In a previous thread I "fixed up" the Dawkins "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL" evolutionary analogy so that it agreed more closely with evolutionary theory.
Dawkins had started his example and computer model with a random string of letters and showed how easy it was for random changes plus selection to generate the "target" WEASEL phrase.
Of course we are told in evolutionary theory that evolution has no goal and that each step in the evolutionary step by step process must be an improvement so that natural selection can cause it to become more frequent in the population.
So I fixed the Dawkins model in the following ways:
1) start with a sentence that makes sense,
2) assume that a letter is selected at random and modifies a randomly selected position in the current sentence,
3) examine the modified sentence to see if it not only makes sense, but makes more sense than the previous sentence did,
4) finally, see if the new sentence "fits" well into the paragraph, like the original sentence
did.
The purpose of this mental exercise was to stimulate thought about what is going on whenever a random change occurs in the DNA of a lifeform.
In all lifeforms we know about, a string of DNA (nucleotides) called a gene is tranformed into another string, RNA, which in turn is used as a template to produce a string of amino acids, a protein. Proteins could be called the "building blocks" of life. They act as "frameworks", enzymes (e.g. hormones), and may play other roles as well.
The string of amino acids known as a protein typically fold up from their string form into a more compact "ball" form. Failure to do this usually means that the protein fails to do its job and is pretty much worthless.
Dawkins used the English language to suggest an analogy with DNA/proteins.
Good idea.
There are some parallels in this which stimulate thought. Genes are sort of like words and/or sentences. Sentences must "fit" into a paragraph, just as genes/proteins do not act in isolation, but work in coordinated "teams" to generate the form, and affect characteristics of lifeforms.
Of course no analogy is perfect: they aren't intended to be. They simply suggest different ways of thinking about some subject, perhaps ways that add to understanding. A camera is not perfectly similar to an eye, but it does suggest a way of thinking about an eye.
In the case at hand most people would agree that changing letters one at a time in a sentence randomly would almost never generate a new sentence that made sense and also "fit" better in the paragraph it was embedded in.
Now the question is: to what extent might this be true of DNA/proteins and the biomechanisms that they are a part of?
My past experience with studying the cytochrome c protein molecule resulted in a series of color-coded charts displaying many different versions of this molecule in different lifeforms. As far as I know most species have slightly different versions, usually differing in one or two positions in a molecule consisting of a chain of amino acids about 100 long.
What was interesting to me was that the data was highly clustered, meaning that the protein molecule of most species was very, very similar within a larger grouping, but very much different from one major grouping to another. For example mammals were similar to one another, but repties, birds, amphibians, plants, bacteria, etc. were all very different.
This pattern held for every major group.
Within each group there was great similarity, but each of the groups were equally distant from every other group (as measured by the number of positions which differed).
This interesting phenomenon was first noted by Michael Denton, an evolutionary biologist. He was arguing against Darwinism, not evolution, because he has an alternate idea of how evolution works, one that does not rely on the accumulation of small changes over millions of years through the action of random mutations plus natural selection.
He wrote a book, Evolution, A Theory In Crisis, and ever since he has been accused of being a creationist. Pretty funny really. He simply had honest doubts that Darwinism was the answer as to why lifeforms evolve over time.
At any rate, the previous material suggests to some that the prior thinking which pretty much ignored the fact that proteins must "fold up" into a "ball" into order to function, needs to look into how often this folding will result in non-functional or subfunctional proteins.
Fortunately this is an active field of research although it is so difficult to predict when folding occurs properly that supercomputers are being used to aid in the task.
Hopefully within a few years answers will be forthcoming and we will no longer have to guess whether proteins are like English sentences, and the process of step by step random changes over millions of years was either a pipedream or a real possibility.
Dawkins had started his example and computer model with a random string of letters and showed how easy it was for random changes plus selection to generate the "target" WEASEL phrase.
Of course we are told in evolutionary theory that evolution has no goal and that each step in the evolutionary step by step process must be an improvement so that natural selection can cause it to become more frequent in the population.
So I fixed the Dawkins model in the following ways:
1) start with a sentence that makes sense,
2) assume that a letter is selected at random and modifies a randomly selected position in the current sentence,
3) examine the modified sentence to see if it not only makes sense, but makes more sense than the previous sentence did,
4) finally, see if the new sentence "fits" well into the paragraph, like the original sentence
did.
The purpose of this mental exercise was to stimulate thought about what is going on whenever a random change occurs in the DNA of a lifeform.
In all lifeforms we know about, a string of DNA (nucleotides) called a gene is tranformed into another string, RNA, which in turn is used as a template to produce a string of amino acids, a protein. Proteins could be called the "building blocks" of life. They act as "frameworks", enzymes (e.g. hormones), and may play other roles as well.
The string of amino acids known as a protein typically fold up from their string form into a more compact "ball" form. Failure to do this usually means that the protein fails to do its job and is pretty much worthless.
Dawkins used the English language to suggest an analogy with DNA/proteins.
Good idea.
There are some parallels in this which stimulate thought. Genes are sort of like words and/or sentences. Sentences must "fit" into a paragraph, just as genes/proteins do not act in isolation, but work in coordinated "teams" to generate the form, and affect characteristics of lifeforms.
Of course no analogy is perfect: they aren't intended to be. They simply suggest different ways of thinking about some subject, perhaps ways that add to understanding. A camera is not perfectly similar to an eye, but it does suggest a way of thinking about an eye.
In the case at hand most people would agree that changing letters one at a time in a sentence randomly would almost never generate a new sentence that made sense and also "fit" better in the paragraph it was embedded in.
Now the question is: to what extent might this be true of DNA/proteins and the biomechanisms that they are a part of?
My past experience with studying the cytochrome c protein molecule resulted in a series of color-coded charts displaying many different versions of this molecule in different lifeforms. As far as I know most species have slightly different versions, usually differing in one or two positions in a molecule consisting of a chain of amino acids about 100 long.
What was interesting to me was that the data was highly clustered, meaning that the protein molecule of most species was very, very similar within a larger grouping, but very much different from one major grouping to another. For example mammals were similar to one another, but repties, birds, amphibians, plants, bacteria, etc. were all very different.
This pattern held for every major group.
Within each group there was great similarity, but each of the groups were equally distant from every other group (as measured by the number of positions which differed).
This interesting phenomenon was first noted by Michael Denton, an evolutionary biologist. He was arguing against Darwinism, not evolution, because he has an alternate idea of how evolution works, one that does not rely on the accumulation of small changes over millions of years through the action of random mutations plus natural selection.
He wrote a book, Evolution, A Theory In Crisis, and ever since he has been accused of being a creationist. Pretty funny really. He simply had honest doubts that Darwinism was the answer as to why lifeforms evolve over time.
At any rate, the previous material suggests to some that the prior thinking which pretty much ignored the fact that proteins must "fold up" into a "ball" into order to function, needs to look into how often this folding will result in non-functional or subfunctional proteins.
Fortunately this is an active field of research although it is so difficult to predict when folding occurs properly that supercomputers are being used to aid in the task.
Hopefully within a few years answers will be forthcoming and we will no longer have to guess whether proteins are like English sentences, and the process of step by step random changes over millions of years was either a pipedream or a real possibility.
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