DNA duplication, mutation, and information

[Faizal_Ali]

Not just complex, but more often than not needlessly complex, invariably in exactly the sort of way that evolutionary theory would predict.

Odd, that.

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@colewd

The design argument that Behe makes is a “method” and not a hypothesis. A method of detecting design in nature.

If it was a method, he would be publishing papers in the primary scientific literature describing its many applications.

[Puck_Mendelssohn]

@Mercer

If it was a method, he would be publishing papers in the primary scientific literature describing its many applications.

I assume he is. Or is there no Journal of the Fooling of Rubes?

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@Puck_Mendelssohn

I’ve always thought so. Indeed, the “argument from complexity” seems to me to run just the opposite way from how the cdesign proponentsists have it: living things are just too complex to have been designed. That’s not a formal argument – it is, rather, an intuitive judgment, and so of no scientific value (just as the ID judgment to the contrary is) but it has always struck me as downright weird that anyone would look at the sorts of complexity seen in living things and think of design.

Yes, the key here being the nature of the complexity, clearly produced by a relentlessly iterative process. Instead, IDcreationists simply repeat the mantra, “That’s really complex!” without ever dealing with the nature of the complexity.

That’s why I can keep asking @colewd for the ID hypothesis explaining the polymorphism of human MYH7 and he’ll never even try to come up with a coherent one that explains all the data.

[Roy (34-year veteran)]

@John_Harshman

@Meerkat_SK5

Duplications are the result of repeating existing genetic information, and mutations change existing genetic information (whether original or duplicated) but neither of them adds new information.

You have just agreed that every possible sequence has no new information compared to every other possible sequence. Did you know that’s what you were doing? Because that also means it would take no new information to transform a bacterial genome to a human genome. All genomes must have identical information content. Is that really the hill you want to die on?

Ah, but transforming a bacterial genome to a human genome is unnecessarily hard if you just duplicate sections and mutate nucleotides. It may be more efficient if you can delete unneeded sections.

The new information must be added during these deletion operations.

[Roy (34-year veteran)]

@Puck_Mendelssohn

@Mercer

If it was a method, he would be publishing papers in the primary scientific literature describing its many applications.

I assume he is. Or is there no Journal of the Fooling of Rubes?

Bio-Complexity.

[scd]

@Jordan

Again, “a system” vs “animals” vs “designed object” are all different things.

in this case we are talking about the same system: a system that can make an object to move in the direction of lgith. that trait can exist in both animals and designed objects. so as we can see now- we cant do that by a single step.

[Puck_Mendelssohn]

@Mercer

Yes, the key here being the nature of the complexity, clearly produced by a relentlessly iterative process. Instead, IDcreationists simply repeat the mantra, “That’s really complex!” without ever dealing with the nature of the complexity.

You know, one of the oddest things in creationist rhetoric, or so it seems to me, is this: the whole argument from design requires a judgment that “THAT looks like what a designer would have done!” Not very scientific, and immensely subjective, but there it is and it makes a kind of sense if you squint really hard and don’t think about it too much. The whole argument hinges upon one’s ability to discern a design intention underlying the thing under examination by looking at the thing’s attributes and seeing whether it’s the sort of thing one thinks a designer would have been inclined to make.

But then there is the twist: whenever anyone ELSE tries to do precisely the same thing, it’s immediately declared to be off-limits. “Bad design”? PAH! Who are you, mere mortal, to attempt to imagine what constitutes “bad design” from the point of view of the Designer (Hallelujah, and Sis-Boom-Bah!)? Don’t you know that NO inquiry into the mind or intents of the designer, even by inference from its designs, is EVER permissible? Never mind, of course, that this is precisely what the design argument was in the first place.

And so “I quiver at the majesty of the Almighty every time I see a protein” is automatically a good argument FOR design, but “that doesn’t look like the Almighty was involved, and if he was, he must have been on a bender” is automatically a bad argument AGAINST design. The key thing in distinguishing between the bad argument and the good argument is: is it for design? Then it’s a good argument. Against design? Then it’s a bad argument.

[Chris_Falter]

@Rumraket

IIRC it’s been estimated there’s something like 10^4 unique protein folds used by cellular life on Earth. If we sort of spread that out equally over the 4 billion year history of life on Earth, we arrive at a new protein fold emergence once every 400 million years.

Hi Rum,

I think conceptually you are driving at an accurate conclusion about new folds being explained by evolutionary mechanisms.

However, I think your math is off here. When I run the numbers, I calculate a new protein fold emergence every 400,000 years.

4*10^9 / 10^4 = 4 * 10^5 = 400,000

Best,
Chris

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

lol yes. Must have been seeing double that day and just not thought about the number.

[T.j_Runyon]

@colewd

This is quite cleaver A process of intelligently guided information generation.

ID argumentation in a nutshell.

ID Proponent: show me an experiment that demonstrates new information!

Scientist: Okay. Here you go!

ID proponent: nope! That doesn’t work! Because you intelligently designed the experiment.

[colewd (Bill Cole)]

@T.j_Runyon

ID proponent: nope! That doesn’t work! Because you intelligently designed the experiment.

The process was intelligently guided. 4 people liked you comment so at least your popular

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@colewd

The process was intelligently guided.

What process?

[Witchdoc]

What process?

You know, the process of change via organic choice, by which those better adjusted to their Hilbert space are more likely to pass on their digital information.

[Chris_Falter]

Hi Bill,

You and I are 100.0% in agreement that an Intelligent Designer created the information-generating biological process we call evolution.

Biologists have the pleasure and privilege of investigating that process and telling us how it works (transpositions, point mutations, recombination, de novo genes, genetic drift, population genetics, regulatory gene networks, non-coding DNA, etc., etc.).

In my opinion, the reason that the theory of evolution so powerfully explains the history of life from microbes to man is that biologists have done a great job of hypothesizing, studying, and modeling what God designed.

Have a great weekend!

Chris

[T_aquaticus]

@colewd

A lack of a tested hypothesis is what many historic sciences suffer from including evolutionary theory.

You apparently don’t understand how science works.

Background information: Not all substitution mutations have an equal chance of occurring. Specifically, transitions occur more often than transversions, and CpG mutations occur at the highest rate.

Hypothesis: The differences between the human and chimp genomes is due to the same processes that produce mutations today. If this is so, we should see the same bias towards transitions and CpG mutations when we compare the human and chimp genome.

Experiment: Align the chimp and human genomes and tally the substitution mutations.

Results: We see the same bias towards transitions and CpG mutations and same ratios of SNP’s in the human/chimp data as we see in mutations happening in real time.

Conclusion: The evidence supports the hypothesis. The evidence is consistent with mutations producing the differences we see between humans and chimps.

100% scientific.

[colewd (Bill Cole)]

@T_aquaticus

100% scientific.

And certainly confirms universal common descent

[T_aquaticus]

@colewd

And certainly confirms universal common descent

Just so we are clear, the world around us is the product of its history. Events that happen in the past can leave evidence in the present. Therefore, we can use that evidence to test our hypotheses of what happened in the past. Hypotheses in the “historical sciences”, or what we call “science”, are easily tested.

[colewd (Bill Cole)]

@T_aquaticus

Hypotheses in the “historical sciences”, or what we call “science”, are easily tested.

Agree.
When you testing standards are low enough you can test almost anything.

[T_aquaticus]

@colewd

When you testing standards are low enough you can test almost anything.

Sour grapes?