False.
It could (and does) work without all the tRNAs, using less than 21 amino-acids.
It could (and possibly did) work without any DNA sequences, using only RNA templates.
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It doesnât matter how many times you repeat your flawed logic, it will never become unflawed.
{p(X) and q(X) and p(Y)} -/-> q(Y).
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I think that analogy is rather exaggerated.
Youâve been shown evidence that the ribosomal core is highly similar to tRNA, and that their sequence similarity increases as we go deeper in the nodes of their phylogenetic trees (back in time), which implies they share a common ancestor, and youâve been shown evidence that the PTC center can function as a peptide bonding ribozyme by first self-assembling from a molecule highly similar to tRNA into a dimer, entirely in the absense of ribosomal proteins, the absense of all the rest of rRNA, and the small ribosomal subunit.
Youâve also been shown evidence that the two families of aminoacyl-tRNA-synthetases, today comprising 64 distinct enzymes, derive from one ancestral gene.
All of this implies an era in which almost the entirety of the rest of the translation system was missing (including all the ribosomal proteins and the small ribosomal subunit), and this common ancestral molecule had an entirely different function, or alternatively was dimerizing into something like the PTC and was more or less only stringing mino acids together in an uncoded fashion.
None of this seems to correspond all that well to the idea that youâve just been given a one-propeller and two-propeller airplane.
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And yet we have evidence the system evolved so your statement seems to have no capacity to explain the data we see or how the system came to exist.
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Yes but first of all, the problem is youâre just saying that, while offering no explanation for any of the data that indicates that the genetic code evolved.
And second, the inference that âlike other digital codes, the product of an intelligent mindâ is an inductive inference from the observed which @Faizal has already addressed.
Presumably you are trying to argue that we should think the genetic code was intelligently designed, because other digital codes we know of have been intelligently designed. But as Faizal points out, another just as well-supported inductive inference from observation is that intelligent minds require the genetic code, thus implying a contradiction between the two inductive arguments. The genetic code cannot have come into existence without having already existed in the intelligent designer that created the code. So one or both of the inductive inferences must be false.
It just so happens we have good reason to think both statements are false. There is evidence the genetic code evolved, and we know of other digital codes that werenât designed (tree rings), and thereâs good reason to think intelligent designers can be machines for example.
This idea that the translation system was more or less created as-is in any particular organism by some instance or process of intelligent design has no explanatory power when it comes to the data we have about the translation system and itâs various components in many different organisms. This data is however well explained by the hypothesis that the system is the product of an evolutionary process, because this hypothesis can explain why the data looks the way it does. Itâs also a useful basis for doing research aiming to understand how the code evolved, because it has yielded numerous curious insights into how the code functions (and would have functioned at earlier stages).
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Why not answer my question with a simple âyes,â in that expecting a Wikipedia-level understanding is not possible?
No, you still donât know what youâre talking about, and your pasting of a large block of text only illustrates that.
What is shows is that it is not arbitrary. If you have so much faith in your position, why all of the painfully obvious goalpost moving?
Youâre ignoring the âorâ in the definition you posted:
1b: based on or determined by individual preference or convenience rather than by necessity or the intrinsic nature of something.
Again, this gets back to your abject failure to understand what catalysts are incapable of doing. Enzymes donât perform magic.
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Straw man. They were predicted by the hypothesis that the genetic code (no reason to capitalize anything) evolved.
You, on the other hand, have multiple false predictions of your hypothesis piling up that you tacitly acknowledge by moving the goalposts and changing definitions.
You literally reject the scientific method. Testing empirical predictions is simply how science works. Youâre desperately trying to misrepresent science as mere after-the-fact explanations.
More scientifically, much of it was predicted by the existence of that era.
Interestingly, we know manyâprobably mostâof these things because, unlike IDcreationist rhetoricians, real scientists tested and confirmed many of these predictions with the goal of improving human health, something the rhetoricians apparently donât care about.
I wonder if those claiming to understand the big picture better than we do even know how these things are relevant to medicine.
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Exactly. And what are you using? The opposite of knowledge?
Yes, I think everyone here understands this. And, as has been repeatedly explained to you, you have not demonstrated that this is sufficient reason to conclude that something is âdesigned.â
I reject the assertion, made by ID proponents and other creationists, that whether something is âdesignedâ is determined by inherent characteristics like âirreducible complexityâ, âspecified informationâ or âcodeâ. It is determined, rather, through our knowledge of whether something is produced naturally or requires human beings to manufacture it.
Well, I would disagree that the statement âAll swans are whiteâ is not scientific. It would be a perfectly fine conclusion to draw thru inductive reasoning if the empirical evidence was such that millions of swans had been observed and none of them were any colour other than white. It is, however, a false statement, since we know that black swans exist. Thatâs how science works.
Similarly, my statement would be falsified if we witnessed a god or angel or demon or some other being that did not require DNA and could create a code.
But, more to the point, the statement, âEvery intelligent being that can create a code requires the genetic code to existâ is at least as strongly supported by evidence as is your assertion âEvery code requires an intelligent being to create it.â And you have yet to provide any rational reason that you accept one premise and not the other. It is quite apparent to me that the only reason is because you believe one statement supports your religious beliefs, and the other refutes it. That is not a rational reason, but one of personal prejudice.
IOW, you still do not understand the evidence and arguments that have been provided. If anyone wants to try explaining it some other way, they are welcome to try. Though I suspect many are coming to the conclusion that it is a lost cause.
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Thereâs no explaining the scientific method to those who reject it.
Again, hereâs my challenge to @theaz101 and @appsandorgs:
What I find remarkable about religion-driven rejection of science is how little real faith backs it up.
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Why then, did you describe genetic code as digital information (or any other base), if that is irrelevant to it being the product of an intelligent mind?
So I think we are finally agreed on this point about base; it is irrelevant. Therefore your conclusion should be that ALL INFORMATION is the product of an intelligent mind, not just that genetic code. (This is where you inject the supernatural.)
No doubt you will object. You might reasonably counter by providing an example of information, using your definition, that is not the product of an intelligent mind? You might have used tree rings, but then you wrote âŚ
If ânaturally occurring informationâ is tree rings, then it isnât digital information.
But if the base is irrelevant then tree rings must be information in the same sense as genetic code is information.
What is really going on here, is that I have imposed the same definition of coded Information on tree rings as you have imposed on the genetic sequences. The only intelligent minds at work here are ourselves.
[Bolded for reasons which will become apparent]
It seems obvious you are doing just that - appealing to the supernatural. Otherwise, where is the explanatory power in such a claim?
âŚas a cause of a chemical reaction.
If you are not appealing to the supernatural as a cause of a chemical reaction, or arranging or sequencing of DNA bases at the time that life originated, then what are you appealing to?
Other have already noted this moving of the goalposts.
By this, do you concede that the genetic code has evolved from an ancestral state?
Do you agree this is unlike any human designed code, which do not change themselves?
Thatâs also my understanding that the history of the ribosome is surprisingly obvious from itâs structure alone. Before one stage, the precursors of the two subunits could not interact with one another which is necessary for translation. So what did these things do before translation? They made polymers, peptides probably but perhaps also other kinds of polymers, but these were not encoded (i.e. template directed sequences). In the absence of coding, that does mean that the modern complex folds that we see in proteins today were not available to these early peptides, and the nature of their sequences were highly statistical, producing a collection of similar sequences instead of one specific sequence from one gene: the âStatistical ensemblesâ as hypothesized by Carl Woese. The folds of these sequences would also be rather simple, but as translation was established and fidelity increased over time we would expect that peptides would have attained more complex folds correspondingly. It turns out that this history of protein folding is also recorded in the structure of the ribosome and ribosomal proteins. The peptide strands which interact with deeper and older parts of the ribosome are simpler and donât fold, but as you go to more younger parts of the ribosome, the peptides attain more complex folds.
Hi Nes
The simple to complex process forming new arrangements is an assumption as there is little if any empirical evidence to support this critical assumption that is required for the claim that similarities alone can support the evolutionary paradigm.
The similarities donât come âalone.â The similarities come in nested hierarchies.
That is one of the many reasons why the evidence for âthe evolutionary paradigmâ is so overwhelmingly compelling.
Those nested hierarchies are also surrounded by the piles and piles of compelling CONSILIENCE OF EVIDENCE from many many fields of science.
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7 posts were merged into an existing topic: Side Comments: Is there really information being conveyed within a cell?
This is all great stuff, thanks for posting these treasures. I just read a paper that features some of the new(ish) ways that structural biologists are capturing enzymes âin the act,â and thatâs interesting by itself but I learned more about the way that biophysicists talk about protein structural dynamics and itâs changed how I visualize/conceptualize enzymes and active sites. Here are a few sentences from their Introduction:
Enzymes, like all proteins, exist in conformational ensembles corresponding to multiple populated minima in their potential energy landscapes (4, 5). Protein dynamics are a combination of motions within these minima and transitions among them. The conformations that compose an ensemble can have intrinsically different catalytic proficiencies, permitting sampling of optimal conformations during catalysis (6, 7), in the laboratory (8, 9), or through evolution (10â12). Because the catalytic cycle transiently changes the underlying protein energy landscape, enzyme conformational ensembles also change during catalysis (7, 13, 14).
This seems conceptually similar (just a bit) to the âstatistical ensemblesâ idea. It undermines the highly simplistic views of poorly informed biochemists like Behe and archaic rigid views of Axe (unless heâs actually read some papers in the last couple of years), but to be fair to those lost souls, simple views of protein structure are ubiquitous in textbooks and in the old slogans of previous eras of biochemistry. âLock and keyâ is a useful simplification for the first step of explaining a binding site and/or an active site to a beginner, but like all such simplifications, it is all too easily co-opted by apologists who need the world to be simple.
The paper is from one year ago, is open access, and includes some nice rabbit trails references. The concept of âenzyme ensemblesâ is not new, but I think (could be wrong) the phrasing is recent. The authors cite this really interesting 2016 Nature Chemical Biology paper for its exhaustive experimental evolutionary analysis of a protein evolving in the lab, and that paper doesnât use the phrase.
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Your post and the link was fascinating to me. Entertaining, even. And yes, Iâm one of those people entirely outside of the field who still thinks in simple âlock and keyâ termsâbut I know just enough about the basics of enzymes and protein folding to not be a bit surprised that new discoveries of the complexities and their explanatory mechanisms are dazzling to behold.
Yet again, every time we turn around, the consilience of evidence for evolutionary processes just gets more and more compelling. And goes deeper. And richer. And very beautiful.
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