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 ...
Spaghetti code?
More likely: “Whatever comes in the days ahead, it appears that there is far more information processing occurring in the cell than even Watson and Crick imagined – and that was startling and elegant enough. Barry states that the raw genetic information transcribed in DNA now appears to be 62 times what genes alone would produce. The fundamental operational unit of life may, therefore, be nonphysical: information, not molecules.”
ping!
I laughed and laughed at that picture.
Very fascinating article - thanks for posting it. It’s interesting to hear that life is more complex that the basic genetic model. I have seen a few other articles posted here relating to this dawning realization.
“This is a classic case of a paradigm change in science occurring before our eyes. Even what we mean by an intuitively-obvious word like gene is being questioned: is there such a thing? Does it have physical reality, or is it a mental picture humans have imposed on a much more subtle reality? The new buzzword is network, but is that an accurate characterization? Networking is concerned more with the interactions of entities than with the entities themselves; this means that the rules of the game are more important than the nodes of the network. How could that fit within a materialistic world view?”
Our living world clearly is based on an information code which is more complex than anything man and/or his computer science has ever yet devised. Anybody who thinks this kind of stuff can evolveis living in lala-land.
Amen to both!!! Epigenetics should prove a very interesting field in the coming decades!!! I suspect that the Darwinists will be forced to retreat into a neo-lamarckian paradigm in a last ditch effort to salvage materialism—GGG
The problem, both camps, is DNA is taken as what drives evolution.
Quite an assertion. Information is irrelevant.
DNA doesn’t drive evolution, and isn’t actually vital to the life of cells: some cells get by with no DNA for months. OTOH, neuronic cells use DNA to build various neurotransmitter chemicals and do it all the time.
I wouldn't accept that if I were inclined toward Creationism. Lie down with dogs . . .
Really? Most life is single cell. By weight. That includes a considerable fraction of our very own bodies.
I don't know what you mean by "both camps," but Darwinian evolution was around for 80 years before genetics became the focus.
The concept of variation and selection does not imply any specific mechanism, nor does it imply only one simple mechanism.
Obviously a lot of people have reputations invested in specific theories, but then so did particle physicists during the 20th century. The alternative to failed models is not divine intervention.
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