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

by dhw, Wednesday, March 20, 2019, 13:25 (1865 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Preprogramming has to work in just that way. Or there are also dabbling switches for God to activate.

dhw: I’m glad that my description of your hypothesis is accurate. […] apparently the majority of scientists now seem to support the concept of cellular intelligence.

DAVID: Still the same problem. All of us are looking in from the outside. NO ONE knows the truth. It is all still opinion. Intelligent cell reactions are still 50/50: some degree of intelligence choice decisions or following intelligent instructions. Scientific conclusions are not by democratic vote, but by paradigm shifts (Kuhn).

Agreed. Let us then eagerly await the shift of paradigm through the discovery of programmes for whale flippers, cuttlefish camouflage, monarch migration and weaverbirds’ nests (multiply examples by a few billion) hidden inside the bacterial genome. Or possibly a shift of paradigm towards cellular intelligence.

DAVID: I don't understand your definition of itty-bitty except it doesn't fit the 200 cc jumps in size of the hominin stages of brain development. […]

dhw: By “itty bitty” I mean one bit at a time. All dealt with under “Big brain evolution”: if your God’s one and only purpose was to produce H. sapiens, and he was in full control, why did he take millions of years fiddling with the big toe, the pelvis, different sizes of brain, different types of hominin, different types of human? […]

DAVID: Gaps are still huge gaps. Poor Gould fought for years to explain them, and came up with punc inc, which still remains as a weird proposition. Species arrive de novo and no one knows why, based on natural events. There Are no intermediate forms, since the ones we find have huge gaps on either side.

Yes, we’ve been over this a hundred times. You suggest divine preprogramming or dabbling, and I suggest cellular intelligence. I trust you now agree that your God’s design of H. sapiens proceeded itty bitty by my definition.

Under "Horizontal gene transfer"
DAVID: It can be physically obtained by needling another bacterium and seizing DNA:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-018-0174-y

QUOTE: "Natural transformation is a broadly conserved mechanism of horizontal gene transfer in bacterial species that can shape evolution and foster the spread of antibiotic resistance determinants, promote antigenic variation and lead to the acquisition of novel virulence factors.” (dhw’s bold)

DAVID: Bacteria can alter their responses with this mechanism, but, for example, E. coli will stay E. coli. Doesn't solve speciation.

Nobody has yet solved speciation, but if you believe that all species descended from other species, that does not mean that all their antecedents have to die out! Of course E.coli are still E.coli, just as apes are still apes. The proposal is that SOME single cells formed multicellular communities, and over billions of years SOME multicellular communities changed themselves into different multicellular communities. And since we now know that bacteria can change their responses, MAYBE that same mechanism is capable of producing “novel factors” which have “shaped evolution” (See the Behe thread)