Hacker News Reader

Comment by ijidak | Hacker News Reader

The idea of junk DNA never made sense to me.

Having a list of proteins (coding DNA) does nothing to tell an organism how to combine those proteins to form working systems.

It's like claiming that the parts list in an assembly manual is the only information of importance. And the step-by-step instructions are junk, because they don't describe a useful part in the box.

Did we think that the whole organism just self-assembles once it makes the tens of thousands of individual parts described in coding DNA?

"Junk DNA" was a terrible terrible phrase to begin with.

Disclaimer: I believe in a creator. (https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/science/)

View on HN

No creator necessary.

Imagine a big machine run by paper tape. On the tape are two possible holes. Punch one and feed it in, the machine makes a man. Punch the other, it makes a mouse.

Does the tape 'encode' the essence of 'human being'? (or even 'mouse'?) Of course not.

The machine is a vital part of the equation. Likewise, dna in a jar is just a molecule. It has to have a cell, evolved over a billion years, ready to make something of it.

So no self-assembly, no magic in the DNA.

Yes you're right, we know that DNA is inert and used as a storage device by an organism.

What we don't know is how an organism with no intelligence (cell), could develop code (DNA), archive it, rehydrate it and then parse and copy it like someone with intelligence.

Without getting too deep into it, it's just not convincing anymore to appeal to vast amounts of time and random chance to do something which is fundamentally within the realms of engineering.

Sure we do. It's littered with history, fragments from all over. And organisms today are more complex than organisms of the past, some of which still have remnants existing. So many stages of development as examples. There's no magic to it.

You're entitled to your opinion, but what you're suggesting is wrong. What you've said are some observations made and some interpretations based on evidence gathered but none of it concludes that cellular organisms invented DNA, that suggestion is still stuck in a chicken vs egg scenario.

The fact is, we don't know how these systems could have created themselves or been created abiogenesis. There are wildly different theories, but it's far from a closed case.

I used to think the same thing as you because that's all I was taught to think, but perhaps if you looked at what synthetic chemists think about abiogenesis you may find it interesting / informative to see what they have to say about the challenges involved in it. An interview with a synthetic organic chemist on the topic: youtube.com/watch?v=r4sP1E1Jd_Y

While an interesting thought experiment, no one is proposing that you will get self-assembly of an organism by expressing 10,000 genes. We really don't know what the beginning steps of this process were - since it only happened once (or however many times life arose). Once an organism was made, now it can just express whatever proteins it currently needs, based on lifecycle/nutrients/metabolic requirements/etc.

Besides its DNA, every living thing has at least one whole functioning cell to use as a template, since they all start as dividing cells.

Natural selection doesn't care about what looks pretty, only that it works. A modern operating system is millions of lines of code. Do you think it is possible that some of the code are no longer used but nobody dares remove it?

That would presuppose an intelligent designer who doesn't dare to try and remove the code. (Unless that's what you are saying)

Are you saying god is working in two-week sprints and has no control over the backlog? That would explain a lot.

That'd be the case if a conscious entity was not daring to remove code.

An evolutionary process, on the other hand, doesn't fear removing random sections so their continued presence indicates the "junk" must (somehow) be important to the organism's fitness.

Or not. Since a random process doesn't care, its easy to carry around indefinitely. Like that closet you never bother to clean.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com