If DNA does not interact with the other molecules in the cell then terms like “inert” or “non-reactive” might be better terms. In more focused studies, a term like “non-specific” would be used.
I’m not much of a dualist myself. However, I do think there is a qualitative difference between human ideas and immediate chemical reactions.
I guess I am more interested in the mathematical potentials for self-organization and the phenomenon of life – which I think exists in both mediums.
Do you think thoughts do not have a physical (as in natural rather than bodily) or concrete existence?
Just because they don’t make proteins doesn’t mean they don’t interact with other molecules. Sometimes they regulate the protein expression of other sections of DNA and sometimes their role is to provide the possibility for evolutionary adaptations.
Human ideas can clearly model immediate chemical reactions and I think it is obvious that chemical reactions model human ideas because it is in chemical reaction where those human ideas exist (that is what the rejection of dualism leads to). That suggests to me that both have similar capabilities.
I think thoughts do have a physical and concrete existence, but we use symbols to relate what those thoughts are. If I think of a tree I wouldn’t send you an fMRI image of my brain while thinking of a tree. I would write “tree”. That’s an abstraction, a tool we use to communicate what we are thinking of. That isn’t what DNA is, either junk or functional DNA.
There is DNA that binds transcription factors, but it does so through its chemical properties, and the chemical properties of the molecules that bind to it. There is nothing abstract in those interactions from what I can see.
As to the possibility of evolutionary adaptations, I think that has more to do with humans being biased towards teleology. It’s like saying the organization of rocks on a mountain are there for the possibility of creating a landslide and destroying cars.
An interesting thought. I think this would have more to do with the properties of emergence. We could say that neurons have the needed properties to give rise to the emergence of thought and the ability to produce abstractions. However, I don’t see the level of complexity and interaction in DNA that would seem to support that same type of ability to create abstraction.
In reality in closed biological systems the information declines. Which is shown for bacteria and explained by eugene koonin in his book The Logic of Chance.
Again, by any definition of ‘information’ I can think of, this statement is simply false. Could you provide some arguments and evidence to support your assertions?
If you start with a single bacterium in culture and let it reproduce, genetic diversity will spontaneously appear. If you culture a single bacterium in the presence of dilute antibiotic, its descendants will spontaneously develop resistance to the antibiotic. (I don’t work with bacteria but we do this routinely in our lab with malaria parasites.) If these don’t represent an increase in information, why not?
Human languages do not generally rely on stochasticity to function. E.g., no language relies on readers sometimes reading through a full stop at the end of a sentence to make the sentence function.
That sounds exactly like some of the computer code that I’ve had to work on throughout my career. You’d be surprised to learn how many codebases there are out there that have no overall design, inconsistent duplications, defunct pathways that are no longer executed, and patches to fix bugs in other parts of the code.
The main reason for this is changing requirements. Business objectives change. Regulatory requirements change. The technologies we have to work with change. Security requirements change. The competitive landscape changes. Computer code in business and industry has to adapt to these changing requirements, frequently on an inadequate budget, in a limited timescale. And you have to work with and adapt what’s already there, because rewriting everything from scratch would take far too long and rarely gets sign-off from the business.
I remember when I first heard about the recurrent laryngeal nerve, and how it loops down under your aorta and back up to your larynx. As evidence for evolution, it’s pretty compelling, not least because the equivalent nerve in fish and amphibians goes straight. But at the same time, it left me thinking, Yes, that sounds familiar. I’ve worked on plenty of codebases that have made intelligent design decisions just like that one.
lol I was going to say the same thing (I’m a software engineer). I think that the general process of iterative innovation is actually a good (but imperfect) analogy for how evolution works, precisely for this reason.
That’s why the distinction between “code” and “language” is important. When we encode English words into binary code for storage in electrical systems, we are not writing a new language, we are encoding (that is, changing the symbols for) English. Just as if you encoded English words into Morse Code, it would still be English, but with different symbols.
On top of that, the computer itself does not “think” in English. It doesn’t “think” at all. All it does is store electrical charges and react to their properties (in very complex ways). This is the distinction between “meaning” and “function”. Computer code always has a function, but it only has meaning when we’re using it to encode English/French/German/etc, which is not always what we’re doing, and doesn’t matter to the computer anyway. Computer code doesn’t need to have a meaning to have a function, any more than gasoline needs to have a meaning to have a function in an engine.
In this sense, it seems to me (who is not a biologist) that DNA is a “code”, not a “language”, and that it has “function”, but not “meaning”.
Bacteria don’t develop due to the presence of antibiotic. Some bacteria have resistancy and in the presence of antibiotic they are selected.
If you have bacteria and you multiply them many times, they lose genes. If you have an isolated population of different bacteria and wait, they lose genes.
More precisely, initially identical bacteria mutate and some of those mutations are selected for. In this way, information about the environment (‘there is antibiotic present’) is transferred into the genome of the bacteria. Which it seems you’re claiming is impossible.
An isolated population of bacteria (or anything else) can both lose and gain genes. Both happen. Gene duplication, in particular, happens all the time.
As @glipsnort mentions, you can start with antibiotic sensitive bacteria and then select for subsequent mutations that confer antibiotic resistance.
The evolution of antibiotic resistance is actually part of a quite famous paper from 1952:
The Lederbergs were able to demonstrate that you can start with a single bacterium that is sensitive to antibiotics, let it replicate a whole bunch, and expose all of the descendants to antibiotics. What they found is that mutations were occurring as the bacteria replicated, and the mutations that produced antibiotic resistance happened before the bacteria were exposed to antibiotics. The question at the time was whether bacteria had a small chance to produce resistance in response to being exposed to the antibiotic or if there was a random event that conferred resistance in each replication. This experiment, along with the work of Luria and Delbruck, established the randomness of mutations.
This is a rather long publication considering the density of its terminology, and a role for stochasticity is far from obvious so perhaps you should point out to everyone…
What role stochasticity is playing?
How is the process described central to the functionality of DNA?
How the process cannot work without stochasticity?
Cellular machinery translates the DNA of a gene into a protein. The translation stops at a particular bit of DNA called a stop codon, ending the protein at the correct point. Sometimes the machinery randomly makes a mistake, keeps going through the stop codon, and continues adding amino acids to the protein until it comes to another stop codon. In some organisms, both the standard-length protein and the extended version have important functions and are needed for the normal working of the organism. Without the stochastic production of the longer protein, the DNA does not fully function.
I don’t claim that transfer of information is impossible, of course. There is a situation of bacteria that, due to random mutations gain some difference in antibiotic susceptibility. Due to antibiotic use, there is selection of the resistant ones which means that sensitive ones are whiped out which is depletion of information. However in fact, change of a few nucleotides is not addition of information. When bacteria make new enzymes that breakdown antibiotics, that would be increase of information. Nobody expect that occurring spontaneously de novo. Bacteria receive such genes from other bacteria.
I would expect that this isn’t all that visible to research scientists. As I understand it, the majority of scientific programming involves relatively small programs with clearly defined requirements that don’t change over the lifetime of the project and are usually written by just one or two people. It’s much easier to keep your code clean in situations such as that.
I sometimes wonder if this is why engineers tend to be more receptive to ID than biologists: they have different concepts of what intelligent design should actually look like. Also, it’s harder to deny that Intelligent Design is a thing when “intelligent design” is your own job description.
I would say yes. And then you start talking about nylon eating bacteria. And then, I say that this is only a small modification of an already existing mechanism. And then you say that small modifications can have large effects. And then I say yes but the level of accidentally acquiring new information is smal in that situation.
