At 04:20 AM 12/27/2012, Jojo Jaro wrote:
The views expressed by Lomax below are typical of those who have not
read Darwin's book or understand what Darwinian Evolution really says.
I have not read "Darwin's book," nor do I give a fig about "Darwinian
Evolution." I care a bit more about the mechanisms through which life
was created on this planet, and especially how life is maintained and develops.
It is typicial, again, of so-called Creationists, that they posit
this bugaboo, Darwinian Evolution, and then attempt to poke it full
of holes. Darwin wrote a lot time ago. And science is not about
individuals, and the progress of science is about *informed consensus.*
We are not interested in Fleischmannite Fusion. What Fleischmann
thought about his work is *irrelevant.* He was dead wrong about
certain things, but he was also a scientist. He admitted his errors,
when he had the chance. That's what distinguishes scientists from ideologues.
Natural Selection is not the process of DNA building, it is the
macro result of mutations.
Well, that's not accurate. Natural Selection is a product of the
interaction between genetic trait and survival. Mutation creates
diversity in genetic traits, and natural selection creates
preferential survival for certain traits, varying with conditions.
DNA building is not relevant, actually, except as DNA is "built"
through cells that replicate it, and that make copying errors.
That selection is "natural" is a bit of a tautology. The implication,
though, is a distinction between selection that is somehow programmed
toward a result, and selection that simply occurs.
Mutations are the mechanism Darwin claims to be behind changes.
No, mutations *are* changes. And, again, I don't care what Darwin
claimed. I'm not a "Darwinian."
As to the development of life, it is no longer controversial that
species differ in genetic code, and, indeed, that we all differ from
each other, each inheriting a specific and unique code. All humans
are almost identical, but not quite. By "change," here, Jojo must
mean "speciation." And it's obvious that species have different
genetic code. What Jojo is claiming I suspect, is that one species
never changes into another through mutation. However, he's not
actually proposing a different mechanism for speciation. Perhaps he
will claim that there is no speciation. The mother of a squirrel was
always a squirrel, the mother of a hummingbird was always a hummingbird.
The changes result in a survival advantage, hence Natural
Selection occurs. Hence the process is in fact a random process.
Mutation is not necessarily a random process. (The level of mutation
is *controlled*, generally. Different organisms have varying degrees
of protectin of copying accuracy.) However, let's grant that.
However, what was said was not that mutation was not a random
process, but that natural selection is not a random process, and the
context was a claim that "natural selection" cannot "originate information."
That's obviously bogus. Natural selection isn't mere mutation, which
might be a kind of random input, but rather is the product of
mutation and survival. The result, the genetic code as it shifts
through time in a population, is "information" about something very
obvious: what survived to reproduce, not just once, but many times.
It is important for us to understand that Natural Selection does not
occur at the cellular or DNA level.
Oh, it does. There are many copying errors that will kill the cell,
promptly. But perhaps Jojo means something else here.
In other words, there is no Natural Selection mechanism to determine
at the cellular/DNA level what random mutation is to be retained.
That is generally correct, given the exception that I noted.
That mutation has to cause a change in the macro organism that would
confer a survival advantage before Natural Selection can be invoked.
There is no trait "confers survival advantage." "Natural selection"
is a term for an overall process, a very gross summary of what
happens, it is not an actual mechanism. Yes, an unexpressed change,
one that has no effect on the "macro organism," will have very little
effect on survival. Survival is the actual mechanism that filters
mutations, but the filtering may be quite slow. The exception I know
of: there is a lot of junk DNA, DNA that apparently does not code for
any expressed protein or messenger. If there was too much of that,
the inefficiency would start to bog down the process of copying, and
copying is essential to growth and repair and operation of the cells.
You can have many many many mutations or changes at the cellular
level but only when changes confer a survival advantage does that
mutation get retained. Retention of changes occur at the individual
to offspring level - a macro level, not at the cellular/DNA level.
This is completely false. All mutations that don't kill the organism
are retained, the human copying machinery is designed to maintain the
integrity of copies, and the machinery generally doesn't know the
difference between what is new (mutation) and what is old (what was
before). If the mutation is in the gamete, it will be in the
offspring. Mutations are not created in the individual, per se, but
in the individual cells that become offspring, as mutations. There is
another mechanism, recombination, where already-existing genes are
recombined, through sexual reproduction -- or, in primitive
organisms, other means of gene-sharing. Essentially, a mutation is
normally *not* something found in the parent, but only in the
offspring. The offspring will have the mutated genome as their entire
genome, for every cell.
Perhaps what Jojo means is that a mutation, a change, will not
increase in a population unless it confers a survival advantage. I
think that's generally correct, but it won't go away, either. If
there is no advantage or disadvantage, it will fluctuate randomly.
If there is no reproduction, there is no Natural Selection.
That's correct. The mechanism of selection is over what DNA survives
to be reproduced.
If there is no "survival advantage", there is no Natural Selection.
That, again, is correct.
If you understand this, you will understand how utterly impropable
Darwinian Evolution is.
Again, I'm not responsible for Darwinian evolution. I could guess at
what Jojo is getting at here, though. It's a semantic trick.
If we have had infinite time, then yes Darwinian Evolution is
possible, but we only have had 4 billion years since the creation of
the Earth and 15 billion years since the creation of the
Universe. Not enough time.
Because he says so. He is positing that speciation and evolution are
only based on random events, the mutation rate. Through the argument
he's given, he thinks that, then, the code that defines a species
must arise though random change, and he's got in mind starting from
nothing and ending up with, say, a hummingbird.
That's not how natural selection works. Natural selection is not
targeted at a result. When we think of "creation," we think of a
targeted, designed object, where all the process involved was
designed to create it. That is definitely not the process of natural
selection. Sometimes natural selection is called "survival of the
fittest," which is an error. It's survival of the survivors.
"Fittest" is simply another word for "surivors." There is no
"fittest," except through some established competition that compares.
Yes, that happens, and it's a driver, but ....
Natural selection does not set out to create the hummingbird. It
doesn' set out to do *anything* except to do what comes naturally:
birth, metabolism, existence, and death. We don't know how common
life is, in the universe, but a simple definition of life could be
"self-replicating pattern." That's not enough of a definition, but it
will do for starters. Once there was a self-replicating molecule, a
molecule that catalyzes it's own copying in the environment that
existed, the rest, quite likely, would be history. Beause this
molecule, given a billion years or so, would make a huge number of
copies of itself, limited only by two things, the natural breakdown
rate (where some ion or something breaks the replicating molecule) or
mutation, copying error. We can expect with the earliest copying
mechanism that it wouldn't be terribly accurate, so the population of
molecules would have a lot of variety. But, sitting in the soup for a
long time, a truly huge number of combinations would exist, and some
of them would be able to ... eat. They would find useful sequences
and either break them down or even incorporate them whole into their
own little factory.
It looks likely to me, then, that a minimal seed of life would copy
itself and evolve, very slowly at first, until mechanisms developed
to speed it up. Speeding up the process would, again, enhance the
survival of some of the copies. I think single-celled organisms
appeared something like a billion years ago, on Earth. The step from
the single molecule I describe to a single cell is huge. From a cell
to us is probably less of a jump.
Fact? No. This is a fantasy. See, I wasn't there. Or, come to think
of it, was I?
(Note, that I do not personally subscribe the the 4 billion Earth
age nor to the 15 billion age of the Universe. I just mention it to
highlight the utter fallacy of Darwinian Evolution.)
Fail. The argument is devoid of any quantitative sense. It's purely
linguistic. It jumps across a false premise, to repeat:
only when changes confer a survival advantage does that mutation get retained
That, if true, would require that "survival advantage mutations" be
complete before they would survive. No, lots of copies of mutations
are exposed to survival, and the ones that survive, survive. There is
no preference for "survival advantage," lots of mutations with no
survival advantage at all survive, out DNA is full of the junk code.
And then, sometimes, a new mutation turns some sequence into an
active gene. And even then it may not make any significant difference.
Jojo did much better on this than he did on most of his arguments. He
actually stayed coherent. But he's still got the nonscientist trait
of utter certainty without adequate knowledge. That's because, I'll
suspect, he's reasoning from conclusions. He thinks that evolution is
"contrary to the Bible."
More likely, since life *does* evolve, that's not in controversy
among biologists, he doesn't understand the Bible.
Theoretically, the Bible could be wrong, but I won't go there, it
would be rude and unnecessary.
Jojo
PS. BTW, I did not start this thread lest Lomax and Jouni will
claim that I am starting a trolling thread again.
Jojo does not normally start "trolling threads," as I recall. The
usual thing is that he jumps in with trolling. Is that happening
here? Well, the discussion is fairly likely to go awry, but I don't
think it has done so yet. The general topic here is science, and this
is more on topic as a discussion of science than many of late, which
have diverged into political and religious polemic, with highly
provocative statements being made.
Starting a "trolling thread," if that's done, is actually less
harmful than an interjected trolling post in a non-trolling thread.
Yes, Jojo did not start this thread, but he changed the topic to
evolution. It was really about using DNA as a method of encoding
large amounts of data. That change, in itself, I don't consider a big deal.
The history is below. The topic was DNA, as a literal molecule, it
had nothing to do with evolution, as such. Jojo did not merely change
the topic to evolution, he made it be about "Darwinian
evolutionists." That's ideological, and he brought in "threats" and
"bribery," all of which could make a subject other than a friendy
dicussion. I'd not be saying this if not for Jojo's expectation that
I'd mislead. No biggie.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Abd ul-Rahman Lomax" <a...@lomaxdesign.com>
To: <vortex-l@eskimo.com>; <vortex-l@eskimo.com>
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2012 1:20 PM
Subject: Re: [Vo]:Digital information storage in DNA
Natural Selection can not explain how random process can originate
information; let alone exabytes of information present in DNA in
its natural state.
Natural Selection is not Random Process. Nor are there exabytes of
information encoded in our DNA, at least not in a single copy of
our set. It's far, far less than that.
But, of course, Darwinian Evolutionist are right because there's
2000 of them and nobody has heard on one of them being threatened or bribed.
Gee, bringing in two separate contentious issues at once, like AGW
and Evolution.
"Darwinian Evolution" uses the name of a person. Why? Do we care
about persons, or do we care about principles?
Jojo
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:jedrothw...@gmail.com>Jed Rothwell
To: <mailto:vortex-l@eskimo.com>vortex-l@eskimo.com
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2012 6:32 AM
Subject: [Vo]:Digital information storage in DNA
Not quite as off topic as you might think. I am looking into this
as part of an essay about the history of cold fusion I am writing. Anyway, see:
<http://arep.med.harvard.edu/pdf/Church_Science_12.pdf>http://arep.med.harvard.edu/pdf/Church_Science_12.pdf
This prof. at Harvard, George Church, has been experimenting with
recording data in DNA. He recorded his own book and then read it
back, with only a few errors. He reproduced it 30 million times,
making it "the biggest best seller in history" in a sense.
Quote: "DNA storage is very dense. At theoretical maximum, DNA can
encode two bits per nucleotide (nt) or 455 exabytes per gram of ssDNA . . ."
I'd like to confirm I have the units right here --
Present world data storage is variously estimated between 295
exabytes in 2011 to 2,700 exabytes today (2.7 zettabytes). See:
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12419672>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12419672
(295 exabytes)
<http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23177411#.UNt2eSZGJ5Q>http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23177411#.UNt2eSZGJ5Q
(2.7 ZB)
I don't know what source to believe.
This takes a colossal number of hard disks and a great deal of
electricity. On NHK they estimated the number of bytes of data now
exceeds the number of grains of sand on all the beaches of the
world. Assume it is 2.7 ZB. That seems like a large number until
you realize that you could record all of this data in 6 grams of DNA.
That demonstrates how much our technology may improve in the
future. We have a lot of leeway. There is still "plenty of room at
the bottom" as Feynman put it.
DNA preserves data far better than any human technology. It can
also copy it faster and more accurately by far. I mean by many
orders of magnitude.
It might be difficult to make a rapid, on-line electronic
interface to DNA recorded data, similar to today's hard disk. But
as a back up medium, or long-term storage, it seems promising. As
Prof. Church demonstrates, this technology may come about as a
spin off from genome-reading technology. Perhaps there are other
3-dimensional molecular methods of data storage. Maybe, but I
would say why bother looking for them when nature has already
found such a robust system?
- Jed