Missing genetic information refutes neo-Darwinism

[Molinaro]

One can dispute whether 100 or 1,000 bytes are enough to determine folding and behaviour of proteins, but we can be sure that this information is not enough to describe in a halfway complete way a protein capable of carrying out several tasks.

Why would you expect a need to to encode instructions on how to fold the protein? The laws of physics determine how it will fold. All that is needed is for the sequence of base pairs to be put together. From that point, the fold is pre-determined, and requires no additional instructions.

Likewise, why would you expect proteins to require something like a program to tell it what to do once it is formed? Again, what it does once it is formed is purely determined by the laws of physics. The protein merely does what it can do without any recard to some pre-suposed intructions about what it should do.

 

[Dr Adequate]

Oh, another question. Which genetic information is not coded for by DNA? If it is known that DNA is insufficient, then surely is must be known that some particular enzyme is not coded for.

Oh, and how do such enzymes get there. How does something immaterial produce a perfectly material enzyme?

And if it is possible to do this without the whole complex process of transcription, why is there DNA at all? Why bother with all that complicated biochemistry when magical invisible things can do all the work?

 

[Ladewig]

Without reading anything in the other thread, I'm sure I can summarize:

Person with little to no understanding of developmental biology can't understand how our current understanding of biology can explain evolution or development.

Am I right?

You have hit on only one facet of the other thread. The rest is devoted to "scientific proof" of reincarnation.

 

[Soapy Sam]

That's closer to being true than most people realize. Almost all English texts do consist of the same 20,000 or fewer words. The difference between Bleak House and The Hound of the Baskervilles is not the vocabulary, but in the arrangement.

*Initiates search for "Baskerville" in "Bleak House". *

 

[Earthborn]

Why do you say so? And if so, why are there enough letters in the English alphabet to compose all the books?

That's because you can use as many letters as you want. Not all books need to have the same number of letters. The number of basepairs in DNA is pretty much the same for organisms of the same species.
It is also because you can use as many words as you want and put them in any arrangement you want. The number of genes in the genome is pretty much the same for organisms of the same species, most of the genes are the same and they are placed pretty much in the same order. And in humans there are only about 20 000 of them, humans have more than 20 000 properties so the genes cannot be an intricate description of a human.

In other words: suppose a Star Trek like transporter scans an entire human being and places all necessary information to rebuild a human in its buffer. You would need a whole lot more memory space than the 750MB needed to store the human being's DNA sequence, even when compressed. If you believe (a view wogaga attributes to "neo-Darwinists") in the misleading analogy that DNA is a sort of computer program to build a human, you might get the impression that

TransporterBuffer - 750MB = MissingInformation

Of course, the information is not really missing. It is just that nobody in his right mind argued that it was to be found in DNA.

The difference between Bleak House and The Hound of the Baskervilles is not the vocabulary, but in the arrangement.

In the genome, even the arrangement is mostly the same from person to person.

 

[plumjam]

English alphabet, 26 letters.
English dictionary, 100,000 words.
English literature, more than a few books.

How is this possible?

by adding intelligent design

 

[Dr Adequate]

Please refrain from unjustified attacks on other posters.

Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

 

[HawkeyeMD]

Point of information: what is a 'psychon' supposed to be? The particle of a woo brain that is irresistably attracted to a bad idea?

This may be explained in the other thread, but...

 

[cyborg]

Even without compression it turns out to be less than 15 megabyte (i.e. less than one percent of Windows XP).

And here was me thinking that what a program does was more important than the number of bytes it has.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

That's because you can use as many letters as you want. Not all books need to have the same number of letters. The number of basepairs in DNA is pretty much the same for organisms of the same species.

So this suggests that if we found 100 books with approximately the same number of letters, or even words, they would have to be quite similar. But, of course, they do not.

It is also because you can use as many words as you want and put them in any arrangement you want. The number of genes in the genome is pretty much the same for organisms of the same species, most of the genes are the same and they are placed pretty much in the same order. And in humans there are only about 20 000 of them, humans have more than 20 000 properties so the genes cannot be an intricate description of a human.

First of all, most of the genes are not the same. There are many alleles. Second, the order does not matter. Chromosomes are not sequential computer programs, they are a pile of fairly independent templates for making proteins.

In other words: suppose a Star Trek like transporter scans an entire human being and places all necessary information to rebuild a human in its buffer. You would need a whole lot more memory space than the 750MB needed to store the human being's DNA sequence, even when compressed. If you believe (a view wogaga attributes to "neo-Darwinists") in the misleading analogy that DNA is a sort of computer program to build a human, you might get the impression that

TransporterBuffer - 750MB = MissingInformation

Of course, the information is not really missing. It is just that nobody in his right mind argued that it was to be found in DNA.

I'd stay far away from this analogy, since the information needed to rebuild an existing human would have to map every particle in the person's body. Heisenberg might even rule this out.

In the genome, even the arrangement is mostly the same from person to person.

But the trick is that the arrangement does not matter with anywhere near the strictness of the arrangement of words in a book.

~~ Paul

 

[Dr Adequate]

Please refrain from unjustified attacks on other posters.

Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

Again, I should love to know what it was that I actually said.

Thank you.

Edited by Miss A: 

Previously removed comment deleted

 

[balrog666]

Again, I should love to know what it was that I actually said.

Thank you.

Edited by Miss A: 

The removed comment that had been previously removed has now been removed

Unjustified?

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA!

 

[Cuddles]

And here was me thinking that what a program does was more important than the number of bytes it has.

It's not what you do with it, it's how big it is that counts. Something like that anyway.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

It's an Evangelical fantasy, find the flaw that disproves ALL SCIENCE!!!!!

 

[wogoga]

Yiab wrote:

>> What about the fact that gene expression will have extremely different large-scale results depending on the environment the genes are situated in? <<

If a computer program can perform "extremely different" tasks depending on input parameters, then from a purely logical point of view we must conclude: either the program contains the information corresponding to all tasks which can be switched on by parameters, or the parameters themselves constitue the information needed for the tasks. In the latter case we simply have additional information which is added to the programm in order to perform the corresponding task.

>> The fact that a fertilized human egg grows into a human shape within the womb of a human mother (or an environment almost identical to it) is a necessary part of the process, as is the nutrition transferred to the growing fetus through the umbilical cord. <<

Do you suggest that the growing egg somehow creates from the womb-environment additional information concerning the construction plan of the human being? Even if this were possible, there remains the problem addressed once by Richard Harter as an objection to a similar argument of PZ Myers:

"The problem is that development is not heritable. Consider a parent organism creating an egg. The parent not only passes on a genotype, it also passes on an environment in which the child organism will develop. Fine, this apparently is information that is not in the child's genotype. Consider, however, what happens when the child in turn creates an egg. It must supply the same developmental environment to its offspring. Now where does that information come from?" See: groups.google.com/group/sci.skeptic/msg/9b3b2aeb97dfba48

BTW, do you know that from a logical viewpoint reductionism implies, that a just hatched chick is less ordered (complex) than the just fertilized egg, because only processes which increase entropy are possible? (The open/closed-system confusion is pointless in this context.)

Panpsychism takes the fact seriously that enzymes do not conform to the laws of thermodynamics and Brownian motion, and therefore are able to increase order by working as purposefully as termites when constructing termite hills.

The main insight of panpsychists such as Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) was the recognition, that plants and animals do not grow from dead matter, but are built up by invisible animated entities with the involvement of perception and intelligence. See: groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/msg/9254fb9039c90b9c


A 'Critical Thinker' wrote:

>> Without reading anything ... I'm sure I can ... <<

Isn't it a strange result of evolution that dogmatic souls believing in the orthodox mainstream worldview tend to consider themselves to be critical and sceptic?

>> Too bad PZ Myers doesn't have time to participate in this forum. <<

Once I felt entitled to defended myself against attacks from PZ Myers: groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/msg/fb6f1be140221b7d


Cheers, Wolfgang

Isn't it an irony of evolution, that many of the most advanced souls of terrestrian evolution deny their own existence?

 

[voidx]

Whose this "God" fellah I keep hearing about?

Surely someone must have a consistent description for me.

Hello.....Hello?

**...where'd all the crickets come from...**

 

[Hellbound]

BTW, do you know that from a logical viewpoint reductionism implies, that a just hatched chick is less ordered (complex) than the just fertilized egg, because only processes which increase entropy are possible? (The open/closed-system confusion is pointless in this context.)

Um, no.

Yes, all processes will increase entropy, generally.

However, a process can decrease entropy in a local area, as long as that corresponds with a greater increase outside that locality.

By your argument, we could never have snow, the temperature could never go down, and ice cubes are a violation of thermodynamics.

Your initial point is correct, your conclusion if not. The "complexity" of life is not doomed to get less by thermodynamics...life produces an abundant amount of entropy to counteract the localized ordering it creates.

And, finally, your assertion that open/closed has nothing to do with this simply illustrates your lack of understanding. Open/closed has everything to do with this. Because you are drawing a circle around the organism and considering only that part of the system; at which point it must be understood that this is an open system, and energy comes in and entropy outside the organism increases. The fact that an organism is not closed ties into the fact that it does not decrease entropy. You must consdier the entire system if you want to leave open and closed out of it.

Panpsychism takes the fact seriously that enzymes do not conform to the laws of thermodynamics and Brownian motion, and therefore are able to increase order by working as purposefully as termites when constructing termite hills.

See above. You are incorrect. Nothing about enzymes refutes thermodynamics or Brownian motion. IF you have evidence otherwise, please refer to it specifically, rather than a generalized statement.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

If a computer program can perform "extremely different" tasks depending on input parameters, then from a purely logical point of view we must conclude: either the program contains the information corresponding to all tasks which can be switched on by parameters, or the parameters themselves constitue the information needed for the tasks. In the latter case we simply have additional information which is added to the programm in order to perform the corresponding task.

And that is why we can describe evolution as a process of transmuting information from the environment to the genome.

... because only processes which increase entropy are possible?

Oh, please.

~~ Paul

 

[Hellbound]

Paul:

Well, he's right, techically, that (so far as we know, on the macro level) only entropy-neutral or entropy-increasing processes are possible.

But that's general, not in regards to every part of an interacting system.

The decrease in entropy locally for a life-form is more than balanced by the increase in entropy that life form creates in the environment around it.

 

[Belz...]

So if we cannot even be sure that there is enough genetic information in order to determine all the proteins working in our body, then it becomes (sorry for the expression) completely absurd to assume that there is enough genetic information for the human body with all its anatomical features, let alone for human intelligence and consciousness.

Therefore, neo-Darwinism is refuted inasfar as it excludes non-material information. There remain however at least these three logically viable hypotheses:

1) The missing information comes from God
2) The missing information comes from morphic fields (Rupert Sheldrake)
3) The missing information comes from psychons (the 'units' of evolution)

The psychon hypothesis leads to the most and the most precise predictions (e.g. demographic saturation).

Cheers, Wolfgang

Go back to school.