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

by dhw, Sunday, February 24, 2019, 09:41 (2099 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: 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. [The ability to invent] 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.

DAVID: 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.

dhw: We only know what cells/cell communities do after the fact of speciation. Nobody knows how the innovations occurred. I accept your rational doubts about cells’ ability to invent – it is a hypothesis – just as we both rationally doubt the efficacy of random mutations as the driving force. But for the life of me I cannot understand how you can stick to your irrational fixed belief that although your God’s one and only purpose was to specially design the brain of H. sapiens, he chose to create a now 3.8-billion-year-old library with precise instructions for flippers, slug glue, cuttlefish camouflage, dragonfly reproduction systems and the weaverbird’s nest, plus every other undabbled life form extinct and extant.

DAVID: We can stop this vein of discussion. I don't know how God did it but He drove evolution and all the bushiness we see.

I fully understand your desire to drop it, but so long as you continue to push your own inexplicable hypotheses, and to denigrate research that points to cellular intelligence, the discussion will go on.

QUOTE: "Behe’s new book […] concludes that natural selection of random mutations occasionally makes species better adapted to their environment by destroying things, but it never creates. So it is not, after all, the one natural process in the universe that can make Nature “run backward.” [..]

Behe is about ten years behind us then. You and I have long since rejected random mutations as a driving force, and have pointed out that natural selection never created anything – it simply explains why some organisms survive and others don’t. Let's hope the rest of the book comes up with something more enlightening.

Under “De novo genes”
QUOTE: “Taxonomically restricted (i.e., orphan) genes have contributed to the evolution of unique tissues and organs in a number of animals."

Fits in nicely with the idea that cells produce instructions “on the hoof” or “de novo”, as opposed to magically and automatically picking out their new instructions from a 3.8-billion-year-old library of instructions for the whole of evolution.