Genome complexity: most important article ever! (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, May 09, 2015, 11:40 (3268 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: This is a must read with care and full understanding. It is a description of the inventive mechanism imbedded in gene networks. It describes patterns and suggests laws covering the drive to complexity that seems to be the force behind evolvability.
There are nuggets below, but it must be fully digested. It reeks of design, but the author can't say that. Darwinists would pounce.-http://nautil.us/issue/20/creativity/the-strange-inevitability-of-evolution-It also reeks of autonomy, unless you think your God directs every change, or preprogrammed every innovation 3.7 billion years ago. However, there is one more quote I would like to comment on, as I do not quite understand it but suspect that it slightly distorts the picture:
 
“The structure of these combinatorial landscapes of biomolecules then enables nature to make bold and creative innovations rather than being forever consigned to making incremental variations on what already exists. Evolution need only take a random walk along a web of neutral (or at least almost neutral) mutations, that, without impairing the fitness of an organism, surrounds it with very different neighbors: innovative solutions to selective pressures that are there for the taking when the circumstances compel it. Through this neutral drift, organisms can reach locations in phase space which would not have been accessible by strictly adaptive mutation from their original starting position.”-Perhaps you could explain what they mean by a random walk along a web of neutral mutations.
 
To make the process clearer, I would say it is not some strange force called nature that innovates, but individual organisms themselves that combine (combinatorial landscapes). And evolution does not take a random walk, but individual organisms themselves respond inventively as well as adaptively to random changes in the environment. Nor do circumstances necessarily compel innovation, as bacteria have remained bacteria since it all began: innovations are not motivated solely by the need to survive, but also by the desire to improve. And finally, to go back to autonomy, we should never forget that in 99% of cases, the inventive/adaptive mechanism fails. Once again, if your God designed it in the first place, he either preprogrammed the failure, intervened to engineer it, or left organisms to fend for themselves (= autonomy).-Thank you for this article. Definitely very important!