Big brain evolution: our special gene is identified (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, January 12, 2019, 18:42 (2140 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: [re cellular intelligence] If your 50/50 hypothesis is worth considering, then so is Shapiro’s.

DAVID: Shapiro describes the int-inf ability of bacteria to edit their DNA to a small degree. 50/50 is that one must interpret cell-process research as observers. […] If a new stimulus is encountered, since the maintenance of life is at high speed, proper responses are automatic.

dhw: Shapiro concludes that the ability of bacteria to solve problems indicates intelligence. As a doctor, you know it takes generations of bacteria to solve some problems, and millions die before they work out ways of countering measures devised to kill them. This is not “high speed”. Meanwhile, what happened to your God’s instructions?

Missed my point: I was referring to immediate stimuli of daily living. The antibiotic appears, and if it is totally effective, all bacteria die. But there will always be a small group with enough immunity to survive and adapt to the antibiotic by adopting an existing metabolic path answer or using gene transfer. Bacteria do this automatically, God's instructions used.

DAVID: The deletion idea from Behe is simply the reserve [dhw: reverse?] of that possibility, in that info is simply taken out of the process. One or the other is very likely a correct analysis.

dhw: “Simply”? It means that the first cells contained the DNA for every single life form in history – insects, birds, reptiles, mammals – not to mention all the bits that got discarded during speciation: teeth, sexual organs, spikes, fins, legs, trunks, human pelvises, whale pelvises….You call that simple?

Simple for God.

DAVID: Again avoiding the point of small group size. To go from ape to erectus takes massive mutational changes. If as suspected 10,000 erectus existed and previous antecedent hominins were in similar amounts, and if we use the known helpful mutations rates which are slow, and if we assume a new generation every 18-20 years how did erectus and sapiens appear so quickly in geologic time of six-eight million years?

dhw: Once again, nothing to do with group size, and everything to do with speed. 6 million divided by 20 = 300,000 generations. I am not talking about helpful chance mutations but about the ability of cell communities described above, so how the heck would anyone know how many generations are needed? There is no precedent.

The precedent is the human rate of mutations is known and is slow and less than 20 % cause an advance. "

https://www.bionews.org.uk/page_91833

"The team at the Sanger Institute have now accurately calculated the mutation rate. They sequenced the same piece of DNA - just over 10,000,000 letters from the Y chromosome - from two men separated by 13 generations, whose common ancestor lived 200 years ago. They counted the difference between the two sequences and found only four mutations. From their data they were able to calculate the mutation rate.

''These four mutations gave us the exact mutation rate - one in 30 million nucleotide each generation - that we had expected', says Dr Tyler-Smith."

DAVID: Based also on the fact that apes didn't need to bother to change, what drove human development? Not chance or natural forces, because it is demonstrably too fast for those influences.

dhw: Chance again! You agree that the groups were small, and I proposed that they were localized, probably because of changes to local conditions, whereas the rest of the ape family were not affected. Why do you think this hypothesis is less likely than your God fiddling with the anatomy of a few apes and then telling them to go and live on the ground even though they would have been happy to stay in the trees?

Again avoiding the speed of the change. It has to be by design.

DAVID: I believe organismal modification is adaptations within existing species, never leading to speciation, therefore within God's guidelines for each species.

dhw: Once more: If your God provided the first cells with complete instructions for all undabbled innovations, ecosystems, lifestyles and natural wonders, please tell us which half of the “semi-autonomous” evolutionary process was autonomous. i.e. was the independent, intelligent decision-making of the organisms concerned.

It is a concept. You, in a silly way, want exactitude. Semi-autonomous means within prescribed limits of design.