In particular, a simple model shows the selective advantage of underlying variability in DNA being an inheritable trait and not being constant along its length. DNA tunes its own error rates. In order to understand how our minds work it is necessary to understand why we have dreams , why humour works, how it is that music affects us and what the basis of effective hypnosis is. The suggestions I put forward in this article go only a part of the way towards explaining these aspects of thought. A related page gives a mini-review of four different researchers' approaches to the mind.
Proteins are ubiquitous bio-polymers with a huge range of very different functions.
Computer algorithms can compare the chemical structures of different proteins and sometimes find unexpected similarities . In this article I describe surprising protein similarities I found in a comprehensive database versus database search - and what these similarities may tell us. A Study in Optimisation Sequence Alignment Algorithms are the most heavily used algorithms in bioinformatics. Their use for database searching was once restricted to parallel computers because of their high computational cost. Whilst not reducing this complexity measure, I wrote an intensively optimised version with a more than fifty fold speed up over what was previously thought possible.