and ML methods to understand the genome (I work in statistical genetics), but the complexity of biology has so far proved a tough nut to crack.


Replies

codethieftoday at 11:54 AM

> It maybe can be, but what is the maxima that is being solved for exactly?

Survival rate/reproduction rate/rate of genes being spread?

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yuretztoday at 10:20 AM

Great answer! Thank you!