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Mysterious ‘Jumping Gene’ That Appears 500k Times in Human DNA

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Re: Mysterious ‘Jumping Gene’ That Appears 500k Times in Human DNA

#41

Post by JohnBerea »

bena wrote: post #31
menacingly wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not usually much of an intelligent design advocate, but approaching it from the angle that we know enough right now to make definitive calls as to the merits of different genetic approaches is hubris _at best_. Not to mention the sneaky embedded assumption that an engineering approach is even the best way to go.

Then it's just as meaningless. I mean, the claim is that we're so complex we must have been designed. But there are what seems like very serious design flaws in lots of organisms. Giraffes have a nerve that travel up and down their necks only to wind up a few inches from where it should be. Our eyes have the nerves attached on the wrong side, giving us blind spots and a host of other problems. And on and on. You can'…

On the recurrent laryngeal nerve in mammals: A direct route to the larynx already exists through the superior laryngeal nerve. A second path provides redundancy if one is damaged (e.g. by disease or developmental defect)

The nerve innervates the deep cardiac plexus at the bottom, and the esophagus and trachea on its way to the larynx. So the path needs to be run anyway, leaving little advantage to another route.

Gray's Anatomy (the book, not the tv show) says during development the recurrent laryngeal nerve provides "a means of support that would permit the ductus to develop as a muscular artery" which it can do because it "has a greater proportion of connective tissue than other nerves, making it more resistant to stretch." Having a single cell build itself into a giraffe (or human) requires scaffolding along the way, and having the scaffolding that is also reused as a functionally redundant component of its own is better design than if it were not.

The inverted vertebrate retina is needed to allow additional cooling through blood flow. This article goes into additional tradeoffs in the design: http://www.quarkphysics.ca/scripsi/vision-of-octopi-and-the-...

Re: Mysterious ‘Jumping Gene’ That Appears 500k Times in Human DNA

#43

Post by 1_over_n »

Retric wrote: post #14
Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't most intelligent designs actually done by sane engineers filled with quirks like this? Spaghetti code at places, leaky abstractions, hard-coded things, replicating old bugs to make the program compatible with bad OSes or other old software, etc. etc. This could just as easily be an artifact of the complexity of reality, not an argument for- or against "intelligent design". There might be reasons do doubt intel…

Wait what? Are you arguing that 'god(s)' where and or might be incompetent? Anyway, I don't think ID requires that every mutation was designed, rather that an intelegent agent made at least one adjustment to an ongoing process. The problem is it's not a falsifiable theory because it makes no specific testable predictions.

this may or may not be an original thought - but i often wondered if we look at the efforts of Craig Venter and his "synthetic life" if that life form undergoes evolution - potentially even becoming a higher being than that of the creator's species, would it be appropriate to call Craig "God" and an event of intelligent design. I understand this is (currently) something of a far-fetched thought experiment, none the less it's a thought I have gone back to several times.

Re: Mysterious ‘Jumping Gene’ That Appears 500k Times in Human DNA

#44

Post by jerf »

bena wrote: post #31
menacingly wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not usually much of an intelligent design advocate, but approaching it from the angle that we know enough right now to make definitive calls as to the merits of different genetic approaches is hubris _at best_. Not to mention the sneaky embedded assumption that an engineering approach is even the best way to go.

Then it's just as meaningless. I mean, the claim is that we're so complex we must have been designed. But there are what seems like very serious design flaws in lots of organisms. Giraffes have a nerve that travel up and down their necks only to wind up a few inches from where it should be. Our eyes have the nerves attached on the wrong side, giving us blind spots and a host of other problems. And on and on. You can'…

Criticisms about organism design would carry more philosophical heft if humans had designed... well... anything that was capable of self-replication. We can't even do it cribbing off of the existing designs yet, let alone design something truly original. And if you cross that bar, there's still a long way to go before we've built something as complicated as, say, a paramecium.

I was talking to my kids about my job a couple of months ago, and showed them the view of source code I usually work with. They laughed and said it was colored funny. I'm not particularly convinced the criticisms of "obvious design flaws" in organisms are any more sophisticated than that.

Re: Mysterious ‘Jumping Gene’ That Appears 500k Times in Human DNA

#46

Post by fifnir »

jerf wrote: post #44
bena wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then it's just as meaningless. I mean, the claim is that we're so complex we must have been designed. But there are what seems like very serious design flaws in lots of organisms. Giraffes have a nerve that travel up and down their necks only to wind up a few inches from where it should be. Our eyes have the nerves attached on the wrong side, giving us blind spots and a host of other problems. And on and on. You can'…

Criticisms about organism design would carry more philosophical heft if humans had designed... well... anything that was capable of self-replication. We can't even do it cribbing off of the existing designs yet, let alone design something truly original. And if you cross that bar, there's still a long way to go before we've built something as complicated as, say, a paramecium. I was talking to my kids about my job a…

You are equating your kids' reaction to your code to scientists who have spent their whole life doing science on a topic.

Why does everyone have such strong opinions about biology in particular, there's never doubts about what the physicists say but everyone's an evolutionary biologists

Re: Mysterious ‘Jumping Gene’ That Appears 500k Times in Human DNA

#47

Post by booleandilemma »

fifnir wrote: post #46
jerf wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criticisms about organism design would carry more philosophical heft if humans had designed... well... anything that was capable of self-replication. We can't even do it cribbing off of the existing designs yet, let alone design something truly original. And if you cross that bar, there's still a long way to go before we've built something as complicated as, say, a paramecium. I was talking to my kids about my job a…

You are equating your kids' reaction to your code to scientists who have spent their whole life doing science on a topic. Why does everyone have such strong opinions about biology in particular, there's never doubts about what the physicists say but everyone's an evolutionary biologists

Physicists get their share of doubt too. Reactions towards string theory, for example.

Re: Mysterious ‘Jumping Gene’ That Appears 500k Times in Human DNA

#48

Post by fifnir »

JohnBerea wrote: post #41
bena wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then it's just as meaningless. I mean, the claim is that we're so complex we must have been designed. But there are what seems like very serious design flaws in lots of organisms. Giraffes have a nerve that travel up and down their necks only to wind up a few inches from where it should be. Our eyes have the nerves attached on the wrong side, giving us blind spots and a host of other problems. And on and on. You can'…

On the recurrent laryngeal nerve in mammals: A direct route to the larynx already exists through the superior laryngeal nerve. A second path provides redundancy if one is damaged (e.g. by disease or developmental defect) The nerve innervates the deep cardiac plexus at the bottom, and the esophagus and trachea on its way to the larynx. So the path needs to be run anyway, leaving little advantage to another route. Gray…

So more or less you are hitting all the points from this bit: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Laryngeal_nerve#But_it_is_desi...

so I'll answer from there myself:

Make no mistake, as an explanation this achieves as much as saying "because the Flying Spaghetti Monster wanted a laugh". It does leave a few curiosities about the supposed intelligence of the designer, however, which are unanswered by this non-explanation. It effectively makes the larynx an afterthought in the design process; as if it was only a by-product of the nerve's existence rather than an aim, despite communication and language being so important to humans. But the designer, given omnipotent powers to yield creatures as She sees fit, doesn't think to merely alter the branching points of the nerves instead? This is a very counter-intuitive approach design at the very least.

Re: Mysterious ‘Jumping Gene’ That Appears 500k Times in Human DNA

#49

Post by JohnBerea »

fifnir wrote: post #48
JohnBerea wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the recurrent laryngeal nerve in mammals: A direct route to the larynx already exists through the superior laryngeal nerve. A second path provides redundancy if one is damaged (e.g. by disease or developmental defect) The nerve innervates the deep cardiac plexus at the bottom, and the esophagus and trachea on its way to the larynx. So the path needs to be run anyway, leaving little advantage to another route. Gray…

So more or less you are hitting all the points from this bit: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Laryngeal_nerve#But_it_is_desi... so I'll answer from there myself: Make no mistake, as an explanation this achieves as much as saying "because the Flying Spaghetti Monster wanted a laugh". It does leave a few curiosities about the supposed intelligence of the designer, however, which are unanswered by this non-explanation. It…

The article you quoted says "there seems to be no apparent benefit to an extensive routing of the nerve supplying the larynx," but it doesn't mention or address the three reasons I cited above.

Re: Mysterious ‘Jumping Gene’ That Appears 500k Times in Human DNA

#50

Post by fifnir »

joshuahedlund wrote: post #39
bena wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then it's just as meaningless. I mean, the claim is that we're so complex we must have been designed. But there are what seems like very serious design flaws in lots of organisms. Giraffes have a nerve that travel up and down their necks only to wind up a few inches from where it should be. Our eyes have the nerves attached on the wrong side, giving us blind spots and a host of other problems. And on and on. You can'…

The counter-argument to many "design flaws" is, as a sibling comment mentioned, they may be "artifacts of the complexity of reality," especially constraints due to the fact that living things are built up from single cells and need to be functional during the growth process, as opposed to being pieced together like a robot from existing materials. IANABiologist, but I think I've heard that the giraffe nerve has to gr…

> The counter-argument to many "design flaws" is, as a sibling comment mentioned, they may be "artifacts of the complexity of reality," [...]

I've been trying to answer to this for about 5 minutes and I don't know where to start to untangle this...

The "artifacts of the complexity of reality" is exactly science's position, you can't take that and use it as a counter argument against it. The argument is that while artifacts are to be expected with evolution, they cannot and should not be expected from an omniscient and omnipotent designer.

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