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

by dhw, Tuesday, February 26, 2019, 10:01 (1887 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

DAVID: 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.

dhw: Ah, so cells today are intelligent and produce their own instructions, but in the past they could only read selected volumes from God’s 3.8-billion-year-old library.

DAVID: That is your conclusion, not mine.

Then I don’t understand your answer to my comment that cells produce instructions “de novo”. You said “that is true for what exists today”. If so, it means cells are intelligent today. You go on to say that before evolution was “completed” (I envy your foreknowledge of events over the next few billion years), it was all preprogramming and dabbles, which can only mean cells were not intelligent then.

QUOTE: "In the same vein, we can now understand why the same genetic resources can be used in many different ways in different organs and tissues. Genes now utilized in the development of our arms and legs, first appeared in organisms that have neither. [/b]

dhw: Contrary to your comment above, this paper does offer an explanation of evolution: intelligent cells utilize the same genetic resources to develop new organs.

DAVID: We know speciation occurs. Your statement is a guess. We don't know how genes achieve results.

You claimed that the paper did not offer an explanation of evolution. It does – it clearly sides with Shapiro. But of course the explanation is a hypothesis or “guess”. And it’s a totally different guess from your own.

dhw: The quotes could hardly be clearer: these scientists agree with Shapiro that the underlying informational control mechanism is cellular intelligence, and that is what coordinates the massive set of processes. They have not said how this mechanism might have come into being in the first place, but I have consistently proposed that a possible source is your God. Of course none of this provides the conclusive evidence you are looking for in any hypothesis that contradicts your own unproven hypothesis, but I must thank you for illustrating yet again the fact that there are lots of modern scientists who now support the concept of cellular intelligence as the mechanism that runs evolution – as opposed to your 3.8 billion-year-old library of instructions.

DAVID: And they are all materialists. Us ID folks will always disagree as to the correct interpretations.

I thought you told us that Shapiro was a practising Jew, but it makes no difference at all. The idea that the underlying informational control mechanism is cellular intelligence does not in any way exclude God or intelligent design, and in your discussions with me, your attempts to equate it with atheism and materialism are out of order. I am neither an atheist nor a materialist.

QUOTE: So it has been dawning on us is that there is no prior plan or blueprint for development: Instructions are created on the hoof, far more intelligently than is possible from dumb DNA. That is why today’s molecular biologists are reporting “cognitive resources” in cells; “bio-information intelligence”; “cell intelligence”; “metabolic memory”; and “cell knowledge”—all terms appearing in recent literature. “Do cells think?” is the title of a 2007 paper in the journal Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences. On the other hand the assumed developmental “program” coded in a genotype has never been described.[/i]

I am repeating this quote because time and again you have told me that only a small minority of scientists (I always name Margulis, McClintock, Buehler and Shapiro as my examples) support the concept of cellular intelligence, and everyone else is on your side. Apparently “today’s molecular scientists” are not on your side. But I must thank you yet again for your integrity in presenting papers which support my arguments.