Mules and Hinnies

Yesterday, JasonJ wrote about “Mitochondrial Deoxyribonucleic Acid”, which is really significant for human history.

It reminded me of a problem i had seven years ago. At that time i had found a development system able to do all that stuff i like a system to do like storing whole procedures in texts – which themselves can be stored in databases – and such creating a totally different runtime-system dependent on the individual demands.

I had managed to have a message bus, controlling the interaction and doing all the boring stuff software has to do like popup-lists, error-messages, changing language on the fly, a standard user-interface-window, which offered everything, each usual software window handling databases has to offer and a standard report – all perfectly anonymous regarding the individual, special case of the database-model, this “Kernel”-system had to process.

And it worked.

Dependent on the metadata in a control-file, where the individual surface of the standard-window and standard-print was stored, where the individual checks of the file and its fields could be found, the system could handle anything based on mass data – as long as it was defined in the metadata.

At that time Websites started to become important. And so i started to think about enhancing the system to be able to manage Websites – but then i thought: What will come next?

That’s how i began to look for the “Uber process” – the process, able to handle standard-windows, standard-prints, standard-Websites, everything you want. I had no idea how to do and so i searched for an answer in biology, because no one is as good in programming as Mother Nature.

And in fact, there exists the “Uber process”, biologists say – the egg. Because reproduction is only based on genes, biologists say, and that simply means, that the processes in the egg, the engine, the runtime of the genes, must be totally and perfectly anonymous regarding the metadata (the genes). And that, i thought, has to mean, that the egg must be the “Uber process” – able to manage all the species on Earth (all the “jobs” to be done by reproduction) only dependent on the Metadata “gene”.

But despite the fact, that i knew of the existence of the “Uber process”, i wasn’t able to catch only an idea how to do it or just where to go.

And now, what do you think, did the brazen person do, which didn’t hesitate to search for the definition of information, really genius people couldn’t find for more than 40 years – simply assuming that they all may walk the wrong line?

I didn’t hesitate to think, the biologists must be wrong. There isn’t a way to create a totally and perfectly anonymous process regarding each and every special case through pure representation with metadata, for the simple fact, that the process must “understand” the metadata and therefore both must be strongly intertwined to ensure a working, stable cycle– and only stable cycles are repeatable processes “carrying” information.

(The only totally and perfectly anonymous process regarding any metadata is the quantum noise, i guess, the pure action without repeatability and identifiability.)

Ok, i thought – if you are right and the process has to shape the whole dynamics against the “common knowledge”, you must find something in nature proving the “shaping” against the genes.

But how could i find such a proof? I had to look between the species, because the “kind” of the job, reproduction has to do, could be seen as the offsprings of one kind of “engine”, one kind of egg – and here i found some interesting hints: Species with a variation of about 5% in phenotype shouldn’t be able to unite (==> processes aren’t easy to combine because of their own characteristics), at least in the human species eggs aren’t created by the woman’s body, but by their mothers body (==> the process has to be protected, so better let it go through the generations instead of trying to start it each time), depending on the expectation of women about their future, the birth gender ratio can be changed or the cruel fact about “foetus in foetu” (==>the growth of the body controlled by the genes, but performed by the egg, can be changed and harmed due to external processes influencing the “movement”)...

alas, all those hints were just that: hints.

Then i stumbled across the mule and the hinny, both offsprings of horses and donkeys. Many people think, that both should be the same, because “The genetic inheritance of the hinny is exactly the same as the mule” (American Donkey and Mule Society).

But genes are only metadata – and metadata without a performing engine are meaningless – without any information. Because? Information is process, repeatable, identifable process – and here you see, where the metadata comes into play: in the repeatability and identifiability. But without process, without the action, the ongoing drive to change states there is no information.

So i tried to find something about mules and hinnies – because it is the best known example of mammal hybrids. Problem is, that if they can mate, both kind-defining processes must be similar enough to be able to interprete the metadata of the other species/process: the species must be “closely related”. And because the process defines kind, but the metadata defines the individuality (the title of my first book, btw), you have both elements in each and every individual, and so the more you look at the details, the more inconsistent data you get.

But there is a hint, that there MUST be a general difference – simply because it’s said, that the hinnies are “rarer”. So something controlling the breeding (either humans or nature) prefers mules and to prefer something you have to detect a difference to decide what you want.

And then i found this statement of the American Donkey and Mule Society: “The equine hybrid is easier to obtain when the lower chromosome count, the donkey, is in the male.”

When the donkey is the male, the engine is offered by the kind “horse” – that’s the mule. When the horse is the male, the engine is offered by the kind “donkey” – that’s the hinny. And while some say, there are nearly no differences, other say, the hinny looks more “horselike” or more “donkey-like”, not really consistent, i guess. But there is one hint you can use (Bertrands Paradox) to decide who may be right: the human preference of the horses. The more an animal looks and behaves like a horse, the more it is appreciated – and the mule is preferred.

Why it is so hard to detect the influence of the process? Because the process defines the kind and that simply means, that the process is (nearly) equal for each individual of that kind.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: What can’t be differentiated, is equal. Equality means: no differences, no identifiability – no information...

No distinctness in(side) the process.

You have to compare kinds to compare processes, not individuals, because the individual, the “special case” is dependent on the metadata (btw that’s exactly the same problem, software or ontology has: to differ between system/general services, branches/kinds and single cases/individuals).

Actually, exactly the difficulty to tell precisely the difference between the processes of horse and donkey (similar enough to allow combination of the controlling metadatas) is something like an evidence for the importance of the characteristics of the performing process: Because only nearly equal species/processes can mate/harmonize.

Add to this JasonJ’s “Mitochondrial Deoxyribonucleic Acid, allowing to trace the human movements over the whole Earth by comparing characteristics solely based on the engine.

This proves identifiability – if the mtDNA wouldn’t be identifiable even without the individuality of the genes, you couldn’t trace the march of the tribes.

Btw: i guess, this is one of the basic problems scientists have to understand what information is. They focus on the details of the individuality while ignoring the basic, but omnipresent precondition:

the creating activity.