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

by dhw, Sunday, March 24, 2019, 10:56 (2071 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You haven’t answered the major point, which is bacteria were preserved, and therefore they did not evolve into multicellularity by any mechanism they might have had. As God speciated, they purposely were kept for future functions and God produced something entirely new while using some of what bacteria had: DNA.

dhw: I have now answered it twice, but I’ll try again. Evolution does not mean that EVERY existing organism turns into another organism. SOME bacteria would have joined forces to create multicellularity, and others would have remained the same. SOME ape ancestors would have turned into pre-humans, but others would have remained the same. As bacteria have always been able to survive changes to their environment, they did not need to “evolve” into anything but bacteria. But SOME of them decided (“intelligence” theory) or were divinely preprogrammed/dabbled (your theory), or simply happened (chance theory) to form ever evolving communities.

DAVID: You are right in that 99% of species die out. And since we do not know how things speciate, you have listed possibilities.

dhw: Yes indeed. More to the point, as above, is that the non-evolution of some bacteria is irrelevant to the question of whether they are intelligent or not.

DAVID: Not relevant. My main point still persists: bacteria were purposely preserved to play a role now, innately intelligent or not.

You have forgotten the starting point of this particular discussion, which was your entry under “Horizontal gene transfer”:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-018-0174-y

QUOTE: "Natural transformation is a broadly conserved mechanism of horizontal gene transfer in bacterial species that can shape evolution and foster the spread of antibiotic resistance determinants, promote antigenic variation and lead to the acquisition of novel virulence factors.” (dhw’s bold)

DAVID: Bacteria can alter their responses with this mechanism, but, for example, E. coli will stay E. coli. Doesn't solve speciation.

dhw: Nobody has yet solved speciation, but if you believe that all species descended from other species, that does not mean that all their antecedents have to die out! Of course E.coli are still E.coli, just as apes are still apes. The proposal is that SOME single cells formed multicellular communities, and over billions of years SOME multicellular communities changed themselves into different multicellular communities. And since we now know that bacteria can change their responses, MAYBE that same mechanism is capable of producing “novel factors” which have “shaped evolution”

The subject was not the purpose of bacteria but whether they were capable of shaping evolution by producing novel factors (linking up with our heading: what genes do and don’t do). Nobody can possibly dispute the essential roles that bacteria have always played in life.