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

by dhw, Monday, March 04, 2019, 13:12 (2091 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: […] bacteria have need of very few responses.

dhw: They have need of responses to every single situation and environment in which they have found themselves since the beginning of life. Now please explain how they manage unthinkingly to select relevant instructions for every single situation out of your great library of instructions for the whole of life.

DAVID: Not as complex as you would like to think to advance your pet arguments. Bacteria sense others, sense food, sense dangerous chemicals, transfer genes, join in mats, and little more. In causing disease all they are doing is finding great food to eat in the wrong place for the host. And they divide by a very complex mechanism every 20 minutes in the best of conditions. I might ask, how did they learn to divide so precisely and obviously automatically?

It is possible that your God created the mechanism by which all cells and cell communities divide precisely until conditions change and then the cells/cell communities change themselves. Now please stop dodging my question. How do bacteria automatically select the relevant instructions from your 3.8-billion-year-old library of instructions for all conditions, life forms, lifestyles, econiches, and natural wonders in the history of life?

dhw: Hurray for all these transitional fossils, though I can’t help wondering why an always-in-control God should need to take 3.5+ billion years before specially designing big toes, spines and pelvises on the way to his sole aim of specially designing us. However, it is not inconceivable that improvements might gradually emerge as generation after generation of cell communities come up with new ideas. Just a hypothesis.

DAVID: Itty-bitty steps again. if we could only find the your hypotheses about cell inventions might have some credence. Mind the gaps!

dhw: There's a gap in your sentence: “If we could only find the your hypotheses…”

DAVID: What the sentence should say 'is if we could only find the cellular mechanism to support your hypothesis'. It is all hypothesis based on the fact that cells operate automatically in very intelligent ways.

dhw: Sorry you couldn’t respond to the major point about your God’s itty-bitty steps. As regards my hypothesis, it is absolutely NOT a fact that cells operate automatically (although I have pointed out that they may do so once a system has been established, and will only change if conditions change). That is your opinion, which you admit has a 50/50 chance of being wrong, i.e. that their intelligent ways may be the product of autonomous intelligence. And how often do I have to repeat that my hypothesis is a hypothesis. If only we could find your God’s 3.8-billion-year-old library of instructions for the whole of life, your hypothesis might have some credence.

DAVID: The multitude of layers of controls over DNA expression under current discovery is slowly elucidating how it all works.

And we still have your God specially designing humans itty-bitty, and current discovery still hasn’t discovered a 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for the whole of evolution, but according to several of the articles you have posted, scientists seem to be slowly coming round to the idea that cells create their own instructions “on the hoof” and “de novo”, because they are intelligent. Even you give that hypothesis a 50/50 chance.