I'm pretty sure you wrote a lot worth responding to, to correct it, but I
did not read your tiresome lengthy essays. Please learn to split you
arguement into smaller readable segments.
Jojo
----- Original Message -----
From: "Abd ul-Rahman Lomax" <a...@lomaxdesign.com>
To: <vortex-l@eskimo.com>; <vortex-l@eskimo.com>
Sent: Friday, December 28, 2012 10:03 AM
Subject: Re: [Vo]:Digital information storage in DNA
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
