Rapid evolution or epigenetics? (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, March 03, 2011, 00:32 (5015 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: why not an inside intelligence? What would be the difference in procedure and outcome between chance or pre-programmed mutations and self-initiated mutations?
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> DAVID: This suggestion is not really different from my theory that the UI has put into the evolutionary code, all the advanced planning for evolutionary complexity, to be tested against the geochemical change as the Earth also evolves.
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> I'm still confining myself to innovation, and for me testing against geochemical changes means adaptation. You move onto epigenetics again before returning to what I see as the crucial question: How do we suddenly have entirely new species? "Darwin's guess is not supported in the fossil record as Gould has shown. Your focus on innovation is extremely important to the current discussions in science. And this is why Darwin may be totally wrong except for the modification of existing species to new environmental challenges."
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> If my suggestion (that innovation is powered by intelligent cells) is not really different from your theory (that cells are pre-programmed to innovate), may I take it that there is no scientific objection? -Yes, objections. It seems as though you are picking my brain with knife and fork. Let's define what we are discussing. All cells have the same DNA, but cells are differentiated into unchanging cell types for the different organs in complex eukaryotes (CE). The only cells allowed by biochemical controls in that CE to further differentiate are adult stem cells, and they are meant for repair. Thus we are left with germ cells making sperm or egg. They can mutate or change epigenetically and then can carry forward some change in the CE, usually small. If somatic cells, those of the various organs, decide to change, what we see clinically is that now you are dealing with cells out of control and creating a cancer originating in the particular organ. -So our discussion is confined to germ cells, and they can change endogenously by epigentic adaptation mechanisms, some of which I listed in my last entry, or exogenously by cosmic rays, or transcription errors, etc. It would be neat to satisfy our curiosity about macroevolution, by your fuzzy theories, but they won't work, based on the enumerated controls. We have not researched all 'junk' DNA, and as it is picked apart it reveals more and more code or control mechanisms. The 'drive to complexity' may turn up there if I am correct or DOC may be hidden in histones, around which DNA is carefully wrapped. We just don't know enough as yet. So we remain where we started: Darwin does describe microevolution, but has no answers for macroevolution. But neither do we, as yet, the skeptics.