DNA animation

Around 8% of men and 0.1% of women, IIRC.

But initially RNA fragments are easier to make. Prior to that there is a conjecture that an even simpler sugar may have played its part.

RNA is slightly too good to be anything other than the product of even earlier evolution playing out at a molecular level.

RNA still isn't very stable so things that are still based on RNA today like viruses tend to vary a lot more than eukaryotes that have DNA based genomes. I presume it was better than pre-RNA though since we don't see any evidence of life forms on Earth using other sugars today.

It is always going to be the case that if you go back far enough the emergence of life will be rather blurred. Chances are that RNA with some other sugar(s), phosphate and a lot of time can eventually perform all required functions to become self replicating in the right environment.

There are various factions of RNA-world - this isn't a bad introduction:

In particular it is worth reading the footnote about the possibility that RNA itself was the product of evolution. Prior to RNA-world there was possibly a simpler sugar backbone using therose instead TNA-world which then got supplanted by RNA. Both structures have the right characteristics to be able to make autocatalytic molecules and enzymes.

Scientists are prepared to change their minds when new evidence comes along. But ultimately nature is the final arbiter. The experimentalists are getting close to being able to design life forms from scratch.

--
Regards, 
Martin Brown

Some junk DNA is recognisable as stuff that retroviruses have inserted. So long as it doesn't cause harm it replicates along with the good stuff.

And it does tend to accumulate in the nucleus.

A human genome has about 30 billion base pairs. *BUT*

The largest known plant genome as of 2010 is Paris Japonica which so shocked the researchers that they had to double check its sequencing.

150 bn base pairs 50x that of a human and for a plant that is fragile slow and difficult to grow. There might even be a bigger one by now.

The marbled catfish comes second in the race for longest genome at

130bn base pairs. A bit better at what it does than the plant.

Some of that has to be junk! If it were all there by intelligent design and not chance why isn't that plant walking around eating us?

--
Regards, 
Martin Brown

It was in an FPGA -- think the goal was to make an oscillator, without any particular design constraints as we would think. I don't recall if outputs driving outputs were prohibited, or if it went ahead with such abuse regardless.

The result was very fragile too, AFAIK.

Fragility seems very normal with evolutionary systems, including with neural networks, and life itself.

Consider how many stupid edge-cases there are in terms of environment (oh, you got slightly too hot and died), chemistry (oh, you ate the wrong thing and died), adversarial evolution (oh, you contracted the wrong virus and died), even just stimuli (oh, you watched the wrong video and it triggered PTSD symptoms).

There are numerous examples of carefully crafted images to confuse or defeat neural networks; and perhaps fewer for advanced biological networks (e.g., human eyes), but one might argue optical illusions and Captchas are examples.

And good old fashioned camoflauge, which varies in quality but the most sophisticated really doesn't count as confusion so much as completely blending in, minimizing your signal as much as possible, with respect to any analysis method at all. The, well, perhaps even more sophisticated, but in a more minimalist sense -- camoflauge works on failures of simpler analysis methods. Bright animal patterns, WWI "dazzle" ships, etc. are probable examples of this.

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs, LLC 
Electrical Engineering Consultation and Design 
Website: https://www.seventransistorlabs.com/

That is for the most common form of R-G colour blindness (which is sex linked on the X chromosome). Other forms are not so simple.

In the days before thermal IR cameras the people who could tell live trees from cut down branches being used as camoflage were very handy.

--
Regards, 
Martin Brown

Another thing creationists are ignorant about -- design itself is a sloppy, iterative, random process, hardly distinguishable from ordinary evolution when done at sufficient scale.

It's nice to look at a watch, shiny and perfect, and think it's a good design. But that's one, very purposefully shiny endpoint, from a very messy learning process. You don't see all the rough and messy prototypes, you don't see the challenging days spent learning the subject, you don't see the many scribblings of the design process. If these things were visible, would "design" really sound so appealing, after all?

We observe the same thing in nature. From the highest level ecosystems to the lowest level proteins, we see janky "design" all over. Nothing has particularly high fitness for its habitat, it's mostly just that nothing of greater fitness has yet displaced it.

If creationists/IDers knew these underlying facts, they would have to face a deeply inconvenient truth -- either:

1. They deny something unpalatable but true, or
2. The "god" they believe in, is deeply flawed, a hack of a "designer".

Personally, I'd rather think, if there is a god, it's a lazy engineer. It created a system that evolves, and sits back and watches it go. What could be better?

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs, LLC 
Electrical Engineering Consultation and Design 
Website: https://www.seventransistorlabs.com/

Statements like that remind me of a demo of oxy-acetylene welding at school. Teacher: "And finally, you have to remember to turn off the gasses in the right order."... BANG... "Oh, perhaps it was the other order...".

Mike.

Statistically invalid. Cherry picked for publication. Not reproducible. Faked.

It is if it's faked.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Well, duh, anything that you don't know now is "outside the universe as we know it." Your opportunities for discovery, or amazement, are small.

I suppose it's fundamental that people who never have ideas are usually hostile to ideas.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Rocket engines must burn wood pellets or something.

The Sprint missile went from launch to 7500 MPH in five seconds, but that was solid fuel.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Yes. They are very different issues. Darwinian evolution probably doesn't apply to the origins issue.

It's a beautiful system and a beautiful problem. If it doesn't all work, none of it works. And the only thing that can manufacture a living cell is a living cell.

I'm not a biologist, but I can speculate as well as most of them can. Maybe better.

It may take a lot longer than 50 years. We may never know how the universe, or life, started.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Why would incremental evolution go through a large number of iterations to produce a "terrible design" human eye? Each step would make it worse, and the final, immensely complex, result would be a competitive disadvantage.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

many other programs. The only mystery there is why anybody takes it serious ly.

"Just"... casual use of a four letter word. I would not give consciousness the time of day except for my personal experience with it. I can't know t hat anyone else is actually conscious or not. But I know I am. Consciousn ess is my experience. Not sure how to address that with science.

--

  Rick C. 

  ---- Get a 1,000 miles of free Supercharging 
  ---- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

150e9/30e9 = 5

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Really? There are people who claim viruses are not life? I don't know what they think viruses are then.

--

  Rick C. 

  ---+ Get a 1,000 miles of free Supercharging 
  ---+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

No organism ever evolve, what evolves is just the recipe for the next one. In most cases a minor failure, rarely a fatal one, very rarely a successful mutation.

Best regards, Piotr

So that's your argument... if you can't see the validity of my claim, you must be blind? Way to go. No evidence required!

--

  Rick C. 

  --+- Get a 1,000 miles of free Supercharging 
  --+- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

Not exactly. If people are doing enough experiments, 5% of them are going t o look significant the 5% level. The people doing the experiment and report ing it are reporting what they saw. The 95% of them who didn't get a signif icant effect don't publish, so the few who got lucky don't - initially - re alise that they'd got lucky.

After a while people get to discuss why their experiments didn't work and o ther peoples did, and you start seeing meta-analyses, but it takes a while.

They weren't aware that they were cherry-picking, and didn't have to fake a nything to fall into the trap.

They can be wrong without being faked. "Misleading" is a less loaded piece of invective.

In fact John Larkin was commenting on a the link

which was confined to gene correlation studies in psychiatry.

Gene correlation studies in other branches of medicine can get by with smal ler samples, because often the number of genes involved is small, or the ef fect dramatic.

Is a gene correlation study that wasn't wrong. The single gene involved is rarely defective, but when it is the people carrying the defective have lot s of problems with fine motor control, and can't do speech well.

Most genes of psychiatric interest have very small effects, and there seem to be a lot of them, so you need large populations to look at, and it helps if each participant in the study has had their genome completely sequenced (which only has to be done once to capture all the genes that the investig ators might want to look at).

There haven't been a lot of studies like that done yet but Robert Plomin's "Blueprint" picks up a few.

view

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Not exactly. If people are doing enough experiments, 5% of them are going t o look significant the 5% level. The people doing the experiment and report ing it are reporting what they saw. The 95% of them who didn't get a signif icant effect don't publish, so the few who got lucky don't - initially - re alise that they'd got lucky.

After a while people get to discuss why their experiments didn't work and o ther peoples did, and you start seeing meta-analyses, but it takes a while.

They weren't aware that they were cherry-picking, and didn't have to fake a nything to fall into the trap.

They can be wrong without being faked. "Misleading" is a less loaded piece of invective.

In fact John Larkin was commenting on a the link

which was confined to gene correlation studies in psychiatry.

Gene correlation studies in other branches of medicine can get by with smal ler samples, because often the number of genes involved is small, or the ef fect dramatic.

Is a gene correlation study that wasn't wrong. The single gene involved is rarely defective, but when it is the people carrying the defective have lot s of problems with fine motor control, and can't do speech well.

Most genes of psychiatric interest have very small effects, and there seem to be a lot of them, so you need large populations to look at, and it helps if each participant in the study has had their genome completely sequenced (which only has to be done once to capture all the genes that the investig ators might want to look at).

There haven't been a lot of studies like that done yet but Robert Plomin's "Blueprint" picks up a few.

view

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney