Genome complexity: We don't know how DNA works (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, September 04, 2015, 22:29 (3368 days ago) @ David Turell

How do we get a 3-D organism from the 1-D code. We basically don't know:-http://www.huffingtonpost.com/suzan-mazur/neuroscientist-david-edel_b_8051746.html-David Edelman: "One of the problems, and we're still confronting these problems in modern genetics, is that we do not have the ability to discern from a 1D code, which is basically what a given genome is, a 3D organism. We don't yet have any way to explain how 3D organismal form comes about.-*** -"There's an intellectual crisis in modern biology. A hyper-determinist streak runs through the thinking, particularly in molecular biology and genetics. Even if researchers can't get directly from DNA code to a 3D organism, they believe essentially that it's simply a coding problem.-"It's actually more complex. The problem is that we cannot observe a lot of processes in sufficient detail and at all the necessary levels of interaction -- either during individual development or across evolutionary time. And these processes are messier than we believe. Right now, we can't infer processes in a systematic way regarding the relevant levels of morphological change. We don't have the capacity to do that yet. -***-"One of the unfortunate aspects of Western science is that it's hyper-reductionist. There's nothing wrong with that to a certain extent. You can certainly pull things apart to study them and look at the constituent elements; at a certain level of organization they look like a highly mechanical system and to some extent you can discern from your dissections what each element does. When you look at certain molecular biological problems, for example, that's what you see. But the critical issue is that we're talking about much larger systems, systems nested within other systems. It's the interactions across those different levels of organization that need to also be considered.-***-"I also think it's in the nature of trained Western scientists to look for a big breakthrough answer. We scientists tend to admire the mechanistic reduction of classical physics. What my dad used to call a case of "physics envy." We'd love the biological world to cooperate in the same way that the atom and everything else scaled up to the atom behaved prior to Einstein, prior to 20th century physics. For the world to be reducible in a very mechanistic way. I am leery of this conception because biology defies it at every turn."-Comment: I'm told I believe in a god-of-the-gaps by atheists who are offended and comment on my book. Not really. I believe in the complexity of life, way beyond what Darwin imagined. Darwin is the god of atheism, even if he was himself agnostic. What I believe in is that the complexity of life requires God as designer.