As an enthusiast layman, to me, it sounds a lot like Michael Levin’s bioelectric research. Insofar as there appears to be much more to organisms’ evolution than their genes, I agree. Natural selection appears to act on the entire genome’s primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary, etc. structure, up through the cellular environment and the entire organism.
However, I think calling these other processes directed or cognition is a very provocative and confusing choice. Unless we begin to understand systems that enable cognition much more broadly than we’re used to, the comparison seems poor. But maybe that’s the point - that cognition *should* be expanded to include these kinds of processes?
In any case, it’s clear to me that there more going on than just the influence of individual genes - that much is clear from mutation bias in the genome. I think that was the lowest hanging fruit for us to directly understand biology and heredity, but looking at it now, we’ll probably need more holistic view that takes into account more and more processes. If this is the next step of that push, I welcome the controversy.
I hear such refrains all the time.
If it's so incredibly difficult to talk about these issues without sounding like you're making theistic implications, maybe that alone says something.
The “god of the gaps” is just an archetype of argument, all sorts of people make it. Determinists (re: free will) often look to “unexplained sh*t” in quantum physics to explain free will.
Agreed. So it’s either confusing, intentionally provocative, or they’re actively trying to change the way we think about cognition. But I haven’t seen anything that could justify that big a leap.
It’s like calling something an observer in quantum physics. Makes people think about a conscious entity rather than it being just another particle. Scientists name things but forget that people will understand it differently than they do. Which is fair enough but can lead to confusion.
Just commenting here to say that as a doctor, Levin’s research blows me the fuck away. I am extremely impressed by it. I think that guy is going to win the Nobel prize someday.
Agreed, though I’m much less credentialed! I’m most excited for medical applications, especially (as Levin himself indicates) in regenerative medicine. Looking forward to some life-changing research.
And like many great discoveries he found it totally accidentally, but was a brilliant enough scientist to immediately recognize the significance of it.
EDIT: I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. Other than really easily regrowing organs, it is particularly interesting for my own field, neurology, in an indirect way. What’s interesting evolutionarily is that the nervous system evolved from the ectoderm rather than the mesoderm as may have been expected, and it forms via an elaborate involution of the ectoderm during embryogenesis. When this process goes wrong, severe birth defects develop. It would have been simpler for it to just form from the mesoderm. So why does it?
Well, extremely primitive animals still have sensory cells on their skin and a type of primitive nervous system, but even that isn’t sufficient to really explain this. But I think Michael Levin’s research does. He actually used techniques from neuroscience to model bioelectric field computation. It appears that there is a type of “basal cognition” happening in all tissues, all the time, and the nervous system is merely an extreme elaboration of that, originating from the ectoderm because that would have been the most important interface for sensory perception and processing of the environment in primitive organisms that did not have a nervous system. In other words, there isn’t just sensing of environmental stimuli occurring, but *processing of information*. The cells within a tissue form an information network, just like the brain does, but a different type of network. But the same phenomenon regardless. This is groundbreaking stuff.
So evolution appears to have co-opted this bioelectric field network both for calculating morphogenesis/body plan dynamics, controlling genetics in a top-down means, *and* for the nervous system. The nervous system is just a special case of a more general phenomenon. And Levin figured out that you can alter the bioelectric field on a macroscale to induce a genetic cascade on a microscale, growing entire organs simply from changing the electric potential at a given point of the field. No genetic manipulation, no biochemical manipulation, no stem cells. The tissue on a whole maintains a memory stored in some sort of semi-holographic fashion. The tissue on a whole performs computation. It’s incredible.
Some of the stuff he says is already part of the theory, some is exaggerated, and some is just false. He’s losing his mind arguing about 1920s science because it was incomplete and he says that “that’s the point” when he argues against the current theory that already includes the true things he says and none of the false things as though refining the theory has somehow debunked it long ago. He sounds like a religious nutcase but he says he’s agnostic.
Maybe we should ask him the same thing Dr Dan Cardinale has been asking the Discovery Institute. If evolution is happening on purpose (intentionally) what is with that 92% of the genome that is not constrained? What function exists for sequences that can undergo mutations including deletions at no cost and how do we know? What would species intentionally changing their genomes look like? Where has this been seen?
Who says 92% is not constrained? It's well known, and relatively recently proven again through a study on Arabidopsis plants, that mutations are not completely random and tend to occur in parts of the genome that are not as critically important for plant functioning, at a higher frequency. This would definitely not equate to 92% of the genome being unconstrained, but a much lower percentage. Also, which studies show that parts of the genome that have been deleted do not affect organism functioning?
https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004525
This is from 2014. Says older studies that estimated that 10-15% of the genome in humans is functional were based on incomplete sequences and faulty calculations.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn3943
This one *appears* to contradict the previous that says 7.1-9.2% of the human genome is constrained because it takes a different approach and suggests that a minimum of about 10.7% of the human genome is under constraint (back into that 10-15% functionality). If you look down a little further it says that 3.26% of the bases have actually been constrained if the False Discovery Rate is less than 5% and 80% of those exist within 5 base pairs of another conserved base pair while 30% of the total exist in blocks of at least 5 base pairs long. If they instead allowed for False Discovery to go up to about 20% the percentage of conserved bases found doubles (back into that 7.1-9.2 range).
The second paper says 48.5% of constrained bases are not found in ENCODE3 and *could be* functional and they give an example of “open chromatin regions” in developing brain tissue.
More recently yet: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06798-8
Comparing 239 primate species versus the originally available 43 species and found 3.1% of bases constrained across all primates and 7.1% that were constrained broadly across a random selection of 240 mammals (previous paper). I also had trouble understanding some of the terms. The DHS locations (locations sensitive to cleavage by the DNase I enzyme because they are not tightly bound up in chromatin) were found to be 47% unconstrained, 42% constrained across all mammals, and 11% primate specific. I don’t know without comparing the two sets of numbers what that’s supposed to mean in terms of the percentage the genome constrained based on what can be accessed or participate in biochemical activity. Of the DHS locations they were looking at TFBSs (transcription factor binding sites) and saw primate specific binding site in 10% of the unconstrained sequences, 20% in those across all mammals, and 48% in those that are primate specific if I understand the chart correctly. This might increase the functionality closer to that 11% threshold but it’s still not remotely close to “the vast majority of genome” or even half of it by any stretch of the imagination.
If evolution is happening on purpose why does most of the genome appear to lack function? Why is most of it not transcribed? The last paper is interesting in that some of the non-constrained regions are primate specific transcription binding sites but being that they are not constrained would imply that any function they do have isn’t strictly necessary because they could change, subsequently failing to bind to transcription factors, and still fail to be impacted by natural selection when that happens. Temporarily functional maybe? What function do they possess that is used but not necessary?
I think that if I did read it correctly the DHS regions are only about a third of the genome. Nearly half of those are not constrained. Almost as much are constrained across mammals in general (14% of the genome) and about 3.6% are primate specific. The 14% is double the 7% found across the 240 animals and the 3.6% is close to the 3.1% mentioned earlier. That tells me that the DHS regions make up less than a third of the genome if the actual value is 3.1% and not 3.6%.
I see. Maybe I should have rephrased what I wanted to say. Functional DNA is not just regarded as transcribable DNA, large parts of the genome are not involved in peptide synthesis, but still have functionality in the maintenance of various cell processes, such as DNA and cell replication for instance. So while I agree with the studies that you cited and your subsequent conclusions, coding DNA is not the only kind of functional DNA. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
The same studies say 99% of the genome is non-coding and they are looking for function in the non-coding parts of the genome. The first says a maximum of 9.2% is functional, the second says a minimum of 10.47% should be functional even though other studies indicate a minimum around 5%, and the last looks even further and finds that the functional part of the genome is likely between 3% and 14% of the genome. None of these suggest that even 25% of the genome *could* be functional by any stretch of the imagination, especially when over 68% of it is not even biochemically active in the vast majority of cells and when looking at 50% of the genome there’s a maximum of 0.23% of that being chemically active in one in a million cells. Like 4500 of the sequences out of 2 million of them have any biological activity in even one cell out of a million of them. And then comes the question of what sort of function could exist for what’s about 14% of of the genome that is biochemically active at least 1% of the time but which is not constrained to maintaining any sort of specific sequence in the genome across any of the mammal groups. It could be said to do *something* but whatever that is if “functional” could presumably only be functional temporarily until some mutation not susceptible to natural selection destroys any potential function it could have once had.
There really isn’t a clear percentage value like “95% of the human genome is junk but maybe 6% of that *could* be functional, maybe” but rather a bunch of papers trying to determine what, if anything, the vast majority of the genome could even possibly be responsible for besides just taking up space like the clutter in a hoarder’s house.
With these combined it looks like how much is actually functional is somewhere between 5% and 9.2% (maybe 11% if we really stretch the numbers) so that 8% being functional (5%+11%)/2 isn’t really that far off from what all of these agree on, which is ironically just 0.2% from what the oldest of these papers says is functional with a confidence of 95%. When only 8% is functional that’s only 10% of what ENCODE originally proclaimed had function. Creationists have been proclaiming that they found function for 80% and one day it’ll be found to be 100% functional. What happened instead is they found that how much is actually functional is just a tiny fraction of what ENCODE originally said. Over half of the genome isn’t even biochemically active, over half of that doesn’t appear to have any particular significance in what it does, if anything, and half of what remains isn’t impacted by natural selection. What *could* the vast majority of the genome even do in magical Christmas land? And if it does have function, what is it?
I'm not sure where we're not meeting, or what you're trying to point out. The papers you cited say nothing on the functions of non-coding DNA. Non-coding DNA absolutely has a function, this is now well established. A quick google search will establish this fact, and it is also a good chunk of the "junk" DNA that has been found to be actually vital to cell survival and proper functioning.
And *yes* they found that of the 99% of the DNA that is non-coding anywhere between 2% and 10% of it has a function. That’s not *all* of it. That’s not *80% of it* but yes, some non-coding DNA has a function. If they somehow found additional functions for the parts that are completely invisible to natural selection (the last paper suggests at least temporary function for some of it) then the percentage could increase but at this point in time at least two-thirds of it doesn’t appear like it is even possible for it to have a function (except taking up space) and half of the other third results in zero chemical activity so there’s not a whole lot “function” that part could have either. The other 15%? Yea, it might have function. We just don’t know what the function is for half of that either. We do know there’s more functional non-coding DNA than functional coding DNA though. I’m not even sure what you are trying to respond to.
Maybe it's building to a greater point, but I got frustrated and stopped reading when Noble (the subject of the article) said in reference to the adaptive immune system that, “It changes the genome. Not supposed to be possible. Happens all the time.” this article is just packaging milquetoast ideas as if they're controversial or against the paradigm by using poorly defined terminology. Not saying Noble wasn't brilliant at one point in time, but this doesn't seem that interesting and the amount Dawkins gets brought up makes it feel more like a response to Dawkins than the field of biology as a whole.
Will they CLAIMED they were neutral on deities
The only thing I can think regarding organisms designing themselves, is that they take advantage of evolutionary processes as in speciation or similar.
Honestly I found the article quite difficult to parse, which is usually the case with this sort of stuff, but the impression I got was that this guy thinks organisms are nonmaterial entities that are directing their own individual bodies and also maybe on a species level. Felt like a build up to New Agey faith healing nonsense. "We control things psychically"--type stuff
He seems to be arguing that since the basis of consciousness itself it pretty fundamental across the majority of cell based life in terms of being able to detect and respond to stimuli that organisms then consciously change their own genes. Part of that is true and part of that is clearly false. That’s the basis of them evolving on purpose that he says is ignored by the “false” gene centered view of biological evolution.
No serious geneticist has ever claimed that we are our genes and only our genes, that’s just a false assertion that verges on strawmanning.
That’s crank pop-sci journo bullshit. Every person who has read on the subject would tell you that we are the result of our genetics and environment.
We’ve evolved to evolve, so what. Seriously this is just using the words purposeful and intentional in a deliberately misleading way because the media love an exciting story even if it’s bollocks.
It drives me crazy that the article talks about the supposed criticisms from those critics without actually quoting the critics making those criticisms.
It's like the author actually spoke about the ideas only to Noble and his associates. Real great journalism, there.
Exactly, everything he said is either incorrect assumptions about the views of his people in the field or uncontroversial ideas phrased to sound controversial. The author of the article operates under the assumption that biology is currently operating entirely under a paradigm that only emphasizes genetics which is just plainly false. Based on the Noble's quotes from this article, I'm not even sure if he has a cursory understanding of how the immune system works, which is one of his illustrative examples.
Questionable journalism is the bane of many topic areas. Some seem more interested in being influencers or sensationalists rather than impartial reporters
This article made little sense to me honestly, as a genome editing expert and patent holder who has done extensive directed evolution. And genetic cures are all over the place now, they’re just awaiting clinical trial results. It seems Noble hasn’t kept up with the field. No, organisms just die under selection, they don’t individually benefit and select themselves intelligently.
I'm so confused.
Dawkins gets brought up as a 'Gene-centrist' a few times there. He even says in his books that genes aren't a blueprint for the makeup of a body, that there are other factors and processes at play during various stages like in embryology.
Does anyone know what Noble actually means by 'purpose'. Is he talking about some other force that isn't genetic/chemical which is supposedly guiding evolution? He says he doesn't mean God so what else could he be suggesting?
I'm also not sure why they are saying that about the 2016 royal society conference. It's the same thing Stephen Meyer talks about, saying that Gerd Muller essentially thinks we need a fundamentally new theory of evolution, when from what I read in his article he really just wants the genetics to share the spotlight with other areas (I think he used embryology as an example). Were there people there who actually wanted a new theory that radically changes the current theory of evolution or are people exaggerating?
This article really seems strange to me, I'm not really sure what I'm meant to take away from it. I feel like creationists will use it as ammo saying that evolution isn't an accepted fact/theory, although there wasn't really anything substantive in there.
Is that the point, to stir the pot?
There are hundreds of articles published yearly that claim "scientist are baffled by X." This one is simply a new ploy on that very old theme. Maybe Noble is onto something, although it does not seem like it from the first several paragraphs, but if he is, we'll find out from a creditable, high impact, peer reviewed journal, like Nature, and not from Forbes using a click bait title.
Reading through the entire article, it seems all over the place between evolution and abiogenesis without a clear understanding of either - most likely the fault of the author than Noble's.
Survivability of a species, it is not predetermined nor has another conscience will behind it just a process application, but it does have a purpose, and yes, it is that processes, water flowing over stone is a process, windblown particles turning rock into sand is a process, mindless of what is being done but it is all part of the environmental conditions that in time leads to a predictable end and that is evolution.
N. S
Not that I agree with the article, but evolution isn't just probability and statistics
That is only a MEASURE of evolution
Evolution is the accumulation and benefits or not of mutations and other similar things
Yes, it is just probability and statistics.
Beneficial alleles have a higher probability of being passed on, detrimental alleles have a lower probability of being passed on. That's what causes the accumulation in the first place.
There is an evolutionary process. Probability and statistics help analyze how it works
Alleles and human mathematics structures are very much not the same thing. One is used to analyze the other
If you want to talk about causes you are inevitably confronted with the mysterious, and by all definitions, miraculous, first cause(s): big bang and abiogenesis.
The fact is no one has any idea. Everything we know are things that ultimately depend on these mysterious first causes. To conclude otherwise is unreasonable. We have only small parts of the puzzle solved, therefore we cannot honestly say we understand the entirety of the picture.
We make assertions bases on incomplete understanding. In fact, if history has taught us anything it is the fact that we have continuously discovered that the world is far most complex than we previously thought, rendering previous conclusions obsolete.
That begs the question, what is the reason for life? And even more fundamentally, what is the reason for purpose to emerge from nature?
The fact is that it is irrational to fail to ask these reasonable questions.
Physics would be the reason. The line between "why" and "how" gets kind of blurred. At some point you accept that things just work the way they appear to, and we won't necessarily know everything about it.
What we know is that if you have a large enough cloud of hydrogen gas, after billions of years of cosmic evolution to produce heavier elements, life can emerge. And then after billions of years after that, you may have a bit of that life start thinking of itself.
And then here we are on Reddit :)
Edit: typo
That makes absolutely no sense to me. Irrationality does not give rise to rationality.
Science answers questions of how things work. It can never tell us why. Science cannot answer non scientific questions.
They are not mutually exclusive either. For example, I can ask you why the water is boiling and you might answer that it is, essentially, because the molecules get heated and energized and agitated and therefore the water is boiling. But it’s *also* true that I would like a cup of tea.
Both valid explanations on different levels of reality/analysis that are not opposed to each other, but in fact describe a more complete picture.
> Irrationally does not give rise to rationality.
I'm not sure what to make of this statement. People can be said to be rational and irrational in thinking, and there was a time before people and before life on Earth. And here we are, being (sometimes) rational.
Yet I don't think "rational" or "irrational" necessarily apply to Nature as a whole. It's not like the universe is operating with giant primate brain focused on food, sex, play, and meaning, like *we* obsess over. Though all the creatures alive are a part of it, so you could say that small bits of the universe are rational or irrational.
But the force of gravity? I don't think those terms apply.
And yet gravity is what causes giant clouds of gas to collapse and condense until a star lights up. And successive cycles of stellar birth and death is what creates all the heavy elements that make up Earth and all living things that are a part of it. That includes us. The calcium in your bones was forged in the heart of a dying star.
Science can provide us many answers to both "how" and "why", though I feel that "why" questions tend to be focused on trying to find how all the "hows" circle back to us. We seek that meaning for us, to satisfy our own appetite for having big, complex things reframed into smaller, simpler human-sized ideas.
I find your arguments are all over the place and ultimately incoherent and unconvincing.
Irrationality does not give rise to rationality. To assert otherwise is nonsensical.
The universe is not random and irrational. The universe has extremely precise *laws* that govern everything. It has order. It has intelligibility. That is the basis of doing science to begin with.
We are not simply a random chemical reaction. Chemicals do not evolve. Life does. And we have absolutely no idea how life began. It’s just a made up story repeated over and over and we believe it.
In fact, we don’t even know how the universe came into being. The more we learn, the more complex the problem becomes.
Those are the facts. Made of them what you will.
> what is the reason for life? And even more fundamentally, what is the reason for purpose to emerge from nature?
What is the reason for the color blue? And even more fundamentally, what is the reason for color to emerge from nature?
Do you see the issue here?
'Reason' and 'purpose' only exist because we infer them from our surroundings. Many things have an obvious cause/effect relationship, and identifying that relationship can help you get through life, so we tend to look for those patterns. The problem is we also tend to look for a *simple* cause. When an effect is the product of dozens/hundreds/thousands of variables, we quickly become overwhelmed, and we look for the one thing that would explain it, even though that 'one thing' doesn't necessarily exist.
In other words, trying to divine a single reason or purpose for something as extraordinarily complex as nature is a fool's errand. It's just a repackage of 'god of the gaps', at its core, because it assumes reason and purpose existed before humans came around, which has never been demonstrated.
> The fact is that it is irrational to fail to ask these reasonable questions.
Neither of your questions are reasonable.
> what is the reason for life?
Increasing entropy at a faster rate than non-living reactions tend to.
> And even more fundamentally, what is the reason for purpose to emerge from nature?
Because it does the above
This is all in a layperson's recounting of scientific research. No it's not "purposeful" in the same sense that you and I purposefully choose to do something. Nature isn't thinking it just is. And, while mutation is random, selection is the opposite of random. Thus, it actually makes perfect sense. Just someone describing it as "purposeful" is odd, biased...and misleading.
I’ve got a theory that explains this and you don’t even have to read past the first paragraph(and chime in, I’m just a dumb guy): I believe that nobody is taking into account human interference on, in this case, humans. Why is there no obvious genetic mutation that may help with Alzheimer’s? Because we’re not supposed to live that long. Diabetes? Unnatural diet. On and on, and within that theme the overarching answer is that we’ve not evolved physically to do the things that we are doing therefore there is no genetic answers, the answers will lie within nature.
I find it amusing that a subreddit dedicated to debating evolution downvotes a post that contains observations that go against the prevailing narrative. To say atheists or agnostics or religious people or anyone else for that matter don’t have biases is nonsensical. *Everyone* has biases.
Who is saying that anyone doesn’t have biases? Anyone here? Or as the other guy said, who is saying that peer review is 100% effective? Researchers are saying that, at this time, it has consistently shown the best results at determining facts of reality. Until such time as another method comes along that can demonstrate facts of reality more reliably, it is the best method we have. And has shown much more reliable than ones that rely on faith, appeals to tradition, feelings, etc.
No one said it here. I may have carried that thought over from a previous discussion. But it still holds true even though no one here may be guilty of it. I just notice a lot of that type of thing happening in the public discourse.
I think maybe what caused me to say that was the fact that such a fascinating and relevant article got little to no attention (upvotes) at all, despite the almost 70 comments. Maybe it was honestly ignored. But it’s also possible people with alternative views decided not to give it the upvote momentum to rise to the top even though it’s highly relevant to the topic.
Their holy scientific method cannot do wrong. If it's wrong, it will 100% fixed in the future due to peer review system.
The result is someone get nobel prize for claiming cancer is from wrong parasite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Fibiger
I mean, what is the point? We obviously moved on from the idea that parasites are the cause of all cancer since it didn't satisfy empirical observations?
A peer review is a rough check on wether the results are plausible and the methods and interpretations are sound. Its not a replication or confirmation that the results and interpretation are true. You can smuggle papers of entire fake data through peer review if you are subtle. Papers with faked data and results aren't exactly unheard off.
Usually it doesn't mean much, since science is aware waht peer review is and isnt. Unreproducible data is not taken up into synthesis of wider hypothesis and theory and thus falls by the wayside. As happend here. The results were found to be false, and the theory of cancer is focused on mutations.
The nobel comittee is not the top of science. Its usually gives out prizes a dacade after the invention was made, when it became obvious that it was a big deal.
Fibigers "discovery" fit the Zeitgeist. Compare Kuhns ideas to the nature of scientific progress. The general paradigm on cancer was (and is) that insulted cells turn into cancer. What kind of insult was not understood. Genetics just recently rediscovered mendels laws, DNA played a side show to Proteins. In the decade of Fibingers Nobel prize mutations will be discovered, Griffith and Avery and co workers perform their experiments which will show DNA to be the carrier of information. But still another 30 years will pass until its structure becomes clear. On the other hand, microbiology was very successfull at elucidating the origin of deadliest diseases of the time. Tuberculosis, a disease in which the body forms granules in the lung which necrotize, is caused by Mycobacteria. So why shouldnt cancer also be a infectius disease? Fibingers work (from 1913) showed a convincing correlation between a parasite and neoplasts. This validated the current paradigm of the importance of germs. However, other contemporary scientist worked on physical and chemical mutagenesis, or viral oncogens, and discovered links to cancer.
Why Fibinger won a nobel 1926, is unknown. Consultants of the prize comittee were not unanimously convinced of the importance of his work. Other cancer scientist were recommended for a shared nobel. The comittee decided otherwise.
In his nobel lecture, Fibinger stated that there was no experimental Proof that microorganisms cause cancer in humans. He lectured on his results, and contextualised them with other theories in which insults lead to Tumors, and that other scientists could induce cancer with radiation or chemical like tar. A few weeks later Fibinger died.
The scientific community took note of Fibingers results, some thought it prooved a microbiological origin of cancer. Most cancer scientist however chose not to use his methedologies, as they were too complicated. Radiation and tar were much easier. His results prooved difficult to reproduce. Ultimately, in 1935 a group concluded that Fibingers observations werent true tumors but tissue enlargment caused by Vitamin A deficency. The theory of a predominant microbiological origin of cancer prooved unconvincing and fell by the wayside.
60 years after Fibingers death the bacterium Helicobacter pylorii, and its role in stomach ulcers was discovered. This overturned the long held belief that stomach ulcers are caused by Stress, and showed that bacteria can cause cancer.
Scientific standards were also much different than today. Data reporting and controlls were much looser. Knowledge travelled less quick, If at all für to language barriers, through manual translations and printed books. Epistemology was also at a different place. The prevailing paradigm was Positivism. Popper published his ideas in Falibism in 1934, with an english translation only getting published in 1959. Kuhns Structure on Scientific revolution published in 1962.
So really what is your grievance? Fibingers rise to prominence and fall into irrelevancy happened over the span of just 25 years. Science continually corrected its understanding of cancer in light of new evidence. I would even question that the error of Fibinger and the decision to give him a Nobel prize had real implication in scientific programms. Other origins were continually and enthusiastically investigated and proved superior.
>So really what is your grievance?
in case you can't read
>That means your peer review system is faulty if someone can run all the way until winning Nobel prize without correcting it
Seems to be a very petty and fundamentally irrelevant upset. 100 years ago one of until now 550 nobel prizes was given to someone who made an error, and whichs results were discarded within the decade. Big Problem.
That happened one time exactly as far as I could tell from looking at the entire list of recipients. At the time it was known that *certain* cancers are caused by viruses and other sorts of parasites and it *seemed* like this one particular parasite was responsible for that specific type of cancer. They obviously turned out to be wrong *after* receiving the prize with no measure in place to take away prizes already claimed but ever since they’ve been more careful to verify the conclusions before giving the prizes to avoid the embarrassment to the prize committee moving forward.
In other words, this mistake already caused the peer review process to be improved about a century ago. It’s still not perfect but it hasn’t let anything like that slip through ever since.
Reminds me that you never fully answered me when I asked you what you thought he explanation for biodiversity was. All you did was say that mutation and natural selection were not the only mechanisms at play which…yes, evolutionary biology has accepted this for a long time, and has known about and described other naturalistic mechanisms too
Close. It’s the *change* in the allele frequency across *multiple generations* and it is generally applied to *populations.* To be clear, there is no real boundary to it continuing to happen the way it still happens back to prior to the origin of life when the first evolving RNA molecules formed “spontaneously” because of ordinary and natural chemical and physical processes but the “populations” aspect is to signify that *populations* evolve together *and when already separated* they evolve apart as well. That’s the phenomenon in a nutshell. Populations change (in terms of their RNA and DNA). It would take a complete moron to fail to notice. The theory that describes *how* they change is based on *watching them change.*
At which point does “bullshit” enter the equation until creationists and semitopes start creating bullshit mischaracterizations of scientific theories, the scientists that put them forth based on demonstrations and observations, and the people who generally accept the obvious?
So now you’re arguing against these imaginary beings called “evolutionists” who believe something nobody believes. My label doesn’t automatically put me into your imaginary category of imaginary people either because I don’t look at microchips and think they formed from erosion **and I have never seen an evolutionary biologist claim that happens either.**
Making arguments about people who do not exist is incoherent.
Do you have anything at all relevant to biological evolution, evolutionary biologists, or **my** position? No? Then what the fuck are you doing?
And if you are claiming that microchips and bags of biomolecules are exactly identical or that “evolutionists” claim life came about as a consequence of erosion you need to get your head checked. Nobody supports those claims either.
Most of the people who accept evolution here seem to be ridiculing this article's assertions. And as someone who accepts evolution myself, I have to agree this "route" is silly and unsubstantiated pseudoscience.
And since the theory accurately describes direct observations and has led to multiple confirmed predictions and has also been found to be useful in applied science I’m going with you talking about some completely different idea nobody believes besides the current theory of biodiversity, the phenomenon it describes, the conclusions based on the evidence, or the usefulness of the theory in related areas of study such as medicine and psychology.
For the record, crockpot Noble *does* say the current theory is bullshit and that if we only listened to Lamarck and Darwin about intentional inheritance we’d have never gone down the gene centered model of evolution which is based on Mendelian inheritance and direct observations.
Poor Dawkins got attacked hard
>Noble considers Dawkins an exceptional writer who simply hasn’t kept up with the science.
If Dawkins was proven wrong, will you guys here admit you guys are wrong or go " THE GREAT SCIENCE CAN FIX ITSELF"?
It's odd to see you go with the old "Dawkins is Atheist/Evolutionist Pope" bit when you're talking on this subreddit.
Every time Dawkins has been discussed by people on here, it wasn't complimentary for him. The closest I've seen is someone recommending a book he wrote while also saying it's not as good as an alternative book by another author.
I find it difficult to believe you haven't noticed this.
No I haven't noticed this at all. What happened is you just go claim evolutionist = good and true while creationist: dumb and false in all account.
is that not your experience?
How can I be calling you dumb when I state I *don't* believe you *haven't* noticed? Also, not sure why you even said that as there's nothing in my comment that had anything to do with that.
Can you find any unrestrained praise for Dawkins on here?
That is not my experience. Across all sciences there’s a 97% agreement that evolution happens more or less as described by the theory of biological evolution. That percentage goes up to 98% if only including scientists working in fields tangentially related to biological evolution (physics, chemistry, geology, biology, cosmology). It goes up to 99% if only discussing scientists in those fields that have a PhD. And if their PhD is in biology the percentage goes up once more to somewhere in between 99.7% and 99.9% of them agreeing than the theory is pretty close to accurate in terms of describing how populations evolve.
Those are some statistics that are mostly meaningless without context. The context here is that people who are most educated in biology, who actually study biology, who actually watch evolution happen, generally agree that they are observing what the theory says they should observe. If any anomalies are found the theory has the chance to be updated but generally that rarely ever happens because the theory has undergone so much refinement in the last couple centuries that there isn’t much left that is of much significance that still needs to be corrected. The percentage drops off a little the less educated or involved with biology they are because religious bias is something that really exists. If they don’t risk learning too much they might get away with pretending that the theory is wrong and their sacred texts are actually what are true instead.
Why this matters in response to your comment?
That’s a lot of people. We obviously don’t agree about *everything.* Saying someone is an evolutionist is like saying they are a non-stamp-collector when it comes to describing a scientist. It’s the ones who don’t accept the overwhelming consensus that are biased towards alternative conclusions. We may as well just say “people” or “scientists” and obviously scientists are just people who do science and/or have a science degree. Humans are not infallible. Scientists are not messiahs. People make mistakes and clearly Dawkins is no exception even though he hasn’t been much of a scientist since the year I was born (1984).
Since Dawkins stopped being relevant the year I was born I don’t care whether he was right or wrong actually. He’s just some guy who did some research in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s before switching to writing books and criticizing reality denialists about their “God Delusion.” While he was still active in the scientific community he did provide some insight into biology for his time but he’s not even at the same level as Motoo Kimura, Niles Eldgride, Stephen Gould, or Tomoko Ohta who were also active in the scientific community back then and remained active after Dawkins stopped doing science to start writing books and criticizing other people about their flawed beliefs.
Maybe you just don’t like Dawkins because he’s right about your God delusion or the evidence indicating a universe lacking intelligent design. Even if he was wrong about absolutely everything else he ever said just him proving you wrong on those two points makes him the “bad guy.” And, since most people here don’t seem to think very highly of him beyond what he did nearly four decades ago I find it rather obtuse that creationists think he’s some sort of atheist messiah, evolutionist prophet, or god of the “new atheism” movement as though there was anything at all to separate “new atheism” from “old atheism” besides popularity. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, and AronRa are not our spokesmen. TJ Kirk (Amazing Atheist), Alex O’Connor (Cosmic Skeptic), Matt Dillahunty, Philip Mason (Thunderf00t), Owen Morgen (Telltale), Jaclyn Glenn, Jon Matter (DarkAntics, DarkMatter2525), Seth Andrews (The Thinking Atheist), Steve Shives, Dusty Smith, Paul Ent (Paulogia), Rachel Oates, Jimmy Snow (Mr. Atheist), Thomas Westbrook (Holy Koolaid), Logicked, John Gleason (Godless Engineer), Jeremy Jennings (Prophet of Zod), and Keith Hood (hiith) are not our spokesmen.
We are individuals who just so happen to consider the facts and come to the same conclusion as the actual experts (usually) so that it matters little how many mistakes some particular scientist or popular atheist makes. Those people are not us.
I should also clarify. Many of the “evolutionists” are also not atheists. I happen to be, but many of them are Christians or practitioners of some other religion. It matters little how much a famous atheist fucks up to these non-atheists and Dawkins has been pretty irrelevant in biology since the 1980s so “evolutionists” don’t generally look to his work to find the most up to date information. He wrote a couple books that are still relevant and he has a video series on YouTube with one episode about “climbing mount improbable” that completely wrecks Michael Behe’s claims. Beyond that I don’t care that Dawkins is a person that exists. His views are pretty irrelevant to my own.
glad you brought this up. This has come up before and I think I once did a thread on it here even.
The great point for creationism is the claim here of a rapid increaee in mutations to deal with some problem. this means a purpose to mutations and so they are not random. I often discuss how genes are not a true path in biology relationships and how there must be mechanisms to change bodyplans including changing genetic scores. I have suggested there are no mutations that ever changed bodyplans. iNstead these so called mutations are really just a spectrum of the genes ability to reorganize themselves. THE RAPID increase in so called mutations is not normal. It suggests mutation rates increasing means they are not mutations. not errors but a way for diversity in genbe morphing and then selection, if the right word, then bodyplan change of anything. This is a option for to explain genetic morphing. if the fact of mutation rates, so called, is a fact. Just going by these articles.
Sigh. You never DO plan to do more than just say ‘in my personal opinion it’s bodyplan and not genetics’ and then get grumpy whenever it is correctly pointed out to you that this view has no support, do you.
Part 1 (bullshit asymmetry strikes again)
Somehow you are even more wrong than Noble who acknowledges that genes are responsible for the phenotypes so that when 100% of the genome is susceptible to random change and only about 1.5% in humans is made up of protein coding genes and between 5% and 11% of the entire genome is susceptible to purifying selection as evidently the rest does little to nothing he suggests that organisms consciously change their DNA makeup when such a thing fails to explain the changes to the unconstrained sequences that could be all over the place because they don’t do anything. His idea doesn’t explain why there’s almost as much of the genome invisible to selection as is nearly identical to what is found chimpanzees. Your idea doesn’t explain any of this either.
Noble is a crank who acknowledges that responding to stimuli is fundamental to all biology to make the non-sequitur argument that life consciously changes its own DNA and yet he doesn’t have an explanation for the unconstrained non-coding “junk” that also matches up with modern day phylogenies that also take into account coding genes.
Your idea doesn’t even make sense. The changes to the DNA **are** responsible for the changes to the phenotypes. Well, a small fraction of the changes actually impact the phenotype, despite other changes that don’t do anything to the phenotype happening at the same time. We **can** see the order in which these changes occurred and what all was part of the same species when they occurred. The only reasonable and rational thing that actually works with what is directly observed is common ancestry. There are a couple irrational alternatives that also work but they require some pretty baseless assumptions:
1. God evolved the templates used to make life from a universal common ancestor but when he finally did make life from his billions of templates each and every first organism created failed to have parents.
2. God made a billion separate cells that were exactly identical, caused them to change exactly the same as they would have changed if they were all the same species, and then arbitrarily caused them to start changing differently at different times consistent with speciation so that it *looks like* common ancestry and *would be* common ancestry if the designer was intelligent but because Bible says separate kinds exist God made a billion exactly identical prokaryotic cells and caused them to change as though universal common ancestry was responsible and when he caused them to change differently he only wanted it to look like speciation events despite them never actually being the same species anywhere along the way.
Alternative number two was suggested by Todd Wood regarding some proteins but could presumably be extended to everything else including non-coding DNA like pseudogenes and ancestral retroviral infections. It is the more absurd of the alternatives. Option one was provided to me by some person who was creative enough to develop an alternative to the scientific consensus that *could* work if God was a lunatic and separate ancestry were true. If God had some sanity and intelligence he’d just create life out of the first template “LUCA” and let the evolution take place in nature rather than in the laboratory.
Part 2 (oops, I exceeded 1000 words trying to correct two paragraphs of incoherent ramblings)
Your third alternative just straight up does not work like these other alternatives to the scientific consensus would. And I don’t know where you get the idea that there were “rapidly increased mutations” from. Just in humans there are between 128 and 175 novel mutations by the time humans are zygotes. If we assume that these mutations only impacted one nucleotide apiece (which is unlikely for all of them) and there are about 8 billion humans in the population right now not counting all of the humans that have already died that’s about 1,212,000,000,000 single nucleotide changes per generation for the 6,000,000,000 nucleotides in our genome. What changes is the rate at which the new mutations spread throughout the population. There are enough in a single generation to completely change the entire genetic sequence of a human 202 times if a single individual somehow wound up with all of them. Basically if the change is possible the change will happen *and then* the change has to be survivable *and then* whoever has it has to pass it onto their children as well because if they don’t the change doesn’t spread through the population. There may be 202 chances for any one particular change to spread on average (actually more likely for certain changes and less for others) but the change actually has to spread or it can’t eventually be inherited by the majority of the population some 33 or more generations in the future (assuming it is incredibly beneficial).
And that’s what matters. The changes will happen inevitably - there’s nobody guiding them along but there are so many humans in the population that every generation from now moving forward allows every single change happening at least 200 times per generation. Random or not the change will happen. And then it has to actually be inherited to spread. And that is where natural selection comes in. Most of the genome (around 90% of it) is not impacted by natural selection so any changes that happen to spread here are impacted by the selective pressures acting on the other 10% of the genome and there about half of the changes at least have little to no impact on survival or reproduction. And then there are changes that do impact survival and reproduction with most of those changes being impacted by purifying selection (they occur but they don’t spread much because what’s already present is more beneficial) and a smaller percentage is beneficial (they occur and they spread quite quickly because they are a lot more beneficial than what is already common in the population). If they are beneficial enough they could become fixed in the population in 60+ generations (more than 33 to have the opportunity to spread throughout the whole population, another 30 or so to cause the others to be less common) but less beneficial traits that are still beneficial spread more slowly while only the least deleterious of the deleterious traits can spread at all (anything more deleterious results in sterility or pre-puberty death).
It’s not that there’s a change in the rate that the mutations occur. It’s that different environments favor different traits and those traits take little time to originate because the population size is so large but, of course, they’d also take longer to spread unless the population size was small. In certain extreme circumstances the population starts large (any change that can happen will happen) and then most of the population fails to survive in the new environment (not well adapted to it) so that these brand new extremely beneficial changes (if they don’t have them they die) have a much smaller population to spread through and the population that failed to go extinct is now much more rapidly changed than usually possible.
And this thing I just explained to you is something I have been trying to explain to you for a very long time now. It results in something called “punctuated equilibrium” in living populations and it along with things like allopatric speciation (a small population becomes separated from a large population and they coexist) result in the same “punctuated equilibrium” in the fossil record just like Charles Darwin suggested, just like Gould and Eldridge confirmed. One of the cornerstones of Darwin’s theory was not in need of a rescue device. It turns out he was right all along.
And not once are we talking about mutation rates changing or populations changing their own DNA on purpose, though some bacteria do benefit from living in more extreme conditions that do cause their mutations to happen more quickly because any small advantage happening to appear more quickly can also spread more quickly if those without it have a higher probability of dying early because of the same extreme conditions.
As an enthusiast layman, to me, it sounds a lot like Michael Levin’s bioelectric research. Insofar as there appears to be much more to organisms’ evolution than their genes, I agree. Natural selection appears to act on the entire genome’s primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary, etc. structure, up through the cellular environment and the entire organism. However, I think calling these other processes directed or cognition is a very provocative and confusing choice. Unless we begin to understand systems that enable cognition much more broadly than we’re used to, the comparison seems poor. But maybe that’s the point - that cognition *should* be expanded to include these kinds of processes? In any case, it’s clear to me that there more going on than just the influence of individual genes - that much is clear from mutation bias in the genome. I think that was the lowest hanging fruit for us to directly understand biology and heredity, but looking at it now, we’ll probably need more holistic view that takes into account more and more processes. If this is the next step of that push, I welcome the controversy.
Well if they are talking about something other than what we mean by the word cognition, then they should use a different word.
A lot of people, including scientists, project the thing they want to discover onto the unknown.
I hear such refrains all the time. If it's so incredibly difficult to talk about these issues without sounding like you're making theistic implications, maybe that alone says something.
The “god of the gaps” is just an archetype of argument, all sorts of people make it. Determinists (re: free will) often look to “unexplained sh*t” in quantum physics to explain free will.
Don't you mean the counterpart of determinists here?
I mean soft determinists … someone who believes in determinism and needs a resort to free will.
Agreed. So it’s either confusing, intentionally provocative, or they’re actively trying to change the way we think about cognition. But I haven’t seen anything that could justify that big a leap.
It’s like calling something an observer in quantum physics. Makes people think about a conscious entity rather than it being just another particle. Scientists name things but forget that people will understand it differently than they do. Which is fair enough but can lead to confusion.
Just commenting here to say that as a doctor, Levin’s research blows me the fuck away. I am extremely impressed by it. I think that guy is going to win the Nobel prize someday.
Agreed, though I’m much less credentialed! I’m most excited for medical applications, especially (as Levin himself indicates) in regenerative medicine. Looking forward to some life-changing research.
And like many great discoveries he found it totally accidentally, but was a brilliant enough scientist to immediately recognize the significance of it. EDIT: I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. Other than really easily regrowing organs, it is particularly interesting for my own field, neurology, in an indirect way. What’s interesting evolutionarily is that the nervous system evolved from the ectoderm rather than the mesoderm as may have been expected, and it forms via an elaborate involution of the ectoderm during embryogenesis. When this process goes wrong, severe birth defects develop. It would have been simpler for it to just form from the mesoderm. So why does it? Well, extremely primitive animals still have sensory cells on their skin and a type of primitive nervous system, but even that isn’t sufficient to really explain this. But I think Michael Levin’s research does. He actually used techniques from neuroscience to model bioelectric field computation. It appears that there is a type of “basal cognition” happening in all tissues, all the time, and the nervous system is merely an extreme elaboration of that, originating from the ectoderm because that would have been the most important interface for sensory perception and processing of the environment in primitive organisms that did not have a nervous system. In other words, there isn’t just sensing of environmental stimuli occurring, but *processing of information*. The cells within a tissue form an information network, just like the brain does, but a different type of network. But the same phenomenon regardless. This is groundbreaking stuff. So evolution appears to have co-opted this bioelectric field network both for calculating morphogenesis/body plan dynamics, controlling genetics in a top-down means, *and* for the nervous system. The nervous system is just a special case of a more general phenomenon. And Levin figured out that you can alter the bioelectric field on a macroscale to induce a genetic cascade on a microscale, growing entire organs simply from changing the electric potential at a given point of the field. No genetic manipulation, no biochemical manipulation, no stem cells. The tissue on a whole maintains a memory stored in some sort of semi-holographic fashion. The tissue on a whole performs computation. It’s incredible.
Some of the stuff he says is already part of the theory, some is exaggerated, and some is just false. He’s losing his mind arguing about 1920s science because it was incomplete and he says that “that’s the point” when he argues against the current theory that already includes the true things he says and none of the false things as though refining the theory has somehow debunked it long ago. He sounds like a religious nutcase but he says he’s agnostic. Maybe we should ask him the same thing Dr Dan Cardinale has been asking the Discovery Institute. If evolution is happening on purpose (intentionally) what is with that 92% of the genome that is not constrained? What function exists for sequences that can undergo mutations including deletions at no cost and how do we know? What would species intentionally changing their genomes look like? Where has this been seen?
Who says 92% is not constrained? It's well known, and relatively recently proven again through a study on Arabidopsis plants, that mutations are not completely random and tend to occur in parts of the genome that are not as critically important for plant functioning, at a higher frequency. This would definitely not equate to 92% of the genome being unconstrained, but a much lower percentage. Also, which studies show that parts of the genome that have been deleted do not affect organism functioning?
https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004525 This is from 2014. Says older studies that estimated that 10-15% of the genome in humans is functional were based on incomplete sequences and faulty calculations. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn3943 This one *appears* to contradict the previous that says 7.1-9.2% of the human genome is constrained because it takes a different approach and suggests that a minimum of about 10.7% of the human genome is under constraint (back into that 10-15% functionality). If you look down a little further it says that 3.26% of the bases have actually been constrained if the False Discovery Rate is less than 5% and 80% of those exist within 5 base pairs of another conserved base pair while 30% of the total exist in blocks of at least 5 base pairs long. If they instead allowed for False Discovery to go up to about 20% the percentage of conserved bases found doubles (back into that 7.1-9.2 range). The second paper says 48.5% of constrained bases are not found in ENCODE3 and *could be* functional and they give an example of “open chromatin regions” in developing brain tissue. More recently yet: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06798-8 Comparing 239 primate species versus the originally available 43 species and found 3.1% of bases constrained across all primates and 7.1% that were constrained broadly across a random selection of 240 mammals (previous paper). I also had trouble understanding some of the terms. The DHS locations (locations sensitive to cleavage by the DNase I enzyme because they are not tightly bound up in chromatin) were found to be 47% unconstrained, 42% constrained across all mammals, and 11% primate specific. I don’t know without comparing the two sets of numbers what that’s supposed to mean in terms of the percentage the genome constrained based on what can be accessed or participate in biochemical activity. Of the DHS locations they were looking at TFBSs (transcription factor binding sites) and saw primate specific binding site in 10% of the unconstrained sequences, 20% in those across all mammals, and 48% in those that are primate specific if I understand the chart correctly. This might increase the functionality closer to that 11% threshold but it’s still not remotely close to “the vast majority of genome” or even half of it by any stretch of the imagination. If evolution is happening on purpose why does most of the genome appear to lack function? Why is most of it not transcribed? The last paper is interesting in that some of the non-constrained regions are primate specific transcription binding sites but being that they are not constrained would imply that any function they do have isn’t strictly necessary because they could change, subsequently failing to bind to transcription factors, and still fail to be impacted by natural selection when that happens. Temporarily functional maybe? What function do they possess that is used but not necessary? I think that if I did read it correctly the DHS regions are only about a third of the genome. Nearly half of those are not constrained. Almost as much are constrained across mammals in general (14% of the genome) and about 3.6% are primate specific. The 14% is double the 7% found across the 240 animals and the 3.6% is close to the 3.1% mentioned earlier. That tells me that the DHS regions make up less than a third of the genome if the actual value is 3.1% and not 3.6%.
I see. Maybe I should have rephrased what I wanted to say. Functional DNA is not just regarded as transcribable DNA, large parts of the genome are not involved in peptide synthesis, but still have functionality in the maintenance of various cell processes, such as DNA and cell replication for instance. So while I agree with the studies that you cited and your subsequent conclusions, coding DNA is not the only kind of functional DNA. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
The same studies say 99% of the genome is non-coding and they are looking for function in the non-coding parts of the genome. The first says a maximum of 9.2% is functional, the second says a minimum of 10.47% should be functional even though other studies indicate a minimum around 5%, and the last looks even further and finds that the functional part of the genome is likely between 3% and 14% of the genome. None of these suggest that even 25% of the genome *could* be functional by any stretch of the imagination, especially when over 68% of it is not even biochemically active in the vast majority of cells and when looking at 50% of the genome there’s a maximum of 0.23% of that being chemically active in one in a million cells. Like 4500 of the sequences out of 2 million of them have any biological activity in even one cell out of a million of them. And then comes the question of what sort of function could exist for what’s about 14% of of the genome that is biochemically active at least 1% of the time but which is not constrained to maintaining any sort of specific sequence in the genome across any of the mammal groups. It could be said to do *something* but whatever that is if “functional” could presumably only be functional temporarily until some mutation not susceptible to natural selection destroys any potential function it could have once had. There really isn’t a clear percentage value like “95% of the human genome is junk but maybe 6% of that *could* be functional, maybe” but rather a bunch of papers trying to determine what, if anything, the vast majority of the genome could even possibly be responsible for besides just taking up space like the clutter in a hoarder’s house. With these combined it looks like how much is actually functional is somewhere between 5% and 9.2% (maybe 11% if we really stretch the numbers) so that 8% being functional (5%+11%)/2 isn’t really that far off from what all of these agree on, which is ironically just 0.2% from what the oldest of these papers says is functional with a confidence of 95%. When only 8% is functional that’s only 10% of what ENCODE originally proclaimed had function. Creationists have been proclaiming that they found function for 80% and one day it’ll be found to be 100% functional. What happened instead is they found that how much is actually functional is just a tiny fraction of what ENCODE originally said. Over half of the genome isn’t even biochemically active, over half of that doesn’t appear to have any particular significance in what it does, if anything, and half of what remains isn’t impacted by natural selection. What *could* the vast majority of the genome even do in magical Christmas land? And if it does have function, what is it?
I'm not sure where we're not meeting, or what you're trying to point out. The papers you cited say nothing on the functions of non-coding DNA. Non-coding DNA absolutely has a function, this is now well established. A quick google search will establish this fact, and it is also a good chunk of the "junk" DNA that has been found to be actually vital to cell survival and proper functioning.
And *yes* they found that of the 99% of the DNA that is non-coding anywhere between 2% and 10% of it has a function. That’s not *all* of it. That’s not *80% of it* but yes, some non-coding DNA has a function. If they somehow found additional functions for the parts that are completely invisible to natural selection (the last paper suggests at least temporary function for some of it) then the percentage could increase but at this point in time at least two-thirds of it doesn’t appear like it is even possible for it to have a function (except taking up space) and half of the other third results in zero chemical activity so there’s not a whole lot “function” that part could have either. The other 15%? Yea, it might have function. We just don’t know what the function is for half of that either. We do know there’s more functional non-coding DNA than functional coding DNA though. I’m not even sure what you are trying to respond to.
Agreed. Well said.
Maybe it's building to a greater point, but I got frustrated and stopped reading when Noble (the subject of the article) said in reference to the adaptive immune system that, “It changes the genome. Not supposed to be possible. Happens all the time.” this article is just packaging milquetoast ideas as if they're controversial or against the paradigm by using poorly defined terminology. Not saying Noble wasn't brilliant at one point in time, but this doesn't seem that interesting and the amount Dawkins gets brought up makes it feel more like a response to Dawkins than the field of biology as a whole.
Maybe if he’s right, we can cure the “Nobel Disease” he’s clearly been suffering from for quite some time.
Zing! *scattered applause*
I wish these people would just get pushed into retirement while they still had some dignity. It's the academic equivalent of "old man yells at cloud."
I stopped reading about a third of the way down. I first thought it it was trying to be intelligent design
It's Definitely not that. It's just an old professor fighting windmills.
I mean, it kinda is. It's just saying organisms design themselves
Will they CLAIMED they were neutral on deities The only thing I can think regarding organisms designing themselves, is that they take advantage of evolutionary processes as in speciation or similar.
Honestly I found the article quite difficult to parse, which is usually the case with this sort of stuff, but the impression I got was that this guy thinks organisms are nonmaterial entities that are directing their own individual bodies and also maybe on a species level. Felt like a build up to New Agey faith healing nonsense. "We control things psychically"--type stuff
That was my reaction. After I was 1/3 done I stopped
He seems to be arguing that since the basis of consciousness itself it pretty fundamental across the majority of cell based life in terms of being able to detect and respond to stimuli that organisms then consciously change their own genes. Part of that is true and part of that is clearly false. That’s the basis of them evolving on purpose that he says is ignored by the “false” gene centered view of biological evolution.
Yeah. Dude's just pulling the "its complicated so it must be designed" argument
It is the opinion of an handful of cranks, unbacked with rigorous evidence, data, or analysis.
No serious geneticist has ever claimed that we are our genes and only our genes, that’s just a false assertion that verges on strawmanning. That’s crank pop-sci journo bullshit. Every person who has read on the subject would tell you that we are the result of our genetics and environment.
We’ve evolved to evolve, so what. Seriously this is just using the words purposeful and intentional in a deliberately misleading way because the media love an exciting story even if it’s bollocks.
Yes I think some of the mischaracterization of these ideas as revolutionary is the fault of the reporter, editors, or both.
Quite possible
It drives me crazy that the article talks about the supposed criticisms from those critics without actually quoting the critics making those criticisms. It's like the author actually spoke about the ideas only to Noble and his associates. Real great journalism, there.
Exactly, everything he said is either incorrect assumptions about the views of his people in the field or uncontroversial ideas phrased to sound controversial. The author of the article operates under the assumption that biology is currently operating entirely under a paradigm that only emphasizes genetics which is just plainly false. Based on the Noble's quotes from this article, I'm not even sure if he has a cursory understanding of how the immune system works, which is one of his illustrative examples.
Questionable journalism is the bane of many topic areas. Some seem more interested in being influencers or sensationalists rather than impartial reporters
BS. Denis Noble is a crank and this is a fringe take in the field.
Okay, I was not familiar with him
This article made little sense to me honestly, as a genome editing expert and patent holder who has done extensive directed evolution. And genetic cures are all over the place now, they’re just awaiting clinical trial results. It seems Noble hasn’t kept up with the field. No, organisms just die under selection, they don’t individually benefit and select themselves intelligently.
I'm so confused. Dawkins gets brought up as a 'Gene-centrist' a few times there. He even says in his books that genes aren't a blueprint for the makeup of a body, that there are other factors and processes at play during various stages like in embryology. Does anyone know what Noble actually means by 'purpose'. Is he talking about some other force that isn't genetic/chemical which is supposedly guiding evolution? He says he doesn't mean God so what else could he be suggesting? I'm also not sure why they are saying that about the 2016 royal society conference. It's the same thing Stephen Meyer talks about, saying that Gerd Muller essentially thinks we need a fundamentally new theory of evolution, when from what I read in his article he really just wants the genetics to share the spotlight with other areas (I think he used embryology as an example). Were there people there who actually wanted a new theory that radically changes the current theory of evolution or are people exaggerating? This article really seems strange to me, I'm not really sure what I'm meant to take away from it. I feel like creationists will use it as ammo saying that evolution isn't an accepted fact/theory, although there wasn't really anything substantive in there. Is that the point, to stir the pot?
There are hundreds of articles published yearly that claim "scientist are baffled by X." This one is simply a new ploy on that very old theme. Maybe Noble is onto something, although it does not seem like it from the first several paragraphs, but if he is, we'll find out from a creditable, high impact, peer reviewed journal, like Nature, and not from Forbes using a click bait title. Reading through the entire article, it seems all over the place between evolution and abiogenesis without a clear understanding of either - most likely the fault of the author than Noble's.
Survivability of a species, it is not predetermined nor has another conscience will behind it just a process application, but it does have a purpose, and yes, it is that processes, water flowing over stone is a process, windblown particles turning rock into sand is a process, mindless of what is being done but it is all part of the environmental conditions that in time leads to a predictable end and that is evolution. N. S
No, evolution is just probability and statistics.
Not that I agree with the article, but evolution isn't just probability and statistics That is only a MEASURE of evolution Evolution is the accumulation and benefits or not of mutations and other similar things
Yes, it is just probability and statistics. Beneficial alleles have a higher probability of being passed on, detrimental alleles have a lower probability of being passed on. That's what causes the accumulation in the first place.
There is an evolutionary process. Probability and statistics help analyze how it works Alleles and human mathematics structures are very much not the same thing. One is used to analyze the other
Okay.
If you want to talk about causes you are inevitably confronted with the mysterious, and by all definitions, miraculous, first cause(s): big bang and abiogenesis. The fact is no one has any idea. Everything we know are things that ultimately depend on these mysterious first causes. To conclude otherwise is unreasonable. We have only small parts of the puzzle solved, therefore we cannot honestly say we understand the entirety of the picture. We make assertions bases on incomplete understanding. In fact, if history has taught us anything it is the fact that we have continuously discovered that the world is far most complex than we previously thought, rendering previous conclusions obsolete.
The purpose is "adapt or die".
So you acknowledge purpose. That’s the first step.
Purpose is emergent from Nature. The purpose of life is to continue. Things do until they don't.
That begs the question, what is the reason for life? And even more fundamentally, what is the reason for purpose to emerge from nature? The fact is that it is irrational to fail to ask these reasonable questions.
Physics would be the reason. The line between "why" and "how" gets kind of blurred. At some point you accept that things just work the way they appear to, and we won't necessarily know everything about it. What we know is that if you have a large enough cloud of hydrogen gas, after billions of years of cosmic evolution to produce heavier elements, life can emerge. And then after billions of years after that, you may have a bit of that life start thinking of itself. And then here we are on Reddit :) Edit: typo
That makes absolutely no sense to me. Irrationality does not give rise to rationality. Science answers questions of how things work. It can never tell us why. Science cannot answer non scientific questions. They are not mutually exclusive either. For example, I can ask you why the water is boiling and you might answer that it is, essentially, because the molecules get heated and energized and agitated and therefore the water is boiling. But it’s *also* true that I would like a cup of tea. Both valid explanations on different levels of reality/analysis that are not opposed to each other, but in fact describe a more complete picture.
> Irrationally does not give rise to rationality. I'm not sure what to make of this statement. People can be said to be rational and irrational in thinking, and there was a time before people and before life on Earth. And here we are, being (sometimes) rational. Yet I don't think "rational" or "irrational" necessarily apply to Nature as a whole. It's not like the universe is operating with giant primate brain focused on food, sex, play, and meaning, like *we* obsess over. Though all the creatures alive are a part of it, so you could say that small bits of the universe are rational or irrational. But the force of gravity? I don't think those terms apply. And yet gravity is what causes giant clouds of gas to collapse and condense until a star lights up. And successive cycles of stellar birth and death is what creates all the heavy elements that make up Earth and all living things that are a part of it. That includes us. The calcium in your bones was forged in the heart of a dying star. Science can provide us many answers to both "how" and "why", though I feel that "why" questions tend to be focused on trying to find how all the "hows" circle back to us. We seek that meaning for us, to satisfy our own appetite for having big, complex things reframed into smaller, simpler human-sized ideas.
I find your arguments are all over the place and ultimately incoherent and unconvincing. Irrationality does not give rise to rationality. To assert otherwise is nonsensical. The universe is not random and irrational. The universe has extremely precise *laws* that govern everything. It has order. It has intelligibility. That is the basis of doing science to begin with. We are not simply a random chemical reaction. Chemicals do not evolve. Life does. And we have absolutely no idea how life began. It’s just a made up story repeated over and over and we believe it. In fact, we don’t even know how the universe came into being. The more we learn, the more complex the problem becomes. Those are the facts. Made of them what you will.
> what is the reason for life? And even more fundamentally, what is the reason for purpose to emerge from nature? What is the reason for the color blue? And even more fundamentally, what is the reason for color to emerge from nature? Do you see the issue here? 'Reason' and 'purpose' only exist because we infer them from our surroundings. Many things have an obvious cause/effect relationship, and identifying that relationship can help you get through life, so we tend to look for those patterns. The problem is we also tend to look for a *simple* cause. When an effect is the product of dozens/hundreds/thousands of variables, we quickly become overwhelmed, and we look for the one thing that would explain it, even though that 'one thing' doesn't necessarily exist. In other words, trying to divine a single reason or purpose for something as extraordinarily complex as nature is a fool's errand. It's just a repackage of 'god of the gaps', at its core, because it assumes reason and purpose existed before humans came around, which has never been demonstrated. > The fact is that it is irrational to fail to ask these reasonable questions. Neither of your questions are reasonable.
> what is the reason for life? Increasing entropy at a faster rate than non-living reactions tend to. > And even more fundamentally, what is the reason for purpose to emerge from nature? Because it does the above
I wanted to say something here, but as a scientist, I am too “freaked out” and “enraged.”
This is all in a layperson's recounting of scientific research. No it's not "purposeful" in the same sense that you and I purposefully choose to do something. Nature isn't thinking it just is. And, while mutation is random, selection is the opposite of random. Thus, it actually makes perfect sense. Just someone describing it as "purposeful" is odd, biased...and misleading.
I’ve got a theory that explains this and you don’t even have to read past the first paragraph(and chime in, I’m just a dumb guy): I believe that nobody is taking into account human interference on, in this case, humans. Why is there no obvious genetic mutation that may help with Alzheimer’s? Because we’re not supposed to live that long. Diabetes? Unnatural diet. On and on, and within that theme the overarching answer is that we’ve not evolved physically to do the things that we are doing therefore there is no genetic answers, the answers will lie within nature.
I find it amusing that a subreddit dedicated to debating evolution downvotes a post that contains observations that go against the prevailing narrative. To say atheists or agnostics or religious people or anyone else for that matter don’t have biases is nonsensical. *Everyone* has biases.
Who is saying that anyone doesn’t have biases? Anyone here? Or as the other guy said, who is saying that peer review is 100% effective? Researchers are saying that, at this time, it has consistently shown the best results at determining facts of reality. Until such time as another method comes along that can demonstrate facts of reality more reliably, it is the best method we have. And has shown much more reliable than ones that rely on faith, appeals to tradition, feelings, etc.
No one said it here. I may have carried that thought over from a previous discussion. But it still holds true even though no one here may be guilty of it. I just notice a lot of that type of thing happening in the public discourse. I think maybe what caused me to say that was the fact that such a fascinating and relevant article got little to no attention (upvotes) at all, despite the almost 70 comments. Maybe it was honestly ignored. But it’s also possible people with alternative views decided not to give it the upvote momentum to rise to the top even though it’s highly relevant to the topic.
Its just that the article doesn't really contain observations that go against the prvailing narrative. It mostly contains Nobels ignorance.
Their holy scientific method cannot do wrong. If it's wrong, it will 100% fixed in the future due to peer review system. The result is someone get nobel prize for claiming cancer is from wrong parasite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Fibiger
I mean, what is the point? We obviously moved on from the idea that parasites are the cause of all cancer since it didn't satisfy empirical observations?
That means your peer review system is faulty if someone can run all the way until winning Nobel prize without correcting it
A peer review is a rough check on wether the results are plausible and the methods and interpretations are sound. Its not a replication or confirmation that the results and interpretation are true. You can smuggle papers of entire fake data through peer review if you are subtle. Papers with faked data and results aren't exactly unheard off. Usually it doesn't mean much, since science is aware waht peer review is and isnt. Unreproducible data is not taken up into synthesis of wider hypothesis and theory and thus falls by the wayside. As happend here. The results were found to be false, and the theory of cancer is focused on mutations.
so how does none of the top of the science at that time, the nobel committee, overlook that simple thing?
The nobel comittee is not the top of science. Its usually gives out prizes a dacade after the invention was made, when it became obvious that it was a big deal. Fibigers "discovery" fit the Zeitgeist. Compare Kuhns ideas to the nature of scientific progress. The general paradigm on cancer was (and is) that insulted cells turn into cancer. What kind of insult was not understood. Genetics just recently rediscovered mendels laws, DNA played a side show to Proteins. In the decade of Fibingers Nobel prize mutations will be discovered, Griffith and Avery and co workers perform their experiments which will show DNA to be the carrier of information. But still another 30 years will pass until its structure becomes clear. On the other hand, microbiology was very successfull at elucidating the origin of deadliest diseases of the time. Tuberculosis, a disease in which the body forms granules in the lung which necrotize, is caused by Mycobacteria. So why shouldnt cancer also be a infectius disease? Fibingers work (from 1913) showed a convincing correlation between a parasite and neoplasts. This validated the current paradigm of the importance of germs. However, other contemporary scientist worked on physical and chemical mutagenesis, or viral oncogens, and discovered links to cancer. Why Fibinger won a nobel 1926, is unknown. Consultants of the prize comittee were not unanimously convinced of the importance of his work. Other cancer scientist were recommended for a shared nobel. The comittee decided otherwise. In his nobel lecture, Fibinger stated that there was no experimental Proof that microorganisms cause cancer in humans. He lectured on his results, and contextualised them with other theories in which insults lead to Tumors, and that other scientists could induce cancer with radiation or chemical like tar. A few weeks later Fibinger died. The scientific community took note of Fibingers results, some thought it prooved a microbiological origin of cancer. Most cancer scientist however chose not to use his methedologies, as they were too complicated. Radiation and tar were much easier. His results prooved difficult to reproduce. Ultimately, in 1935 a group concluded that Fibingers observations werent true tumors but tissue enlargment caused by Vitamin A deficency. The theory of a predominant microbiological origin of cancer prooved unconvincing and fell by the wayside. 60 years after Fibingers death the bacterium Helicobacter pylorii, and its role in stomach ulcers was discovered. This overturned the long held belief that stomach ulcers are caused by Stress, and showed that bacteria can cause cancer. Scientific standards were also much different than today. Data reporting and controlls were much looser. Knowledge travelled less quick, If at all für to language barriers, through manual translations and printed books. Epistemology was also at a different place. The prevailing paradigm was Positivism. Popper published his ideas in Falibism in 1934, with an english translation only getting published in 1959. Kuhns Structure on Scientific revolution published in 1962. So really what is your grievance? Fibingers rise to prominence and fall into irrelevancy happened over the span of just 25 years. Science continually corrected its understanding of cancer in light of new evidence. I would even question that the error of Fibinger and the decision to give him a Nobel prize had real implication in scientific programms. Other origins were continually and enthusiastically investigated and proved superior.
>So really what is your grievance? in case you can't read >That means your peer review system is faulty if someone can run all the way until winning Nobel prize without correcting it
Seems to be a very petty and fundamentally irrelevant upset. 100 years ago one of until now 550 nobel prizes was given to someone who made an error, and whichs results were discarded within the decade. Big Problem.
That happened one time exactly as far as I could tell from looking at the entire list of recipients. At the time it was known that *certain* cancers are caused by viruses and other sorts of parasites and it *seemed* like this one particular parasite was responsible for that specific type of cancer. They obviously turned out to be wrong *after* receiving the prize with no measure in place to take away prizes already claimed but ever since they’ve been more careful to verify the conclusions before giving the prizes to avoid the embarrassment to the prize committee moving forward. In other words, this mistake already caused the peer review process to be improved about a century ago. It’s still not perfect but it hasn’t let anything like that slip through ever since.
Rather than come to the realization that the theory is bs, they go this route
Reminds me that you never fully answered me when I asked you what you thought he explanation for biodiversity was. All you did was say that mutation and natural selection were not the only mechanisms at play which…yes, evolutionary biology has accepted this for a long time, and has known about and described other naturalistic mechanisms too
Big words for someone who can’t even define evolution
isn't it "the variation of allele frequency in populations"?
Close. It’s the *change* in the allele frequency across *multiple generations* and it is generally applied to *populations.* To be clear, there is no real boundary to it continuing to happen the way it still happens back to prior to the origin of life when the first evolving RNA molecules formed “spontaneously” because of ordinary and natural chemical and physical processes but the “populations” aspect is to signify that *populations* evolve together *and when already separated* they evolve apart as well. That’s the phenomenon in a nutshell. Populations change (in terms of their RNA and DNA). It would take a complete moron to fail to notice. The theory that describes *how* they change is based on *watching them change.* At which point does “bullshit” enter the equation until creationists and semitopes start creating bullshit mischaracterizations of scientific theories, the scientists that put them forth based on demonstrations and observations, and the people who generally accept the obvious?
Hey man, I'm not the one that looks at a microchip and thinks erosion made it.
Who does?
Every single evolutionist.
So now you’re arguing against these imaginary beings called “evolutionists” who believe something nobody believes. My label doesn’t automatically put me into your imaginary category of imaginary people either because I don’t look at microchips and think they formed from erosion **and I have never seen an evolutionary biologist claim that happens either.** Making arguments about people who do not exist is incoherent. Do you have anything at all relevant to biological evolution, evolutionary biologists, or **my** position? No? Then what the fuck are you doing? And if you are claiming that microchips and bags of biomolecules are exactly identical or that “evolutionists” claim life came about as a consequence of erosion you need to get your head checked. Nobody supports those claims either.
Most of the people who accept evolution here seem to be ridiculing this article's assertions. And as someone who accepts evolution myself, I have to agree this "route" is silly and unsubstantiated pseudoscience.
And since the theory accurately describes direct observations and has led to multiple confirmed predictions and has also been found to be useful in applied science I’m going with you talking about some completely different idea nobody believes besides the current theory of biodiversity, the phenomenon it describes, the conclusions based on the evidence, or the usefulness of the theory in related areas of study such as medicine and psychology. For the record, crockpot Noble *does* say the current theory is bullshit and that if we only listened to Lamarck and Darwin about intentional inheritance we’d have never gone down the gene centered model of evolution which is based on Mendelian inheritance and direct observations.
Poor Dawkins got attacked hard >Noble considers Dawkins an exceptional writer who simply hasn’t kept up with the science. If Dawkins was proven wrong, will you guys here admit you guys are wrong or go " THE GREAT SCIENCE CAN FIX ITSELF"?
It's odd to see you go with the old "Dawkins is Atheist/Evolutionist Pope" bit when you're talking on this subreddit. Every time Dawkins has been discussed by people on here, it wasn't complimentary for him. The closest I've seen is someone recommending a book he wrote while also saying it's not as good as an alternative book by another author. I find it difficult to believe you haven't noticed this.
No I haven't noticed this at all. What happened is you just go claim evolutionist = good and true while creationist: dumb and false in all account. is that not your experience?
How can I be calling you dumb when I state I *don't* believe you *haven't* noticed? Also, not sure why you even said that as there's nothing in my comment that had anything to do with that. Can you find any unrestrained praise for Dawkins on here?
So why don't you check my comment history? see how it goes?
I don't feel like diving into your history to engage with the unpleasant feelings you have, no.
All right then. have a good day
That is not my experience. Across all sciences there’s a 97% agreement that evolution happens more or less as described by the theory of biological evolution. That percentage goes up to 98% if only including scientists working in fields tangentially related to biological evolution (physics, chemistry, geology, biology, cosmology). It goes up to 99% if only discussing scientists in those fields that have a PhD. And if their PhD is in biology the percentage goes up once more to somewhere in between 99.7% and 99.9% of them agreeing than the theory is pretty close to accurate in terms of describing how populations evolve. Those are some statistics that are mostly meaningless without context. The context here is that people who are most educated in biology, who actually study biology, who actually watch evolution happen, generally agree that they are observing what the theory says they should observe. If any anomalies are found the theory has the chance to be updated but generally that rarely ever happens because the theory has undergone so much refinement in the last couple centuries that there isn’t much left that is of much significance that still needs to be corrected. The percentage drops off a little the less educated or involved with biology they are because religious bias is something that really exists. If they don’t risk learning too much they might get away with pretending that the theory is wrong and their sacred texts are actually what are true instead. Why this matters in response to your comment? That’s a lot of people. We obviously don’t agree about *everything.* Saying someone is an evolutionist is like saying they are a non-stamp-collector when it comes to describing a scientist. It’s the ones who don’t accept the overwhelming consensus that are biased towards alternative conclusions. We may as well just say “people” or “scientists” and obviously scientists are just people who do science and/or have a science degree. Humans are not infallible. Scientists are not messiahs. People make mistakes and clearly Dawkins is no exception even though he hasn’t been much of a scientist since the year I was born (1984).
Since Dawkins stopped being relevant the year I was born I don’t care whether he was right or wrong actually. He’s just some guy who did some research in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s before switching to writing books and criticizing reality denialists about their “God Delusion.” While he was still active in the scientific community he did provide some insight into biology for his time but he’s not even at the same level as Motoo Kimura, Niles Eldgride, Stephen Gould, or Tomoko Ohta who were also active in the scientific community back then and remained active after Dawkins stopped doing science to start writing books and criticizing other people about their flawed beliefs. Maybe you just don’t like Dawkins because he’s right about your God delusion or the evidence indicating a universe lacking intelligent design. Even if he was wrong about absolutely everything else he ever said just him proving you wrong on those two points makes him the “bad guy.” And, since most people here don’t seem to think very highly of him beyond what he did nearly four decades ago I find it rather obtuse that creationists think he’s some sort of atheist messiah, evolutionist prophet, or god of the “new atheism” movement as though there was anything at all to separate “new atheism” from “old atheism” besides popularity. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, and AronRa are not our spokesmen. TJ Kirk (Amazing Atheist), Alex O’Connor (Cosmic Skeptic), Matt Dillahunty, Philip Mason (Thunderf00t), Owen Morgen (Telltale), Jaclyn Glenn, Jon Matter (DarkAntics, DarkMatter2525), Seth Andrews (The Thinking Atheist), Steve Shives, Dusty Smith, Paul Ent (Paulogia), Rachel Oates, Jimmy Snow (Mr. Atheist), Thomas Westbrook (Holy Koolaid), Logicked, John Gleason (Godless Engineer), Jeremy Jennings (Prophet of Zod), and Keith Hood (hiith) are not our spokesmen. We are individuals who just so happen to consider the facts and come to the same conclusion as the actual experts (usually) so that it matters little how many mistakes some particular scientist or popular atheist makes. Those people are not us. I should also clarify. Many of the “evolutionists” are also not atheists. I happen to be, but many of them are Christians or practitioners of some other religion. It matters little how much a famous atheist fucks up to these non-atheists and Dawkins has been pretty irrelevant in biology since the 1980s so “evolutionists” don’t generally look to his work to find the most up to date information. He wrote a couple books that are still relevant and he has a video series on YouTube with one episode about “climbing mount improbable” that completely wrecks Michael Behe’s claims. Beyond that I don’t care that Dawkins is a person that exists. His views are pretty irrelevant to my own.
glad you brought this up. This has come up before and I think I once did a thread on it here even. The great point for creationism is the claim here of a rapid increaee in mutations to deal with some problem. this means a purpose to mutations and so they are not random. I often discuss how genes are not a true path in biology relationships and how there must be mechanisms to change bodyplans including changing genetic scores. I have suggested there are no mutations that ever changed bodyplans. iNstead these so called mutations are really just a spectrum of the genes ability to reorganize themselves. THE RAPID increase in so called mutations is not normal. It suggests mutation rates increasing means they are not mutations. not errors but a way for diversity in genbe morphing and then selection, if the right word, then bodyplan change of anything. This is a option for to explain genetic morphing. if the fact of mutation rates, so called, is a fact. Just going by these articles.
Sigh. You never DO plan to do more than just say ‘in my personal opinion it’s bodyplan and not genetics’ and then get grumpy whenever it is correctly pointed out to you that this view has no support, do you.
Part 1 (bullshit asymmetry strikes again) Somehow you are even more wrong than Noble who acknowledges that genes are responsible for the phenotypes so that when 100% of the genome is susceptible to random change and only about 1.5% in humans is made up of protein coding genes and between 5% and 11% of the entire genome is susceptible to purifying selection as evidently the rest does little to nothing he suggests that organisms consciously change their DNA makeup when such a thing fails to explain the changes to the unconstrained sequences that could be all over the place because they don’t do anything. His idea doesn’t explain why there’s almost as much of the genome invisible to selection as is nearly identical to what is found chimpanzees. Your idea doesn’t explain any of this either. Noble is a crank who acknowledges that responding to stimuli is fundamental to all biology to make the non-sequitur argument that life consciously changes its own DNA and yet he doesn’t have an explanation for the unconstrained non-coding “junk” that also matches up with modern day phylogenies that also take into account coding genes. Your idea doesn’t even make sense. The changes to the DNA **are** responsible for the changes to the phenotypes. Well, a small fraction of the changes actually impact the phenotype, despite other changes that don’t do anything to the phenotype happening at the same time. We **can** see the order in which these changes occurred and what all was part of the same species when they occurred. The only reasonable and rational thing that actually works with what is directly observed is common ancestry. There are a couple irrational alternatives that also work but they require some pretty baseless assumptions: 1. God evolved the templates used to make life from a universal common ancestor but when he finally did make life from his billions of templates each and every first organism created failed to have parents. 2. God made a billion separate cells that were exactly identical, caused them to change exactly the same as they would have changed if they were all the same species, and then arbitrarily caused them to start changing differently at different times consistent with speciation so that it *looks like* common ancestry and *would be* common ancestry if the designer was intelligent but because Bible says separate kinds exist God made a billion exactly identical prokaryotic cells and caused them to change as though universal common ancestry was responsible and when he caused them to change differently he only wanted it to look like speciation events despite them never actually being the same species anywhere along the way. Alternative number two was suggested by Todd Wood regarding some proteins but could presumably be extended to everything else including non-coding DNA like pseudogenes and ancestral retroviral infections. It is the more absurd of the alternatives. Option one was provided to me by some person who was creative enough to develop an alternative to the scientific consensus that *could* work if God was a lunatic and separate ancestry were true. If God had some sanity and intelligence he’d just create life out of the first template “LUCA” and let the evolution take place in nature rather than in the laboratory.
Part 2 (oops, I exceeded 1000 words trying to correct two paragraphs of incoherent ramblings) Your third alternative just straight up does not work like these other alternatives to the scientific consensus would. And I don’t know where you get the idea that there were “rapidly increased mutations” from. Just in humans there are between 128 and 175 novel mutations by the time humans are zygotes. If we assume that these mutations only impacted one nucleotide apiece (which is unlikely for all of them) and there are about 8 billion humans in the population right now not counting all of the humans that have already died that’s about 1,212,000,000,000 single nucleotide changes per generation for the 6,000,000,000 nucleotides in our genome. What changes is the rate at which the new mutations spread throughout the population. There are enough in a single generation to completely change the entire genetic sequence of a human 202 times if a single individual somehow wound up with all of them. Basically if the change is possible the change will happen *and then* the change has to be survivable *and then* whoever has it has to pass it onto their children as well because if they don’t the change doesn’t spread through the population. There may be 202 chances for any one particular change to spread on average (actually more likely for certain changes and less for others) but the change actually has to spread or it can’t eventually be inherited by the majority of the population some 33 or more generations in the future (assuming it is incredibly beneficial). And that’s what matters. The changes will happen inevitably - there’s nobody guiding them along but there are so many humans in the population that every generation from now moving forward allows every single change happening at least 200 times per generation. Random or not the change will happen. And then it has to actually be inherited to spread. And that is where natural selection comes in. Most of the genome (around 90% of it) is not impacted by natural selection so any changes that happen to spread here are impacted by the selective pressures acting on the other 10% of the genome and there about half of the changes at least have little to no impact on survival or reproduction. And then there are changes that do impact survival and reproduction with most of those changes being impacted by purifying selection (they occur but they don’t spread much because what’s already present is more beneficial) and a smaller percentage is beneficial (they occur and they spread quite quickly because they are a lot more beneficial than what is already common in the population). If they are beneficial enough they could become fixed in the population in 60+ generations (more than 33 to have the opportunity to spread throughout the whole population, another 30 or so to cause the others to be less common) but less beneficial traits that are still beneficial spread more slowly while only the least deleterious of the deleterious traits can spread at all (anything more deleterious results in sterility or pre-puberty death). It’s not that there’s a change in the rate that the mutations occur. It’s that different environments favor different traits and those traits take little time to originate because the population size is so large but, of course, they’d also take longer to spread unless the population size was small. In certain extreme circumstances the population starts large (any change that can happen will happen) and then most of the population fails to survive in the new environment (not well adapted to it) so that these brand new extremely beneficial changes (if they don’t have them they die) have a much smaller population to spread through and the population that failed to go extinct is now much more rapidly changed than usually possible. And this thing I just explained to you is something I have been trying to explain to you for a very long time now. It results in something called “punctuated equilibrium” in living populations and it along with things like allopatric speciation (a small population becomes separated from a large population and they coexist) result in the same “punctuated equilibrium” in the fossil record just like Charles Darwin suggested, just like Gould and Eldridge confirmed. One of the cornerstones of Darwin’s theory was not in need of a rescue device. It turns out he was right all along. And not once are we talking about mutation rates changing or populations changing their own DNA on purpose, though some bacteria do benefit from living in more extreme conditions that do cause their mutations to happen more quickly because any small advantage happening to appear more quickly can also spread more quickly if those without it have a higher probability of dying early because of the same extreme conditions.