DNA animation

[Bill Sloman]

On Thursday, May 9, 2019 at 9:48:30 AM UTC+10, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:

On Wednesday, May 8, 2019 at 10:43:53 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Thursday, May 9, 2019 at 12:15:07 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 08 May 2019 09:44:21 -0400, Joseph Gwinn
joegwinn@comcast.net> wrote:

On May 8, 2019, John Larkin wrote
(in article<k9m4de93eokbg9gh91ekedg0vsu06kg34q@4ax.com&gt:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpHaxzroYxg

This is insane. This is impossible.

Yes, but that is how it works. It took some billions of years for all that
organized complexity to evolve, one trick at a time.

But it couldn't evolve one bit at a time.

Actually, that's exactly what it did.

If it doesn't all work, none of it works.

A famous fallacy. Each stage of development has to work, but the successive evolutionary steps can follow any path that works.

And it builds every bit of itself.

Eventually. Haekel said that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory

which happens to be wrong, but in an educational way.

It builds us too, but that's a detail.

But important to us, at the moment. We clearly need intelligent redesign.

Only an unimaginative fool would believe living organisms evolved at random.
The process was very deterministic beyond a certain point where the organism's interaction with its environment influenced its gene development and DNA chemistry. It's called epigenetics.

Epigenetics explains why some environmental effects are visible after one of two generations. It isn't a mechanism that would allowed acquired characteristics to be passed down any further.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Thursday, May 9, 2019 at 9:30:36 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 9 May 2019 09:16:03 +1000, Clifford Heath <no.spam@please.net
wrote:

On 9/5/19 3:38 am, John Larkin wrote:
Is that a fact? In modern life, DNA builds RNA.

There are primitive organisms that only have RNA, no DNA at all. That
pretty-much eliminates your argument here.

RNA viruses? They are built by DNA.

Mostly. There are some RNA-only enzymes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world

People are looking for RNA-only cellular organisms

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22093146

They hadn't found any then, but figured that it was worth keeping on looking.

Cells are more complicated than viruses, and the superior stability of DNA would be worth more to them than it is to viruses, and may have given them an overwhelming competitive advantage over the last few billion years.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Thursday, May 9, 2019 at 1:09:39 PM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Wed, 8 May 2019 13:31:26 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
gherold@teachspin.com> wrote:

On Wednesday, May 8, 2019 at 4:11:15 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 8 May 2019 15:55:18 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 8 May 2019 13:03:36 -0500, "Tim Williams"
tiwill@seventransistorlabs.com> wrote:

"Tom Del Rosso" <fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote in
message news:qav3jo$v1g$1@dont-email.me...

<snip>

Design by some creature that evolved in a different way, something
that had a more reasonable incremental path to complex structure.

Panspermia of DNA-based life, which merely suggests that the solution
to the DNA mystery happened far away, billions of years ago, in a very
different environment. A gas giant planet or something.

A claim for which there is absolutely no evidence at all.

Quantum mechanical, essentially quantum computing, mechanisms that are
more efficient at evolution than cosmic rays whacking base pairs.

None of which have ever been identified. It's less-than-plausible science fiction.

If you believe in evolution (which most people actually don't) you
might consider that evolution evolves better mechanisms to speed
evolution.

Yeah, it's called sex! great invention. :^)

It's almost impossible to have an intelligent conversation here.
(unless it's about electronics or instrument design for which we have a
lot of wisdom)

I was reading this during lunch... science losing it's way.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/

George H.

Yup, most gene correlation studies are wrong.

So far, most psychiatric gene correlation studies have been wrong. There are quite a few physical diseases where having one, or a few different genes can explain what is gong on.

The psychiatric gene studies that do seem to work needed huge population samples and had to look at thousands of genes, none of which had much of an effect on their own.

The psychiatrists were seduced by the examples of physical diseases where only a few genes were involved. Now that we have large samples of people whose genomes have been sequenced completely, they may be able to do better.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Jasen Betts]

On 2019-05-08, John Larkin <jjlarkin@highland_snip_technology.com> wrote:

On Wed, 8 May 2019 16:54:08 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:


There is still a lot of hand waving. As in

"it is fruitful to consider the alternative possibility that RNA was
preceded by some other replicating, evolving molecule, just as DNA and
proteins were preceded by RNA."

Is that a fact? In modern life, DNA builds RNA.

Reverse transcriptase does the opposite.

but the RNA for that is found in retroviruses so it could be argued that
it's not "life", weasel words that pomoters of that claim may cling
to.


--
When I tried casting out nines I made a hash of it.

 

[whit3rd]

On Wednesday, May 8, 2019 at 8:26:21 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

The great mysteries are the origin of the universe, the origin of
life, and consciousness. So far we are clueless about all three.

Huh?
Every object IN the universe, and their dispositions as we can see them,
are clues.

Life is well enough understood to custom-build some...
<https://www.technologyreview.com/s/419359/how-to-make-an-artificial-cell/>

Consciousness is possible to mimic with mechanisms, because
we've collected enough clues for that one, too.

If you don't see clues, see your eye doctor.

 

[Martin Brown]

On 08/05/2019 17:38, R Collins wrote:

On Wednesday, May 8, 2019 at 7:42:36 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, May 8, 2019 at 7:25:05 PM UTC+10, Martin Brown
wrote:
On 08/05/2019 05:24, John Larkin wrote:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpHaxzroYxg

This is insane. This is impossible.

It is an impressive animation of the the copying and transfer of
DNA is actually occurring at a molecular level inside every cell.
Thanks for sharing. It is a shame that you cannot be bothered to
understand it.

Asking him to understand it is trifle unreasonable - he hasn't got
the education on which an understanding might be built. And while
we can probably understand the transcription from DNA to messenger
RNA (which is presumably what was being animated) the business of
getting from there to protein synthesis is trickier.

-- Bill Sloman, Sydney

I find it hard to believe the transcription was a real time video.
The bases find the enzyme via diffusion which I would think would not
be that fast. But then the distances are very tiny so maybe my sense
of how fast diffusion can work is the unrealistic part of it all.
The video makes it look like there is a current funneling the bases
into the enzyme.

The video is strictly classical in terms of ball and spoke models of the
various components and their lock and key behaviour. Diffusion would be
good enough for things to work but there may be a little bit of quantum
mechanics helping things along as well.

It is probably no coincidence that a quantum Turing machine would have
four rather than two "binary" states since in the quantum world a single
comparison allows you to branch four ways. DNA and RNA may well be in
effect a Turing machine of sorts exploiting quantum mechanics.

In a similar fashion the number of amino acids is suspiciously close to
the number of ways you can branch in three quantum comparisons. If there
is a role for quantum effects in life then it is in making these stages
more efficient than they would be if purely classical dynamics applied.

It's pretty cool watching the RNA spew out from the enzyme at such a
rate.

It is diffusion limited but a little bit of quantum tunnelling may well
help the right component to find its mark. I expect they are right about
the speed it runs. I found the DNA copy process animation fascinating.

Unless and until we can find independent life on another planet (or this
one in an isolated example of archaea) and see what its genome and
biochemistry looks like we have no other novel examples to look at.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Martin Brown]

On 08/05/2019 17:53, John Larkin wrote:

On Wed, 8 May 2019 17:35:25 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 08/05/19 15:31, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Thursday, May 9, 2019 at 12:11:14 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 8 May 2019 01:04:50 -0500, "Tim Williams"
tiwill@seventransistorlabs.com> wrote:

Hardly. There's a lot of room at the bottom. A phrase still as true
today as it was half a century ago!

What's insane is people still think this stuff was created in the snap
of some magic finger.

Tim

It's even crazier that some people think it happened at random.

Nothing crazy about it. That's what random variation plus selection can
manage.

The crazies are the intelligent design fans, who think that an intelligent
designer would have gone to all that trouble then not put in any error
detection and correction coding.

Plus give us humans clearly "suboptimal" designs when
there are better designs available, e.g. the "wiring"
between our retina and our brains.

I read one book that suggests that our retinas aren't designed wrong.
The light has to make its way through a maze of nerves and blood
vessels to hit the sensitive stuff on the back of the retina, which
sounds bad, but the light is conveyed through the maze on fiber
optics.

Our eyes are a terrible design compared to either top preditors or deep
sea cephalopods. They are just good enough for a hominid omnivore. We
have the advantageous feature of colour vision for seeing ripe fruit. A
few people have various forms of colour blindness and much rarer are
people who can distinguish living and dead plant pigments by eye.

Raptor livers are another complete disaster area. Somewhat dodgy
compromises for being able to fly fast and take severe impact stresses.

If a God designed them then he was having an off day when he did so.

> I wonder how that could evolve by random processes.

You start out with a spot that is light sensitive and gradually evolve
under competitive pressure. Every tiny incremental improvement makes
survival of the owner more likely (all other things being equal),
neutral things make no difference and defects tend to get you killed.

People seem to forget that incremental improvements stack up
exponentially so that 100 1% improvements gets you to 270%.

Evolution works so well that for some otherwise intractable problems we
use computer models of evolution to solve real world optimisations.

Simulated anealling works pretty well too for difficult global
optimisation problems - and that is *entirely* random but with a very
specific thermodynamic rule on when it is allowed to jump to a sub
optimal state which is gradually tightened as it is allowed to cool.

You can believe in approved random "just so" stories if you wish but do
not try to peddle them in the sci.* heirarchy.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 09/05/19 00:41, John Larkin wrote:

On Wed, 8 May 2019 23:32:28 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 08/05/19 21:21, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 8 May 2019 20:48:56 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 08/05/19 18:28, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
Tim Williams wrote:
"Bill Sloman" <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in message
news:dfa3d2c1-ef88-43c5-abac-c583a2e83bcf@googlegroups.com...

It's even crazier that some people think it happened at random.

Nothing crazy about it. That's what random variation plus selection
can manage.

The crazies are the intelligent design fans, who think that an
intelligent designer would have gone to all that trouble then not
put in any error detection and correction coding.

There are math analyses of that, and they involve a lot of zeroes.

So what? Three billion base pairs is already quite a few zeros.


There's only one force in the universe powerful enough to construct
something that complex: evolution. One must either believe that, or
believe that there is something impossibly wrong with all known laws
of physics*.
(*And I don't just mean the stuff we don't know at the bottom, or the
subtle details between things we do. I mean the things that are
settled and proven.)

I'm always incredulous at the lack of thinking ability when people say
complexity requires a designer, but it doesn't occur to them that a
designer must also be complex.

Yup, and they certainly can't get the "its
turtles all the way down" joke concept.

You assume that the only thing that could design our form of life is
our form of life. Maybe it's not all turtles.

No, I don't.

But when I was 7yo I worked out that "doubting" Thomas
was right to insist on feeling the stigmata before
believing Christ had risen from the dead.

So, yes, I demand evidence rather than unsupported fantasies.

This is a design group. Design involves considering possibilities.
Adherence to orthodoxy and reflexive rejection of possibilities is
poison to design.

Quite right.

I always consider that gremlins are the cause of my
circuits' maloperation.

Besides, the random mutation and selection concept of the origin of
life is just another fantasy, and not a very good one. There's no
evidence for it either.

Strawman argument.

Darwinian evolution describes how species evolve, not the
origin of DNA.

The origin of DNA is, as yet, unclear and a fascinating question.

I've seen no evidence that flying spaghetti monsters,
earth-divers, protogenoi, and other deities have anything
to do with it.

If you have evidence, let's hear it.

Any time that the biological origin of life is freely considered, some
people will start to scream about religion to shut off possibilities
that they don't approve of.

No. If evidence is provided, they will listen. It may
take the usual 50 years until all the old fogies have died,
but evidence will be sufficient in the end.

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 09/05/19 09:07, Martin Brown wrote:
> A few people have various forms of colour blindness

Around 8% of men and 0.1% of women, IIRC.

 

[Martin Brown]

On 09/05/2019 05:16, Jasen Betts wrote:

On 2019-05-08, John Larkin <jjlarkin@highland_snip_technology.com> wrote:
On Wed, 8 May 2019 16:54:08 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:


There is still a lot of hand waving. As in

"it is fruitful to consider the alternative possibility that RNA was
preceded by some other replicating, evolving molecule, just as DNA and
proteins were preceded by RNA."

Is that a fact? In modern life, DNA builds RNA.

But initially RNA fragments are easier to make. Prior to that there is a
conjecture that an even simpler sugar may have played its part.

RNA is slightly too good to be anything other than the product of even
earlier evolution playing out at a molecular level.

RNA still isn't very stable so things that are still based on RNA today
like viruses tend to vary a lot more than eukaryotes that have DNA based
genomes. I presume it was better than pre-RNA though since we don't see
any evidence of life forms on Earth using other sugars today.

Reverse transcriptase does the opposite.

but the RNA for that is found in retroviruses so it could be argued that
it's not "life", weasel words that pomoters of that claim may cling
to.

It is always going to be the case that if you go back far enough the
emergence of life will be rather blurred. Chances are that RNA with some
other sugar(s), phosphate and a lot of time can eventually perform all
required functions to become self replicating in the right environment.

There are various factions of RNA-world - this isn't a bad introduction:

https://www.the-scientist.com/cover-story/rna-world-20-37888

In particular it is worth reading the footnote about the possibility
that RNA itself was the product of evolution. Prior to RNA-world there
was possibly a simpler sugar backbone using therose instead TNA-world
which then got supplanted by RNA. Both structures have the right
characteristics to be able to make autocatalytic molecules and enzymes.

Scientists are prepared to change their minds when new evidence comes
along. But ultimately nature is the final arbiter. The experimentalists
are getting close to being able to design life forms from scratch.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Tim Williams]

"Rick C" <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:979b244c-1168-45f3-9661-1952dda50fc1@googlegroups.com...

I recall an evolutionary experiment which I believe was done in an analog
circuit simulation, I don't recall for sure.
snip

It was in an FPGA -- think the goal was to make an oscillator, without any
particular design constraints as we would think. I don't recall if outputs
driving outputs were prohibited, or if it went ahead with such abuse
regardless.

The result was very fragile too, AFAIK.

Fragility seems very normal with evolutionary systems, including with neural
networks, and life itself.

Consider how many stupid edge-cases there are in terms of environment (oh,
you got slightly too hot and died), chemistry (oh, you ate the wrong thing
and died), adversarial evolution (oh, you contracted the wrong virus and
died), even just stimuli (oh, you watched the wrong video and it triggered
PTSD symptoms).

There are numerous examples of carefully crafted images to confuse or defeat
neural networks; and perhaps fewer for advanced biological networks (e.g.,
human eyes), but one might argue optical illusions and Captchas are
examples.

And good old fashioned camoflauge, which varies in quality but the most
sophisticated really doesn't count as confusion so much as completely
blending in, minimizing your signal as much as possible, with respect to any
analysis method at all. The, well, perhaps even more sophisticated, but in
a more minimalist sense -- camoflauge works on failures of simpler analysis
methods. Bright animal patterns, WWI "dazzle" ships, etc. are probable
examples of this.

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs, LLC
Electrical Engineering Consultation and Design
Website: https://www.seventransistorlabs.com/

 

[Martin Brown]

On 08/05/2019 20:58, Tom Del Rosso wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
"Junk DNA" was dogma for decades. A lot of the stuff between the
obvious genes turns out to have functions.

Some junk DNA is recognisable as stuff that retroviruses have inserted.
So long as it doesn't cause harm it replicates along with the good stuff.

It sounds like hypothesis rather than dogma, but it seems clear that if
there is junk it would replicate.

And it does tend to accumulate in the nucleus.

A human genome has about 30 billion base pairs. *BUT*

The largest known plant genome as of 2010 is Paris Japonica which so
shocked the researchers that they had to double check its sequencing.
150 bn base pairs 50x that of a human and for a plant that is fragile
slow and difficult to grow. There might even be a bigger one by now.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/8196572/Worlds-largest-genome-belongs-to-slow-growing-mountain-flower.html

The marbled catfish comes second in the race for longest genome at
130bn base pairs. A bit better at what it does than the plant.

Some of that has to be junk! If it were all there by intelligent design
and not chance why isn't that plant walking around eating us?

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[whit3rd]

On Wednesday, May 8, 2019 at 8:09:39 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

> Yup, most gene correlation studies are wrong.

Meaning, what? Study isn't 'wrong' in any sense, on any subject.
Study semantics, you'll learn to give coherent voice to concepts.

It's possible to make multiple-choice tests, where some choices are 'wrong',
although it isn't EASY to set up such situations. It's hard
to see how 'a study' can be one of those things that can be 'wrong'.

Are you thinking of a poor student? He'll learn, give him time...

 

[Martin Brown]

On 08/05/2019 21:10, John Larkin wrote:

On Wed, 8 May 2019 15:55:18 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 8 May 2019 13:03:36 -0500, "Tim Williams"
tiwill@seventransistorlabs.com> wrote:

"Tom Del Rosso" <fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote in
message news:qav3jo$v1g$1@dont-email.me...
I'm always incredulous at the lack of thinking ability when people
say complexity requires a designer, but it doesn't occur to them
that a designer must also be complex.


Indeed, and not just complex, but _more_ complex.

And what if -- it's designers all the way down? Well, it
*certainly* can't be that. Any sufficiently advanced being would
contain so much information it would collapse into a black hole! To
assume that such a "god" exists, contradicts the laws of
physics-as-we-know-them.

They can be conveniently placed outside the universe as we know it.

"Light inaccessible hid from our eyes" is a bit tricky in the
electromagnetic spectrum now that we have sensors for just about
everything from ultra low frequencies to hard gamma rays.

There are lots of reasonable paths to building our biology other than
random mutation and selection, but too many people refuse to even
think about them, but prefer to use their limited imaginations to
manufacture insults.

Well I didn't intend to insult you, and it isn't apparent that you are a
creationist. I interpreted the original post as amazement rather than
skepticism.

I'm not a bit religious and I don't know exactly what your definition
of "creationist" is.

Someone who refuses to accept that evolution driven by natural selection
is quite capable of generating the diversity of life we see around us.

For given physical constraints they can even converge independently on
the same physical form as has happened several times. New world cacti
and old world Euphorbias have several look alike shapes that fit the
environmental constraints of living in a hot arid desert. Euphorbias use
chemical weapons whereas cacti mostly concentrate on vicious spines.

We should give thanks that so few plants have mastered organofluorine
chemistry or life would be much harder for herbivores.

But what explanations are there that don't involve randomness and
selection?

Design by some creature that evolved in a different way, something
that had a more reasonable incremental path to complex structure.

More meaningless hand waving.

Panspermia of DNA-based life, which merely suggests that the solution
to the DNA mystery happened far away, billions of years ago, in a very
different environment. A gas giant planet or something.

Why should that make a difference? Gas phase chemistry is lousy and
slow. You pretty much have to have a physical surface like ice or dust
or a liquid solution for chemistry to run at an appreciable rate.

Quantum mechanical, essentially quantum computing, mechanisms that are
more efficient at evolution than cosmic rays whacking base pairs.

I don't disagree that nature exploits quantum mechanical behaviour at
the very lowest level but only in the sense that QM binary code uses
four bases for DNA because that is how wavefunctions collapse.

Similarly in photosynthesis QM allows higher efficiency than classical
rules would predict. But the "designer" clearly missed a trick -
photosynthesis arose in a reducing environment and modern plants still
waste a significant proportion of their energy capturing O2 instead of
CO2. This mistake has recently been fixed by genetic engineering:

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/genetically-engineered-tobacco-does-more-efficient-photosynthesis-65286

40% improvement in growth rate though no longer wasting energy.

How did the omniscient being miss this simple fix for Rubisco?

If you believe in evolution (which most people actually don't) you
might consider that evolution evolves better mechanisms to speed
evolution.

You presumably also imagine that beavers will invent chainsaws then.

> You might imagine more, if you let yourself.

Be careful your brains don't fall out. Imagining things is easy.
Imagining things which are consistent with the scientific evidence is
considerably harder. Inventing untestable "just so" explanations that
require magyck to serves no useful purpose.

> "Water is necessary for life" is more emotional dogma.

It is certainly necessary for life as we know it. We are ~50% water.

It might still be possible to find archaea life that evolved in an
ammonia based reducing atmosphere or a sulphur rich volcanic
environment. Iron was soluble in the oceans and oxygen was a rare trace
gas right until photosynthesis really got going on the Earth.

Chances are if not water then some other common compound with three
phases that can co-exist on a planet to stabilise the temperature. The
main reason to favour water is that water ice floats on liquid water
which is a very unusual property. Most solid phases sink in their molten
phase which means they freeze solid. CO2 might do.

The abundance of hydrogen makes a hydrogen containing molecule very
likely. Titan has an atmosphere of methane with ethane/propane rain.

Improvements in planet hunting telescopes are getting to the point where
by nulling out the parent stars glare they may be able to detect the
atmospheres of orbiting earth like planets. That will be very
interesting. If the composition is non-equilibrium then the chances are
we will have detected the signature of life elsewhere.

I'm hopeful we might find something on one of the water ice moons around
Jupiter or Saturn. When we send a probe we will have to be very careful
not to contaminate the pristine environment with terrestrial DNA.

Until we find another example we just have to study what we have. A bit
like in astrophysics you are stuck looking at what you can see from our
particular location with no realistic prospect of visiting remote
galaxies (or even nearby stars for that matter).

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Martin Brown]

On 09/05/2019 09:37, Tom Gardner wrote:

On 09/05/19 09:07, Martin Brown wrote:

A few people have various forms of colour blindness

Around 8% of men and 0.1% of women, IIRC.

That is for the most common form of R-G colour blindness (which is sex
linked on the X chromosome). Other forms are not so simple.

https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/color-vision-deficiency#inheritance

In the days before thermal IR cameras the people who could tell live
trees from cut down branches being used as camoflage were very handy.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Tim Williams]

"Martin Brown" <'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:qb0q92$jjn$1@gioia.aioe.org...

The marbled catfish comes second in the race for longest genome at 130bn
base pairs. A bit better at what it does than the plant.

Some of that has to be junk! If it were all there by intelligent design
and not chance why isn't that plant walking around eating us?

Another thing creationists are ignorant about -- design itself is a sloppy,
iterative, random process, hardly distinguishable from ordinary evolution
when done at sufficient scale.

It's nice to look at a watch, shiny and perfect, and think it's a good
design. But that's one, very purposefully shiny endpoint, from a very messy
learning process. You don't see all the rough and messy prototypes, you
don't see the challenging days spent learning the subject, you don't see the
many scribblings of the design process. If these things were visible, would
"design" really sound so appealing, after all?

We observe the same thing in nature. From the highest level ecosystems to
the lowest level proteins, we see janky "design" all over. Nothing has
particularly high fitness for its habitat, it's mostly just that nothing of
greater fitness has yet displaced it.

If creationists/IDers knew these underlying facts, they would have to face a
deeply inconvenient truth -- either:
1. They deny something unpalatable but true, or
2. The "god" they believe in, is deeply flawed, a hack of a "designer".

Personally, I'd rather think, if there is a god, it's a lazy engineer. It
created a system that evolves, and sits back and watches it go. What could
be better?

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs, LLC
Electrical Engineering Consultation and Design
Website: https://www.seventransistorlabs.com/

 

[Mike Coon]

In article <qb1064$1fg8$1@gioia.aioe.org>,
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk says...

Gas phase chemistry is lousy and
slow.

Statements like that remind me of a demo of oxy-acetylene welding at
school. Teacher: "And finally, you have to remember to turn off the
gasses in the right order."... BANG... "Oh, perhaps it was the other
order...".

Mike.

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 9 May 2019 09:07:01 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 08/05/2019 17:53, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 8 May 2019 17:35:25 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 08/05/19 15:31, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Thursday, May 9, 2019 at 12:11:14 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 8 May 2019 01:04:50 -0500, "Tim Williams"
tiwill@seventransistorlabs.com> wrote:

Hardly. There's a lot of room at the bottom. A phrase still as true
today as it was half a century ago!

What's insane is people still think this stuff was created in the snap
of some magic finger.

Tim

It's even crazier that some people think it happened at random.

Nothing crazy about it. That's what random variation plus selection can
manage.

The crazies are the intelligent design fans, who think that an intelligent
designer would have gone to all that trouble then not put in any error
detection and correction coding.

Plus give us humans clearly "suboptimal" designs when
there are better designs available, e.g. the "wiring"
between our retina and our brains.

I read one book that suggests that our retinas aren't designed wrong.
The light has to make its way through a maze of nerves and blood
vessels to hit the sensitive stuff on the back of the retina, which
sounds bad, but the light is conveyed through the maze on fiber
optics.

Our eyes are a terrible design compared to either top preditors or deep
sea cephalopods. They are just good enough for a hominid omnivore. We
have the advantageous feature of colour vision for seeing ripe fruit. A
few people have various forms of colour blindness and much rarer are
people who can distinguish living and dead plant pigments by eye.

Raptor livers are another complete disaster area. Somewhat dodgy
compromises for being able to fly fast and take severe impact stresses.

If a God designed them then he was having an off day when he did so.

I wonder how that could evolve by random processes.

You start out with a spot that is light sensitive and gradually evolve
under competitive pressure. Every tiny incremental improvement makes
survival of the owner more likely (all other things being equal),
neutral things make no difference and defects tend to get you killed.

People seem to forget that incremental improvements stack up
exponentially so that 100 1% improvements gets you to 270%.

Why would incremental evolution go through a large number of
iterations to produce a "terrible design" human eye? Each step would
make it worse, and the final, immensely complex, result would be a
competitive disadvantage.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK482309/figure/retinal_degeneration.F18/


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[Rick C]

On Wednesday, May 8, 2019 at 11:13:28 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

Consciousness is just a monitoring program running in our minds - one of many other programs. The only mystery there is why anybody takes it seriously.

"Just"... casual use of a four letter word. I would not give consciousness the time of day except for my personal experience with it. I can't know that anyone else is actually conscious or not. But I know I am. Consciousness is my experience. Not sure how to address that with science.

--

Rick C.

---- Get a 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
---- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 9 May 2019 10:01:22 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 08/05/2019 20:58, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
"Junk DNA" was dogma for decades. A lot of the stuff between the
obvious genes turns out to have functions.

Some junk DNA is recognisable as stuff that retroviruses have inserted.
So long as it doesn't cause harm it replicates along with the good stuff.

It sounds like hypothesis rather than dogma, but it seems clear that if
there is junk it would replicate.

And it does tend to accumulate in the nucleus.

A human genome has about 30 billion base pairs. *BUT*

The largest known plant genome as of 2010 is Paris Japonica which so
shocked the researchers that they had to double check its sequencing.
150 bn base pairs 50x that of a human and for a plant that is fragile
slow and difficult to grow. There might even be a bigger one by now.

150e9/30e9 = 5



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics