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

by dhw, Monday, February 04, 2019, 13:13 (2119 days ago) @ David Turell

The two quotes that David said were exact expressions of his thoughts:

QUOTE: "Scientists now understand that the information in the DNA code can only serve as a template for a protein. It cannot possibly serve as instructions for the more complex task of putting the proteins together into a fully functioning being, no more than the characters on a typewriter can produce a story."(David’s bold)

QUOTE: "as the British biologist Denis Noble insists in an interview with the writer Suzan Mazur,1 “The modern synthesis has got causality in biology wrong … DNA on its own does absolutely nothing until activated by the rest of the system … [/i[/color]] “DNA is not a cause in an active sense. I think it is better described as a passive data base which is used by the organism to enable it to make the proteins that it requires.”[/b](David’s bold)

DAVID: We disagree about the source of the colored portion of the second quote as you note below.

So you agree that the cell communities (organism) use the passive information, but you disagree. (See below re the “library”).

DAVID: What the article says to use your words differently is that the cells appear to 'learn' and 'construct information on the hoof', but it is my word 'appear' that applies.

dhw: The article does not use the word “appear”, unless you have misquoted it. The quotes with which you agreed are unequivocal.

DAVID: I said it was my word, 'appear'.
Even if cells “appear” to learn etc., this should at least allow you to say that maybe they do learn etc., as the article states unequivocally - in keeping with the findings of Shapiro & Co.

dhw: Yes, the system runs intelligently. I also propose a “ghost in the system”, which is cellular intelligence. Your “ghost” is a 3.8-billion-year old library of instructions, and presumably another set of instructions instructing the ghost to pick out volume 3,000,000,007, under “fin”, or “camouflage”, or “flight path”, or “nest”. You described as “sloppy thinking and writing” your earlier proposal – that DNA may have contained all the info for evolution, and “info” meant a complete set of instructions. The only change appears to be that you have substituted “genome” for DNA.

DAVID: You have summarized our differences. As for following instructions from 3 billion+7 , a bacteria, following instructions, splits in two every 20 minutes. The biochemical reactions are in nanoseconds. This goes on constantly throughout a multicellular organism. They don't have to search the library, the one weakness in a library analogy, they know the whole library constantly, a requirement for the emergence of a living system.

So cells already know all the information necessary for every single innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of evolution, and along with that, your God has provided them with all the instructions necessary for picking out the one instruction (out of the billions) required for their particular situation. And this is your fixed belief?

QUOTES from “How cells use genetic information”, with dhw’s bold:

"[The scientists] found that during embryo formation fruit fly cells use “all information available from the genetic code” to position themselves within a single cell’s width of where they are supposed to be.

“'The theoretical idea is very simple, which is that every cell is using all the information that it can squeeze out of the relevant genes," says physicist William Bialek.

“One can imagine cells as GPS devices which, instead of satellite signals, collect molecular ones to figure out their locations.”

“'This gives us an amazing tool for understanding how decision-making in biology actually works,

DAVID’s comment: Note the automaticity of the cells response to changed directions. The scientists could not have gotten these results if the cells did not automatically follow the substituted gene patterns.

Where do you find automaticity in these quotes? GPS devices are a form of artificial intelligence. If you changed the information from the satellite, no doubt you would be able to predict which way the GPS would send you. Fruit flies are not man-made: their intelligence is natural. The article says they “figure” things out, and if the information is changed, they change their response. So would you.

DAVID: This still does [not] tell us how genes act to create the final physical results they control. We do see they order the production of certain proteins at certain places b ut we do not know exactly how they exert their controls. we just beginning and end but not much of the middle molecular activity.

Precisely. We do not know how cells exert their controls. And yet you insist that, in spite of Shapiro & Co and the article you quoted and initially agreed with, the control cannot possibly be cellular intelligence but must be a 3.8-billion-year-old library of information together with a 3.8 billion-year-old set of instructions for every single situation in life's history bar those that your God dabbles in directly.