Genome complexity: most important article ever! (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, May 10, 2015, 21:27 (3273 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Perhaps you could explain what they mean by a random walk along a web of neutral mutations.
Thank you for your explanation, which I shan't reproduce. A random walk doesn't sound much like pre-planning to me, and I still don't see how neutral mutations can lead to innovations, but perhaps we should leave it at that.-dhw: 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.
DAVID: I see here you are making your own interpretation and disagreeing with the author. You have that right. I do it all the time. You are accepting epigenetics, which I think was pre-planned to help organisms do exactly what you describe.-People often forget that every innovation has to take place within individual organisms, and that is hard to imagine. If we reject random mutations, innovation implies a mind, but life, Nature and evolution are not terms we normally associate with a mind. Your answer is God, but many experts say that organisms also have some sort of mind. The question then is whether the ability to respond inventively to environmental change comes from outside the organism (God) or inside. 
 
dhw: 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.
DAVID: Be careful, 'desire to improve' smells of teleology. How do bacteria even conceive of improving themselves?-Most of them obviously don't, but they can conceive of defending and adapting themselves. The experts you disapprove of tell us that even such minuscule organisms are individual. It's not unimaginable that all innovations are brought about by certain individual organisms having a greater degree of awareness than others - just as individual humans vary enormously in their degree of intelligence, inventiveness etc. By coincidence, today's Sunday Times reviews a new book by a biochemist named Nick Lane: THE VITAL QUESTION: -“For two billion years, earth was populated by busy but boring bacteria and archaea, single-cell life forms known as prokaryotes [...] An archaea and a bacteria, against all the odds, mingled in a process known as endosymbiosis, and started a whole new process from which eukaryotes - cells with nuclei - emerged.” -God preprogramming these two little critters? God dabbling? Sheer luck? Two autonomous little explorers deciding to experiment? We should remember that every single innovation afterwards entails a similar process of "mingling", or perhaps we should call it cooperating.
 
dhw: 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).
DAVID: But yet there are humans living all around you, despite your complaint. You should be grateful worked so well to give you your experience of life.-My post is not a complaint. I am merely pointing out that your insistence on pre-planning runs into difficulty when you are confronted with the 99% of apparent failures. As for gratitude, yes indeed, I cherish my experience of life. That does not mean I have to believe in divine pre-planning and/or dabbling.