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The Inconvenient Truth About Genetics


DanielBoyd

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May I suggest that if you're not on sufficiently on the page of the subject to provide clear and rational critique, you at least refrain from misquotes and ridiculous conclusions like that I must be a 'raving creationist'?

 

By the way, 'real' scientists continually make things up: that's the source of scientific progress. They then attempt to disprove that which they have made up through logical argument and empirical testing. I would be more than grateful if you could point out a single factual or logical error in my article. 

OK. Reason 1 looks, on the face of it, a highly questionable assertion.

 

How do you support your claim that the genome does not contain enough information for the development of an organism? Can you link any references? Or is this an idea of your own. If so, how do you reach your conclusion?  

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Ok, I will raise Exchemist and go to ''reason 2''

 

as stated ''Reason 2: The genome only says how to build some parts.''

 

How did you arrive at this conclusion, again, the genome contains all the information necessary to build an organism, otherwise, we would never have been able to make genetic duplicates - so on the same based question, how did you arrive at this pretty wild assumption?

 

Any evidence or papers to back this all up?

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I will admit there are some fallacies in his paper but overall I thought it got the point across of what he was trying to say. I think that he understands what he is talking about but just made some silly wording mistakes such as "fat turning into muscle" of course there is a sugar stage between the two, but I think that is a literature thing where he typed it as something he didn't mean.

Edited by VictorMedvil
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This is a science forum, may I suggest if you can't talk science, then expect these kind of responses.

I seriously doubt that an independent adjudicator would find your responses to my article more scientific than the article itself.

In any case, you're going to have to do better and come up with some actual arguments. Simply claiming that I'm 'not talking science' doesn't  cut it as a criticism.

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I will admit there are some fallacies in his paper but overall I thought it got the point across of what he was trying to say. I think that he understands what he is talking about but just made some silly wording mistakes such as "fat turning into muscle" of course there is a sugar stage between the two, but I think that is a literature thing where he typed it as something he didn't mean.

Hi Victor, Could you say which fallacies you have identified? That would allow us to enter an interaction on content rather than getting caught up for longer in this rather overheated air.

 

By the way, the 'fat turning into muscle' thing is simply a misunderstanding. Perhaps it would have been clearer if I had used a semicolon rather than a comma: "If you eat too much you get fat; work out in the gym and your muscles grow." Two independent clauses. But even with the comma, I don't see how you could read it as meaning that fat turns into muscle. 

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OK. Reason 1 looks, on the face of it, a highly questionable assertion.

 

How do you support your claim that the genome does not contain enough information for the development of an organism? Can you link any references? Or is this an idea of your own. If so, how do you reach your conclusion?  

Finally a good comment and a relevant question. I'll need to think on this one and get back to you.

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Ok, I will raise Exchemist and go to ''reason 2''

 

as stated ''Reason 2: The genome only says how to build some parts.''

 

How did you arrive at this conclusion, again, the genome contains all the information necessary to build an organism, otherwise, we would never have been able to make genetic duplicates - so on the same based question, how did you arrive at this pretty wild assumption?

 

Any evidence or papers to back this all up?

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Thanks for your question. This is a very simple fact. Cells are not just made out of proteins, but also of all sorts of other organic and inorganic molecules. The genome only codes for protein amino acid sequences, and provides no construction information for these other cellular components.

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I seriously doubt that an independent adjudicator would find your responses to my article more scientific than the article itself.

 

 

You remind me of another crank that keeps looking for attention. It's funny how each time his identity is known, its off to create a new one. While primarily, my background has been largely based in the understanding of physics, I have even taken biology courses and some remedial chemistry courses. Trust me when I say, your article is not scientific, nothing close.

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Thanks for your question. This is a very simple fact. Cells are not just made out of proteins, but also of all sorts of other organic and inorganic molecules. The genome only codes for protein amino acid sequences, and provides no construction information for these other cellular components.

 

If that is an answer to your second question, this is so terribly simplified, that I am out. It is clear to me, not sure about others, that you are clearly not ready to be ''writing papers'' on such things.

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Hi Victor, Could you say which fallacies you have identified? That would allow us to enter an interaction on content rather than getting caught up for longer in this rather overheated air.

 

By the way, the 'fat turning into muscle' thing is simply a misunderstanding. Perhaps it would have been clearer if I had used a semicolon rather than a comma: "If you eat too much you get fat; work out in the gym and your muscles grow." Two independent clauses. But even with the comma, I don't see how you could read it as meaning that fat turns into muscle. 

 

Alright your reasons 1 to 4 along with reason 9 are fallacies, it is nonsense these 5 reasons you have stated the others are fine though, initially I wasn't going to say anything because I assumed you had just worded it wrongly but as the others have pointed out there are serious problems with those reasons. When I originally was reading this paper I kinda was skim reading it and missed these reasons you have but some of them are outright incorrect. The body is a bit wordy with blurbs about religion which is fine but however I would suggest revision to the article in the sense it needs to be less wordy.

Edited by VictorMedvil
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Regarding mtDNA, sure this does supplement nuclear DNA as genetic information in the cell (I didn't actually explicitly limit myself to the latter), but this dual source does not negate any of the arguments given.

 

Is there anyone who will actually provide a counterargument to one of my Reasons to allow a scientific discourse?

I noted mt DNA because of your bit here:

 

but no designs for the many other essential cellular components such as fats, carbohydrates

Most metabolic stuff can be found in the mitochondrial loops if I remember my old bio texts correctly, in humans it would be for converting carbs to ATP and the back and forth switch between sugars and fats. I think nuclear DNA codes for the glycolysis metabolic pathway rather than the mitochondrial DNA, but I'm foggy since it's been a while.

 

Carbs would be fully coded for in the chloroplast DNA or main line DNA of plants since they produce the carbs. It's not really a surprise to be missing code for a thing you don't produce but just use. The factory doesn't need to have blueprints of a fuel refinery to burn gas.

 

Minerals is also a red-herring to put in there since those aren't produced they are absorbed and used in other process.

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OK. Reason 1 looks, on the face of it, a highly questionable assertion.

 

How do you support your claim that the genome does not contain enough information for the development of an organism? Can you link any references? Or is this an idea of your own. If so, how do you reach your conclusion?  

 

The question is: How much information would a design of your body require? To make a comparison: the blueprints for a car needs to define where about 30,000 parts need to be placed. Your body, on the other hand, is created by getting some 40,000 billion cells in the right place. Your genome only contains about 3 billion base pairs. So even if each base pair were to contain the location of one cell it would not contain nearly enough information even at this morphological level.

 

In reality, there is a lot of repetition which vastly reduces the amount of information required. A single muscle may contain billions of cells that can be positioned using the instruction: “build a muscles of size x there”. Even at this level, though, the amount of information required is staggering. One approach here is to consider Gray’s Anatomy, which takes 1500 pages to describe our bodies at a reasonable level of detail (through not sufficient to actually build it from cells). The illustrations in this book, as in most blueprints, are the most informative part (since a picture paints a thousand words). In bitmap format, these would also require more than the genome’s 3 billion base-pairs to be stored.

 

The above calculations exclude the instructions that would be needed to build each of the body’s 200 different kinds of cells out of the appropriate molecules. Here the number of parts (molecules) is even greater, but again, we could restrict ourselves to cellular morphology, and be helped out by the fact that many organelles are essentially the same in different kinds of cell and would therefore only need to be specified once. Still, our design would need to specify all the distinguishing features of these cell types, which is a significant additional amount of information.

 

The simple conclusion is that the genome is by far too small to act as a design for the body (even if the information it contains was dedicated to this task, which it isn’t).

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The question is: How much information would a design of your body require? To make a comparison: the blueprints for a car needs to define where about 30,000 parts need to be placed. Your body, on the other hand, is created by getting some 40,000 billion cells in the right place. Your genome only contains about 3 billion base pairs. So even if each base pair were to contain the location of one cell it would not contain nearly enough information even at this morphological level.

 

In reality, there is a lot of repetition which vastly reduces the amount of information required. A single muscle may contain billions of cells that can be positioned using the instruction: “build a muscles of size x there”. Even at this level, though, the amount of information required is staggering. One approach here is to consider Gray’s Anatomy, which takes 1500 pages to describe our bodies at a reasonable level of detail (through not sufficient to actually build it from cells). The illustrations in this book, as in most blueprints, are the most informative part (since a picture paints a thousand words). In bitmap format, these would also require more than the genome’s 3 billion base-pairs to be stored.

 

The above calculations exclude the instructions that would be needed to build each of the body’s 200 different kinds of cells out of the appropriate molecules. Here the number of parts (molecules) is even greater, but again, we could restrict ourselves to cellular morphology, and be helped out by the fact that many organelles are essentially the same in different kinds of cell and would therefore only need to be specified once. Still, our design would need to specify all the distinguishing features of these cell types, which is a significant additional amount of information.

 

The simple conclusion is that the genome is by far too small to act as a design for the body (even if the information it contains was dedicated to this task, which it isn’t).

I think you need to learn about information compression. Computer science is learning a lot about that from the very bit you're criticizing. As you say, every cell has the same basic structure, and only differences between them need to have information. DNA is actually very messy and replete with duplicate information (mostly used to control how much of any one protein is produced at a time in the chaos theory environment of random reads and writes) and can probably function just fine if you clip it down..for a short while.

 

The neat thing about cell differentiation is that it's controlled externally from the cell, not internally. Most of the organelles respond to an "if then" sort of reflex when they are in the body, that's how you can take a chunk from one part of the body and have it respond properly when you move it elsewhere.

 

This is a "bootstrap" environment you're trying to describe, not a full image state.

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