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

by David Turell , Wednesday, January 23, 2019, 19:08 (1920 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: I can’t follow your analogy. We’re dealing with the invention of the machine (the "fully functioning being" or species) not how the invention is to be used! You have told us the article is an exact expression of your thoughts, and the article quite specifically states that the DNA code is a passive data base (= passive information) “cannot possibly serve as instructions”, cells “learn” and “create instructions on the hoof” and create instructions “de novo”. Now you’ve reverted to your belief that information means instructions, and lower down (bolded) you will tell us it is active.

Very simply information can do both, supply instruction for new speciation and how it should react to challenges. DNA is just the code level of protein production. There must be other levels of the genome to contain that function, and some may be hidden in the vast size of DNA inthe non-coding regions (96-98%).

DAVID: Shapiro tells us that the cells in all of this massive activity can modify their genome to alter their function. This implies that the instructions for life are used and malleable. You appear to approach information as descriptive, but in life it is a central active component which makes life emerge.

dhw: And Shapiro tells us that cells are sentient, intelligent, decision-making beings, and anyone who thinks otherwise is guilty of “large organisms chauvinism”.

Shapiro studied bacteria which he interpreted as having a read/write control over their DNA. There is no way he could tell if this was independent activity or acting under response instructions.

DAVID: It is a concept. Just as you have an idea that cells contain their own inventive mechanism (IM) I can see it existing with God-imposed limits to the degree of modification.

dhw: And apart from limits imposed by the environment and by their own capabilities, what “limits” do you see?

They cannot speciate themselves into a new form

dhw: In passing, I don’t like the word “advances” on its own. I don’t regard whale fins as an advance on pre-whale legs, or toothlessness/baleens as an advance on teeth, but I do accept your own contention that evolution is a bush and not a tree. The higgledy-piggledy bush of evolution sprawls outwards (not an advance) as well as upwards. And yes, our DNA has lots of room for rearrangements, and the articles suggest that only small rearrangements are necessary for large changes, but if DNA is a passive data base, it is the active organisms (comprising cell communities) that use the passive information.

Your invention of cell communities does not prove there is any evidence of cells having any ability to communicate new design plans for advancing modification or speciation. Your entire idea is based on the tenuous conclusion Shapiro made after studies of single cell bacteria which can do specific gene transfer for specific purposes like antibacterial resistance..

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

DAVID: I saw nothing to respond to besides survival. You made your usual attempt to interpret the bush of life as something God produced but offered none of your humanizing reasons for God doing it. My idea that it is for food fits the facts of natures balance each ecosystem with its top predator.

dhw: On the subject of survival, see “Little Foot” again. Your idea is that your always-in-control God specially designed a bush of food to fill in 3.5+ billion years of life until he could specially design the only thing he wanted to design. I suggest that the helter-skelter bush is the result of him wishing to create a helter-skelter bush. We needn’t go into the “humanizing” reasons we both hypothesize.

But all you have done is look for humanizing reasons. There is no reason for humans with consciousness to appear unless God desired that result of evolution.