Posted on 08/10/2002 5:08:09 PM PDT by gore3000
How? Why?
You have to remember Andrew, that evolutionists are great believers in miracles. Species transform themselves into new species how? It just happens! They mutate favorably - how? It just happens! They write long pieces of DNA specifically designed for special functions - how? It just happens! As Darwin said - if you have read through a few hundred pages of my blather already, you gotta believe the next whopper I am going to tell you.
I see, I am an idiot but you cannot point what I said that was incorrect even though you are by your admission a genius! Tell me another joke, I need a good laugh.
BTW, Gore, your firm opposition to the notion that species are capable of the slightest independent genetic change would suggest that you are a fixed species man. Most young earth, strict creationists allow for rather considerable genetic change, arguing, for instance, that the entire Equid family may well represent a single "created kind," even though all species of horses, asses, and zebras have different chrosome numbers, and therefore reorganizations in their DNA well beyond what you would countenance.
Creation science types generally take profound offense if they are stereotyped as holding to fixed species. Are you the embodiment of the elusive stereotype?
Fascinating! So, how much of the genome do you think is made up by these? And are there start & stop codons?
This brings up a question I have yet to get answered: What exactly are you measuring when you measure "information" WRT our bodies? The length of the genome, the number of genes, the number of proteins, or what? Here's an example of an increased number of coding sequences (the gene + later the disabling RNAi snippet) that cause a decrease in the number of proteins created.
Or looked at another way, you have a function (the gene) that previously would be activated when (A [the promoter region getting triggered] == TRUE), but is now activated when (A AND B == TRUE). That's a more complex expression that's being evaluated, but it would == TRUE less often than before. Is that a gain or loss of information?
Or looked at yet another way, if I start out with Snippet 1 below, and change it to Snippet 2, have I increased or decreased the information?:
// Snippet 1...
<script language="javascript">
oMsg = new String ("This is a message.");
if (oMsg != "")
{alert (oMsg);
}
// Snippet 2...
oMsg = new String ("This is a message.");
oMsg = "";
if (oMsg != "")
{alert (oMsg);
}
</script>
Unknown. This is a very new area of research, especially as it relates to mammals. The Scientist just published an article on a handful of scientists who now believe that much gene regulation is actually effected through untranslated RNAs transcribed from intragenic regions. This is, of course, a highly controversial idea. If so, short, interfering RNAs would be one of perhaps a number of RNA-based mechanisms for gene regulation. It's not controversial that RNAs do have certain very specific regulatory roles. For example, it's pretty clear that there are RNAs which play a role in X-linked dosage compensation in female mammals -- that is, where one of the two X chromosomes is effectively put to sleep in every cell to produce the same gene dosage as in males (XYs). However, it's generally thought that proteins are far more important than RNAs in regulating transcription in general -- but these scientists are suggesting there's a whole world of RNA-based regulation that we've only scraped the surface of to date.
In general, there is a general trend in molecular biology towards discovering more and more things that RNAs can do that we had previously only attributed to proteins. This is not that surprising: RNAs are just another type of polymer, and most biologists think that the first forms of life were based entirely on RNA, with RNA performing the catalytic role now largely taken over by peptides, and the genetic or information storage role now performed by DNA, in addition to serving its present primary role of messenger. However, no one knows for sure if the "RNA world" idea is correct, and there are some interesting alternative hypotheses out ther.
Getting back to RNAi, I don't think that is a legacy of RNA world, or anything quite as exciting as that. RNAi is based on a set of proteins which recognize double-stranded RNA -- something that isn't normally used in the cell -- and attacks it. So, it probably evolved as a defense mechanism against foreign nucleic acids. However, once the system was in place, it was co-opted to a gene regulation role, at least in a few instances that we have recently discovered, and possibly in a bunch of others that we don't yet know about. But that's something you see all the time in molecular biology -- a new module or function evolves, and then gets co-opted to other roles over geologic time.
My primary interest in RNAi is as a controllable method of knocking out specific genes, rather than in the phenomenon itself. We didn't know how to do this in mammalian cells until very recently, and it could turn out to be a powerful tool for reverse-engineering genetic circuits. Having said that, all the results aren't in yet. Check back in a a couple of years, and it may still turn out to be a lot of hype.
All those things could be used as metrics, but I don't think you could ever say one number is absolute and definitive, unless it's what you could compress a person's bitstream down to for a Star Trek transporter beam. Nucleotides of DNA in the genome, each corresponding to two binary bits, is a good rough measure, but there are a lot of caveats. For example, DNA never builds a cell or an organism by itself, so there is some information in the machinery of the cell, which isn't as easily quantifiable. OTOH, you could probably throw out much if not most of the DNA of a human being and it wouldn't make any significant difference to the development of the organism (provided you knew which bits to throw out!)
Here's an example of an increased number of coding sequences (the gene + later the disabling RNAi snippet) that cause a decrease in the number of proteins created.
Well, the use of an endogenous "siRNA" transcript to down-regulate another gene is conceptually no different from the use of a protein transcription factor to down-regulate another gene. It only really buys you something if the expression of the silencing agent -- the siRNA or transcription factor -- is conditional and regulated. If it were just cancelling out the effect of the other gene all the time, the whole thing would just represent a waste of bits, and would be lost over time, or never develop in the first place. And generally there also wouldn't be much point if the regulator has only one target, because then you just get a regress, since the target gene could just be regulated directly without the complication of the intervening regulator. But regulators are few and controlled genes are many: gene networks feature hierarchies of control, just like armies, nation-states and business corporations. One regulator controls many downstream genes, just as one foreman gives orders to several workers. These considerations hold regardless of whether we are talking about traditional protein-mediated control, or these novel siRNA-mediated mechanisms. Protein versus RNA is just a question of instrumentality, like JAVA versus C++.
I have never heard of any anti-evolutionist say that you can make hundreds of new DNA bases at random, so I think you are putting words in the mouths of others. I do not hold to fixed species in the sense you speak of either. Species have a very large gene pool. That's how we can get everything from wolves to chihuahuas to great danes from a single gene pool without any mutations.
I doubt very much that if this gene interference was a lot of hype:
The company, whose labs are packed with jars of flies and worms used in such research, says nearly 80% of its gene studies now use the technology.
But that's something you see all the time in molecular biology -- a new module or function evolves,
That's a pretty big assumption being made by evolutionists considering no one has ever seen such a thing ever happening don't you think?
In the process of creating proteins, the DNA of course requires the use of raw materials from outside the nucleus located in the cell itself. These raw materials of course got there because when the cell was formed as a certain kind of cell its purpose was to get just those raw materials. That is why different cells have different functions and produce different proteins even though theoretically they could produce any protein at all since they all have the same DNA code.
What all this leads to however is a sort of chicken and egg problem - which came first the DNA or the cell? This is a really big problem for those who believe abiogenesis is possible.
One regulator controls many downstream genes, just as one foreman gives orders to several workers. These considerations hold regardless of whether we are talking about traditional protein-mediated control, or these novel siRNA-mediated mechanisms. Protein versus RNA is just a question of instrumentality, like JAVA versus C++.
Interesting that you mention programming languages in the discussion of gene regulation. You sound like an anti-evolutionist insisting that the genome is a program and was thus intelligently designed. Surely you do not wish to assert that programs are written and modified at random do you?
Every new discovery in the field of biology in the last century has shown us more and more complexity. It has also shown us more and more the interrelatedness of the different functions the organism. This is what intelligent design has always claimed is the case. This is why everyone before Darwin laughed off any suggestion that organisms could be built up piece by piece. Science is having a tremendous laugh at Darwin and the evolutionists fail to see that everyone is laughing at their silly theory.
All those things. Bascially, commands and data that didn't previously exist in the genome. In this case, information seems to exist but simply lay dormant.
Your code example (A [the promoter region getting triggered] == TRUE), but is now activated when (A AND B == TRUE) would indicate a programing change and an information increase. But suppose the code was written --I'm not a programmer so forgive the incorrect syntex -- as (A == TRUE) Unless RNA = Double THEN (A AND B == TRUE)?
That would not be an increase in information.
Hmmm... I was trying to reduce your desription to code, but I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to describe. (I can tell you're not a programmer. :-)Your code example (A [the promoter region getting triggered] == TRUE), but is now activated when (A AND B == TRUE) would indicate a programing change and an information increase. But suppose the code was written --I'm not a programmer so forgive the incorrect syntex -- as (A == TRUE) Unless RNA = Double THEN (A AND B == TRUE)?
That would not be an increase in information.
What I was describing was the logical expression that gets evaluated when the gene (G, we'll call it) gets activated & transcribed (condition A). If originally G got transcribed & eventually produced protein P, and then later a regulatory mechanism evolved that sometimes prevented P from getting produced, that mechanism could act at one of several points: It could prevent the activator from being produced in the first place, it could prevent the activator from reaching G & starting translation, it could prevent translation into P in midstream (like the RNAi seems to do), or it could block P somehow after it's produced. Either way it's a more complex system than the one without the regulation, even if the result is less P's getting produced in the cell.
glibertarians!
How did the various species of horsey's all get different chromosome numbers, considering that you obstinantly resist the notion of much more minor genetic changes than that even within species.
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