Natures wonders: Subsea Microorganisms Long Life (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, August 19, 2018, 19:02 (2286 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: This video talks about subsea biology. Most striking to me was her commentary on the cellular life spans. Particularly when she compares their life cycle and ours saying 'a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day.'

DHW: Thank you, Tony, for this brilliant, fascinating, amazingly illuminating lecture. I was bowled over by it. You will not be surprised when I say that the most striking thing for me was the statement that “all these species had to have had a common ancestor” – and the species ranged from bacteria to humans. The cell is the basis of all life, whether it was designed by a God or not. And whether the astonishing variety of living forms extant and extinct was divinely preprogrammed, separately dabbled, or the consequence of cellular responses to different environments, is one of the questions we have been discussing for days that are like years, or years that are like days!

Tony: If you look at DNA as a programming language, the commonalities do not HAVE to represent common decent so much as common functionality. Let me give you an example:

In C++, you may have a function that looks like

int startvalue= somevalue; //defines a starting value
int end=someothervalue; //defines an ending value

//iterate through all possible values of i, from start to end, and does something

For (i=startvalue;i!=endvalue;i++){
do something with i;}

This code is nearly ubuiquitous in all c++ programming. You would be hard pressed to find a modern C++ program that does not contain this code. The start and end values may be different, and the 'do something' code may be different, but the iterator framework is identical.

This is exactly what we see in the LPL (living programming language). How can we both look at the same exact chart and see such totally different things? Because of which narrative we are using to describe what we see. To an evolutionist, it means common decent, even across species who obviously did not descend from each other. For me, it shows a programming language with reusable elements that does not care about descent.

Thank you Tony. Great lecture. And further thank you for interpreting DNA as a program for processing life with functional coding. Easy to imagine a primary designer for the first living cells from which these sub-sea ogranisms must have developed.