Genome complexity: variation within species (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, December 16, 2016, 12:10 (2900 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: If bacteria, the initial life forms, are extremely variable within species as shown in this article I presented on Dec. 9th: Friday, December 09, 2016, 18:51,
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/47510/title/The-Pangenome--Are-Si...
why not accept that the variability was supplied by God from the beginning? They obviously use the 'toolkit' easily as the article describes and can live anywhere/everywhere as we see. They didn't have to 'devise' much, if anything, with the tools they were given originally. You are right. All existing potential!

I have always allowed for the possibility that God supplied the toolkit from the beginning. But what is central to my overall evolutionary hypothesis is that they do “use” it. They are not preprogrammed, and some are better than others at using it(= variability). And that is where “intelligence” comes in.

DAVID: With variation and with alternative pathways, the adaptations may be relatively automatic, relatively if partially resistant organisms have to have several generations to arrive at complete resistance.

dhw: A nice bit of Darwinian itty-bitty improvement. Do partially resistant organisms just die more slowly? I don’t understand what you mean by “relatively automatic”. The expression has nothing to do with a gradually improved resistance. Either the process is completely automatic or organisms take decisions of their own.
DAVID: See my other entry on the subject today with the reference article. Some partially resistant organisms survive and reproduce more resistant progeny until the existing population is fully resistant, just as in the E. coli antibiotic resistance discussion we had. The 'partially automatic' refers to the reproductive process which takes several generations to work.

I still don’t understand partial resistance, but you are the expert. I’d have thought organisms which survive are resistant, and the resistant organisms reproduce while the non-resistant ones die, so that in the end you have a fully existing population of resistant organisms. And I’d have thought that the initially resistant ones were the individuals which were best able to use the ‘toolkit’ your God may have provided them with at the beginning: namely, the intelligence with which to work out their own methods of survival.