The "central dogma" was declared by Francis Crick in 1958, after DNA's structure had been discovered.
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and his tongue was firmly in his cheek when he called it a "dogma". He was never someone who took himself too seriously.
But it may take a while, and the route may be unexpected. We are probably evolutions way of evolving a product documentation and version control system, and genetic engineering is probably the first real example of intelligent design.
ll refuse to see it.
Science does advance as older and more dogmatic scientist retire and die, but this is more correlation than causation. It isn't dogmatic blindness to facts that is stopping biological scientists from embracing your version of intelligent design, but simply a better informed grasp of what goes on inside the genome and the phenome.
You've been listening to journalists again. We now know quite a lot about how various cancers work - and none of them work in exactly the same way - and this does seem to be producing the occasional cure (or a least a more effecitive treatment) for some specific cancers, but it's going to take some time before we've worked all the way through your list.
And you won't like the cure for fatheadedness, if you live long enough to benefit from it - you'll suddenly become bright enough to realise just how fat-headed this sort of post was, and experience a couple of decades worth of cringing in the time it takes for the treatment to work.
John doesn't seem to realise that an open mind can also store objectively verifiable facts, rather than just the implausible hypotheses that you should - in fact - be testing against those more or less well-substantiated facts that you also know.
In general, populations survive because each individual survives long enough, on average to transmit their genome to a descendant. In mammals - and other diploid species that reproduce sexually - this involves two descendants per individual, since each descendant get half of each parents genome.
Once you have survived long enough to do this, your continuing health provides a progessively decreasing benefit on your reproductive success, and detracts from the potential reproductive success of your off-spring.
Humans are odd in that they cooperate effectively enough that a surviving grandmother contributes to the reproductive success of her daughters by increasing the survival rate of her daugther's off- spring, and this does seem to have pushed human evolution to select for relatively long life compared with the other anthropoid apes.
Since this all happened reasonably recently, we probably haven't had time to optimise our survival rate. We do seem to include a sub- population that survives better than the rest of us - if a male survives to 80 in tolerably good health, or a female to 85, they are probably members of that sub-population. My mother is definitely in that group, for what it is worth.
We can't know that DNA can't plan. We can know that it doesn't have anywhere safe to put it's plans nor any mechanism to check out how they are working out, beyond the simple survival of the indvidual embodying the latest modification, whose genome doesn't seem to contain anything that looks like a version control system. None of that is dogma.
It is certainly complex, but nobody who has thought about the complexities of the jobs it can do is going to be astounded by the complexity, though they may be astonished that it works at all.
That's the immune system. But that's not the kind of intelligent design system that you are talking about. Finding the right antibody to mass-produce to swamp a virus of a bacterium is rather simpler job than the one's you seem to have in mind.
Sure. Look how well we've done, now that we can transmit information from generation to generation by something more flexible than DNA sequences. And since we aren't obliged to have the cultural transmitted information subjected to mutation to maintain a pool of variation to cope with a changing environment, we can use error detection and corredction to make sure that the information we transmit is good.
Sure. But we are the only example that we know about.
Your have been perfectly sound rational reasons why the scheme that you proposed won't work. This isn't disapproval, it's rational scepticism.
True. But evolution got to the place you think it is already at by evolving us, rather than by putting a version control system into the DNA. I'm not saying that you couldn't design a version control system that could run in a genome-like processor - in fact I imagine that genetic engineering will do exactly that in a generation or two - but such a processor would have to have much better error-detection and correction than anything we've yet found inside the genome.
Such a processor would presumably have to cope with the need to generate random variation to cope with the eventual changes in the environment (such as better software in rival processors) but with any lack we could give it a simulator in which the variants could fight it out, rather than by testing them by raising lots of children with genetic defects aka sub-optimal variations.
Not that it doesn't work very well for them, it would be far more efficient if it could be constructed but there is no way to plumb in a living large scale structure that is compatible with a rotary motion and significant power transfer to the rotor.
It is largely a matter of scale. The bacterium or protozoa can do it because it is small enough.
So you admit to having limited imagination. That *is* a first.
It doesn't have to be useful. Merely not detrimental to reproduction.
Sickle cell anaemia is an example in the human population - although somewhat bad for the individual it confers a decent level of immunity from death by malaria infection in the suffers. I know you don't like being confused by facts or real scientific evidence but try this page:
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Harvard Medical school have done some rather nice research on it and the overview is reasonably accessible.
Some of the old DNA and related survival mechanisms from way back when life was a blob of cells in a hostile environment can be a serious threat to the well being of a complex differentiated organism.
Actually in humans you need the adults to live at least long enough to look after their children up to almost sexual maturity.
I thought familial protective behaviour did occur in other mammals too (sometimes with only the highest ranking females breeding).
The crucial point here is that unless the DNA and what it codes for is challenged from time to time you have no guarantee that it still works. Or that it still codes for useful behaviour in the environment of an animal with complex organs as opposed to a blob of slime mould.
And that according to the local chemical environment stem cells can be coaxed to develop into very different specific organs.
The immune system does store patterns of previously recognised infections as antibodies, some are even passed on to offspring. Though this can also be dangerous where parents have opposite Rhesus factors.
And we are doing it by harnessing a subset of the viral RNA toolkit and some very clever chemistry. Someone is presently close to swapping the stop tag "TAG" for "TAA" in E. Coli with the intention of freeing "TAG" up to code for a novel amino acid. Some details at New Scientist:
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(unsure if you need to be subscriber to view) They are literally harnessing evolutionary mechanisms to do the work for them by making controlled crosses of tweaked bacteria.
His ideas are always "Larkin correct" and we all know what that means.
The genome's error correction is actually surprisingly good and the cell death mechanism for uncorrectable errors does work most of the time. But if it fails then there is a really bad problem if the resulting dodgy cell is effectively immortal and reverts to the most primitive survive and reproduce at any cost cellular strategy.
The main thing that our mastery of DNA manipulation will give us in the medium term is the ability to eliminate certain very nasty genetic diseases like haemophilia and cystic fibrosis. See for example:
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We will have to decide at some point whether to allow GM style corrective gene therapy on embryos and small children. I am not sure where I stand on this from a purely ethical point of view. But I think I could be persuaded those that want this treatment should have it.
It would be a very bad idea to use the technology to correct all "mistakes" in the human genome. Maintaining genetic diversity is very important as we will one day learn to our cost when industrial scale high yield agricultural monoculture goes pearshaped.
John is interested in finding something pithy to say, rather than in producing a reasoned response in a rational discussion.
Siblings of the mother help in several mammalians species - the naked mole rat is the text-book example, but I think some hyenas work the same way. Grandmothers might be useful in elephants and some whales, but I don't think that anybody has got good statistics to prove it
Classic example is olfactory genes in primates - half of them don't work any more. They all work in mice, who are more dependent on their noses.
That's not astounding or astonishing - we couldn't exist if it wasn't possible, since we start off as a single fertilised egg. Working out the fine details of how it happens is going to take a while.
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Programmed cell death is more error handling than error correction. The kind of error correction I had in mind was the sort that adds eight check bits to a 64-bit word, and can detect and correct any one bit error. The number of check bits doesn't rise in proportion to the length of the word, and packet-switched communications tended to treat packets as long single words.
Didn't I just say something like that? "The need to generate random variation to cope with the eventual changes in the environment (such as better software in rival processors)"
I may not have expressed the idea quite as explicitly, but I certainly agree that any kind of monoculture is at risk of going pear-shaped.
Perhaps. Or maybe the Tea Party will win the next election, and we'll end up living in sod huts - those of us that survive.
Understanding what stops us living a thousand years provides no guarantee that we will be able to reverse that mechanism when we do understand it.
And it might well take such extensive re-engineering of our genome that the creature that could live for a thousand years couldn't inter-breed with us, which would make it a different species.
Particularly when you haven't got an answer to the points I'm making. Snipping isn't - of itself - a problem. Unmarked snips are a violation of net etiquette, and snipping the post to which you are responding so that you can post a smart-ass response which doesn't actually respond to the point raised is decidedly contemptible.
You like to claim I lack imagination - which doesn't happen to be true, as I've pointed out before - because you imagine that it is an effective insult, and your reaction to being shown up as an ill-informed windbag is to lash out with any insult that you can come up with.
There are plenty of waving flagella about, and if you screw up the symmetry of a back and forth actuator, it will try to rotate the flagellum. Not too helpful if the flagellum can't rotate, but if it can, or can be broken off the patch of cells that grew it, you've got your propellor. And a break-away flagellum is handy if there are bacteria-eating predators around.
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Probably not. The term "evolution" implies continuity, and Darwinian selection depends on every generation of the evolving life-form surviving long enough to reproduce.
So the "useful-intermediate" stuff is a central part of the Darwinian hypothesis. It's no more
"authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from,"
than any other part of the Darwinian hypothesis.
Of course if you do want to diverge from it, you are in the business of setting up your own explanation of what we can see around us and in the fossil record, along with the people who are proving Einstein wrong, that HIV doesn't cause AIDS and that anthropogenic global warming isn't happening, and if it is, it is all for the greater good.
There you go. I had though that I was being over-careful about setting the ground rules before getting onto the grand-mother effect, which does happen to be rather cute, but I clearly underestimated the abysmal depth of your ignorance, which never fails to surprise me.
You'd better devote some thought to the radical idea that a paragraph that is referring to populations and includes the phrase "on average" might be talking about the mean over the population, rather than making a claim about the number of children every single individual would have to have in a stable population.
Most educated grown-ups don't need to think about this kind of issue.
You claim to be both educated and grown up. We do have reason to be sceptical about your claim to be educated (outside of electronics) and your response to this posting will probably involve you throwing your rattle out of the pram.
It's not my job to interpret what you say, especially when it's off topic opinion.
You and Sloman love to post enormous chunks of fuzzy non-electronic stuff, so you can claim how smart you are without proof. If you were really smart, you'd post it in an appropriate forum.
The relevant skill would be molecular biology - which may be seen as a sub-set of biochemistry, in much the same way as biochemistry may be seen as sub-set of chemistry, which doesn't stop universities from having separate departments for biochemistry and molecular biology.
If this were a purely electronics newsgroup, you wouldn't post recipes here from time to time.
John doesn't seem to notice that I've posted my complaint in the forum where he does most of his posturing. If anybody is suffering from a cognitive malfunction around here, it may not be just me.
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