20 - 005 What is RNA ?

So if DNA is the master plan for life what is RNA? Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a molecule, like DNA is a molecule, formed as a stepping stone between the DNA script and the real cell that gets created from the DNA script. So the DNA script code is converted into an RNA code which if you like is the real recipe for making a real living cell. So in the making of a real living cell it is not DNA script directly to living cell but more like DNA script to RNA recipe to living cell. This is really significant because although the DNA script is very locked down with few changes allowed back through from living cells to change it the RNA recipe seems to be more flexible and more easily subject to change. With the possibility of some of these changes once established in the RNA recipe able to make it back to the DNA script. In fact the RNA recipe seems to be more susceptible to receiving feedback from living cells and the things they are experiencing in the outside world of living within a living organism. If that makes sense. I have deliberately called it a DNA script to indicate it is like a set of working instructions not containing all the detail on making the living cell in a chemical way. But it does give the detail on how to link to the particular RNA recipe required to make the living cell. But stepping through the DNA script it is able to call on a particular RNA recipe which as the term recipe implies has the detail on exactly which chemicals need to be mixed together to make the actual living cell. So the appears to be some hierarchy between DNA script and RNA recipe. Remember we are trying to envisage a digital representation of a chain of chemical processes making us a Digital Human. Now this difference between what I term digital thinking and chemical thinking is difficult to comprehend. But if you are a consilience thinker, which is about getting down to simple concepts that you believe underlies everything in this world, then in fact chemical and digital are exactly the same. Chemical changes go through stages so all the chemical elements can be defined exactly at each stage and it is their relationships at each of these stages that can be represented as a digital pattern. The periodic table of elements has been defined exactly linking to the atoms that support each element. All life is made up of these elements and nothing else. I am not a chemist but my favourite quote in 1924 was by Charles Mayo , the head of the American Medical Association, who published a tongue in cheek calculation that if you split the human body into piles of its constituent elements the total value would be around eighty four cents. So for me we are just assembled from these elements and the way we are assembled will be based upon set chemical patterns and these can be digitally represented. But there is one other important dimension relating to these digital patterns and that is time. In my human body these chemical structures and their representation as digital patterns are changing all the time. With RNA changing more dynamically than DNA.