DNA animation

No one said anything about it not working. The speed is the issue. Diffus ion is not directed and not fast. The Brownian motion seen in the video is the basis of the random movements of various reactants. New bases are not "propelled" as the video seems to show. It actually shows bases streaming into the work area as if forced into a funnel. Most quantum mechanical fo rces are much shorter range than that.

What four way branch does quantum mechanics provide?

My concern is simply the rate at which the bases arrive at the reaction sit e. In general chemical reactions there are N of one reactant and M of anot her reactant bouncing around and periodically bump into one another in a wa y that results in the reaction. DNA replication requires the bases to bump into a relatively few reaction sites for the enzymes to attach them to the newly forming strand. Much less likely and so a lower rate.

Why would you think that? At every stage, the eye has to be better than the ones the competitors are using, otherwise it's the competitors - and their eyes - who survive to represent the next step in the process

John Larkin claims to believe in evolution, but obviously doesn't understand how it works.

Retinal degeneration is problem that shows up at ages when childbearing and child raising is long past. Darwinian evolution doesn't have a lot of leverage then.

The human genome contains three billion base pairs, not thirty billion.

I thought it was an FPGA, but that seemed a bit odd for the resulting circuit features.

The Fever Monument - Poem by Richard Brautigan

I walked across the park to the fever monument. It was in the center of a glass square surrounded by red flowers and fountains. The monument was in the shape of a sea horse and the plaque read We got hot and died.

But each incremental step must be an improvement or it won't be selected. So how can evolution build an immensely complex system, where all the pieces have to be working before any of it it can work (and reproduce itself) ?

DNA is useless without a complex machinery to support and use and copy it; see the video. But DNA is programmed to build all those support things. How could that happen? Where did the programming come from?

It isn't terrible but it is nothing like well designed. It is just about good enough for the purpose of keeping a hominid omnivore alive.

Not every change is for the better either but the ones that are get to survive and reproduce combining in different ways with each successive generation. How hard is that to understand?

Humans have done it to domestic dogs and livestock pretty much since we stopped being hunter gatherers. Playing god with the traits we considered most desirable in them and selective breeding. The selection pressure being what we consider useful/pretty rather than predation.

Oh wow! A pretty picture taken out of context. How interesting!

Why would a designer equip us with such a botched design having already got it right in cephalopods? We have a blind spot where the nerve bundle enters the eye. They do not. Ours is a considerably worse design.

It is pretty much the difference between a bog standard cheap and nasty webcam design and a thinned rear window astronomical CCD camera.

Our eye is just about good enough to keep us from getting killed by things that can see better - nothing special in terms of resolution with raptors 3-5x better or sensitivity with night predators 2-3x better.

Most of it is lousy and slow. There are as ever a few exceptions that prove the rule.

I have known several lecturers do the oxy-acetylene mix into washup water to make explosive foam. It quite literally raised the roof in one or two places with displaced ceiling tiles raining down on the audience.

LOX on cotton wool was another favourite explosive demo.

Most evolutionary algorithms seek a pre-defined goal, and have metrics for measuring progress along the way. This is intelligent design for sure.

Critters don't quite work that way.

There have been attempts at automated, evolutionary topological (not just value tuning) circuit design, with hilarious results. Even value tuning of a given circuit is hazardous.

In the absence of a pre-defined goal, the implicit goal is survival.

This has been reproduced time and time again, even with extremely simple computational models (cellular automata where each cell runs its code, interacts with its neighbors, and reproduces under natural selection conditions). After thousands of generations, some "species" seems to take over; then after a while with no change, random mutations accumulate to cause another tipping point and speciation occurs.

It's really quite obvious. If a thing ceases to exist, it ceases to exist. It can only continue to persist if it persists. In the presence of competition, we call this natural selection.

Tim

The term you're looking for is "self-awarewolves".

Tim

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How can you not understand this? Every detail of DNA replication is not re quired for it to work. Or earlier versions of enzymes might have done the job, but not as well. I don't have any specifics, but I recall reading abo ut enzyme evolution that has improved disease resistance among populations. Small changes provide small improvements. Are you one of those people wh o think the human eye could not have developed through evolution? If you l ook around you can see the various stages of development in other species. I seem to recall Planaria have "eye spots" which are just photosensitive t issue without other features except for having two of them on opposite side s of their center line and so slanted slightly apart.

It's not hard to imagine how the eye developed in thousands or even million s of tiny steps. the green and blue receptors are thought to be an evoluti onary result from a number of very small changes in the genes.

Of course they do. The predefined goal is survival. It's always about survival.

Yep, much like evolution in nature.

Its entirely reasonable to try and find the simplest possible canonical thing that can be said to meet the minimum requirements for "life".

They can only reproduce by hijacking the cellular apparatus of a suitable host. They sit in the DMZ between life and non-life.

Viroids specific to plants are even smaller and still less like life. They are in essence small loops of RNA that catalyse making copies of themselves once they find the right host.

Shortest are under 500 base pairs and they are infectious agents for the very specific plant that they target. Transposons are even more curious.

They are very much a double edged sword.

That is a simplification more for clarity. It would be a mess if all the other molecules jostling for position were also shown. I expect it is truly diffusion limited if there is a long sequence of just one base.

I'm struggling to find an explanation that isn't far too mathematical but this is the best I have been able to find in a quick search.

I know there is a better one somewhere that showed how well you could do with anything up to 4 quantum comparison branches nested but its URL eludes me. It is more than a decade since I last looked at this stuff.

In a handwaving sort of way a qubit can represent 2 conventional bits at once. This is a little bit more technical without going overboard:

All the other treatments I can find use advanced inpenetrable notation for generalised rotations which have a steep learning curve. I know there was a nice table for comparisons somewhere but right now I can't find it.

DNA replicase enzymes work remarkably well.

Survival and reproduction. Unless the individual with the novel feature survives to reproduce then the trait is lost to subsequent generations.

What was stunning was how quickly even relatively trivial genomes would converge on the right solution for their environment (or they all died). I did program one or two such simulations used in teaching genetics long before virtual fruit fly. Hercules graphics card which dates it.

Start with random genomes. Starve them for a while and they evolve to sweep maximum area for food then add a Garden of Eden where the living is easy and some quickly evolve to loop around inside it.

Zap the garden of Eden again and they either adapt or expire.

You get boom and bust behaviour and catastrophic losses when they overwhelm the capacity of the Garden of Eden to provide for them too.

It was astonishing how such a simple model had such complex behaviour.

I was at the Royal Institution as a sixth former, and the demo was detonating stoichometric mixtures of gases and oxygen.

The finale was a (glass) 1 pint milk bottle of acetylene and oxygen. There was a deafening explosion, two of the surrounding safety shields (reinforced glass and a lab stool!) were broken, and the glass bottle was reduced to glass /dust/.

Chemistry was fun, back then.

As you intimate, it may apply - but we don't know how (yet).

That's too simplistic. "Living" is a very fuzzy concept and has very fuzzy and changing definitions.

I doubt that! Speculations are cheap and easy - and therefore ultimately boring.

For example David Icke (ex footballer and sports announcer) speculates. His speculations are that an inter-dimensional race of shape-shifting reptilians have hijacked the earth.

I meant 50 years after there is decent evidence has been provided. Einstein not wanting to believe quantum theory, and all that.

Why would variation and selection result in an extraordinally complex and optically inferior eye, when squid had a better one already?

Not quite.

Incremental steps that are worse become deselected.

Not the same thing at all.

DNA is not "programmed"; there is no "programmer".

All that counts is the survival of the selfish gene, and humans (both individually and as a species) are one of many mechanisms ensuring that survival.