Posted on 08/10/2002 5:08:09 PM PDT by gore3000
Incidentally, I don't have much problem with evolution of plants, either scripturally or scientifically. That may just be because I have not studied it as much as I have animal or cellular evolution. I do know that they are prone to polyploidy and other things that could in theory make macro-evolutionary changes easier.
How do you figure that? It seems to suggest the flexibility and adaptability of the genome, creating more possiblities, rather than problems, for evolution.
It certainly shows an additional means by which the organism corrects for mistakes, intrusions, and defects. It is interesting that this seems to be a low level - and very specific - attack on genetic errors. Both viruses and mutations create genetic changes and this system seems to be able to dispose of both of them. This is a more specific system than the immune system which basically directs the attacks throughout the body.
It should be noted also how the scientists in this research call this a 'program' several times. Kinda shows some intelligent design in knowing exactly where the problem is and solving it in an economical way.
I guess it depends on how you look at it. With gene silencing you have a dramatic change by subtraction -- an order is given via RNA to stop a protein production and create a new characteristic.
Information must be added to a genome -- wings, thumbs, sexual reproduction --for common descent to be true. Dramatic changes in species is considered to be evidence of common descent.
That dramatic change is caused -- in some cases anyway -- by subtraction is an argument against the common wisdom.
But understand that in no way I'm claiming this disproves your position.
I found this research totally fascinating also. It is very important in many ways. It shows the existence of double-stranded RNA, something not seen before. It also shows a new, very specific, gene suppressing agent. This is good for the organism, which can fix problems in an efficient manner. However, it also gives a tremendous help in genetic research. It enables us to 'disable' a gene and see what happens. It is much more efficient than other methods which is why it has been adopted so quickly by research firms. We can expect to see many new discoveries as a result of this technique in the near future.
You'd be a great hero to many of us here!
Yeah, that particular kind of "intelligent design" is generally referred to as "darwinian evolution". Surely even you don't have any difficulty with short pieces of RNA, much less than a hundred bases long, evolving randomly? As you note yourself the immune system requires more extensive mixing, matching, mutation and selection than that to produce its specific antigens.
That's what FR is for. Only we identify and dice up leftist doubletalk, instead of double-stranded RNA.
Well, that is the evolutionist explanation, but of course there is another explanation. That the function was intelligently designed and that is why it is found apparently just about everywhere in both plants and animals. Evolutionists often claim that the reason something old is still around is that it was 'evolutionarily preserved'. There is no reason to say such a thing except evolutionary bias. An intelligent designer would not constantly reinvent the wheel, but would use what already worked elsewhere in new designs.
What is interesting here is that this adds another method by which the organism tries to prevent changes to it in addition to others we already knew about. This makes it harder for the mutations needed for evolution to be true to succeed.
How? Why?
Completely untrue. Gene silencing by the RNAi pathway would have no effect on the vast majority of mutations. The pathway is effective against exogenous double-stranded RNA, such as is produced in the life cycles of some viruses, and perhaps against the self-complementary inverted repeat sequences found in the transcripts of retroviruses and retroposons. These are features which specifically differentiate RNAi targets from endogenous RNA transcripts. The underlying principle is similar to innate (non-adaptive) immunity, which leverages distinctive molecular signatures of invaders such as bacteria and parasitic wroms. Indeed, conceptually it may be appropriate to think of RNAi as a particular type of innate immunity.
Well, there are indications in the article that point very much to intelligent design:
The small RNAs were guiding the silencing reaction. If their sequences were programmed to match a gene, it would shut it off almost completely.
You did notice the word 'programmed' there did you not? Have you ever heard of a program, regardless of the length that was written at random? Note also that they have to match the gene which is to be silenced. Note also that " the extra copy of the pigment gene he'd added was somehow cueing the plants to shut off their purple color" so we have the gene checking and knowing that something was amiss and issuing double-stranded RNA to the specific gene to stop its protein production. Note also that double stranded RNA is not normal, so we have a special function to do this which needs a special code to do it.
It is even more complicated than that however. We must remember that the genome is just a long series of DNA. This DNA only has four possible meanings and when read in threes as in genes it only has some 64 possible meanings. So how does this DNA know in the case of genes it is to produce single-stranded RNA and in the case of these silencers to make double stranded RNA? The answer is pretty obvious: that the DNA in the genome is primarily a program of which the genes are really the exception, they are the data used by the program. The rest are instructions telling the organism what to do. It is the only possible explanation for the genome 'knowing' that something is amiss, where it is amiss, what RNA is to be produced and where it needs to be produced.
And yes I do deny that any kind of long string of information even a few hundred bases long can arise at random just as I deny that a bunch of monkeys can write even a short sonnett or a short piece of programming code.
Completely untrue. Gene silencing by the RNAi pathway would have no effect on the vast majority of mutations. The pathway is effective against exogenous double-stranded RNA, such as is produced in the life cycles of some viruses, and perhaps against the self-complementary inverted repeat sequences found in the transcripts of retroviruses and retroposons.
You say that it is not true that it prevents some mutations and yet you give examples of some mutations which it prevents! So regardless of the semantics of the matter it is part of the array of methods which an organism has to prevent mutations. It should be noted also that both viruses and cancers often work by inducing hyper-replication of cells and this directly fights this problem.
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