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

by David Turell , Tuesday, January 22, 2019, 15:05 (1922 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: 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: I trust your judgement when you say the article expresses your thoughts exactly: i.e. DNA is a passive data base which has to be used by the organism to make new proteins. You appear to have withdrawn your definition of information as instructions, but you still haven’t redefined it. I understand it as meaning facts or details about a particular subject. It cannot do anything, but has to be used.

You have followed instructions in learning how to use a new machine, your computer for
instance. Life emerges from a very complex set of biochemical reactions. Shapiro tells us that the cells in all of this massive activity can modify their genome to alter their function. This implies that the instructions for life are used and malleable. You appear to approach information as descriptive, but in life it is a central active component which makes life emerge.

DAVID: If it is accepted that God is in control of evolution, as I do, the cells make adaptations within His limits.[/i]

dhw: We have discussed the “limits”, and you could only come up with restrictions imposed by the environment and by the capabilities of the cells themselves. Now please explain what you mean by a “layer of control”

It is a concept. Just as you have an idea that cells contain their own inventive mechanism (IM) I can see it existing with God-imposed limits to the degree of modification,

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

dhw: Small alterations do not mean God removing 99% of his 3.8 byo programmes in order to produce one new species (= “new form”).

Strange response. Loss of 99% of species in no way implies 99% of the original DNA is lost. For example genes are only 2-4% of human DNA with the rest containing modifiers. Advances do require deletions per Behe, but also rearrangements. Our DNA with 3.3 billion bases has lots of room to do this.

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.

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

dhw: Sorry you choose only to pick on the parenthesis concerning survival, which is dealt with under “Little Foot”.

I saw nothing to respond to besides survival. You made your usual attempt to interpret the bush of life as something God produced but offered none of your humanizing reasons for God doing it. My idea that it is for food fits the facts of natures balance each ecosystem with its top predator.