DNA animation

Hardly. There's a lot of room at the bottom. A phrase still as true today as it was half a century ago!

What's insane is people still think this stuff was created in the snap of some magic finger.

Tim

-- Seven Transistor Labs, LLC Electrical Engineering Consultation and Design Website:

But of course! A snap of the middle one...

It is an impressive anination of the the copying and transfer of DNA is actually occurring at a molecular level inside every cell. Thanks for sharing. It is a shame that you cannot be bothered to understand it.

Asking him to understand it is trifle unreasonable - he hasn't got the educ ation on which an understanding might be built. And while we can probably understand the transcription from DNA to messenger RNA (which is presumably what was being animated) the business of getting from there to protein syn thesis is trickier.

It is worth watching to the end. It does show mRNA being created and then follows it to the next stage where it is read and the protein being formed by amino acids. Essentially not unlike a Turing machine.

It also shows the intricacy of the DNA replication process. I hadn't realised that whilst one half of the strand can be copied without any difficulty the other has to be copied by skipping along a loop and then working backwards. The molecular machinery has a preferred direction.

It's a peptide chain at that point. Not many proteins are formed of just one, so when transcription of the assorted bits is done, still "some assembly is required".

Clifford Heath.

On May 8, 2019, John Larkin wrote (in article):

Yes, but that is how it works. It took some billions of years for all that organized complexity to evolve, one trick at a time.

The current general opinion is that the RNA world emerged first, and only later did the DNA world to emerge. The problem with RNA as a genetic store is that it is too error-prone, sharply limiting how big and fancy a critter can be. DNA removed that limitation.

Very interesting video.

Joe Gwinn

It's even crazier that some people think it happened at random. There are math analysies of that, and they involve a lot of zeroes.

And you understand it?

But it couldn't evolve one bit at a time. If it doesn't all work, none of it works. And it builds every bit of itself.

It builds us too, but that's a detail.

Nothing crazy about it. That's what random variation plus selection can manage.

The crazies are the intelligent design fans, who think that an intelligent designer would have gone to all that trouble then not put in any error detection and correction coding.

So what? Three billion base pairs is already quite a few zeros.

He didn't say that. He probably does know enough to know where to look to find out exactly what is going on, and enough to know that it would take a while.

The very first step is probably something like an RNA molecule that can copy itself or catalyse the formation of its own components. Things can bootstrap up from there given geological timescales. The exact details are still unclear but plenty of people are working on the problem.

Eventually. Given about 4.5bn years of evolution.

Actually, that's exactly what it did.

A famous fallacy. Each stage of development has to work, but the successive evolutionary steps can follow any path that works.

Eventually. Haekel said that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny

which happens to be wrong, but in an educational way.

But important to us, at the moment. We clearly need intelligent redesign.

Cell and molecular biology is fascinating... At one time in my youth I thought I wanted to be a biologist. I haven't kept up at all with the subject. Anyone know of some good books?

I found this list,

George H.

I've read several books lately about evolution at the biochemical level. There's a lot of hand waving about the initial origins of life, the accident in the conjectured primordial soup thing. Some math analysies put the probability of that happening, anywhere in the universe any time in the past 12 billion years, so close to zero it would be tiring to type all the digits.

The great mysteries are the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and consciousness. So far we are clueless about all three.

Then you will have heard of RNA-world.

We can haggle about whether life first got started in the proximity of deep water smokers or in a tepid pool somewhere. Self organising redox chemical reactions are very rare but not completely unknown in inorganic chemistry. It isn't that much of a stretch for a particular sequence to occur once that can then take over. RNA instability pretty much guarantees that it will evolve to become better or vanish without trace.

Usually such "analyses" are done by Young Earth Creationists with their own huge axes to grind.

We are not too bad on the origin of the universe. Big bang cosmology works right back to the first 10^-43s or so when physics breaks down.

Biologists are making huge progress with the origin of life. Sequencing entire genomes for species has become almost routine today.

Synthesising designer DNA from scratch is already possible.

Consciousness is the most elusive of the three to pin down. I am inclined to believe that it is an emergent behaviour in a sufficiently complex network of computational elements. Time will tell - computer simulations of the brain are getting closer to being able to match a human and if Moore's law holds for another decade or so will get there.

The most recent attempt I am aware of simulated 1s of 1% of a human brain and took 40 minutes to do it on one of the top supercomputers. They are still about 100x short on capacity and 2400x too slow.

Science progresses by experimenting with nature to see how and why it works. You seek to invoke magyck that merely pushes back the problem to the next layer of the onion with "who designed the designer?".

There's only one force in the universe powerful enough to construct something that complex: evolution. One must either believe that, or believe that there is something impossibly wrong with all known laws of physics*.

(*And I don't just mean the stuff we don't know at the bottom, or the subtle details between things we do. I mean the things that are settled and proven.)

Tim

Plus give us humans clearly "suboptimal" designs when there are better designs available, e.g. the "wiring" between our retina and our brains.