Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Saturday, January 23, 2021, 19:05 (1398 days ago) @ dhw

Snakes repel their own venom.

DAVID: Why dodge? The discussion is all about lethal poisons.

dhw: All the poisons, internal and external, are lethal, but that does not mean they kill every individual organism. If eight survivors find an antidote, why can't the other two?

Still dodging. We know the poison kills others in the two snakes that are self-protected. Self-protection must be simultaneously designed. The eight otheres have no place in this discussion

Darwin scientists find useless evolution

dhw: You asked: “What happened to perfect natural selection which always makes the right choices?” […] According to the article, the molecules are harmless, in which case there was no necessity to discard them.

DAVID: So natural selection allowed useless evolution like junk DNA? Chance at work?

dhw: There would be no pressure for harmless molecules or junk DNA to be discarded. It would not disprove natural selection, but it would raise the question of why a designer God would deliberately design something useless, let alone that makes "terrible mistakes".

The appendix was ' a useless vestige' until its immune purpose was found.

dhw: I have every right to ask you why you think your God designed molecules that make terrible mistakes. Your answer (that I am saying “God doesn’t know what he is doing”) is totally out of order.

DAVID: The high-speed reactions with errors have been discussed ad nauseum.

dhw: And your only explanation was that your God was unable to avoid incorporating the harmful ones, tried to correct them, often failed, and left it to humans to try and correct them. How does this mean that I say God doesn’t know what he is doing?

God know what He is doing in trying to code for error corrections.

Macrophages

dhw: The ability of these cells to multitask in order to meet the needs imposed or opportunities offered by changing environments may well be the key to speciation.

DAVID: This in only clever immune system design. Stop clutching at straws.

dhw: Stem cells are not confined to the immune system, and can also deliberately change their function. Why is it clutching at straws to suggest that when cells change their structure (adaptation/innovation) to meet new needs, it suggests that they have the ability to change their structure to meet new needs?

Stem cells follow given embryological rules.

De novo or orphan genes

DAVID: I still propose God speciating. Behe found advances by deletions without DNA additions.

Did he? You eventually agreed that he had only found examples of species modifications (e.g. among bears). Now please explain your objection to my explanation of discontinuity.

Behe also discussed mammoths vs elephants I didn't mention before because of book explanation complexity, in explaining disappearance of a species in a section called 'speciation by degradation' (page 195), a comparison of DNA in both: mammoths disappeared due to "2,000 amino acid residues mutated,..500 damaged genes, 26 seriously degraded". The two species separated seven million years ago. This is the only actual speciation event he covered. You are correct, the rest is adaptive. Your explanation is fine but ignores the huge gaps in function between new species from old.

An inventive mechanism: A DNA 'Shapiro change'

DAVID: In this case the salmonella reprogram the Krebs cycle by altering DNA in the invaded cells!!! Not their own DNA, which Shapiro studied, but to me editing is editing.

dhw: Agreed. Another example of bacteria working out their own means of survival. I have no idea why your God would have preprogrammed or dabbled with this nasty salmonella to poison us. Do you? Maybe the “editing” is the product of the autonomous intelligence which Shapiro thinks is present in all cells.

Interesting: did you note I understand Shapiro's contributions to evolution research, but I still reject your wild extrapolations. Bacteria are still here as super-important contributors to life. The bad is back to theodicy debates and my suggesting they have a real purpose, not yet discovered, but perhaps as part of the beneficial biome when under control in the GI tract..