Genome complexity: pseudogenes (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, August 26, 2013, 00:18 (3888 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: 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.-Of course chance play a role here. Gould's point about contingency is a counter to your statement. What comes next depends on what came before, and mutations develop forms by a series of accidents. Gould called us a glorious accident!-> dhw: It proposes that innovations are caused by random mutations: dependent on chance. It proposes that nature ensures that what is useful survives: not chance.-Again not true. Natural selection is dependent upon what is presented to it by chance. It chooses from forms that appear by chance. In a way it does mitigate chance, but chance is still the basis.
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> dhw: 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. -Again be careful. Natural selection has no 'potential for variation', it acts on variation. And as for 'junk' it supports the atheist idea that evoluton is a random walk into the future, purposeless to its core, and junk piled up as garbage might under such circumstances, as a hunt and peck approach to complexity might create.-> dhw: 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.-You don't have to choose. Don't act too surprised when you arrive at the Pearly Gates.