Complexity of gene codes (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, January 28, 2011, 02:04 (4858 days ago) @ dhw

David has drawn our attention to a long article about the genome, which consists of "layer upon layer of life all the way down". David says that "the DNA code is alpha. No one can yet see the omega."
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> I don't see how anyone can with confidence maintain that such an intricate mechanism could fashion itself by accident.-I agree absolutely. - "The hopeful thing is that molecular biologists today — slowly but surely, and perhaps despite themselves — are increasingly being driven to enlarge their understanding through a reckoning with genetic contexts. As a result, they are writing "finis" to the misbegotten hope for a non-lifelike foundation of life, even if the fact hasn't yet been widely announced. It is, I think, time for the announcement."
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> I may have totally misunderstood this, and do please correct me if I have, but I presume he means that this research heralds the death knell of the theory that life can come into being from non-living materials (abiogenesis).-No, I think he has a different point of view. He points out that Watson and Crick, and everyone else at that time thought the research was about over. They had the code. But what happened as research went foward, layer upon layer of manufacturing units, checking units, and Lamark units turned up, all coordinated like a symphony orchestra, although we have no yet found or proven a composer or a conductor. I don't think he ever said that life did not come from inorganic materials, but he did not say how life began. I see none of that discussion in the paper.-> 
> No matter how many layers of life it may have, the genome is still material, and so we're left with the argument that material life has always been there ... shades of BBella's views, linked to aspects of process theology? ... which runs counter to every theory of finite beginnings, and makes God the Creator superfluous. I'd have thought that for theists as much as for atheists, the hope for a non-lifelike foundation of life still burns bright.
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> What have I missed?-What I have described. No discussion of how life started but a deeply detailed description of what an amazingly complex factory the genome is. Nowhere near as simple as Darwinian-leaning and atheistic scientists presumed and are finding hard to admit at this time. The author (Talbot) of this paper is a design leaner.-Note this quote from the paper: -The one decisive lesson I think we can draw from the work in molecular genetics over the past couple of decades is that life does not progressively contract into a code or any kind of reduced "building block" as we probe its more minute dimensions. Trying to define the chromatin complex, according to geneticists Shiv Grewal and Sarah Elgin, "is like trying to define life itself." Having plunged headlong toward the micro and molecular in their drive to reduce the living to the inanimate, biologists now find unapologetic life staring back at them from every chromatogram, every electron micrograph, every gene expression profile. Things do not become simpler, less organic, less animate. The explanatory task at the bottom is essentially the same as the one higher up. It's rather our understanding that all too easily becomes constricted as we move downward, because the contextual scope and qualitative richness of our survey is so extremely narrowed.-The search for precise explanatory mechanisms and codes leads us along a path of least resistance toward the reduction of understanding. A capacity for imagination (not something many scientists are trained for today) is always required for grasping a context in meaningful terms, because at the contextual level the basic data are not things, but rather relations, movement, and transformation.