Does so called "junk DNA" consist entirely of this "LINE1" DNA, or does junk DNA cover other genes as well?
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
#62The parasite theory is that transposons are rather like early computer viruses that replicated by embedding themselves in other executables: they exist only to make copies of themselves in their host genome. This theory is not incompatible with these results. Evolution is not a rational design process. Once a transposon starts replicating it is quite possible for the host genome to evolve to incorporate the transposo…
Intelligence could be different from our understanding and projection of it.
I can see the highly structured and mutually influenced movement of galaxies, star systems etc as a type of intelligence.
The processes in stars. Are they completely random? The time we’ve spent observing the Sun is insurmountable short in Star time.
The ecosystems on Earth with their never stopping intertwined flow of signals and influences. Wheat, corn and soy using humans to take over vast territories.
Languages and thought patterns and their disease-like activity often infecting and wiping out huge ecosystems (“let’s kill all the bison!”) and large parts of their host population (genocides, world wars, racism).
I am not religious and am certain that the theory of evolution is sound. There’s no bearded guy in the sky tweaking our genome and berrying dinosaurs to test our faith.
When I look at the self organizing nature of phenomena, my pattern recognizing brain sees patterns and I can’t but think that the regular definition of intelligence might be too small and might benefit by being scaled up.
How is our intelligence different from the ability of species’ genomes to adapt to environments over long periods of time?
Re: Mysterious ‘Jumping Gene’ That Appears 500k Times in Human DNA
#63> "Geneticists tend to pay attention when LINE1 inserts itself in a bad place, causing cancer or genetic disorders like hemophilia." But it's not always doing bad, correct? The point being, these random insertions are not only part of the process, they are key. Without deviation these is no evolving.
Transposons are waaay more likely to break things than to evolve them in a positive direction
In the context of evolution there is no right and wrong mutations - just ones that persist or not. Nature is the judge.
Re: Mysterious ‘Jumping Gene’ That Appears 500k Times in Human DNA
#64Earlier 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
"You are equating your kids' reaction to your code to scientists who have spent their whole life doing science on a topic."
I have a sneaking suspicion calling people who ankle-bite about giraffe nerves and backwards eyes and the one or two other stereotypical complaints "scientists who have spent their whole life doing science on a topic" is, how to put it, comprehensively false.
When humans build anything even remotely resembling an organism that can survive on the same terms as living organisms, I'll pay more attention to the design criticism. Preferably criticism coming from the people who actually did it. Until then, though, even though you misrepresent me (or perhaps rather, badly misrepresent the people making complaints), I'd still stand by the misrepresentation. Today's scientists are still at the point where they are examining the syntax highlighting and hoping to derive insights about the programming. This is not because they have made no progress, but because there is so much progress yet to be made. People complaining about giraffe nerves aren't even that far; they're just repeating propaganda with no understanding, and deserve all the respect such people should be accorded.
Let me give you a concrete metric as to when I'll say we're starting to get a handle on it: When humanity stops systematically discovering that organisms are even more complicated than we thought. When genes could be sequenced, we thought that was going to be it. Then epigenetics. Then the discovery that introns actually aren't as useless as we thought. And so on. Long before we've got it all figured out, we'll stop discovering entirely new sets of dimensions of variation. We clearly aren't there yet, and I see little reason to believe we're even close.
Re: Mysterious ‘Jumping Gene’ That Appears 500k Times in Human DNA
#65Does so called "junk DNA" consist entirely of this "LINE1" DNA, or does junk DNA cover other genes as well?
Not just LINE1. Currently only about 6% of human DNA has ascribed function.
Re: Mysterious ‘Jumping Gene’ That Appears 500k Times in Human DNA
#66Earlier 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.
He made us in his image. Fear the great refactoring that will come the day he gets around to it.
Re: Mysterious ‘Jumping Gene’ That Appears 500k Times in Human DNA
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> saying basically that no scientific truth can be an argument for or against any spiritual claim. This is an agument for "NOMA" or Non Overlapping Magisteria. While this is true in the abstract pure Deist standpoint, it's not true for most religions or supernatural belief systems. All Abrahamic regions (for example) make specific claims about the nature of reality that is in direct conflict with science.
Are we sure that the religious texts themselves make the claims about reality. Is it instead incorrect physical interpretations by followers of the religion of the religious text?
We're sure.
Re: Mysterious ‘Jumping Gene’ That Appears 500k Times in Human DNA
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
The degree to which practitioners of Abrahamic religions believe best guess scientific claims from thousands of years ago varies, of course.
And also, in some scenarios people mock the bible for calling a whale a fish in the story of Jonah, when a whale is a mammal. However the people of the time did not distinguish animals like we do. We only started classifying animals like that in the 1800s.
If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them. (Leviticus 20:13)
So where are we misinterpreting this one?
Re: Mysterious ‘Jumping Gene’ That Appears 500k Times in Human DNA
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intelligent Design, being a religious theory, usually carries the implication that the designer was infallible and made no mistakes, unless they were deliberate mistakes.
Biblical creation theory postulate that a good initial design has had an increasing lot of destructive processes going on after the first man breaking the trust relationship with the Creator. "Genetic Entropy" thus being one of these consequences (there's even a book with that title, by Cornell prof., gene gun inventor and creationist, John Sanford).
If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them. (Leviticus 20:13)
So this genetic entropy caused people to be born gay, for which we should kill them. That sound sound like an imperfect creator.
Re: Mysterious ‘Jumping Gene’ That Appears 500k Times in Human DNA
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
The degree to which practitioners of Abrahamic religions believe best guess scientific claims from thousands of years ago varies, of course.
And also, in some scenarios people mock the bible for calling a whale a fish in the story of Jonah, when a whale is a mammal. However the people of the time did not distinguish animals like we do. We only started classifying animals like that in the 1800s.
I suppose before the 1800s whales were also able to swallow humans. /s