On 28/08/2014 7:42 AM, Jojo Iznart wrote:
As pointed out, the odds for a mutation occuring that would result in
a feature that is useful enough is astronomical.
If the necessary information is present from the beginning, then it only
needs to be triggered and it will express itself. This is my suspicion
of how the process might work.
Consider insect metamorphosis. An apparently simple ugly grub looking
creature "evolves" within a single generation to a beautiful and
apparently more much complex creature. It can suddenly fly! No slow
accumulation of appendages to help it glide, etc, etc, etc. Complete and
fully functional flying apparatus and body structure to suit in a single
generation! Clearly the information to do this was present when the
creature was still a grub. It just needed the right trigger for the
transformation to happen.
So with the right conditions and in the fullness of time an ugly fat
landlubbing dinosaur could lay a batch of eggs, and out could hatch a
bunch of beautiful flying monsters. Evolution occurs as punctuated
equilibrium - to the extreme! If you care to postulate initial design,
then this effect would be easy to build in and almost inevitably produce
the phylogenetic tree that we find evidence for in the fossil record and
from modern genetics.
(See my first link). Its like fllipping 1000 consecutive heads
followed by 1000 consecutive tails. Unlikely does not mean possible.
It depends on the odds. If it is greater than 10^50, it is considered
impossible.
The concept of reversing the change is just as improbable because the
mechanism is random. There is no such thing as rolling "downhill".
The process is the same in both directions.
By "climbing uphill" I refer to the creation of complexity, of
information, of beneficial mutations. Rolling downhill refers to the
destruction of this information. Microbes need far less genetic
information to build them than men, thus you should be able to simply
destroy 90% (or whatever) of the genetic information in a man and still
be able to grow an amoeba like creature. But the reverse direction
requires the creation of a large amount of information and is thus far
more unlikely.
Man->Microbe = easy (downhill), Microbe->Man = difficult (uphill).
My interest was to try to find out from Nigel how the information
content in microbes compared to the information content in men. From
that I was hoping to be able to decide if the evolution process (which I
have no doubt occurs) from microbe to man could possibly have been
designed in from the beginning to await its unfolding in the fullness of
time, or whether it needed information to be added (by natural or
supernatural means) during the process along the way. Unfortunately I
seem to have failed in this endeavour.
On 28/08/2014 7:42 AM, Jojo Iznart wrote
This idea of reversibility in itself is already a violation of one of
the tenets of Darwinian Theory. Darwinian Theory says the change must
be persistent. If the reverse is easier than the forward change, it
violates the "persistence" requirement.
Regarding E. Coli resistance. You are correct in that the resistance
is conferred by an expression of a gene. In this case, just a single
gene which creates a single protein on the cell wall of the bacteria
that prevents the antibiotic from attaching itself to the bacteria
which prevents the denaturing/splitting of the bacteria cell wall.
But this is precisely my argument for the difference between micro
from macro-evolution. The mechanism for expressing a trait is already
encoded in the DNA in micro-evolution - it is adaptation. There is no
mutation that needs to confer a survival advantage. Everything the
bacteria needs to mount a defense is already encoded. That is why you
will never find E. Coli that is resistant to Chlorine for example.
Chlorine will always kill E. Coli, because E.Coli does not have a gene
that it can express to confer Chlorine resistance. The extent of what
E. Coli can be resistant to is determined by its genetic tool box. It
can never be resistant to something that is not in its tool box.
Since we don't understand what all the information in the non-coding
regions is there for, we can never be sure quite what might pop out of
that tool box once a key mutation has had time to occur.
