Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Sunday, September 12, 2021, 16:02 (958 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: I don't know from the evidence. There is co-evolution occurring with the Earth changing from 3.8 bya and evolutionary forms changing, all under His control. Did He follow a plan or set up an overall plan? I can't 'know' the answer.

dhw: You don’t ‘know’ if it was a 3.8-billion-year-old programme for all changes, or ad hoc dabbling, and although you won’t admit it, you don’t know if it was all under his control, and you don’t know that his ‘plan’ was not to give free rein to his invention. Nor, in passing, do you know that he designed every life form, or that every life form was part of a plan to produce humans, even though the vast majority of extinct life forms had no connection with humans.

I know what I believe. I know your views are amorphous.

dhw: I agree that cell communities don’t have a crystal ball. My proposal is that they react to new conditions, not that they foresee them. It is not a fact but simply your belief that cell communities are incapable of autonomous reactions to new conditions.

DAVID: Whoa!!! Organisms make small epigenetic adaptations.

dhw: Yes, we know that. And there is a theory that they may also be capable of large adaptations and even innovations, but you just happen to know that they can’t – hence your authoritative statements, even though you sometimes offer odds of 50/50.

The 50/50 only applies to the probability of cells functioning by following instructions

DAVID: I repeat from my experience. It is easier to do it yourself than to tell others how to do it.

dhw: And I repeat that until now you have had your God preprogramming changes or issuing instructions. Suddenly you have him popping in to make every decision, solve every problem, perform every operation. So much easier, apparently, than inventing a single mechanism that will accomplish all those tasks without him having to lift a metaphorical finger.

No change. I don't know if the process of evolution is all preprogrammed or God steps in to dabble. Instructing cells as to how to dabble to get exact results is way more complex than doing it yourself.

Function in cells
QUOTE: “...the same protein can exert distinct functions depending on the effector it binds to. At the molecular level, protein functions thus translate into protein dynamics, which is key for the development of all cellular processes, from cell division to energy provision and cell fate determination.”

dhw: In the quote, they say that the molecular changes are key to all cellular processes, including cell “fate determination”, which I take to mean “function”. If the article does describe how cells change their function, that would surely help us enormously in our efforts to understand how evolution happens.

DAVID: This is within single cells.

dhw: But single cells form combinations.

Not covered in this paper.

DAVID: 'Fate determination' involves how embryology works with cells following signals to arrive at given places and function.

dhw: But still using the same processes, some cells can change their function. That would surely be highly relevant to our understanding of how evolution works.

Cells are fixed in their functions, but second by second processes vary to slight degrees as in kidney cells altering function to change sodium levels slightly. Living biochemistry produces homeostasis by constant slight changes in cell function.