Nice article as usual. I posted some of this as a reply in the Asimov comment thread but wanted to discuss it further here.

As you have previously discussed, the DNA alone is not sufficient to build an organism. At minimum, you need the cellular machinery of the zygote. But I’m not sure the zygote even has everything it needs. There’s a lot of interaction between the developing embryo and the mother that can influence the final phenotype. Another large well of information is the microbiome, much of which is transferred from the mother but has many different species with their own DNA. Given how the microbiome can influence overall health and cognition, I think it’s necessary to at least consider it. It does seem that it could be quite compressible given the specific composition of the microbiome seems to be less important.

If you were an alien with no context for what a human was, How would the question of “what is the minimal amount of information needed to create a human” change? In addition to all of the above, you’d need some environmental specification (what do they eat and drink? What do they breathe? What temperatures can they tolerate?). Some of this could be deduced or at least narrowed down by examining the DNA and associated proteins itself (essential vs non-essential amino acids, the homochirality of biological molecules, the rough temperature range based on denaturation), but others (trace minerals, etc) may be more difficult.

EDIT: I just saw a similar discussion on the substack comment thread as well

Glad you called this out and I don’t think it hurts your reputation. I enjoy reading your blog because you find interesting, idiosyncratic topics and investigate them rigorously. I send your aspartame article to people all the time and I think you deserve credit for collecting and synthesizing the available information on this subject into one easily-digestible article

I’m not sure that thinking speed alone would give you much. If I could think 10x faster my capabilities for things like math and physics wouldn’t be that much faster. I can only keep so much of a given problem in my head, so I’d still need to write things down and work through the algebra. To avoid that, I’d need a pretty massive increase in working memory, proportional to the increase in speed