DNA animation

"Junk DNA" was dogma for decades. A lot of the stuff between the obvious genes turns out to have functions.

When you have a simple explanation that is sufficient, then non-explanations should be mocked.

Go read "The Blind Watchmaker", slowly, with a few glasses of your favourite tipple and no internet to distract you. Wonderful prose, superb explanations.

I will, of course, be fascinated to hear whatever evidence can be found to indicate how DNA first came to exist. After that, all is trivial and guaranteed.

Yup, e.g. creationism.

Thereby disproving the existence of god :)

Publish a convincing case; you'll win a Nobel Prize.

Well I didn't intend to insult you, and it isn't apparent that you are a creationist. I interpreted the original post as amazement rather than skepticism.

But what explanations are there that don't involve randomness and selection?

It sounds like hypothesis rather than dogma, but it seems clear that if there is junk it would replicate.

How DNA came into existence is indeed a big unanswered question.

But DNA didn't "get programmed".

It doesn't make it less absurd; it is merely another mechanism.

Mutation and selection isn't neo-Darwinian. It is Darwinian.

Oh, dear lord. The irony gave me a belly laugh!

But there's lots of quantitative reasons to think it's not sufficient. No feasible, even if improbable, explanation should be mocked when there is no demonstrably correct explanation.

Most of the scientific establishment mocked Pasteur, Watson and Crick, Townes, Einstein.

People are literally afraid of considering any ideas that they think might somehow encourage creationists. That's lame.

If someone posted a rational explanation, people would not be adverse to discuss it. But it does need to be rational and at least have some aspect of science behind it.

You assume that the only thing that could design our form of life is our form of life. Maybe it's not all turtles.

Certainly current theories of evolution assume that simpler forms preceded complex forms.

Why is it with John you always have to wait for the other shoe to drop?

There are lots of places in the universe with no DNA, it's possible there are no others. The folks who don't exist in these other places aren't discussing it. You got lucky.

Cheers

Go read "The Blind Watchmaker", then come back.

Ah. The "Einstein was mocked and turned out to be great" so "I am mocked and therefore I am great" belief of the snowflakes that were never criticised as kids.

I expect more from you than that!

Nope.

They are afraid of being associated with wingnut creationists that don't (can't? won't?) understand scientific methods, usually for dogmatic reasons.

No, I don't.

But when I was 7yo I worked out that "doubting" Thomas was right to insist on feeling the stigmata before believing Christ had risen from the dead.

So, yes, I demand evidence rather than unsupported fantasies.

On average, yes. But it is far from monotonic and evolution neither predicts nor requires monotonic progression from simplicity to complexity.

There have been many more complex forms that have died out when more simple (whatever that means) lifeforms have continued.

So instead, you assume that completely out of the blue, a Creator just magically appeared who was capable of designing this, and that's not an even crazier thought?

Right. You see that doesn't even start to answer the problem of origins.

Clifford Heath.

Turing machines, computability. It's been proved that every Turing-complete computer can simulate every other one. The DNA mechanism is a Turing-complete computer. That means that what "our form of life" can be simulated by any other form of life that's also Turing complete. So it's possible that some of the turtles are frogs and some are lizards, but it's still reptiles (Turing machines) all the way down.

Read "Godel, Escher, Bach" and you'll understand what these machines are, what formal systems are, and why life and computation fit together in this way.

Yes; and the apparently "uphill" progress has been explained; all these "uphill" steps increase dissipation, the rate of energy usage. Anything that dissipates the available energy source faster tends to dominate over the slower processes and so win out - so it's not really "uphill".

Clifford Heath.

Again, one of the whole aims of "Godel Escher Bach" is to show that every possible improvement in such a defense mechanism just increases the attack surface of corner cases. The more sophisticated a system becomes in its own defense, the more ways there are to attack it.

There are primitive organisms that only have RNA, no DNA at all. That pretty-much eliminates your argument here.