Self replicating and evolving RNA molecule created

Oh, I think "think" was apposite; "reason" wouldn't have been.

Even those in insane asylums "think".

Yeah, he does tend to fall back on "argument by personal incredulity", which most of us find unsatisfying and try to avoid.

Which can, of course, be compared and contrasted with Larkin's beliefs that none of us have imagination and new ideas.

It shows that you are not the only clicking old hen in SED who doesn't design electronics.

All sorts of people can find buddies. It takes no skill.

SED is dying. People who are good at electronic design are repulsed by the squabbling hens who can't.

That might be a form of evolution, but it isn't Darwinian evolution.

Darwinian evolution /is/ random mutation plus natural selection.

The "intelligent designer" fraternity used to claim that about eyes, livers, etc.

We know better now.

On a sunny day (Wed, 23 Mar 2022 08:22:36 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Anthony William Sloman snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote in snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

There is actually a 2021 update to that, they added 19 genes back to the cell, 7 of which are needed for normal cel division. from NIST:

Darwin himself didn't know the source of variation. The neo-Darwinists have insisted that it must be random mutations to genes. They are also hostile to any Lamarckian effects, which could surely be useful thus encouraged by evolution.

Part of the hostility to alternate ideas is the need to not be accused of even slightly trending in the direction of causation or even complexity. That's a barbed-wire fence against unpermitted thinking.

Being in the design business, I am fascinated by how common is hostility to playing with ideas.

Non-Darwinian evolution, jumping genes, epigenetics were not much welcomed.

I need to read this:

Correct - as illustrated by the sentence "Darwinian evolution is random mutation plus natural selection".

We have subsequently discovered genes (and more) as the mechanism of heredity. Random changes are a /sufficient/ mechanism for Darwinian evolution, even though "intelligent designer" fraternity can't get their heads around it.

No mechanism has been discovered, and it is not /necessary/ for Darwinian evolution.

The hostility is against alternate ideas that have already been considered in detail, and found wanting.

Alternate ideas - when they make predict and explain new effects - are sought after, since they can lead to reward and recognition.

Having said that, they may take a generation to become established wisdom, and that's no bad thing.

Irrelevant.

Indeed. But where they are needed to explain effects, they are acknowledged and used.

You need to persevere with trying to understand the subtle arguments and refutations in "The Blind Watchmaker".

You already possess it.

That's the key. Pick some irrelevant numbers. Do some irrelevant calculations with them. Rinse and repeat until you get a number you like. Call it "math" (since Larkin is American). If reality doesn't fit Larkin's ideas, that's reality's problem.

I haven't bothered trawling the archives for every post of yours citing "intelligent DNA", "alien robots", and whatever other nonsense you have said that all amounts to "God did it". (Maybe you didn't read that link and you still don't see the connection?)

Tell us about /yours/.

I live and work by scientific principles, I don't work as a professional scientist. That means I /don't/ do experiments when there are others who do them better and publish their results. Science works by cooperation - no one has a hope of ever learning more than a tiny fraction of scientific knowledge. It is important that experiments are duplicated to reduce the risk of errors (intentional or unintentional), but it's rare for people to have much to contribute to research outside their particular field. That does not hinder people like me from learning about many fields of science.

Yes, I work. Have you ever tried it?

We knew better before, too. As Darw """ [R]eason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. """

Larkin simply has no imagination.

I read that, and The Selfish Gene. They were qualitative, repetitious, and boring. A few pages could have made all his points. Hardly subtle.

Dawkins is a self-admitted agressive atheist. That corrals all his thinking.

Darwin didn't know how inherited traits were passed on, or how mutations occurred. All he knew - and all he needed to know - was that traits /were/ inherited, and random mutations /do/ occur.

That first part is not entirely true. (The second is - Lamarckian evolution is not necessary.) In organisms such as humans, where early development is within the environment of a parent, epigenetic effects occur as do other environmental factors - the lifestyle of the mother can affect the expression of genes in the child, and this can be passed down. But it is a minor effect, in that it is usually only for the one generation (such as the child of a smoking mother often being of poorer health than average).

Exactly. Some ideas get rejected on the first pass, others get kept for further consideration. If you don't sort your ideas, you get bogged down in nonsense that leads nowhere. The hostility here is not towards ideas in general, it is towards repeated and pointless obsession with worthless ideas that do not match reality.

And given the quality of Larkin's ideas here, unsurprising.

Eh? Jumping genes and epigenetics are part of Darwinian evolution. They are just additional complications to the mechanisms of biological evolution as we have it in life on earth - they fit within standard Darwinian evolution. They don't fit neatly within the simple model of getting your traits via genes from your parents - but biologists are used to things being more complicated when examined more closely.

I had a quick check - it is edited by Mae-Wan Ho:

She's even famous enough to be on RationalWiki:

Cofounder of an "interest" group that publishes "fringe articles" on climate change, homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine and "water memory". Being on the "Quackwatch list of questionable organisations" is not great credentials.

Now, I'm sure she has also done plenty of good work, and it's good for society to have people that are openly and actively sceptical to things like genetic engineering - whether what she says is right or wrong, it's important to make sure researchers think about and justify the ethics and risks of what they do and not get carried away in their enthusiasm.

But for a layperson like Larkin, who is missing an understanding of mainstream science in a field, it is unhelpful to read work by such an outlier. You need to understand - but not necessarily agree with - standard viewpoints before it makes sense to consider alternative views.

Mechanisms that aren't 'natural' are ... man-made? As an origin story for life, 'a man made it' is certain to be mocked, as it gets cause and effect in the wrong temporal order.

If you ever met your parents, you know part of your origin story. You may expect never to know ALL of it. When there's billions of links in a chain, historic records will miss a few recent links, and many old ones.

Why does 'is useful' show up in a chain of random occurrences? By hypothesis, random variations include nonuseful ones. If they didn't, they wouldn't be random.

Ach. I never bothered to understand Lamarkian evolution in detail since it has debunked and superseded by Darwinian evolution.

My understanding of Lamarkian effects is limited to the example of a giraffe wanting to grow its neck so it could reach higher leaves.

Life is too short to knowingly consider failed concepts in detail, other as an interesting curiosity.

I prefer to make /new/ mistakes, not repeat known old mistakes.

And, contrary to Larkin's preferences, such mechanisms are being studied in detail in order to explain effects that aren't well explained by schoolkid inheritance==genes.

That seems like Darwin exercising his imagination, while acknowledging that he hadn't assembled sufficient hard evidence.

Hard evidence came from later generations.

I'll add

John Larkin's "get out of jail free card". He likes to think that he designs his electronics, when everything he posts suggests that he evolves his new circuits in a depressingly Darwinian way, and doesn't understand when other people talk about actual circuit design.

You Cursitor Doom, Flyguy and John Doe do seem to form such a group. I hope you will be very happy together.

It doesn't seem to be dying. You can't do electronic design or rational thinking of any useful kind, feel hurt when this is pointed out, and lash out with unpleasant and irrational assertions.

Popeye ate spinach to build up his muscles. You need to find some kind of brain food. What you are at the moment is a spiteful twit.

This is actually system design nonsense. "Prototyping" depends on you knowing that your current prototype is different from your other prototypes, and no cell has any information about where it differs from it's ancestors.

Nothing. AI has a database of failed attempts. Cells can only say "I am what I am".

Cross-correlation is correlating one data sequence with another. The cell has only got one data sequence, it's own.

If each cell came with a library of previous trial versions, there would be a possibility of comparing new options with choices that had been made in the past. There's no such lbrary.

John Larkin can't do system design, so doesn't realise that there isn't any design documentation in the cellular data base. Modifications aren't documented - they just happen and the survivors are the only record of the revision.

Your "other suggestions" are mocked because they are hopelessly inept.

But the original minimal reproduction mechanism does seem to have been RNA based, and some of the complex support mechanism is still RNA based. Wittering on about DNA is clear evidence of a very superficial insight into the subject.

Viruses use reverse transcription to insert their genome into a host's DNA, who then builds move viruses. RT is used to make cells produce useful products like insulin.

Why would we allow RT to work if all it does is enable viruses?

Is viral evolution smarter than our own evolution? Why wouldn't we use RT to beneficial effect?

We probably do. Evolution demands it. If you want to call such effects non-Lamarckian, well that's just your definition.

Insulin is a protein, DNA isn't.

You've just said that reverse transcription is used to build insulin (which is probably wrong) which would be a useful activity.

This is a Flyguy level inanity.

Evolutiojn isn't smart - it is merely persistent. If reverse transcription hasn't been selected out - which is to say disabled by a random mutation - it probably is doing something useful, and viruses have chanced on the capacity to exploit it.

Evolution doesn't "demand" anything. It just happens. Lamark's fault was to suggest that evolutionary changes were goal-directed, which falls down on the fact that nothing that evolves has any idea of where it came from or where it is going. It can either survive and reproduce, or die before it can reproduce.

That's enough to produce a long series of changes that can look goal-directed after the event, but each change is merely a random difference that has survived.

On a sunny day (Wed, 23 Mar 2022 21:58:31 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Anthony William Sloman snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote in snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

It is probably not 'random' at all I mentioned how atoms formed and molecules, all obey some laws of nature, electrons and positrons and neutrons do not 'randomly' combine but always form specific constellation.

All are 'conscious' as to have preferences and 'feel' the interaction with other particles and from that form a 'societies' of particles... ever more complex ... to fabrics, metals .. etc life is not a 'random' (so you can do the math and give a 'probability number') thing but a natural combining process that will keep combining things including us and what will be next,

And from that POV all is simple and logical. We take too much credit for what we do / did invent:-) Its all in the game.

Look at the link I gave to the fruit flies changes in genome over many generation adapting to circumstances ... passing changes on genetically..