God and Evolution (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, August 30, 2018, 19:12 (2275 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

dhw: I am much more interested in the subject with which I ended that post, i.e. your own hypothesis regarding God’s method ofspeciation, which seems to be a mixture of divine dabbling (speciation) and autonomous intelligence (variations and adaptations). Is that a correct interpretation?

Tony: You keep putting words in my mouth, particularly that word speciation, which I have repeatedly said has never been observed, and you are trying to slip cellular intelligence in by a different name, which I have also stated has not been observed to the degree that would be required.
No, sir, as I clearly, and extensively defined in my exposition on my own hypothesis, I propose that the root types (I hesitate to use the word species here) were created, and that this creation process happened repeatedly, as needed at various stages of Earths development. Further, I propose that what we call species, most often are not, because they do not break the barrier of reproductive isolation. Instead, I see them as variants of the same type, and that the limit of their potential variation was set from the beginning of their creation. Thus, they will never truly evolve beyond the scope of what was originally allowed to them.

DHW: There is a misunderstanding here. I thought we had both accepted the definition of species that you offered a little while back (from Britannica? – I can’t find it now) to the effect that species were organisms which, as you say, cannot break the barrier of reproductive isolation. I am perfectly happy to call them root types, and within those categories we have variants. There is no difference between us on this. So now we have root types specially created at various times. That is the equivalent of David’s “dabbling”. But then we come to the variants. Again I agree that they are limited, but that was not what I was asking. I wanted to know what mechanism you envisaged that enabled organisms to vary, but you have answered this now on the pointy egg thread.

Tony:Epigenetics was the inspiration for the idea that our genes are like functions in programming that can produce different outputs when given different inputs. It would allow for variation without changing the underlying genome. Thus, an identical gene in two variants could produce different results, and I suspect these different results most likely come in the way the proteins are folded. The resulting proteins could be chemically identical, but the difference in the folded structure could produce different results when used. That is only a guess, though, and I fully admit I do not have enough information to state it with any degree of certainty.

Folding is one mechanism to change function and is why so many proteins can be used in so many different functional ways