Posted on 09/16/2007 3:45:54 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
“The gene is dead... long live the gene,” announced subtitles to an article in Science News this week.1 Geneticists have come to a striking conclusion over the last few years: genes are not the most important things in DNA, if they even exist as a concept.
The “central dogma” of genetics, since Watson and Crick determined the structure of DNA, is that genetic information flows one-way – from the gene to the protein. In the textbooks, a gene was supposed to be a finite stretch of DNA that, when read by the translation process, produced a messenger RNA, which recruited transfer RNAs to assemble the amino acids for one protein.
As Patrick Barry described in his article “Genome 2.0,”1 the situation in real cells is much messier. “Mountains of new data are challenging old views,” his subtitle announced, including the “modern orthodoxy” that only genes are important:
"Researchers slowly realized, however, that genes occupy only about 1.5 percent of the genome. The other 98.5 percent, dubbed “junk DNA,“ was regarded as useless scraps left over from billions of years of random genetic mutations. As geneticists’ knowledge progressed, this basic picture remained largely unquestioned...." "Closer examination of the full human genome is now causing scientists to return to some questions they thought they had settled. For one, they’re revisiting the very notion of what a gene is."...
http://creationsafaris.com/crev200709.htm#20070912a
(Excerpt) Read more at creationsafaris.com ...
I sure did ~ having spent my turn in the can writing computer programs (COBOL, FORTRAN, AL1, etc. as well as cranking through JCL in the early days) I knew that a good program doesn't have garbage in it ~ particularly when you are working with primitive processors that have to read everything to find something ~ just slows it all down and keeps you up nights rewriting broken code.
So, when Primrose's book came out I read it ~ and some of the others he recommended to bring a reader up to date.
As I recall the sequence, Primrose wrote his book before the quantum-computer idea came along, and certainly many years before anyone had thought to wire up a DNA strand and see if it would process data.
Well, the wires have been hooked (it does), and the quantum-computer is a distinct possibility, and Primrose wrote a second book.
We can quibble over details, but it's pretty obvious there shouldn't be any unused DNA in a biological system.
The mere fact that an admittedly ancient document, the Bible, refers to Moses falls into the "probably miraculous that anyone is named" category.
There's not really a lot of reading matter from way back when!
Windows... Enough said?
The garbage is in the minds of the programmers, not the programs themselves, and it's only due to the programmers' failings as human beings that real garbage gets stuffed in there. They meant to do it more elegantly but they got tired.
No, absence of evidence simply means you haven’t dug deep enough into the riverbanks in Mesopotamia (or into the permafrost in Siberia).
>>We can quibble over details, but it’s pretty obvious there shouldn’t be any unused DNA in a biological system.<<
I think the term ENCODE is using is “few unused sequences” not none.
With regard to programming in Cobol and Fortran, code had to be a lot tighter with such little memory but even then there were comments and inefficiencies.
Best to keep the “comments” in the documentation. Check out this evenings story about nano size superfast memory just developed by some guys in Pennsylvania at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1898712/posts
Right, was this part of what you had in mind during your comment to me about the DNA in the thread yesterday?
Also, thanks for the tip about compound interest: but I am doing a little judicious stock picking as well to help things along. Thanks for the encouragement.
Cheers!
A slight clarification.
Cheers!
Or a punster, you scoundrel :-)
Cheers!
NO more calls, please.
We have a winner!
Was that an oblique reference to the 'tornado in a junkyard' argument, or an unintentionally hilarious typo?
Cheers!
Really? I have not read the entire thread but I ask you to deal with this… The ‘heart’ of the issue is where the modifications and variations within evolution came from… Whether or not they are strictly random and if it all came into being without direction/intelligence.
Let‘s first deal with Random: If we choose to say it’s not random - where did the basic ‘laws’ of nature and physics come from? Where did this physical structure that popped into existence with the Big Bang come from (the Big Bang - another creationist ploy to interject creationism - See Astronomer Harlow Shapley who BTW defined the shape and structure of our galaxy back in 1918 and rejected - and encouraged others to reject - the evidence of the Big Bang because it might interject ID into science)
What if physics cannot account for some phenomena like the rational minds capable of doing physics? Why would anyone expect laws of physics in the to follow any formal order in a universe void of any intelligence (except Earthly intelligence which science believes ‘evolved’ from mindlessness / mindless matter)?
Tell me why natural selection is not tautological - ‘things which are more likely to survive and reproduce are more likely to survive and reproduce’ - if actual physical laws in our universe obviously allow this phenomenon. Are we all supposed to disregard visible order, design, and intelligence in our very universe and lives due to a naturalistic theory with ‘deep time’ substituting as ‘faith‘? You should know that morality and even human consciousness is an illusion within purely natural constraints.
Now, I hope there is no ‘dogma’ (pictures and links of the same stuff from last year) in your response… Because I know your response must be based on science and not ‘faith’.
Thanks for the ping!
Does this then mean that we can be reasonably certain that people or beings named Herakles, Homer, Zeus, Isis, Chalchiuhtlicue, Ganesh, Vishnu, and Yen-Lo-Wang all existed too? If merely being mentioned in ancient texts qualifies one for certainly having existed, well then, we have a crowded hall of deities to explore.
“Oh please. You believe in an old earth, despite evidence and reasoning to the contrary. I gave you a big fat list of dating revisions and other arguments against the infallibility of your dating methods”
And yet... and yet... even with your lists of dating issues, your cunning text search function to prove me wrong and find a single use of the word ‘evolution’ in an article about DNA, you still have zero, I repeat ZERO, positive evidence. to support your assertion of an earth that could be any less than millions and millions of years old which does you no good at all because you require a 6000 year-old planet.
In that same post in which you somehow contend that scientists who claimed rocks formed between 426 and 430 million years ago, or others who dated the Devonian-Carboniferous boundary to 360 (plus or minus 0.7) MYA, are lending credence to your theory, you compared the debate to a political one, but you are wrong in your analogy. Whatever points we make on this forum it has no bearing on what the evidence is. It’s more like we’re arguing about sports teams. You can make all the points you want about our locker-room squabbles, or our lack of cohesion on defense, or even our confused offensive playbook, but it doesn’t make your team any better on the field to point these flaws out.
Instead of misrepresenting the findings of others, it behooves you and your ilk to actually go do some finding yourselves. Because right now you got nothing.
On the other hand, if you have several ancient folks, and you have more than one text naming all of them, or some of them, you probably have much less of a problem.
Most of these debates center on Biblical references, although you see the same arguments popping up with regard to Sumerian texts. The Chinese burned most of their stuff from time to time so there's less conflict.
Still, if I were to suggest that you don't exist because none of your ancestors 20 generations ago was ever mentioned in any records, you would respond that my analysis was faulty. That's why I have confidence that you can be brought around to understanding the concept of "preponderance of evidence" even if it should be one reference made 3000 years ago.
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