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 ...
Thanks for the ping!
Thanks for the ping, this is fascinating.
I’m not up to speed on the “big Bob” find. Is there a definitive link?
If you had any sense, you would know that Jews appreciate Jewish jokes better than anyone else. Beyond that, the reason ethnic humor is funny is because the jokes apply universally. So take your priggish ignorance and stuff it.
More seriously, those who have long pushed information theory, as being possibly a strong argument [if not the strongest argument] against classical "Darwinism", look as if they might soon be vindicated, at least in part.
Hats off to Alamo Girl & Betty Boop, for their efforts towards such, here on the pages of FR, going back a few years now...
Will their naysayers come back, and apologize, uh, sometimes soon? I'll not be holding my breath...
Thank you oh so very much for your encouragements, dear BlueDragon! [I’m not holding my breath either ... LOL!]
I actually first heard heard the "two Jews, three opinions," quip from my Jewish roommate in college. I googled it to see where it came from.
People who haven't heard it and don't know about Jewish humor have obviously isolated themselves from Jews all their lives.
Thank you so much for your kind words of support, BlueDragon! I’m not going to hold my breath either. :^)
"What regulates the regulators?" is the 64-million-dollar question.... I've seen some fascinating speculations about this involving the quantum domain and spontaneous emissions of photons by the yet-deeper universal vacuum field, photons being information carriers that trigger the timing and place reactions essential for biological life occur. The next ten years will probably be a very fertile time for the biological sciences, provided adherents of the currently-reigning orthodoxies don't succeed in strangling such efforts in their cradle.... (It's beginning to seem to me that is the role and function of the peer-reviewed journals these days.)
Thanks so much for this fascinating post, GodGunsGuts!
That's an odd statement. If true, why wasn't Behe able to make a case in his latest book, and why is Dembski reduced to arguing that the information needed to get from the Cambrian to the current era was "preloaded."
Whatever the fate of ID, common descent through variation and selection is stronger than it has ever been. Even Behe acknowledges that.
That, too. How will Hillary!08 and her utopic regime of Change handle that?
For example, just look at the research made the subject of this thread. Oh, wait . . .
Because God chose to lock us in this time domain, we are forced to hit a brick wall in our understanding of reality. Therein lies the greatest blind spot to science, it can only examine a small percentage of our reality.
The supernatural can only be revealed by a source outside our time domain. Why do you think Sir Isaac Newton tripped so hard over the prophecies in scripture. Over the course of his life, it caused him to write more about scripture than science.
The Bible is the most intriguing source of information to mankind, trumping anything science, in it's limited capacity, can reveal.
Pretty much. Some good work could be done by digging into those areas philosophically and in the science lab. For example, where is memory stored? All guesses accepted.
I don't remember!
I do remember the lead character on this show on the Sci-Fi network (cute gal I can't remember her name) said it is a bio-network of non-volatile neural-RAM housed in our skulls.
Don't quote me on that. In fact, try to wipe it from your memory banks.
Thanks. I didn’t know they were calling the T-Rex soft tissue evidence “Big Bob”.
This makes perfect sense really. Think about a computer program. If you only took the display routines or IO routines from the code and considered the rest of it “junk”, then most of a computer program would be considered “junk”. Protein regulation is another way of talking about a cell knowing what to put where and when. The junk-DNA becomes the most important part of the genome because it is the true blueprint. The genes are just the code for the final output.
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