Self replicating and evolving RNA molecule created

And yet you missed all his points.

You make that sound like a bad thing.

It means he /thinks/. People following religious dogma avoid thinking by getting their unquestionable answers presented to them. They are encouraged /not/ to think too deeply, because then they'd see all the inconsistencies and how the answers they've been given don't actually match the questions. Atheists, on the other hand, /do/ get to think, learn and discover things, because they accept that we don't have all the answers.

Some viruses do that, but most do not. Retroviruses are only a small proportion of virus families. (The family includes some big names, like HIV and hepatitis, but it is only one of many different types of virus.)

It is useful in all kinds of artificial genetic modification, as it provides a pathway for altering the DNA of a cell.

Are you really suggesting that the cells of eukaryotes evolved (or were "designed") specifically to enable reverse transcription to work, putting up with some 450 million years of virus infections, just so that one day humans would evolve and advance enough to be able to use RT to make insulin?

Why doesn't the colour blue taste like forgetfulness?

Your words follow the grammatical syntax of English, but are completely void of meaning.

I'm sorry, you don't seem to be using words in the same way other people do.

You've read some books on evolution and genetics, probably mostly by slightly jumbled authors who have particular and peculiar goals - such as trying to sow doubt in conventional understanding so that they can squeeze in their own personal variation of "God did it". From that, you've got some vague understanding of some terms and concepts, you take them out of context, jumble them, add in your weird mental ramblings, subtract everything that sounds mainstream because you feel that limits your ideas, and then you regurgitate the mess on your keyboard.

You read like a Dilbert cartoon where the PHB has read something and then tries to impress people by using big words and technical phrases. Are you /sure/ you are an engineer? I suspect you are really a management consultant or marketing manager.

Nicely put.

The Dilbert/PHB comparison is as valid and amusing as Slowman's better quips :)

How?

John Larkin has this problem with climate change. Anything posted by Anthony Watts strikes John Larkin as unquestionably correct, even though he's part of the climate change denIal propaganda machine.

Agnostics have much the same set of virtues.

On a sunny day (Thu, 24 Mar 2022 00:44:44 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Anthony William Sloman snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote in snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

No, <mutations in DNA are caused by things we experience and are 'consciously' made to increase survival skills>

You could call it 'subconscious' in a human case as you are not normally aware of it. Just like changes in electronics are made by us to try to improve or achieve what we want. All is conscious.

What a load of utter nonsense. Mutations are frequently caused by subatomic particles shooting through the cell and breaking up the DNA helix. It puts itself back together, but not quite the way it was before. There's nothing "conscious" about that.

You couldn't possibly be aware of it. Your cellular machinery doesn't include a DNA sequencing machine.

And frequently don't. Of course we can see the components we are changing, and have some idea what they do. Your cells aren't equipped to monitor their internal components and don't have the kind of processing capacity required to model them.

Really? You seem to be as daft as John Larkin.

On a sunny day (Thu, 24 Mar 2022 05:07:06 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Anthony William Sloman snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote in snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

When you run out of arguments or you fail to read the relevant links or just have lack of understanding of a subject you constantly switch to insults.

You _could_ learn something. J. Larkin is for sure right on some points and actually _designs_ electronics.

So again, we, our DNA, adapts to changed circumstances not in a 'random' way cells experience what they need, are short of, etc that is how people living in in high altitudes adapt fast over a few generations, not by randomly dying. I have things in my DNA that come from things ancestors had to live through and am well aware what those are.

You criticize anything that goes against what you learned to parrot .. When I mention Le Sage you scream like a squeezed cat. That is exactly also what J Larkin meant by how new ideas are received.

Parrots have little added value for us humans.. I have argued (boast boast) against so many ideas dumped on me and so far have been proven right every time. But then again it is clear I was dropped here by flying cup and saucers and you only were dropped by random? birds . (one mutated into a stork) That explains the difference.

So the deeper message is: look what really happens.

:-)

Not exactly. When you have failed to read or understand the relevant literature and make fatuous assertions, you do get told you are wrong.

You may experience this as being insulted, but it isn't a useful reaction. What would be useful if your learned enough to stop making fatuous assertions, but that does seem to be beyond you.

But not from you.

He produces a range of electronic products, and to the extent they are different, they are different designs. Nothing he posts suggest that he designs his new products. it all sounds like a process of trial and error

Some of the people who weren't lucky enough to be carriers of useful mutations do die young. More of them will retreat to lower altitudes.

The population who survives and thrives at the higher altitudes do turn out to carry the useful mutations. Experience - beyond not dying nor suffering from altitude sickness doesn't come into it.

But how did you find out about them?

Because - as a theory - it doesn't work.

Precisely. People who don't know very much get attached to their silly ideas and resent it when it is pointed out how silly they are.

Sadly, you are the parrot here.

To your own complete satisfaction. Flyguy has a similar confidence in his own silly ideas.

It is an explanation. Not one of the ore realistic ones around, but no doubt you find it perfectly satisfactory.

As if you could.

To be fair there are two main routes:

Pure asexual reproduction where the only options are random errors in copying the genome (most of which are either neutral or detrimental) and splicing in of some chunk of useful or harmful DNA by a retrovirus.

In sexual reproduction you have a lot more options.

The default is split each gene and take a one from each parent but sometimes it can go wrong resulting in higher order combinations some of which are incredibly useful (although not necessarily to the organism).

Commercial triploid banana crops and strawberries include high multiplicities of genes coding for the bulk proteins and storage organs in fruit. The price some of them pay for this is no fertile or even no seeds at all so they have to be vegetatively propagated by humans to survive.

His argument is about as plausible as claiming that the ancients could not possibly have built the pyramids or stone henge so therefore aliens must have done it. Von Daniken made a fortune selling such tosh to the credulous and gullible anti-science nutters in the 70's.

It is impressive that the model RNA system they created behaved so well first time.

It tends to suggest that once the first autocatalytic actor that forms in the primordial soup then its progeny gets to inherit the Earth.

ISTR there is a conjecture that the presence of the moon and so lunar month influence on daily tidal range may have played a part in the initial phase of abiogenesis. Isolated rock pools warmed in the sun and concentrated are apparently just right for one of the combination steps.

Because he doesn't understand what incremental means.

Martin Brown wrote: [...]

Daily hot/cold cycles are just what was needed to multiply loose bits of DNA or RNA. It still works that way today in PCR setups. No cells needed, although the medium has to be just right.

Jeroen Belleman

He only had a couple, none original. Maybe you can summarize his many original ideas for us.

Yes. Strong emotions constrain logical thinking.

Why is anti-religious dogma any better than religious? Both put some ideas off-limits.

Because a non-functional complex system is not improved by random mutation and selection.

You start with the simplest systems of all and slowly build ever more complicated systems up from them. Diffusion limited chemical reactions can do quite astonishing things even in purely inorganic chemistry.

You demand that a complex eukaryote springs out of nowhere and insist that the probability of that happening is essentially zero. Fair enough because that is almost certainly *not* how it happened.

The way it happened is that a simple replicator got ever more diverse and complicated. Eventually isolated itself from its environment with a semipermeable lipid membrane so that there was the very first cell.

It was a hell of a long time between the evolution of the most basic archeae and bacteria and the much more complicated eukaryotes. We don't know for sure but the evidence from the way that mitochondrial DNA is entirely inherited along the maternal egg line is that a very long time ago what are now mitochondria (and possibly chloroplasts too) were engulfed by another cell but were not digested and continued to live inside the cell in a symbiotic way to the benefit of both.

This isn't a bad introduction to what is known so far about the early history of life on Earth and the emergence of the first basic prokaryote and then later the more complex cells with a distinct nucleus.

I am suggesting that reverse transcription may be useful, so was not eliminated by evolution. It has been suggested that viruses assist horizontal evolution, for one. I can imagine other uses for RT.

People didn't invent Reverse Transcriptase and we don't have antibodies that destroy it.

Don't discuss, start the mocking. That's what you do to unauthorized ideas.

Killing off the occasional individual is a small price to pay for accelerating species evolution. In that sense, viruses are our friends.

Oops, another idea. Sorrrry.

That's one idea, popular but improbable.

Why are other improbable ideas off-limits?

I have not suggested that he had many ideas. Nor have I suggested that any of his ideas are original. (Nor am I suggesting that he /hasn't/ had many original ideas.)

I merely said you missed his points.

The main point of "The Blind Watchmaker" is that there is no such thing as "irreducible complexity" - complex things can evolve from simple things. Things that might look "all or nothing" at first sight, can develop through evolution. The classic example is the eye. "Intelligent design" fans like to claim "there's no use for half an eye, therefore the eye could not have evolved" - but they are totally and completely wrong, which is easy to demonstrate by looking at the range of currently living organisms with sight organs that are at different places on the path between light-sensitive chemicals and advanced eyes.

That is definitely /not/ an original Dawkins idea - Darwin considered it too, along with every biologist in between.

Apparently, however, it still baffles you.

Atheism is restricted to logical thinking, precisely because it does not accept illogical and unjustified arguments. (It is happy to accept "we don't know".) If you have ever actually read things he has written, or listened to him talk, or watched a Youtube video of him, you'll notice he does not get emotionally worked up or make unsubstantiated appeals to supposed authority, as some of his debate opponents do.

Call Dawkins boring, or repetitive, or unoriginal if you like. But suggesting he can't think logically because of strong emotions is laughable.

I agree - dogma is not good. Scientists don't go in for dogma. They expect theories to be very well justified with solid evidence, experiments and theoretical backing before they accept them as "scientific fact". And even then, it is only as "the current best theory" which every scientist would love to prove wrong.

I beg to disagree - some scientists do issue dogma, by that name:

.

.

Joe Gwinn

There is a clear evolutionary path for an eye, with many actual living examples along the way.

The replication mechanism for DNA is not so friendly to incremental design

There is no solid evidence or experiment that shows a path from inorganics to DNA based living cells. But RNA World is accepted and suggestions that there could be other paths are mocked. Lots of people hate their work to be proven wrong. I've been to some scientific conferences where people were very unwilling to be wrong. Viciously so.

Scientists have emotions too. "Science progresses one funeral at a time."

Crick created and named the Central Dogma, which was obviously wrong. His explanation is that "I just didn't know what dogma meant."

As if.