The Complex Truth About ‘Junk DNA’ • Hacker News Board

Re: The Complex Truth About ‘Junk DNA’

#61

Post by JoeAltmaier » Thu, Sep 02, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

sockpuppet_12 wrote: post #60

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No creator necessary. Imagine a big machine run by paper tape. On the tape are two possible holes. Punch one and feed it in, the machine makes a man. Punch the other, it makes a mouse. Does the tape 'encode' the essence of 'human being'? (or even 'mouse'?) Of course not. The machine is a vital part of the equation. Likewise, dna in a jar is just a molecule. It has to have a cell, evolved over a billion years, ready t…

Yes you're right, we know that DNA is inert and used as a storage device by an organism. What we don't know is how an organism with no intelligence (cell), could develop code (DNA), archive it, rehydrate it and then parse and copy it like someone with intelligence. Without getting too deep into it, it's just not convincing anymore to appeal to vast amounts of time and random chance to do something which is fundamenta…

Sure we do. It's littered with history, fragments from all over. And organisms today are more complex than organisms of the past, some of which still have remnants existing. So many stages of development as examples. There's no magic to it.

Re: The Complex Truth About ‘Junk DNA’

#62

Post by f6v » Thu, Sep 02, 2021, 6:37 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #28

phkahler wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet we probably don't know why they have so many copies. Maybe it's a crude method of regulating the ratio of activation on genes. If a few genes are either on or off, and you want to have ratios other than 1:0 1:1 or 0:1, maybe independently activating N of the M copies can achieve that. Just speculating as to how multiple copies might be useful. You can't prove that they are "extra copies" until you understand…

While I agree in principle, it does look like in most cases, these 100X large genomes are just due to random events that haven't been selected away. Often, what you see looking at evolutionary processes at a point in time, you want to find a "reason for why it's this way", when the reason is "it was random chance". Compare deinococcus radiodurans, where there's a whole mechanism for exploiting multiple copies of the…

It’s always random chance. What’s non-random is why it’s kept in the genome. I’m no plant expert, but genome duplications could be linked to increased fitness due to amount of resulting protein product, right?

Re: The Complex Truth About ‘Junk DNA’

#63

Post by sockpuppet_12 » Fri, Sep 03, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #61

sockpuppet_12 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you're right, we know that DNA is inert and used as a storage device by an organism. What we don't know is how an organism with no intelligence (cell), could develop code (DNA), archive it, rehydrate it and then parse and copy it like someone with intelligence. Without getting too deep into it, it's just not convincing anymore to appeal to vast amounts of time and random chance to do something which is fundamenta…

Sure we do. It's littered with history, fragments from all over. And organisms today are more complex than organisms of the past, some of which still have remnants existing. So many stages of development as examples. There's no magic to it.

You're entitled to your opinion, but what you're suggesting is wrong. What you've said are some observations made and some interpretations based on evidence gathered but none of it concludes that cellular organisms invented DNA, that suggestion is still stuck in a chicken vs egg scenario.

The fact is, we don't know how these systems could have created themselves or been created abiogenesis. There are wildly different theories, but it's far from a closed case.

I used to think the same thing as you because that's all I was taught to think, but perhaps if you looked at what synthetic chemists think about abiogenesis you may find it interesting / informative to see what they have to say about the challenges involved in it. An interview with a synthetic organic chemist on the topic: youtube.com/watch?v=r4sP1E1Jd_Y