Genome complexity: pseudogenes (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, August 25, 2013, 20:54 (4108 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw:The report on the interview also tells us what Dawkins said before his volte face: "It stretches even their [Creationists'] creative ingenuity to make a convincing reason why an intelligent designer should have created a pseudogene -- a gene that does absolutely nothing and gives every appearance of being a superannuated version of a gene that used to do something -- unless he was deliberately setting out to fool us." That's the previous atheist argument I was referring to in my post.-DAVID: The problem with this Dawkins quote,and it makes it obvious Dawkins is not keeping up with the reseach, pseudogenes are now beingfound to have functional abilities. An atheist argument with no basis. And that has been my point. I fully accept your view that minds set in cement will not change, but if a clear thinker follows what is happening, junk disappearing is removing part of the atheists present theory about chance controlling DNA development.-This quote was BEFORE the latest research, and Dawkins is now arguing that if junk is not junk, that fits in with Darwinism. And of course in one sense it does (see below), even if his apparently unacknowledged U-turn makes him look silly. You always talk of evolution as if it were a single theory, but you know that in fact it's several theories, only parts of which depend on chance. It doesn't deal with the origin of life, but atheists attribute that to chance. It proposes that all forms of life are descended from earlier forms: nothing to do with chance. It proposes that innovations are caused by random mutations: dependent on chance. It proposes that nature ensures that what is useful survives: not chance.
 
If junk is not junk, Dawkins can say that natural selection has ensured the survival of the useful, and that's how non-junk DNA fits in with Darwinism. You say, quite rightly in my view, "complexity is anti-chance", but that does not undermine the natural selection part of the argument. You, Dawkins and I agree that once the mechanism is in place, with all its potential for variation, complexity increases and we have evolution. You and I reject random mutations in favour of intelligence built into the genome, and I agree with you that the almost unfathomable complexity of this mechanism undermines the atheist's faith in origin by chance, and favours origin by design. But as usual that only leads us to the problem of the origin of a designer, which is even more unfathomable. You choose to believe in the unfathomable designer, Dawkins chooses to believe in the chance origin of the unfathomable genome, and I choose not to choose.