nonrandom mutations

"Sort of intelligence"? I think we know where the "sort of" intelligence is showing.

Yeah, it makes some sense that mutation rates could be different for different segments of the genetic material. The chemistry behind life is amazingly complex and organisms work with another level on top of the actual chemistry. So it is conceivable that the repair enzymes are modified in their actions on different segments.

Most of the control mechanisms in organisms is in the form of reactions that are moderated by other reactions. So it makes sense that the mechanism of replicating DNA is itself under moderation at and exquisitely fine detail. Some genes require more rapid modification to adapt to the environment while other genes need to be steadfastly conserved.

Life is as much about adaptation as it is the basic day to day functioning. Many lifeforms have appeared, but many don't last so long because they are not good at adapting as was required.

I wonder if we will ever have complete catalogs of genetic makeups through evolution?

It isn't. Random mutations can produce changes that make mutations in a particular area more likely. If the extra mutations prove helpful - averaged over the entire population - that variation will be positively selected and come to dominate in that particular population.

Most mutations are damaging, and get selected out, so it's not exactly an intelligent approach. You lose more kids, but some of the rest have got better protection against malaria, which they can pass on.

Evolution can certainly incorporate disparate phenomena, but the 'beneficial' judgment is rarely clear. Finding a branch of the tree of life with a region of more or less randomness is possible, but it could be something as simple as a toxin sticking to a particular site instead of a random site on the genetic material. That's catalysis of a sort, not an evolution of 'evolution itself'. It could merely be some local trace chemisty.

The results as reported are intriguing, but not really earthshattering. There's more than one hypothesis that makes sense of the HbS data.

==============================

** Must be bastard inside them genes.

( apologies to Fred Hoyle ... )

...... Phil

In that case, judging from the results, it is a very poor intelligence! As others have noted, you really don't understand evolution.

You need to understand the distinction between "sufficient" and "necessary".

Random mutation is sufficient but not necessary. Any form of mutation is sufficient, e.g. copying error, cosmic ray, etc etc.

You don't like trees or bees or yourself?

Or they don't.

Given two competing species, one with sufficient genetic mechanisms and one with better mechanisms, the better one wins and the sufficient becomes extinct.

Randomness is a second-rate design technique. Intelligence is better.

The insistance that changes to the genome must be random, is weird.

Viruses deliberately redesign our genome to their benefit. Why can't we deliberately change our genome to our benefit?

Did you actually read the article? There is no such implication whatsoever. That is completely in your imagination (and shared in the imagination of religious "god-guided evolution" believers and misnamed "intelligent design" fans).

The article mainly says that they found malaria-resistant mutations were more common in Africa than Europe. That is consistent with "plain old evolution" - the selective pressure is higher where there is more malaria.

It also suggests that there are additional mechanisms at play that affect the mutations - something akin to Lamarckin evolution, meaning that the mutations are influenced by the experiences of your ancestors, not just in terms of whether they produce viable offspring or not. In other words, you are more likely to have a mutation against malaria if your parents had (and survived) the disease.

The idea of trans-genetic or epigenetic inheretence is not actually something new, or even controversial for modern biology. There's a lot we don't know about the details involved, and it is actively researched. It doesn't seem reasonable to suppose this influences the inherited genetic code directly, but it can certainly influence the activation of the inherited genes - and that again can affect things further down the line.

Basically, we know how the principles of evolution work. We know how natural selection works. We know that the prime source of "blueprint" is the genetic code, and we know the main mechanisms of how that is passed on, combined, and mutated. But there are a range of minor effects in the process that are being discovered.

There is not enough detail in the article to indicate if the researchers here have support for new ideas - there seems to be a suggestion of the genome carrying additional "real-time" information to the offspring. That won't happen for the female side of the genome, since that is fixed when the egg cells are formed before the female child is born. But it is conceivable that it could happen through the male line. I am not convinced by the article - it seems more likely that the journalist who wrote it misunderstood (just as they misunderstood current mainstream understanding of genetics and evolution).

Still, no one was even hinting at the idea that there is "intelligence" behind any of it.

Or your own favourite animal - the straw man?

Some others do, you don't. This is a well-established fact. You are a fine example of the Dunning-Kruger effect - you know a lot about certain fields, but only a tiny bit about biology (and many other fields). You simply /believe/ that you are an expert in other fields because you don't understand how little you know.

That is over-simplified to the point of being wrong.

And strawberry ice-cream is better than apples - yet strawberry ice-cream does not grow on trees.

Evolution with random genetic mutations but with intelligent guided selection instead of natural selection exists - we call it "selective breeding", and it has given us all our food crops and domesticated animal breeds. These days, even the genetic mutations are done intelligently by genetic manipulation, rather than trial and error.

Yes, if you have an intelligent agent you can get faster results. You can also plan desired targets and guide towards it, unlike natural selection.

That does not mean you find such "intelligent design" in nature. On the contrary, there is absolutely /no/ evidence of it, and plenty of evidence that evolution has been downright stupid.

No, it is simple and obvious.

Viruses don't deliberately do anything.

Natural evolution does not deliberately do anything.

Humans - as an intelligent species acting from the outside - can deliberately change our own genomes. That is know as genetic engineering. It is done using big labs, by highly qualified scientists and based on a vast amount of knowledge and experience built up over many generations of scientists.

Viruses, on the other hand, are small bundles of RNA or DNA code surrounded by a shell of proteins and lipids. You may like to compare your own knowledge and intelligence to that of a microbe, but others are more realistic.

That doesn't follow. You are beginning to sound very like Flyguy.

No. We know that you don't understand evolution - you make it clear at regular intervals. We also know that you are much too vain to admit it.

Not necessarily. The one that ends up with the genome that works better is the one that survives. How it got to that better functioning mechanism is irrelevant.

But it does involve having information about what you are designing for. The only information that the genome has is about what has worked in the past - it doesn't store any information about the environments in which it worked better, or how.

Intelligence does need stored information to work on.

The idea that they could be anything but random is much weirder.

Virus don't deliberately do anything - they don't have any kind of processing mechanism to allow them to deliberate, or any kind of data storage to given them something to deliberate on.

We are finally in a position where we could change our own genome - not your genome or my genome - but the genome of some more less human organism, most of whose genome might still be human, and close enough to regular human beings that interbreeding might still be possible after they'd grown up, if they grew up.

The potential for screwing up the changes is very high.

Our current genomes produce miss-carriages in about 30% of all pregnancies, so they aren't all that wonderful.

The point wasn't that there was more selection in malarial places, but the the related mutation rates are higher.

As it says in the headline, this is directly contrary to the dogma of neo-Darwinism, specifically that mutations are only random.

Then it might not be doing that well. The most commonly-known mutation which affects the incidence of severe illness and death from malaria is sickle-cell disease. The distortion of the red blood cells caused by this genetic mutation is said to offer protection against malaria, as the parasite cannot utilise the distorted RBC in its reproductive cycle.

According to

, in 2017 there were 219 million cases of malaria globally, leading to 435,000 deaths. In other words, a death rate of about 0.2%. According to , in 2015 the death rate from sickle cell disease was about 2.6% (114,800 in 4.4 million cases). Figures vary according to the source, but overall it appears that the death rate from sickle cell disease is about 10 times that of malaria. So although it might help to stop you dying from malaria, you are more likely to die from other causes.

I was surprised by these figures, and would be pleased to find I've got them wrong and sickle-cell disease really does result in a lower death rate than malaria.

What /are/ you wittering about?!

True, but irrelevant - and not necessary for evolution.

Nobody has insisted that.

Humans change genomes via selective breeding and, soon, genetic manipulation.

"Deliberately redesign"? Don't be silly; that would require understanding and intelligence.

So your statement could have /some/ validity iff you regard viruses as intelligent.

We will soon be able to. Future tense.

That is their current idea, but there is no details to show why they think that or how they might have measured it.

If they /really/ are seeing this effect, then it is certainly interesting - but still it is nothing more than a detail and a minor effect, and nothing we have not seen before in other organisms. Bacteria in particular have well-established mechanisms for increasing their mutation rates when under pressure. If they have seen something similar in humans, then that's another detail in the complex science of biology, but it is not revolutionary.

No, it is not. It is perhaps contrary to the over-simplified misunderstandings that many people have, including the journalist who wrote the article. It is perhaps also contrary to the misunderstandings many people have about what the word "random" means.

(Science does not have "dogma". Religion has dogma. Science works when understandings change and new ideas improve upon or replace old ones. Long-established and long understood scientific concepts take a great deal of evidence to change them, but they are not dogma.)

Aren't they both examples of random mutations? I could think of copying errors being different at different locations in the genome, but is there any evidence of that? Cosmic rays are pretty much guaranteed to be random although the repair mechanism could work at different levels of effectiveness at different sites. However, copying error and cosmic rays are examples of mechanisms while "random" mutations is a description. Even if there is some bias around location on the genome, pretty much all mutations are random. I suppose there are chemically induced mutations that can be site specific and so not random.

I think the problem is you are looking at the world human population as a single homogeneous gene pool, it's not by a long shot. Malaria doesn't affect large portions of the world. So world wide statistics can't be expected to show what you are looking for.

snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

And that which you am is total retard.

One copy of the sicle gene is advantageous against malaria. That means it benefits many people without causing illness.

If that were not so, the sickle gene would be eliminated by evolution.

"Due to the adaptive advantage of the heterozygote, the disease is still prevalent, especially among people with recent ancestry in malaria-stricken areas, such as Africa, the Mediterranean, India, and the Middle East.[59] Malaria was historically endemic to southern Europe, but it was declared eradicated in the mid-20th century, with the exception of rare sporadic cases.[60]"

Wiki

Yes, just as the gene mutations for short-sightedness have been eliminated by evolution since they have no benefits but cause problems.

Oh, wait, it turns out that evolution is not quite that simple. Perhaps there isn't a "guiding intelligence" after all?

Evolution has complex interactions. It is /not/ "survival of the fittest". Natural selection selecting particular advantageous traits works faster than for deselecting disadvantageous traits (this is a result of the randomness and selection pressure).

Now, it might well be that the benefits of a single copy of the sickle gene outweigh the disadvantages of having two copies - I don't know the figures. But it is most certainly not guaranteed by evolution. Nor is there the remotest guarantee that the sickle gene mutation is the "best" solution - it could just as well be the case that a different mutation would have given better protection against malaria with fewer side-effects, but random chance has given people this one.

I'm near-sighted. It's a huge advantage for me.

You can argue with Wikipedia on that one. Maybe it's a coincidence that the sickle gene is common in places with mlaria.