Mysterious ‘Jumping Gene’ That Appears 500k Times in Human DNA
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
To continue the computer analogy, imagine that some mad programmer decided to practice software reuse by calling a routine embedded in a virus. Now when you clean the viral infection from your computer the mad programmer's app no longer works. But that doesn't mean that the virus isn't continuing to replicate and cause other harm.
Aside: this is yet another counter-example to the Intelligent Design "theory"; no sane engineer would have done it like that.
Because "first-world" country engineers don't do that?
Anyway, I don't think ID requires that every mutation was designed, rather that an intelegent agent made at least one adjustment to an ongoing process. The problem is it's not a falsifiable theory because it makes no specific testable predictions.
Humans have been modifying organisms for thousands of years, through selective breeding and cultivation.
Does that not count as a form of intelligent design?
Is it detectable?
If not, who is to say it hasn’t been done with us?
The real answer is that "intelligent design" is a movement by evangelical and conservative Christianity to reframe Biblical literalism as a legitimate scientific framework.
I get the humor in your question. Yet I would like to comment for the people who might be more seriously interested in this question, that the most enlightened view seems to be that 'god(s)' are not incompetent, but are simply not done yet, they haven't completed the design. That the design itself is not a finished final product, but rather a continuous form of development. If there is such a development, it would be quite logical that one could take any future (or just further in terms of advancement) iteration of some thing (like human genome), compare it to a previous version and make a claim that it's "inferior" or "incompetent". But this is just an assessment of a logical mind. It could just as easily be called an iteration which is perfectly designed for it's time and place and has an irreplaceable role in the grand scheme of things.
> The problem is it's not a falsifiable theory because it makes no specific testable predictions.
I so wish that more people would understand this. I was trying to point into exactly this by the original comment, saying basically that no scientific truth can be an argument for or against any spiritual claim, that they simply belong to the different areas of knowledge. People who are proficient in either areas of knowledge, are often ignorant to this incompatibility, trying to prove each other wrong. The solution is to recognize the proper way to fuse the two areas, not choose one of them and pretend that it's enough.
Well that's not quite true. Religious people often make authoritative claims about life, the universe and everything based on their beliefs that can shown to be demonstrably wrong with science. While that may not make the unfalsifiable stuff sink, it certain doesn't speak well if your special, divine, or privileged spiritual knowledge results in nonsense and garbage when the rubber hits the road.
This is an agument for "NOMA" or Non Overlapping Magisteria. While this is true in the abstract pure Deist standpoint, it's not true for most religions or supernatural belief systems. All Abrahamic regions (for example) make specific claims about the nature of reality that is in direct conflict with science.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/210956/belief-creationist-view-... [2017]
You should read the story of Mel [1].
Not to mention the sneaky embedded assumption that an engineering approach is even the best way to go.
I mean, the claim is that we're so complex we must have been designed. But there are what seems like very serious design flaws in lots of organisms. Giraffes have a nerve that travel up and down their necks only to wind up a few inches from where it should be.
Our eyes have the nerves attached on the wrong side, giving us blind spots and a host of other problems.
And on and on. You can't hold life up as evidence of an intelligent designer and then when presented with evidence that we're a poor design, counter with "maybe it's smart and we don't know it".
IANABiologist, but I think I've heard that the giraffe nerve has to grow that way due to the way it starts growing, or that there is a rare mutation that doesn't actually grow that way, but it doesn't get selected for, presumably due to some other side effect.
There are also counter-arguments related to constraints regarding human eyes... Octopus eyes are supposed to be superior, not backwards with no blind spot, but I think human eyes can see way farther outside of water.
(I welcome informed corrections to any ignorance I may be spouting).
Essentially, there's a lot of nuance between "maybe it's smart and we don't know it" and "these are definitely very serious design flaws" - whether you think things were intelligently designed, evolved, or intelligently designed via evolution, it seems reasonable to think there may be at least some reasons that a lot of things were selected to be the way they are, and not what may at first glance seem obviously better, at least if you haven't considered all the relevant constraints.
I've been trying to answer to this for about 5 minutes and I don't know where to start to untangle this...
The "artifacts of the complexity of reality" is exactly science's position, you can't take that and use it as a counter argument against it. The argument is that while artifacts are to be expected with evolution, they cannot and should not be expected from an omniscient and omnipotent designer.
Also, "constraints" seems like kind of a funny excuse when considering a creator who is described as omnipotent.
The nerve innervates the deep cardiac plexus at the bottom, and the esophagus and trachea on its way to the larynx. So the path needs to be run anyway, leaving little advantage to another route.
Gray's Anatomy (the book, not the tv show) says during development the recurrent laryngeal nerve provides "a means of support that would permit the ductus to develop as a muscular artery" which it can do because it "has a greater proportion of connective tissue than other nerves, making it more resistant to stretch." Having a single cell build itself into a giraffe (or human) requires scaffolding along the way, and having the scaffolding that is also reused as a functionally redundant component of its own is better design than if it were not.
The inverted vertebrate retina is needed to allow additional cooling through blood flow. This article goes into additional tradeoffs in the design: http://www.quarkphysics.ca/scripsi/vision-of-octopi-and-the-...
so I'll answer from there myself:
Make no mistake, as an explanation this achieves as much as saying "because the Flying Spaghetti Monster wanted a laugh". It does leave a few curiosities about the supposed intelligence of the designer, however, which are unanswered by this non-explanation. It effectively makes the larynx an afterthought in the design process; as if it was only a by-product of the nerve's existence rather than an aim, despite communication and language being so important to humans. But the designer, given omnipotent powers to yield creatures as She sees fit, doesn't think to merely alter the branching points of the nerves instead? This is a very counter-intuitive approach design at the very least.
So the main route between NY and Philly will loop through Chicago. We will build a secondary direct route between NY and philly, but it'll only allow access to certain suburbs not the entire city [1].
This route will connect NY and Chicago on its way there, and NY and philly on the way back. I certainly don't see any advantage to any other route. not even if I were omnipotent and omniscient could I do that.
>during development the recurrent [....] own is better design than if it were not.
During the building of the NY-Philly-throughChicago route, we will be bringing life and jobs to the local communities, so this is of course GOOD DESIGN.
ps.
[1] According to wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_laryngeal_nerve "All intrinsic laryngeal muscles except the cricothyroids are innervated by the recurrent laryngeal nerve." so I don't know what you're talking about in (1)
If you are missing either of the superior or recurrent laryngeal nerve, you can still speak, although not as well as if you have both. Doctors use this hoarseness as a diagnostic for various chest issues.
United Airlines Flight 232 also illustrates the importance of running redundant cables through different paths. One piece of shrapnel pierced all three hydraulic systems on board, and nearly half the passengers were killed.
Come on man seriously? No, what makes sense if you are designing this is to make one direct connection between Ny-Philly and another NY-chicago.
I was talking to my kids about my job a couple of months ago, and showed them the view of source code I usually work with. They laughed and said it was colored funny. I'm not particularly convinced the criticisms of "obvious design flaws" in organisms are any more sophisticated than that.
Why does everyone have such strong opinions about biology in particular, there's never doubts about what the physicists say but everyone's an evolutionary biologists
I have a sneaking suspicion calling people who ankle-bite about giraffe nerves and backwards eyes and the one or two other stereotypical complaints "scientists who have spent their whole life doing science on a topic" is, how to put it, comprehensively false.
When humans build anything even remotely resembling an organism that can survive on the same terms as living organisms, I'll pay more attention to the design criticism. Preferably criticism coming from the people who actually did it. Until then, though, even though you misrepresent me (or perhaps rather, badly misrepresent the people making complaints), I'd still stand by the misrepresentation. Today's scientists are still at the point where they are examining the syntax highlighting and hoping to derive insights about the programming. This is not because they have made no progress, but because there is so much progress yet to be made. People complaining about giraffe nerves aren't even that far; they're just repeating propaganda with no understanding, and deserve all the respect such people should be accorded.
Let me give you a concrete metric as to when I'll say we're starting to get a handle on it: When humanity stops systematically discovering that organisms are even more complicated than we thought. When genes could be sequenced, we thought that was going to be it. Then epigenetics. Then the discovery that introns actually aren't as useless as we thought. And so on. Long before we've got it all figured out, we'll stop discovering entirely new sets of dimensions of variation. We clearly aren't there yet, and I see little reason to believe we're even close.
One of my favorite quotes from the Origin of Species:
"So profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!"
If we assume there is a supernatural force behind everything, then we might as well not do experiments anymore because any result we get might have a wildly uncontrollable variable that is impossible to account for.
I can see the highly structured and mutually influenced movement of galaxies, star systems etc as a type of intelligence.
The processes in stars. Are they completely random? The time we’ve spent observing the Sun is insurmountable short in Star time.
The ecosystems on Earth with their never stopping intertwined flow of signals and influences. Wheat, corn and soy using humans to take over vast territories.
Languages and thought patterns and their disease-like activity often infecting and wiping out huge ecosystems (“let’s kill all the bison!”) and large parts of their host population (genocides, world wars, racism).
I am not religious and am certain that the theory of evolution is sound. There’s no bearded guy in the sky tweaking our genome and berrying dinosaurs to test our faith.
When I look at the self organizing nature of phenomena, my pattern recognizing brain sees patterns and I can’t but think that the regular definition of intelligence might be too small and might benefit by being scaled up.
How is our intelligence different from the ability of species’ genomes to adapt to environments over long periods of time?
Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements
https://www.amazon.com/Genes-Conflict-Biology-Selfish-Elemen...
Nevermind the mitochondria - the powerhouse of our cells - which is basically believed to be a bacterial companion that our single celled ancestors integrated so tightly with - that it became part of our genome [1].
1 - https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-origin-of-mito...
The analogy I particularly liked was that they are little turing machines, and the very original stuff of life - indiscriminate, self-replicating, and therefore part of the bootstrap for everything that came after.
Also, more on LiNE. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrotransposon#LINEs
They are a very specialized DNA chunks that retains the absolute bare minimal needs to trick a host to replicate them. They are parasites.
But it's not always doing bad, correct? The point being, these random insertions are not only part of the process, they are key. Without deviation these is no evolving.