Junk DNA: goodbye! (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, July 30, 2014, 20:50 (3769 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Cells do not plan, they have responses to choose from.-As new situations arise, cells/cell communities must find ways to respond. Some succeed, and some don't. No-one is claiming that they anticipate the new situation and plan ahead for it. The point is that successful cells work together to find an appropriate response. Unless that response has been preprogrammed (and you say it hasn't), they must make their own decisions.
 
dhw: I can accept that all forms of intelligence, including our own, may be “within genetically provided guidelines of response”, since all forms of intelligence appear to be limited by physical capacity. That does not make them automatic. 
DAVID: I repeat, cells do not plan. They are organized to work together within resonse guidences.-As above. I don't know what you mean by “response guidances”, other than the physical limitations within which the cells have to work. Are you suggesting that your God has built in a series of multiple choice solutions for every possible problem throughout the history of evolution? Even if you are, it would still require intelligence and individual decision-making to choose the right answer.-DAVID: You keep skipping the point that as function is discovered in DNA, and we are getting to understand more and more of DNA, there is less 'junk'. we have no true idea as of yet what portion of DNA is real junk. We are in the middle of a research process. The apparent end point is that there will be much less junk, and less support for the Darwinist contention that DNA is a helter-skelter result of an aimless process. I don't think that is hard to predict.-My point was that Oxford scientists clearly disagree with ENCODE scientists, and so the layman can hardly make a decision. You now say we don't know how much is junk, but you predict that there will be less, and no doubt the Oxford scientists would predict there will be more. I don't think more or less junk will make the slightest difference to Darwinist evolutionists. However, it will be a blow to atheists, since they use junk as an argument against design. As regards a “helter-skelter result”, natural selection would explain the lack of junk, and “an aimless process” would refer to the higgledy-pigglediness of all the comings and goings, regardless of how much DNA is junk.