This offers the simplest “neutral” colloquial mixture of “design” and “evolution” that I’ve seen in a long time. The site is no longer maintained, but the language persists.
“As a designer it is important to understand where design came from, how it developed, and who shaped its evolution. The more exposure you have to past, current and future design trends, styles and designers, the larger your problem-solving toolkit. The larger your toolkit, the more effective of a designer you can be.” http://www.designishistory.com/this-site/
Here, the term “evolution” as used just meant “history”. The author was not indicating “design theory evolution”, but rather instead the “history of designs” themselves, which have been already instantiated.
The topic “design is history” nevertheless enables an obvious point of contact between “evolution” and “design”. They both have histories that can be studied. Present in the above meaning of “design” are the origin, processes and agent(s) involved in the “designing”. This differs significantly from the Discovery Institute’s version of “design theory”, when it comes to history, aim, structure and agency, since the DI’s version flat out avoids discussion of design processes and agent(s). The primary purpose of the DI’s “design theory”, meanwhile, is USAmerican religious apologetics and “theistic science”.
The quotation above likely didn’t come from an IDist, and it isn’t referencing “Intelligent Design” theory as a supposed “scientific theory”. The “designer” in the quotation above is a (more or less intelligent) human designer, not a Divine Designer. This fact distinguishes it “in principle” from the Discovery Institute’s ID theory, which is supposed to be (depends on who you’re speaking with in the IDM) about first biology, then informatics, and statistics. The DI’s ID theory is not actually focused on “designing by real designers”, but rather on apologetics using “design” and informational probabilism.
The Discovery Institute’s failure to distinguish or even highlight the differences and similarities between human design and Divine Design, and instead their engagement in active distortion, equivocation, double-talking, and obfuscation between them, are marks of its eventual downward trend to collapse.
It increases the chances of the organism producing offspring before it dies. The genes are an essential part of that offspring as are many other components and processes.
I don’t reject the fact that DNA gets transmitted. I would reject the proposal that genes transmit themselves through the generations.
Reject all you like, that is pretty much what happens. Of course the genes that specifically do that – DNA polymerases and their adjuncts – are but a fragment of the total genome.
Nonetheless, this does not actually address the quote of mine that it purports to address. Common genetic descent is a thing. You share ‘common genetic descent’ with your parents, and back through the generations with coalescent ancestors. We know the mechanism(s). It is that which you ‘reject’ in believing that a common trait does not, in fact, result from a common genetic origin, not whether genes can be said to be active or passive actors in the process.
(I’m just back off (another) holiday, and see you’ve been wading through my many historic utterances in my absence. For funzies, I might work backwards … we probably will not meet in the middle).
That doesn’t work. DNA doesn’t get transmitted to the entire species/kind/group, so cannot explain how groups remain homogeneous. Allan asked for the mechanism that broadcasts novel traits to the entire group.
In addition, to give some weight to your denial that genes “transmit themselves”, you still need to deal with parasitic DNA elements in some other way than turning a blind eye to them. You rely on observation , remember?
I followed the link and read onwards for a few comments, and found this by me. Evidently I’d already said similar several times already, even then. It contains the essence of my twin mantras: that the protein sequences supposedly ‘acting upon’ the genome nonetheless derive from it, and that the evolutionary argument on subgenome levels of selection shouldn’t be confused with a physiological one on gene expression. Add my trademark dose of sarcasm, and you have the essence of every post I’ve written on this matter! I think I’ll just link it in future: saves finger-ends.
Perhaps you need to use a more extreme form of that argument.
It’s sex, isn’t it?
I doubt it. Charlie insists on groups developing certain “passions” but I think he means something else.
Not sure what form that might take!
I think Charlie’s ‘holism’ is better named ‘fuzzism’. If the genetic detail can be rendered in vague enough terms, by sleight of hand the role of genes, elucidated by reduction, becomes magically subordinated to the vague requirements of a ‘system’. For lo, ‘genes’, in the general sense, cannot be expressed without ‘the system’, in the general sense …
No, it is more akin to prose poetry. Just look at it:
That’s friggin’ beautiful. Pity it is completely hollow.
Just girding my loins to wade through the last week! A coffee, first …
Indeed!
I haven’t. I do find odd notions being attributed to me. The genome ‘acts’ via the effect of subsections thereof – genes.
It varies somewhat – in the discussion that followed this comment, Corneel advanced the gene=product view favoured by molecular biologists. So a ‘gene’ would produce either a functional RNA directly, or an mRNA which further processing would translate into a protein. But when Dawkins talks of ‘Selfish Genes’, he is not using that definition, but the broader one coined by George Williams: simply, any segment of a genome with a significant degree of evolutionary persistence independent of neighbouring units. That ‘independent persistence’ is effected, in cyclically haplodiploid eukaryotes, by iterated recombination at the end of the diploid phase. It slices genomes into subunits that integrate into the genomes of the future population, and it is those ‘persistent segments’ that a gene-centrist is interested in.
They couldn’t give a tuppenny fig if these genome segments ‘act’, are ‘acted upon’, or whatever other semantic tomfoolery one wishes to import. What counts is the correlation with organismal fitness of such a segment (typically measured as mean offspring of carriers vs non-carriers). This is what justifies the choice of ‘the gene’ (so defined) as a unit of selection below that of the organism. The – ahem – whole reflected in the parts. It should be right up your street.
It’s not so much what Talbott says here, it is the copious references he gives. References highlighting the intricate coordination required for the most seemingly simple of cellular processes.
Previously you wrote::
Here is the paragraph in question:
This is the concluding paragraph to the whole piece not just to the last few sentences. And even a quick scan of the page can stimulate me to follow the reference, read the primary paper if it is available to me, and to look at related research.
For example from the reference, (Halfmann 2016, doi:10.1016/j.sbi.2016.05.002)., he provided we read this:
Proteins are not just lumps of matter floating in a watery liquid. Thermodynamics plays a large part in their mutability, and intrinsically disordered regions have their role to play in their behaviour. I think it’s worth trying to find out what the latest research is telling us about these processes.
To say that everything is controlled by the genes is a gross simplification that does not come close to the reality of the situation.
CharlieM,
How many times? I KNOW!!! I KNOW!!!! I KNOW!!!!! (Perhaps that’s what Corneel meant by a more extreme form: more exclamation marks … 🤔). I spent years at university, pre and post grad***; I have kept up with the subject matter since. If you think ‘processes are complicated/coordinated’ is a refutation of gene centrism, you don’t really grasp the subject matter.
But either way, you don’t need to say it 50 times.
*** As an undergrad in the 1970’s, if one wrote to one of the chemical/medical supply companies, they’d send you a nice big chart with the main biochemical pathways on – sheets covered in molecules and arrows heading every which way. I had to learn this shit. But thank goodness for Talbott telling me it’s complicated. I’d never have known otherwise.
CharlieM,
As to your Halfmann quote, this is NOT ‘orthogonal to the central dogma of molecular biology’. Unless it involves reverse translation, which it doesn’t. People claim on a daily basis that the dogma is under threat. People thereby prove on a daily basis that they don’t know what it states.
CharlieM,
No, we should definitely stop looking now; we’ve learnt everything there is to know. 🙄
Do you think ‘everything is controlled by the system’ is somehow superior in that regard?
Some people in this conversation may be interested in What Genes Can’t Do by Lenny Moss.
From the blurb, at least he appears to attempt to distinguish the evolutionary and the physiological stances, though even in doing so his ‘gene-P’ (Preformationist) seems to fall into the trap of conflating the evolutionary stance with genetic determinism.
Righto, I’m caught up. I’ve been away in the far North-West of Scotland, contemplating the passions of midge and tick for my particular brand of A-positive. I’ll collate my responses in this single post that people can just skip over, rather than spamming the sidebar.
CharlieM
Yikes! I’ve never been beaten to a hot dog by a bacterium! Well, I probably have, but there was still plenty left. I think an ecology primer might be in order, particularly the sense of ‘competition’.
CharlieM
Perhaps, but that’s a fair way from the ‘matter is condensed energy’ line you started with.
CharlieM
Whataboutery alert! Still, if I ever encountered such an individual, I would of course tell them they were talking shite, and that Darwinian evolution is not in any case a manifesto – descriptive not prescriptive.
CharlieM
Aye, that’s handy – the smallest unit that’s been transferred successfully: that’s where the life force is located! And not much to do with those little thready things, merely used by the ‘life force’.
Still, we have eliminated the cytoplasm. It’s a start.
CharlieM
They’ve lost the ‘regenerative’ part though…
It is not necessary that the genome be constantly present, nor constantly active, in order for the genome to be the source of that which resides in the cytoplasm. It needs to make good losses, but cells are good for a few hours or days without. Depends on turnover.
CharlieM
On the contrary, one evades a paradox: that for which your elaborate and ad hoc solution is the invention of a precursor Mind.
CharlieM
Given my oft-expressed distaste for the over-extended metaphor, I’m surprised you think I might be of the opinion they were.
CharlieM
My point, though, was that the components of the cell which you invoke as ‘living process’ have a shelf-life measured in hours, as the ‘death cap’ experiment shows dramatically. They don’t have any persistence, but turn over continually, to be refreshed from the genome. Only that has the constancy required to provide the ultimate seat of regulation. Of course DNA turns over too, but it has a handy template-based mechanism of allowing the ‘message’ to outlast any given instance of the ‘medium’. It also scatters into trillions of novel copies of that same ‘message’. But, again because of that template mechanism, the informatic role persists. There is no equivalent means of ‘cytoplasmic’, or ‘nuclear-but-not-chromosomal’, persistence.
CharlieM
Digging your heels in here suggests that you deny the possibility of a precursor system unless an example has left descendants of that type. That’s pretty restrictive – the only valid evolutionary processes are those that fail to eliminate competitors! – and sums up a lot of Creationist rhetoric, even though you would distance yourself from Creationism.
CharlieM
Sure – the whole of life does. That’s Dawkins’s answer to Paley in The Blind Watchmaker, for example – although in this instance, the ‘tolerance’ is probably not due to the selection that tends to be Dawkins’s go-to assumption.
It means that there is no reward for further improvement in fidelity. If fidelity is sufficient to keep deleterious mutations below one per replication, that’s as good as it need be for the organism. That’s why prokaryotes can get away with less fidelity – their genomes are shorter. Add to that the constraints on further improvement – there are penalties for taking too long, and limitations due to the mechanism of improvement being itself mutation-dependent – and you can’t simply declare the mutation-permitting gap as ‘built-in’ – it’s just what’s left between where the system has been ‘improved’ to, and 100%. Additionally, regardless what the designer ‘chooses’, if there is an adaptive improvement available, organisms will evolve towards that. Design ‘choices’ can’t persist indefinitely if there is evolution available.
Interestingly, you seem to be subscribing to a ‘pandesignism’ which is a precise mirror of the ‘panadaptationism’ Dawkins is often accused of, and just as bad.
CharlieM
Haha. Just have a squint in this mirror, will you?
Also: you’re wrong. There’s a lot of investigation that can be done using the ever-expanding libraries of genome sequences on the origins of the repair systems. Of course, since these are ancient, the singularity of LUCA prevents us looking too much further back.
CharlieM
Another point goes sailing over the hedge. I mean the concept of gene centrism, not the slogan. Gene centrism (in some formulations) treats genes as little competitive entities, engaged in a contest for colonisation of a ‘landscape’ in precisely the same way as the organisms they sit in.
CharlieM
Except where they don’t. If an allele is lost (what would stop that – especially in a situation of relative advantage?) then the change is irreversible.
CharlieM
To the same extent you just did!
I know there’s Britain’s Most Haunted and suchlike, but that’s hardly evidence. I realise disembodied minds are hard to capture in a glass jar, but to invoke them as causes of material effect surely requires some kind of material evidence?
CharlieM
Yep. What else? If you split the material in two, each has half. That’s dilution. Organelles self-replicate (because they have DNA … ), while during the growth phase new cellular products (including a lot of the organellar material, to head off that gotcha) are synthesised from the nuclear genome.
CharlieM
Sure. Triggered by cold, Arctic birds migrate. Without that trigger, locals stay put. It doesn’t really have any bearing on the broader question of genetics of behaviour.
But not every behaviour varies.
Due to recombination in sexual species, it is about both.
There’s more!
CharlieM
Even though it may seem unduly picky, and the riposte lengthy, I still go with my original contention. Bearing in mind that by ‘genetic’ I simply mean ‘DNA sequence’, here are some kinds of regulation:
1. Allosteric regulation. This involves a conformational change in an enzyme occurring at a location other than the active site due to a binding interaction. This allows a product, for example, to inhibit the pathway that produces it. Since the sequence of the allosteric site is directly encoded in DNA, in exactly the same way as the active part, then this form of regulation has a genetic basis.
2. Chromatin remodelling. The distinctive banding of chromosomes in some preparations is due to regions of greater and lesser chromatin condensation. In condensed regions (heterochromatin), transcription is inhibited, giving a coarse means of regulation. This remodelling is performed by enzymes, produced from the genome, and therefore does not merely have a genetic component, but a genetic basis.
3. Histone modifications. DNA is in intimate association with histone, which can be methylated, phosphorylated etc. These modifications can interfere with access to the machinery of translation, in a finer version of the above coarse control through chromatin. The modifications don’t just happen by chance. They happen, consistently and repeatedly in a given tissue at a given stage, due to enzymes. Guess where they come from?
4. DNA modifications, of which the best studied is DNA methylation. Such modifications allow the silencing or the turning on of genes. Again, this doesn’t just happen; it is itself tightly controlled, but fundamentally methylation and demethylation are carried out by enzymes – essentially, DNA sequence, albeit translationally processed. There is a bidirectional relationship with genotype here – the enzymes are ‘directed’ to certain sites by the genetic sequence at those sites, and can only methylate sequences with certain characteristics, such that ‘the genome’, broadly understood, is involved at both ends of the relationship.
5. Promoter and repressor binding. Small RNAs and proteins bind, with great specificity, to certain sites which can result in both up- and down-regulation of transcription. Again there’s a bidirectional relationship: the binding site is genetic, as is the molecule bound (either directly, for RNA, or via the translation system for protein).
6. RNA titration. Because nucleic acids bind very well to their complement, it is possible to inhibit an RNA, be it small (regulatory) or ‘large’ (mRNA) by production of an antisense transcript. From the genome.
I could go on! My point is that all of these mechanisms do indeed root in genetics. This is why one is able to make definitive statements about regulatory states at specific points in a life history, and know that they generalise to the entire species.
Because genetics.
So why restrict the number of human genes to twenty odd thousand?
And so if all the pre-Cambrian fossils represent only a very tiny minority of organisms present at that time then on the whole we have little clue as to the actual variety and abundance of life in those times.
And so the first forms of physical life would have left very little or more probably no evidence of their existence. The pre-Cambrian earth could have been teeming with life that was so diaphanous that no trace of it has been left.
If that’s all there was to it there would not be so much controversy surrounding it.
Hereis a paper from 1966, ‘Formation of Bacterial Flagella’. It begins:
Not quite as simple as once imagined.
If people do not want to be vaccinated they should not be forced to do so. Our kids had all the usual vaccinations but this was our decision.
The small shelly fauna (often neither small nor shelly) left fossil evidence as far back as the Ediacaran period from around 630 million years ago. The oldest uncontroversial evidence of life on Earth goes back 3.5 billion years. Hard parts bloom in the Cambrian, the proliferation of armoured plates and spikes perhaps due to an explosion in predatory species. Eyes, which also become widespread in the fossil record during the Cambrian period would also have been useful to predators and prey.
But certainly, prior to the Ediacaran, fossil evidence, other than tracks and burrows, is sparse.
A more specific definition of a gene is a sequence of DNA that is transcribed into messenger RNA and then transcribed into a protein (such as a specific enzyme), although some RNA molecules function as ribozymes (RNA catalysts). The number of genes in the human genome is an estimate based on the number of DNA sequences encoding functional proteins. There are more, many more I suspect, non-coding genes that are transcribed into RNA that act as control factors and gene switches.
At what age should children be allowed a say in decisions that affect their own lives? I see in UK the unfettered right to choose or refuse medical treatment is 16, though the Court of Protection can intervene where children and parents disagree.
It takes all sorts. Just as in the cells of an individual animal, some cells remain pluripotent and some become extremely specialised. The whole reflected in the parts.
The more advanced the animal the more that individuality becomes manifest within the group. Dogs demonstrate much more individuality than fish.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that life is very complex at all levels.
This is nonsense, Charlie. The reason dog breeders have been able to tease out Canis familiaris into the wide variety of colours, shapes and sizes is due to high genetic diversity in the species prior to domestication and selective breeding. The process is not endless as diversity only accumulates slowly and is overtaken by inbreeding, the lack of genetic diversity that causes grief to many pedigree breeds these days.
🙄
Practically all world views and ideologies will have their extremists. Darwinism lends itself to be misused in this way.
So did my kids. I was pointing out the “pernicious political influence” of anthroposophy and Steiner’s philosophy that founded it. Do I need to remind you that it was YOU that tried to use vaccination refusal as a stick to beat “Darwinism”?
But unlike those “Darwinian extremists”, anthroposophists refusing to vaccinate their children actually exist.
Yes, I agree. Scientists now have the ability to put together the genome of a woolley mammoth, but the genome alone won’t resurrect anything.
Yes, seeds as opposed to genomes. The seed, the whole seed and nothing but the seed. 🙂
There is physical freedom and there is mental, spiritual freedom. Some people can be put in prison without curtailing their mental freedom. An albatross may have gained a certain freedom from the earth but it isn’t free to decide to go to central Africa to live.
Chromosomes aren’t genes, they are complex, active molecules.
So you’ll have an example ready to hand, then.
There are a lot of complex active molecules that are not related to Down syndrome , what is unique about the chromosome?
Darwinian extremists run rampant in the social sciences and humanities. Darwinian Literary Studies (https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/magazine/the-literary-darwinists.html) and Universal Darwinism (https://www.universaldarwinism.com/page1.html) are just two examples. Biology isn’t really the main problem here, where post-Darwinian ideas are already in circulation, and some say “Darwinism is dead”. It’s rather the “extension” of Darwinian ideas into social sciences and humanities, as applied to human beings, that is most problematic. The list of Darwinian extremists in SSH is considerable, not that it’s likely anyone here is even aware of this, such that they could come up with a list themselves.
Gregory,
Why do you think of Literary Darwinism as a major problem now? I think of it as a dumb short-lived fad from 15 years ago — a short-lived attempt to bring “evolutionary psychology” into literary studies at a time when the fad from “po-mo” was over and literary theorists were looking for the hot new thing. Is literary Darwinism still around or did it go away after people lost interest in nonsense like Madam’s Bovary’s Ovaries?
For that matter, is evolutionary psychology still popular? I don’t know any philosophers who have much respect for it. The closest is Dennett with his memes, but even philosophers I know who think Dennett is right about intentionality and consciousness think he’s wrong about memes.
So who’s on your list of “Darwinian extremists” in the social sciences and humanities?
Kantian Naturalist,
Agreed.
Still quite popular among atheists, yes. Not popular at all among religious theists. It’s a pretty stark contrast. EVopsych might be among the most atheist- or agnostic-dominated fields in the history of the Academy.
With a 3 minute search:
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/sections/evolutionary-psychology
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272735820300805
https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/en/publications/evolutionary-psychology-and-artificial-intelligence-the-impact-of
https://psychcentral.com/lib/evolution-and-psychology/
The opinions of the philosophers you mention likely matter very little in confronting eVopsych. They believe they are “respected” among themselves, which seems to be enough for them to continue promoting eVopsych.
Sorry, one name is not a “list”. Be welcome to go further to show if you’ve been looking or not. Do you have a list, KN? Dennett is far too easy & obvious! MBO’s author David Barash isn’t in SSH; he’s more of a psychological biologist.
Will no-one save us from the horrors of misguided literary criticism?
Aye, those Darwinian extremists destroy everything that is precious to us.
Why should that entail conceiving of the passions as external to the self? A man may contenplate suicide and so be a threat to himself. This does not mean that he is somehow separate from himself. As well as external dangers we face dangers from within.
Passions are a good thing as long as we have self-control.
Living organisms are not just matter. They are intrinsically active, self-governing bodies. Living activity is the primal state of matter and ‘dead’ matter is the product and residue of this activity.
It is a mutually dependent, well-balanced, symbiotic relationship. Disease and death comes when the balance is disrupted. If it were not for the bacteria and such like we would be wading through a layer of corpses. Nature is finely balanced at all levels. The whole reflected in the parts.
They aren’t a problem when they are kept under control. It’s a matter of maintaining balance.