Notes

Thursday, August 27, 2009

On evolution and typos

Seeing correspondences:

"The ancestral message from the dawn of life has grown to an instruction manual containing three thousand million letters coded into DNA. Everyone has a unique edition of the manual which differs in millions of ways from that of their fellows. All this diversity comes from accumulated errors in copying the inherited message."

From Life itself: Its origin and nature (1981) Francis Crick, cited in The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge (1998) Jeremy Narby

In the game variously known as Chinese whispers, Telephone, Broken Telephone, Whisper Down the Lane, Gossip, Arab Phone (from the French Le téléphone arabe), and Stille Post (Silent Post), the first player whispers a phrase or sentence to the next player. Each player successively whispers what that player believes he or she heard to the next. The last player announces the statement to the entire group. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly, and often amusingly, from the one uttered by the first.

From Wikipedia's article on the children's game "Telephone", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers