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

by David Turell , Thursday, February 21, 2019, 20:07 (1891 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: They can't know the truth any more than I can. I'll stick to my view as much more probable.

dhw: Just to clarify, then: you tell us the odds are 50/50, but your view is that the odds are not 50/50. And for good measure you think it is more probable that cellular behaviour is governed by a divine 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme of instructions for every undabbled life form, lifestyle, and natural wonder in the history of life than that your God could have designed cells with an innate ability to “create instructions on the hoof”.

My usual answer. God is in control and if he created such a mechanism, as you imagine, it would contain guidelines.

DAVID: And your non-belief is fixed! All the article shows is cells can be manipulated from outside to make the cells do something they don't normally do. The 'no proof' is that no one knows if cells can do this on their own initiative (your pet theory). You neatly skip over my point!

dhw: The above is a response to your point: an acknowledgement that NONE of these hypotheses are proven, because if they were, they would not be hypotheses but facts. Non-belief (as opposed to disbelief) = open-mindedness, although I must confess that there are some hypotheses to which I do close my mind (remember Bertrand Russell’s example of the invisible teapot circling the sun?), as specified on the “Big brain” thread.

DAVID (under “Biological complexity”): Recent research reveals a huge variety of different parts of living organisms produce an enormous number if different hormones so every part communicates with all the other parts through the circulatory system:
https://aeon.co/essays/the-revolutionary-idea-revealing-the-bodys-hormonal-democracy?ut...

dhw: Yet another article laying emphasis on the autonomous cooperation between cell communities (which you try to ridicule by calling them “committees”). And your bold suggests that precisely the same process of autonomous cellular communication underlay multicellularity. NB: This still allows for your God as the inventor of the mechanism that gave rise to these different autonomous, cooperating, decision-making cell communities.

DAVID: Life appears/emerges from all these biochemical interactions of thousands of communicating processes all working in concert. Cells in each organ have necessarily fixed roles to play. A bacterium has to do it all in one cell. The earliest chordate fish in the Cambrian had this degree of complexity with a variety of organs. No one knows how speciation occurs from the history we have. Now that we see so many multicellular organisms in so many branches, with cells in fixed roles, we don't know how they can modify themselves while still doing their necessary work.

dhw: An excellent summary of the mystery of speciation. We don’t know how it works. Some evolutionists attribute it to chance (via random mutations); a dear friend of mine attributes it to divine dabbling or a divine 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for every undabbled life form, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of life; and I have proposed cellular intelligence (possibly God-given) responding to changing conditions. The articles you keep quoting seem to support the last of these rather than the first two. Here is another:

DAVID (under “how plants construct cells”): Again a very complex system which requires very specific molecules to direct the work. Not by chance. This process is inherited from the very first bacteria of life.

dhw: Yes, it would seem to support the concept of common descent and the idea that all the members of different cell communities cooperate to produce the varying complexities of living organisms. For three alternative explanations of how this system might work, see above.

And see my objections to cellular capabilities to speciate above. Cells have fixed roles. Cells have ability to invent. They can slightly modify their outputs when given sightly different instructions by nerves or hormones.