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

by David Turell , Friday, February 22, 2019, 15:04 (1891 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: They can't know the truth any more than I can. I'll stick to my view as much more probable.

dhw: Just to clarify, then: you tell us the odds are 50/50, but your view is that the odds are not 50/50. And for good measure you think it is more probable that cellular behaviour is governed by a divine 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme of instructions for every undabbled life form, lifestyle, and natural wonder in the history of life than that your God could have designed cells with an innate ability to “create instructions on the hoof”.

DAVID: My usual answer. God is in control and if he created such a mechanism, as you imagine, it would contain guidelines.

dhw: You agree the odds are 50/50, but in your view they are not 50/50. As for your guidelines, they have turned out to be a 3.8-billion-year-old library of information and instructions for every undabbled innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of life. The exact opposite of the autonomous mechanism I am proposing.

And which I continue to reject. You like a slightly impotent God.

DAVID: Life appears/emerges from all these biochemical interactions of thousands of communicating processes all working in concert. Cells in each organ have necessarily fixed roles to play. A bacterium has to do it all in one cell. The earliest chordate fish in the Cambrian had this degree of complexity with a variety of organs. No one knows how speciation occurs from the history we have. Now that we see so many multicellular organisms in so many branches, with cells in fixed roles, we don't know how they can modify themselves while still doing their necessary work.

dhw: An excellent summary of the mystery of speciation. We don’t know how it works. Some evolutionists attribute it to chance (via random mutations); a dear friend of mine attributes it to divine dabbling or a divine 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for every undabbled life form, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of life; and I have proposed cellular intelligence (possibly God-given) responding to changing conditions. The articles you keep quoting seem to support the last of these rather than the first two. Here is another:
DAVID (under “how plants construct cells”): Again a very complex system which requires very specific molecules to direct the work. Not by chance. This process is inherited from the very first bacteria of life.

dhw: Yes, it would seem to support the concept of common descent and the idea that all the members of different cell communities cooperate to produce the varying complexities of living organisms. For three alternative explanations of how this system might work, see above.

DAVID: And see my objections to cellular capabilities to speciate above. Cells have fixed roles. Cells have no ability to invent.

dhw: Cells have fixed roles once an innovation has proved to be successful. Then it is only when new conditions arise that they take on new roles. I presume your last sentence is meant to read cells do NOT have the ability to invent. That is the big question, and that is why my proposal remains a hypothesis, as does your own. But if in your view cells have a 50/50 chance of being autonomously intelligent and hence of creating instructions “on the hoof” or “de novo”, as believed by some scientists in the field, then clearly it is a hypothesis that demands serious consideration even by you - and without the condition of “guidelines” which = God’s instructions.

What all cells can do according to your scientists and mine is that cells can modify responses as necessary, but they still remain the same cells,. Lenski's E. coli have made minor metabolic changes, but are still E. coli after 20,000+ generations. Based on those facts and the many requirements to jump from Ediacaran to Cambrian, Ediacaran cells did not invent Cambrian forms. That is what your hypothesis logically proposes! I can't seriously consider it any more than I can accept an inventive mechanism without God's guidelines.