Genome complexity: what genes do and don't do (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, January 21, 2019, 13:23 (2133 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Is increasing organismal complexity associated with increasing genome complexity? This article says perhaps not:
http://nautil.us//blog/jellyfish-genome-hints-that-complexity-isnt-genetically-complex

QUOTE: “Early cells globbed together to form multicellular coalitions. Those developed more complex bodies and lifestyles as the millennia passed, finding ever more varied ways to make a living.”

Please note in passing that “to make a living” means to survive.

QUOTES: “At the broad genetic level, it doesn’t seem like you need major changes in the genome to make these big changes in your life history...”

“Perhaps it’s easier for life to innovate by rearranging its existing gene networks instead of evolving scores of new genes.”

Life doesn’t innovate. Living organisms innovate, and living organisms are composed of cells. The implication here seems to be that innovation is not the giant step we have imagined it to be, but is more simply a matter of cell communities rearranging themselves.

DAVID’s comment: Any metamorphosing species fits this idea that it mimics speciation. Studies like this one support my contention that the first DNA might have contained all the information needed for all stages of evolution to occur, but rearranging genes and by alternate expression of genes, known processes. What we don't know is that there has to be a layer of control to make these decisions and we don't see that natural layer at this point. Could this be God making the decisions which is my theory?

When I asked you to define what you called the “intelligent information” in the DNA, you said it was "a complete set of instructions for cells to respond to all stimuli.” You have now agreed that DNA is a passive code, and so cannot be a complete list of instructions. Now you slide back to your woolly use of “information”, so perhaps you’d better give us a new definition. Meanwhile, you also revert to your nebulous “layer of control” to make the decisions. So now what is your theory? That your God is sitting inside every cell? If not, you are back to your preprogramming, which means your complete list of instructions. Or God constantly popping in to dabble with all the individual cell communities. Why can’t you at least countenance the possibility that the layer of control is cellular, decision-making intelligence, possibly designed by your God? Most of your remaining comments deal with this same point, so I’ll only cover those that are different.

DAVID: 4) God deleted from the beginning genome and new forms appeared.

dhw: Which means the original genome contained complete instructions for all innovations – but not in the DNA – and God dabbled to remove them. One wonders why he bothered to put them all there in the first place, if he had to remove a million or so programmes every time he wanted to dabble just one. A nightmare for Ockham!

DAVID: Back to Behe and elimination.

You've included this in your list of possibilities, so please explain why you think your God might have used a method that would entail removing millions of his specially designed programmes each time he wanted to implement one.

Dhw: And yet, although your exact thoughts are that DNA is a passive data base which is used by the organism, nowhere in your list of alternatives do we find the possibility that your God might have designed a control system that enabled the organism (cell community) itself to use the passive code!

DAVID: I've always admitted that an 'inventive mechanism' is possible. but you won't accept it as under God's developmental guidelines. Without those guiding principals evolution could proceed helter-skelter.

Your developmental guidelines have always turned out to be instructions, and that is not what I mean by an AUTONOMOUS inventive mechanism. “Helter-skelter” is precisely what I see (though that does not in any way preclude the possibility that there is a God who deliberately designed the helter-skelter), with millions and millions of life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders coming and going as the bush diversifies. But you see all these millions of life forms etc. as having been specially designed to eat one another so that life could survive for 3.5+ billion years (although apparently survival played no role in evolution) until your fully-in-control God could specially design the only thing he wanted to design.