Ashwin and Rumraket on Design and Designers

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@colewd

What about the mechanisms and how they build complex functional DNA sequences leading to complex adaptions?

What about them? The ancestral state evolves into the descendant state by mutations, selection, etc. One ancestor’s “complex functional DNA sequence” and it’s associated “complex adaptations” evolves into it’s descendant’s "complex functional DNA sequence and it’s associated “complex adaptations”.

There are threads on this forum dedicated to elucidating particular examples. We recently had a thread about the reconstructed evolutionary history of the hemoglobin complex:

Origin of complexity in haemoglobin evolution -- newest from Thornton lab

Important new paper from Joe Thornton and colleagues, on the evolution of molecular complexity. Here is the accompanying News and Views piece: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01287-8 Key quote from the News and Views article: The authors’ work shows how natural selection, acting on pre-existing biophysical protein properties, can, in just a few evolutionary steps, create multimeric structures that have complex functions. Most cellular processes involve the action of protein multimers, and Pillai and colleagues’ work serves as one of the clearest examples so far of how such complexity can arise during protein evolution. The piece also explores caveats and future directions. Link below to the primary article itself, and abstract is below. I can help you get a PDF if you get in touch. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2292-y Abstract Most proteins associate into multimeric complexes with specific architectures1,2, which often have functional properties such a…

@colewd

Rum knows that he needs to first explain “in principle” how these mechanisms explain the origin of the eukaryotic cell.

I’ve done that countless times. Endosymbiosis etc.