[Nebullis]

I assert that whereas random mutations no doubt do occur, that the ability to mutate is encoded in the genes - that mutations are more often opportunistic than random as the organism tries to fight off invading viruses, protect itself from the environment or take advantage of environmental opportunity.

Evolutionists are as malleable on the random factor as the evidence allows. There is some evidence that on rare occasions mutations are an adaptive response to an environmental cue. This falls under the contingencies I spoke of above. There is no evidence that this is a major source of evolutionary change. Mutations are used in non-evolutionary processes, for instance, in immune system diversity. Non-adaptive mutations also account for diversity between organisms in a species. It's really a bit naive to propose that the changes in DNA that make up the diversity of life were programmed into the first replicative organisms.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your post!

It's really a bit naive to propose that the changes in DNA that make up the diversity of life were programmed into the first replicative organisms.

If I am naive, then I am in good company with Rocha, Pattee, von Neumann, Chaitin and others.

Following is the abstract of Rocha's Syntactic Autonomy: Or Why There is no Autonomy Without Symbols and how Self-Organizing Systems Might Evolve Them:

Two different types of agency are discussed based on dynamically coherent and incoherent couplings with an environment respectively. I propose that until a private syntax (syntactic autonomy) is discovered by dynamically coherent agents, there are no significant or interesting types of closure or autonomy. When syntactic autonomy is established, then, because of a process of description-based selected self-organization, open-ended evolution is enabled. At this stage, agents depend, in addition to dynamics, on localized, symbolic memory, thus adding a level of dynamical incoherence to their interaction with the environment. Furthermore, it is the appearance of syntactic autonomy which enables much more interesting types of closures amongst agents which share the same syntax. To investigate how we can study the emergence of syntax from dynamical systems, experiments with cellular automata leading to emergent computation to solve non-trivial tasks are discussed. RNA editing is also mentioned as a process that may have been used to obtain a primordial biological code necessary open-ended evolution.

And from the same document, the section on RNA editing:

The idea that life may have originated from pure RNA world has been around for a while47, 48. In this scenario the first life forms relied on RNA molecules as both symbolic carriers of genetic information, and functional, catalytic molecules. The neutralist hypothesis for the function of RNA editing assumes such a RNA world origin of life. It posits that RNA editing could offer a process by which the dual role of RNA molecules as information carriers and catalysts could more easily co-exist. The key problem for the RNA world origin of life hypothesis is precisely the separation between these two functions of RNA. On the one hand RNA molecules should be stable (non-reactive) to carry information, and on the other hand they should be reactive to perform their catalytic function. RNA editing, could be seen as means to fragment genetic information into several non-reactive molecules, that are later, through RNA editing processes, integrated into reactive molecules46. This way, the understanding of this process of mediation between the role of RNA molecules as information carriers and catalytic molecules based on RNA editing, can also offer many clues to the problem of origin of a semiotic code from s dynamic (catalytic) substrate.

Given many random distributions of the reactivity of a RNA sequence space, we could study how easily can reactive sequences be constructed from RNA edition of non-reactive molecules. A study of this process is forthcoming.