Thou Shalt Not Tell Lies:
              Information and Disinformation in the 21st Century

   What makes us human?  We are in the primate family of the mammalian class, and humans have always had theories about language use, tool use, being made in the image of God, or other factors that set us apart from all other life forms on earth.  We now know that some birds and some other primates use tools.  Some birds, whales, wolves and other animals communicate with primitive languages and can be taught human-like language use.  Human DNA is between 98.8% and 99.2% identical to chimpanzee DNA.  Is there truly any factor that sets us apart from other species?  Perhaps it is not a single fundamental factor, but the size or degree of use of one or several factors. 
   Biologists are beginning to understand what DNA is and what it is not.  DNA is an information storage medium.  DNA is not a "blueprint", but might be somewhat similar to a "recipe".  A recipe for bread talks about ingredients and timing and does not attempt to specify where the crust is located or how to get the yeast to distribute the CO2 bubbles evenly.  Tiny changes in the recipe, for example changing one character in the temperature figure from "Bake at 325 degrees for 40 minutes." to "Bake at 825 degrees for 40 minutes."  can completely change the result, while much larger changes in other parts of the recipe can have minimal effect.
   Humans are very clearly the first organisms on earth to store more information outside their genomes than inside.  It is difficult to quantify how many bits or kilobytes of information are encoded in an oral legend of origins, or a cave painting, or a medicine man's life-long teachings to an apprentice.  It is very easy to see that the modern libraries and hard drives of mankind completely dwarf our 18 megabit genomes (9 million base-pairs at 2 bits per base-pair).
   It is as yet undetermined how much of the human genome is "junk DNA", not needed to produce a human.  It is clear that most of the genome is not "genes", but rather repetitive DNA of various types.  One common type of element thought to be "junk" is endogenous retroviruses, which have entered the mammalian and other vertebrate germline DNA over the course of our evolution.  Most of the endogenous retroviruses have degraded over time through random point mutations to become completely nonfunctional.  Others have lost the ability to build virions with viral genome-carrying cores and envelopes, but have retained the ability to copy themselves within the host genome.  They are called "retroposons" or "jumping genes".  It is not yet clear where the line is drawn between these retroviral-derived repetitive elements and other repetitive elements such as Alu repeats, LINES and SINES.
   Some of the heroes of Los Alamos National Laboratory are those who worked on creating computers, information processing theory, and supercomputers capable of developing the science of chaos, nonlinear systems, self-organizing systems and cellular automata.  These fields which have collided at Los Alamos National Lab and spun off to places such as the Santa Fe Institute are beginning to shed light on how a few simple rules like those found in recipes can produce complex results that make the whole seem to be much more than the sum of its parts.
   Another group of heroes at LANL recognized very early on that DNA was information, and that computers and information technology would be useful, if not critical, in making sense of the information being deciphered through DNA sequencing technology.  They built databases of genetic sequences but failed to get funding for studying how to interpret the information.  Los Alamos National Lab was also instrumental in developing many of the technologies needed to scale up DNA sequencing from the gene level to the genome level.
   At the dawn of this 21st century we stand on the brink of revolutionary changes in information storage and processing of the information stored outside our DNA genomes.  We also have a new understanding of DNA and genes, and have developed new technologies with the potential for manipulating genes and genomes.  We continue to find that the more we know, the more we can see the other things that we don't know.  The world of science appears to be an infinitely expanding universe, with new frontiers of unknown territory continuously opening up ahead of the explorers who travel from Newton's mechanical world through Einstein's relativistic world into the quantum mechanical world.  Other explorers travel from the Darwinian world through the Mendelian world into the world of molecular genetics.  The areas where these worlds of science/information/theory collide can be as rich and exciting as the individual disciplines.  When molecular genetics meets information theory, or chaos theory merges with theories of self-organizing systems, new worlds are created.
   Just as the human genome is filled with more "junk DNA" than genes, so too is the information stored outside our genomes filled with more fiction than non-fiction.  The "junk DNA" in our genomes is not necessarily truly "junk", or harmful, or "wasted space".  Even segments of DNA that are detrimental to every individual may be very helpful to the species as a whole under certain circumstances or under all conditions.  For example, individuals would like to live forever, not age and die, but species seem to be better off when individuals have limited life spans.  Likewise not all fiction in our libraries is "junk" or "wasted space".  Science fiction and many other types of fiction can be very important for expanding our minds, and helping to shape our thoughts not only on what new worlds might lie ahead, but also how we as a species might choose to live in those worlds.  We have the technology to replace school teachers with computerized learning machines, but do we want to?
   Retroviruses and other viruses can be dangerous.  All viruses are most likely derived from cellular genomes, as forms of "runaway DNA".  Frank Ryan, in his book "Virus X", postulates that viruses might be an important balancing force in earth's ecosystems.  Viruses might kill off large fractions of populations of species that are reaching overpopulation, before they destroy their environment via overgrazing.  Viruses hosted in a nonpathogenic truce by one species might "pay that species back" by killing off other species which invade the host species' territory.  Just as humans have chosen since before we became truly "human" to not obey all of the "laws of nature", we theoretically have the power now to choose not to allow human populations to undergo "natural" boom-bust cycles, whether caused by starvation or war or plagues.
   If viruses come from our DNA, or at least the DNA of some cellular organisms, are there virtual viruses to be found in the information stored outside our genomes?  In my opinion, the answer is yes.  Information used to create the basis of "hate crimes" is one form of virtual virus.  Since before we became truly "human" we have waged war upon other species and upon other groups of our own species, most often under the idea that "They are different, therefor they are bad, therefor we have a moral right to kill them."  Whether or not some humans do at some time have a moral right to kill other humans who are evil, it is clear that the vast majority of the wars that have been fought by humans in the last 20,000 years did not fall into that category.  The truth is that "different" is not always "bad".  To say "They are different, therefor they are bad." is a lie.  Such lies may be "natural" to us, and may be good for the species as a whole by limiting global populations, but as with plagues we now theoretically have the technology to choose not to obey primitive natural instincts toward war.  We theoretically have the technology to use other means to mediate disputes and learn to live with those who are different from us, if we choose to.
   Not all fiction is "bad" and not all science or "truth" is good.  But it is quite clear that some lies are "bad" or "evil" or detrimental to human individuals, human populations, or even to our whole species.  My current scientific studies are devoted to understanding the natural history of lentiviruses, with the goal of helping guide vaccine development for the human immunodeficiency virus, the AIDS virus.  AIDS is caused by two different lentiviruses that we know about so far, HIV-1 which most likely came to man from chimpanzees, and HIV-2 which certainly came to man from Sooty mangabeys.  At the same time I fight this real lentiviral pandemic which is now estimated to be killing some 30 million people on earth, most of them in the third world, I am also fighting some virtual viruses: the lies that are spread which seek to misinform people that HIV does not exist; that the "cure" for this virus is to give it away to someone else; and other lies about HIV and AIDS that are exactly counterproductive to all scientific and medical efforts to curb or end this plague.