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

by David Turell , Monday, January 21, 2019, 15:15 (2133 days ago) @ dhw

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

Organisms are designed to survive or evolution can't continue.

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?

dhw: 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.

I might ask whether you think DNA is a code which contains information for protein formation? DNA has also has areas of differing modifying factors, which is information of a different kind. My changing views come from new research as it appears.

dhw: 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?

If it is accepted that God is in control of evolution, as I do, the cells make adaptations within His limits.

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.

dhw: 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.

Behe explains that small alterations in DNA can make evolutionary advances. You assume large.

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.

dhw: 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.

Distortion of the survival issue as usual. Survival is built in to each advanced form or evolution would grind to a halt.