Genome complexity: what genes do and don't do (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, January 22, 2019, 11:12 (1922 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID’s comment: Studies like this one support my contention that the first DNA might have contained all the information needed for all stages of evolution to occur, but rearranging genes and by alternate expression of genes, known processes. What we don't know is that there has to be a layer of control to make these decisions and we don't see that natural layer at this point. Could this be God making the decisions which is my theory?

dhw: When I asked you to define what you called the “intelligent information” in the DNA, you said it was "a complete set of instructions for cells to respond to all stimuli.” You have now agreed that DNA is a passive code, and so cannot be a complete list of instructions. Now you slide back to your woolly use of “information”, so perhaps you’d better give us a new definition.

DAVID: I might ask whether you think DNA is a code which contains information for protein formation? DNA has also has areas of differing modifying factors, which is information of a different kind. My changing views come from new research as it appears.

I trust your judgement when you say the article expresses your thoughts exactly: i.e. DNA is a passive data base which has to be used by the organism to make new proteins. You appear to have withdrawn your definition of information as instructions, but you still haven’t redefined it. I understand it as meaning facts or details about a particular subject. It cannot do anything, but has to be used. In this post you claim again that the first DNA might have contained all the information needed for all stages of evolution. I don’t understand how 3.8 billion years ago the first DNA could have contained all the facts and details about every future innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of evolution. The article states that cells learn “on the hoof”, and create instructions de novo. Sounds convincing to me.

dhw: Meanwhile, you also revert to your nebulous “layer of control” to make the decisions. […] Why can’t you at least countenance the possibility that the layer of control is cellular, decision-making intelligence, possibly designed by your God?
DAVID: If it is accepted that God is in control of evolution, as I do, the cells make adaptations within His limits.

We have discussed the “limits”, and you could only come up with restrictions imposed by the environment and by the capabilities of the cells themselves. Now please explain what you mean by a “layer of control” if it does not mean your God sitting in every cell, or preprogramming every development with a 3.8 byo list of instructions, or dabbling every individual innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder.

DAVID: 4) God deleted from the beginning genome and new forms appeared.

dhw: You've included this in your list of possibilities, so please explain why you think your God might have used a method that would entail removing millions of his specially designed programmes each time he wanted to implement one.

DAVID: Behe explains that small alterations in DNA can make evolutionary advances. You assume large.

Small alterations do not mean God removing 99% of his 3.8 byo programmes in order to produce one new species (= “new form”). Speciation implies large changes, but the second article suggested that these can result from small adjustments to the genome – which implies that innovation might not be the large-scale operation you like to emphasize in your argument concerning the gaps in the fossil record.

Dhw: […] nowhere in your list of alternatives do we find the possibility that your God might have designed a control system that enabled the organism (cell community) itself to use the passive code!

DAVID: I've always admitted that an 'inventive mechanism' is possible. but you won't accept it as under God's developmental guidelines. Without those guiding principals evolution could proceed helter-skelter.

dhw: Your developmental guidelines have always turned out to be instructions, and that is not what I mean by an AUTONOMOUS inventive mechanism. “Helter-skelter” is precisely what I see (though that does not in any way preclude the possibility that there is a God who deliberately designed the helter-skelter), with millions and millions of life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders coming and going as the bush diversifies. But you see all these millions of life forms etc. as having been specially designed to eat one another so that life could survive for 3.5+ billion years (although apparently survival played no role in evolution) until your fully-in-control God could specially design the only thing he wanted to design.

DAVID: Distortion of the survival issue as usual. Survival is built in to each advanced form or evolution would grind to a halt.

Sorry you choose only to pick on the parenthesis concerning survival, which is dealt with under “Little Foot”.