You misunderstood the point of my breaking glass; it has nothing to do with replicators. It was an example of something that doesn't need instructions for it to happen.
Did I really misinterpret it that poorly?
Parasomnium writes:
And si
quote:
no instructions are needed for a glass to break when it falls to the floor, no instructions are needed for imperfect replicators to evolve into something more complex under selective pressure. If there are imperfect replicators, and they replicate imperfectly in an environment where there is selective pressure, then logic dictates that these imperfect replicators evolve. It's what must happen in these circumstances.
it is also inevitable that simple things evolve in the direction of increasing complexity.
Then you are at odds with about 95% of evolutionary orthodoxy as far as it relates to the increase of complexity. We've all known this was the implication growing up, but until recently, the concept that things become more complex or "better" has turned on its head.
"All extant species are equally evolved." ” Lynn Margulis
"There is no progress in evolution." ” Stephen Jay Gould
"We all agree that there's no progress." ” Richard Dawkins
"The fallacy of progress" ” John Maynard Smith
But this seems to be counter-intuitive that if evolution is an actual biological occurance that an indication of things going from simple to complex seems abundantly clear-- especially when we look at cladograms.
"Seen in retrospect, evolution as a whole doubtless had a general direction, from simple to complex, from dependence on to relative independence of the environment, to greater and greater autonomy of individuals, greater and greater development of sense organs and nervous systems conveying and processing information about the state of the organism's surroundings, and finally greater and greater consciousness. You can call this direction progress or by some other name." ” Theodosius Dobzhansky
In a certain sense, DNA can be said to contain "instructions", but they are not instructions that tell an organism how to evolve, let alone how to evolve in a specified direction. The only way in which DNA contains instructions is in the specification* it gives for the arrangement of amino acids in proteins.
I see what you're saying, and theoretically, I agree with you to a point. Selective pressures certainly wouldn't have any guided direction, but the implication is that the selective process invariably weeds out the weak and retains the strong. But surely you'd have to concede, at least in part, that DNA is an encoded message that could not have simply formed itself through a series of stepwaise gradations. And this for the simple fact that its a chicken-egg argument. You can't have enzymes w/o genes, and you can't genes w/o enzymes.
My point with the breaking glass was that the logical consequence of having a glass in free fall above a hard surface is that it inevitably breaks. In the same way, the logical consequence of having imperfect replicators under selective pressure is that these replicators inevitably evolve.
How is that? And by what defintion do mean 'evolve?' There are very loose definitions of constitutes evolution. If by the inevitable consequence is that any organisms offspring will have slight modifications, then certainly there is truth to that. Afterall, we acquire different sets of genes from our parents, so as to not be carbon copies of one another.
You are making a crucial mistake here, which is the unwarranted inclusion of the word 'designed' in your assertion. Without it, you have a point. But by insisting that the mechanism must be designed, you invalidate your reasoning.
My inclusion of the word design is my personal belief. Call it an argument of incredulity or call it an argument of sensibility, but given the fierce complexity of energy converters, such as photosynthesis, it seems like a logical inference.
As you can see in what I wrote above, I have no qualms with the concept of "instructions" in DNA. What I said was that DNA is not like a blueprint. That's because a blueprint is an exact description of what something is going to look like when it's finished. DNA isn't like that. It merely specifies what amino acid goes where in a protein. There's nothing in DNA about hair colour, physiognomy or whatever other heritable characteristic you care to think of.
I see what you mean by blueprint being an exact description, but if DNA and RNA determine sequences that tells amino's how to create proteins, and homeobox proteins help to determine morphology, that's a clear instruction. If was not structured, then, as I said, we shoul never expect to see any likenesses in our design. (And by design, I mean patterning, not necessarily a willful act of higher cognizance).
Likewise, there's nothing in a cake recipe that tells you how crispy the crust is going to be, or how mellow the filling. It just specifies what goes into it, in which quantities, and how long to bake it. That's why I said DNA is more like a recipe than like a blueprint.
Then consider it mutations that disrupts the process of the blueprint, like an ink stain on part of the blueprint. But it should be unquestionable that there is a high level of complex arrangements that are already contained within the DNA. If its already there, then why wouldn't be alot like a blueprint? Again, that taking into consideration that nothing is an exact replication of something else.
Where in the recipe for cookies is the crispiness specified? Or the nice brown colour? Those characteristics arise out of the process of making cookies, but they are not specified.
Those specifications are in the instructions(DNA). Hair color is genetic and so is eye color. But, there are mutations that can occur, that are benign in nature that can effect change in that color. All blue eyes are, is caused by non-malignant mutations.
In a cell, when a ribosome reads an RNA molecule, it appends amino acid after amino acid to a growing chain of them, in a linear fashion. But due to the physico-chemical characteristics of the various amino acids and their interactions, the chain folds in a particular way. There is no instruction anywhere in the DNA that corresponds to the way the protein folds.
Are you specifically talking about peptide chains?
quote:
If there were not some instruction involved, we'd just be a random blob of discombobulated atoms in no discernable fashion.
As I've just explained, and as you'll find out if you learn about protein synthesis, that's just not true.
Well, atoms don't qualify. I was injecting a little bit of hyperbole. The point is, without some sort of specific genetic code, your recipe would be recipe for disaster. We'd just be a soup of chemicals otherwise.
In evolutionary theory, only mutations are random. Natural selection is far from random, as has been explained a countless number of times already. Please, in the interest of the discussion, familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of the theory of evolution. If you do, you will realize that randomness isn't by far the whole story.
In order to arrive at the basic building blocks of life while maintaining an evolutionary framework, a chemical evolution would had have had to occur. That chemical evolution certainly would have been a random, shot-in-the-dark occurance. So, I don't see how chaos wouldn't be apart of your fundamental beliefs concerning the theory. In fact, chaos theory attempts to explain how how trial and error will eventually arrive at a pattern. Isn't that exactly what is described about how simple eukaryotes came to be?
Edited by nemesis_juggernaut, : typo
Edited by nemesis_juggernaut, : typo
"There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility." -Theodore Roosevelt
™ Version 4.2