Biological complexity: finding working proteins (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, October 29, 2015, 11:51 (3313 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Another article on the rarity of functional proteins:http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/10/proteins_by_acc100411.html-David's comment: If mutations are the result of blind searching, based on the odds above, how does evolution find the right proteins for a new adaptation for innovation? There must be DNA guidelines on board or there is not enough time for evolution to fit the timelines we know. Thus the two approaches we discuss: on board guidance or external guidance. There can be nothing else.-External guidance means God dabbling to create every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder. On board “guidance” means a 3.8-billion-year-computer programme passed down by the very first cells, or a collection of autonomous “minds” capable of cooperating to making all the necessary changes. The latter would account for the astonishing range of life forms extinct and extant, and since we have no precedent to tell us how long it should take intelligent minds to make such changes, time is not a factor. 
 
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-Your posts on microglia and coral reef fish (I really enjoyed that one!) contain the followingavid's comment: Show me a computer that cannibalizes itself? Again high complexity beyond the abilities of random evolution.-Agreed, but not beyond the abilities of intelligent cells monitoring themselves and cooperating to create an efficient structure and system.
 
QUOTE: "'It all goes to show that coral reef fish have evolved quite a range of clever strategies for survival which are deployed when a threatening situation demands.'"-David's comment: A very common strategy with animals and also plants.-But every strategy for survival has to be individually adapted to the environment and the particular nature of the organism and the threatening situations with which it is confronted. I like the word “clever” in the quote, and can't help wondering if the vast range of such clever survival strategies might not be the product of cellular intelligence - in plants as well as in animals - rather than a 3.8-billion-year computer programme passed down by the very first cells for each individual strategy.