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

by David Turell , Monday, February 25, 2019, 15:12 (1888 days ago) @ dhw

Under “De novo genes”
QUOTE: “Taxonomically restricted (i.e., orphan) genes have contributed to the evolution of unique tissues and organs in a number of animals."

dhw: Fits in nicely with the idea that cells produce instructions “on the hoof” or “de novo”, as opposed to magically and automatically picking out their new instructions from a 3.8-billion-year-old library of instructions for the whole of evolution.

DAVID: In running existing life, that is true for what exists today. The programming through God and His dabbles has produced His goal. I view evolution as completed.

dhw: Ah, so cells today are intelligent and produce their own instructions, but in the past they could only read selected volumes from God’s 3.8-billion-year-old library.

That is your conclusion, not mine,

DAVID: I will enter a very clear paper today, later on how genes don't matter anymore in understanding life, but don't explain evolution.

dhw: The paper is an extended version of the one which you quoted at the very beginning of this thread, on 14 January at 13.35, and which you have been trying to discredit ever since. I will repeat some of my bolded quotes, plus a couple of new ones:

Scientists now understand that the information in the DNA code can only serve as a template for a protein. It cannot possibly serve as instructions for the more complex task of putting the proteins together into a fully functioning being, no more than the characters on a typewriter can produce a story.

"Through the statistical patterns within the storms, instructions are, again, created de novo. The cells, all with the same genes, multiply into hundreds of starkly different types, moving in a glorious ballet to find just the right places at the right times. That could not have been specified in the fixed linear strings of DNA.

Perhaps the most graphic of them all:

So it has been dawning on us is that there is no prior plan or blueprint for development: Instructions are created on the hoof, far more intelligently than is possible from dumb DNA. That is why today’s molecular biologists are reporting “cognitive resources” in cells; “bio-information intelligence”; “cell intelligence”; “metabolic memory”; and “cell knowledge”—all terms appearing in recent literature. “Do cells think?” is the title of a 2007 paper in the journal Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences. On the other hand the assumed developmental “program” coded in a genotype has never been described.[/i]

You could hardly have a clearer endorsement of the thinking cell hypothesis, as opposed to your hypothesis of programming through a library of instructions.

"DNA on its own does absolutely nothing until activated by the rest of the system … DNA is not a cause in an active sense. I think it is better described as a passive data base which is used by the organism to enable it to make the proteins that it requires.”

"In the same vein, we can now understand why the same genetic resources can be used in many different ways in different organs and tissues. Genes now utilized in the development of our arms and legs, first appeared in organisms that have neither. [/b]

Contrary to your comment above, this paper does offer an explanation of evolution: intelligent cells utilize the same genetic resources to develop new organs.

We know speciation occurs. Your statement is a guess. We don't know how genes achieve results.

dhw: "In a paper in Physics of Life Reviews in 2013, James Shapiro describes how cells and organisms are capable of “natural genetic engineering.” That is, they frequently alter their own DNA sequences, rewriting their own genomes throughout life. The startling implication is that the gene as popularly conceived—a blueprint on a strand of DNA, determining development and its variations—does not really exist.

DAVID: […] What has been obvious to me is that we have not found an underlying informational control mechanism. It is still a black box, but somehow a massive set of continues coordinated processes produce an emergence of living beings. And it had to be designed, which, obviously, the author does not believe.

dhw: The quotes could hardly be clearer: these scientists agree with Shapiro that the underlying informational control mechanism is cellular intelligence, and that is what coordinates the massive set of processes. They have not said how this mechanism might have come into being in the first place, but I have consistently proposed that a possible source is your God. Of course none of this provides the conclusive evidence you are looking for in any hypothesis that contradicts your own unproven hypothesis, but I must thank you for illustrating yet again the fact that there are lots of modern scientists who now support the concept of cellular intelligence as the mechanism that runs evolution – as opposed to your 3.8 billion-year-old library of instructions.

And they are all materialists. Us ID folks will always disagree as to the correct interpretations.