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

by David Turell , Sunday, February 24, 2019, 14:59 (1889 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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.

I will enter a very clear paper today, later on how genes don't matter anymore in understanding life, but don't explain evolution.

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.” [..]

dhw: 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."

dhw: 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.

In running existing life, that is true for what exists today. The programming through God and His dabbles has produced His goal. I view evolution as completed.