Extended Evolutionary Synthesis; another view (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, August 07, 2015, 21:10 (3395 days ago) @ David Turell

By a philosopher of genetic science:-http://www.huffingtonpost.com/suzan-mazur/guenther-witzany-modern-s_b_7947442.html-Günther Witzany: I've known the scientific papers of University of Chicago microbiologist James Shapiro going back decades. Jim Shapiro has a perspective about how the genetic component in organisms evolved or disorganized that I find interesting. So I invited him for a congress in Salzburg in 2008 on "natural genetic engineering." This is Shapiro's term natural genetic engineering. ( my bold)-" "Natural genome editing" is the term I coined in 2008 at Salzburg. A lot of other scientists attended our meeting. We discussed how genetic order in organisms is organized. It was clear to those of us gathered that this was different from the Modern Synthesis, where the idea is that genetic content is a result of chance mutations and selection of chance mutations.-***
" My point is if we look at the genetic code, we think first of DNA. But if we integrate the role of viruses and virus-derived parts, such as mobile genetic elements, or endogenous retroviruses, it becomes clear that most of the DNA serves as a house, a habitat for its RNA inhabitants. . . . -"Viruses are so abundant on this planet, in each ecological niche, that there is no organism independent of the influence of viruses and their genetic content. . . .-"The other point is that the genetic code is really a code, it is a natural code. This means it's a natural language, so we must assume there are code users because no natural language speaks itself as no natural code codes itself. It is always competent users that produce sequences for transport of meaning or content. . . . -***-"I found that coordination of living agents, whether they are cells or viruses or parts of cells -- coordination of behavior in organisms needs and must have signaling. Without signaling you can't have transport of information and you can't really get coordination of two participating agents. This is the main principal of communication. Communication means sign-mediated interactions or signal-mediated interactions. . . .-"But the signals are not the agents. There are living agents that use signals and generate signals to transport meaning and content and information-***-"There are four levels of communication in the biosphere. First is signaling within an organism -- mitochondria, chloroplast, cell nucleus, etc. This is intra-organismic communication, within a cell. -"Second, we have the inter-organismic communication process, the signaling between cells of an organism like in an organ or tissue. Specialized communication between the participating cells with the same and related cells. -"Third is the trans-organismic communication level, which is where organisms communicate, signal other organisms not of the same species as we can find it in symbiotic processes. -"The fourth level is sensing and differentiation of indices. They serve as abiotic information for living organisms. . . . -***-"The older concepts we have now for a half century cannot sufficiently explain the complex tendency of the genetic code. They can't explain the functions of mobile genetic elements and the endogenous retroviruses and non-coding RNAs. Also, the central dogma of molecular biology has been falsified -- that is, the way is always from DNA to RNA to proteins to anything else, or the other "dogmas," e.g., replication errors drive evolutionary genetic variation, that one gene codes for one protein and that non-coding DNA is junk. All these concepts that dominated science for half a century are falsified now." (my bold)