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

by dhw, Sunday, March 10, 2019, 10:27 (1875 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Since you believe in common descent, your God’s programmes have to be passed on from life forms to life forms. You (and apparently Behe too) claim that every life form was preprogrammed from the beginning, and yet you claim that bacteria only had a programme for bacteria. So how did they pass on the programmes for whales and their flippers, cuttlefish and their camouflage, monarchs and their migration, and weaverbirds and their nests?

DAVID: Bacteria carry their program and ones for the future they cannot use for themselves but is passed on to allow multicellular forms to arrive.

Thank you. So now we have the first bacteria carrying programmes for every single life form, econiche, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of life past, present and future, and somehow knowing which programme is for them alone. I wonder what happened next. Did they squiggle through history unknowingly passing the dinosaur programme and nothing but the dinosaur programme to pre-dinosaur cells, cuttlefish and camouflage programme to pre-cuttlefish cells, weaverbird and nest programme to pre-weaverbird cells, and hominin and pelvis programme to pre-hominin cells? Wouldn’t it be fascinating to discover what programmes they are still carrying for life in, say, a thousand million years’ time! Of course you think evolution is over, but hey, you never know.

DAVID: As research proceeds, more and more automaticity is described.

dhw: And yet we have just been discussing two articles which tell us that more and more scientists believe cells are intelligent and create instructions on the hoof, de novo. Could your view be the result of confirmation/conclusion bias?

DAVID: What 'more and more' scientists. You keep quoting your tiny list.

On Monday 25 February you gave us an extended version of the article with which you opened this thread. QUOTE (my bold): “So it has been dawning on us is that there is no prior plan or blueprint for development: Instructions are created on the hoof, far more intelligently than is possible from dumb DNA. That is why today’s molecular biologists are reporting “cognitive resources” in cells; “bio-information intelligence”; “cell intelligence”; “metabolic memory”; and “cell knowledge”—all terms appearing in recent literature. “Do cells think?” is the title of a 2007 paper in the journal Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences. On the other hand the assumed developmental “program” coded in a genotype has never been described.”

Sounds like more and more scientists to me.