tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post1475429783430200461..comments2024-03-27T14:50:47.345-04:00Comments on <center>Sandwalk</center>: Junk & Jonathan: Part 9—Chapter 6Larry Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05756598746605455848noreply@blogger.comBlogger36125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-42544565496637516092011-08-22T21:19:40.393-04:002011-08-22T21:19:40.393-04:00Allan Miller I had said:
"Allan Miller you h...Allan Miller I had said: <br />"Allan Miller you have made some progress. You are past the point of comparing Nature to smoked pork products. <br />You are moving in the right direction."<br /><br />In that sense you are moving in the right direction.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-80203887019946934292011-08-22T16:46:52.097-04:002011-08-22T16:46:52.097-04:00I like being in the company of someone like James ...I like being in the company of someone like James Lovelock, except that my position is more modest. <br /><br />I am not as impressed with your opinions as you are. No matter how dogmatically you state them.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-68051649062885535782011-08-22T15:53:46.778-04:002011-08-22T15:53:46.778-04:00Well if you are backing away from what you were sa...<i>Well if you are backing away from what you were saying then that is good.</i><br /><br />OK, let's review ... <br /><br />There is no evidence that having transposons serves a purpose for the organism. Uh-huh, happy with that. <br /><br />Nature lacks the qualities necessary to entitle it to be called <br />a) living<br />b) a being<br />c) intelligent<br />No problem here either. <br /><br />Global feedback loops involving the biosphere do not constitute homeostatic, self-regulatory mechanisms in the organismal sense. Check! (an error you share with James Lovelock). <br /><br />Collections of entities do not necessarily share qualities possessed by their component subdivisions. And vice versa. Check!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-40088568889893586152011-08-21T18:20:11.120-04:002011-08-21T18:20:11.120-04:00Well if you are backing away from what you were sa...Well if you are backing away from what you were saying then that is good.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-22463485882196595382011-08-21T17:10:29.264-04:002011-08-21T17:10:29.264-04:00You are moving in the right direction.
You are ri...<i>You are moving in the right direction.</i><br /><br />You are right - backing away slowly and groping behind me for the door-handle. :0)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-61545345969756211002011-08-21T08:16:25.447-04:002011-08-21T08:16:25.447-04:00Allan Miller you have made some progress. You are ...Allan Miller you have made some progress. You are past the point of comparing Nature to smoked pork products. <br />You are moving in the right direction.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-39954779066010373682011-08-21T05:06:43.888-04:002011-08-21T05:06:43.888-04:00With all due respect Allan Miller, I will go with ...<i>With all due respect Allan Miller, I will go with the wikipedia entry (citing The Columbia Encyclopedia) rather than a fellow on a blog like you who has his own personal opinion. </i><br /><br />Arf arf arf! You do realise that Wikipedia is written by Internet jockeys like myself and yourself, don't you? Some experts get involved, but any one statement could have been written by absolutely anybody - even if quoted with approval from the Columbia Encyclopedia! <br /><br />That there is no <i>outside</i> organisation is not disputed. As in: a self-regulating advertising industry. But you are saying something more, that the sum of all ecosystems (each the sum of all organisms within them) is itself possessed of organisational properties that belong to <i>the wider system</i>, not simply emergent upon the activities and interactions of its component parts. I disagree.<br /><br />A balanced ecosystem is a complex web of interactions between the organisms that compose it. That does not mean that any one ecosystem is intelligent, aware or purposive. The biosphere is just a big ecosystem, or the set of all ecosystems. Why is it special - why declare it possessed of organisational and regulatory capacities that you would not ascribe to a local ecosystem - my back yard, say, or the Sahara?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-41619483250167754872011-08-20T19:50:29.696-04:002011-08-20T19:50:29.696-04:00PNG posted:
"Mutations happen. Speciation hap...PNG posted:<br />"Mutations happen. Speciation happens. The directedness or non-directness of any particular mutation, whether by "Nature" or God or anyone else is a metaphysical question that science has no access to."<br /><br />PNG, do you generally accept theories of the form:<br />"Mutations happen. Speciation happens.".<br /><br />For example, would an explanation like: apples fall to the ground. <i>Falling happens.</i> Would that be acceptable? <br /><br />What is the difference between <br />"Mutations happen, Speciation happens" <br />and<br />we don't know?<br /><br />To say that "mutations happen and speciation happens" is no explanation at all. <br /><br />Right?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-32743604123206117172011-08-20T10:34:21.323-04:002011-08-20T10:34:21.323-04:00With all due respect Allan Miller, I will go with ...With all due respect Allan Miller, I will go with the wikipedia entry (citing The Columbia Encyclopedia) rather than a fellow on a blog like you who has his own personal opinion. <br /><br />http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere<br />"Our biosphere is the global sum of all ecosystems. <b>It can also be called the zone of life on Earth, a closed (apart from solar and cosmic radiation) and self-regulating system.[1] </b>From the broadest biophysiological point of view, the biosphere is the global ecological system integrating all living beings and their relationships, including their interaction with the elements of the lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere. The biosphere is postulated to have evolved, beginning through a process of biogenesis or biopoesis, at least some 3.5 billion years ago.[2]"Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-34475149563284718512011-08-20T08:30:31.163-04:002011-08-20T08:30:31.163-04:00Is Charcuterie self-regulating?
No. And neither i...<i>Is Charcuterie self-regulating?</i><br /><br />No. And neither is Nature. Nature contains self-regulating elements, but is not itself self-regulating (which, in any case, is not a sufficient condition for Life, or intelligence).<br /><br />Life is, in very broad terms, a runaway chain reaction that commenced when the property of replication arose. A replicator able to make even a slight excess of copies possessing that same property has the potential to organise the whole planet. By organising disordered molecules with the property of spreading that organisational capacity, what you call 'Nature' grew from a couple of molecules into something absolutely huge, clothing the planet and almost completely scrubbing the atmosphere of the substantial concentrations of carbon that were there in the prebiotic earth. It's just blind chemistry, self-perpetuating but hardly, on the broad scale, self-regulating.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-13351275648638954612011-08-20T08:09:34.552-04:002011-08-20T08:09:34.552-04:00Is Charcuterie self-regulating?Is Charcuterie self-regulating?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-27281293526230858262011-08-20T05:52:29.949-04:002011-08-20T05:52:29.949-04:00If someone wants to claim that Nature is not intel...<i>If someone wants to claim that Nature is not intelligent then you are saying that in your thinking a non-intelligent entity (Nature) is composed of intelligent entities.</i><br /><br />And that's a problem because ... ? There aren't that many intelligent entities to be honest. Most organisms don't even have a nervous system, which I would insist is an absolute prerequisiste for the kind of intelligence you have in mind - purposive and aware. Until the early Cambrian, Nature definitely contained no intelligence, and it has only shown vague sparks since. Your notions seem vaguely Gaian, and I don't buy that either.<br /><br /><i>All living entities are part of Nature.</i><br /><br />That doesn't make Nature anything special outside of its component parts. All smoked pork products are part of Charcuterie.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-30580010215075223972011-08-20T01:09:08.054-04:002011-08-20T01:09:08.054-04:00Anonymous:
"The mechanisms of evolution theo...Anonymous:<br /><br />"The mechanisms of evolution theory are completely insufficient for the origin of new species. <br />A number of scientists have come to that conclusion."<br /><br />You really should put "scientists" in quotes. These people have degrees but generally they aren't professional scientists - they are just critics.<br /><br />Mutations happen. Speciation happens. The directedness or non-directness of any particular mutation, whether by "Nature" or God or anyone else is a metaphysical question that science has no access to. <br /><br />Science can look at the statistical distribution of events of particular classes and see whether they fit some model with a random aspect, but individual mutations are not analyzable with statistics. <br /><br />Any conclusion we draw about directedness is an intuition, which may be right or wrong, but it isn't part of what we mean by "science" at this point in history. <br /><br />That's my take anyway.PNGhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10152649124164862094noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-74675057540438446512011-08-19T21:12:17.235-04:002011-08-19T21:12:17.235-04:00When I refer to "Nature" I have been ref...When I refer to "Nature" I have been referring to the "biosphere":<br /><br />"Our biosphere is the global sum of all ecosystems. It can also be called the zone of life on Earth, a closed (apart from solar and cosmic radiation) and self-regulating system.[1] From the broadest biophysiological point of view, the biosphere is the global ecological system integrating all living beings and their relationships, including their interaction with the elements of the lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere. The biosphere is postulated to have evolved, beginning through a process of biogenesis or biopoesis, at least some 3.5 billion years ago.[2]"<br /><br />If someone wants to claim that Nature is not intelligent then you are saying that in your thinking a non-intelligent entity (Nature) is composed of intelligent entities. <br /><br />All living entities are part of Nature.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-49978557008025081162011-08-19T11:04:32.885-04:002011-08-19T11:04:32.885-04:00Allan Miller - so you believe in the intelligence ...<i>Allan Miller - so you believe in the intelligence of Nature as I do then?<br />Nature as a living, intelligent being.</i><br /><br />No, I'm afraid I don't. Let's just take those three words:<br /><br />Living ... To me, to be living is simply to be a viable instance of a replicating system. Replication is the essence, the sine qua non, whatever school biology texts may emphasise. They tend to put replication at the end of the list, and look instead to homeostasis, or organisation, metabolism etc. But I think of these as secondary. The essence of life is replication - of nucleic acids, in the modern implementation. All derived states serve this objective, while the very fact of replication in a finite world creates the basis of evolution - imperfect replication and concentration of variants by sample error and selection. Nature itself does not replicate, and so I can't see it as living. I'm aware that my emphasis would also have viruses as living, within the world that they inhabit. I don't have a problem with that. <br /><br />Being ... there are a number of hierarchic levels capable of being considered an evolutionary 'being'. Ant colonies and wasp nests are one such, then we have multicellular individuals, themselves composed of cells that are also capable of evolutionary change, even when not free-floating as single-celled organisms. Even lower, I think a case can be made for certain sub-genome elements, which behave for all the world like 'conventional' biological entities within their subgenome world. But the whole collection - Nature itself? No, I wouldn't say so. <br /><br />Intelligent ... This is kind of interesting, in a purely philosophical manner. I do think that the operation of Natural Selection has parallels with intelligence. It examines alternative strategies and discards those less worthy. That's pretty close to 'intelligent' in my book. But I would extend it no further than that. Conflating intelligence with purpose or consciousness (because that's what it always associates with in our particular implementation of it) doesn't get us anywhere, and I don't see where such purpose or awareness could reside.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-51513972471620416902011-08-19T09:51:52.486-04:002011-08-19T09:51:52.486-04:00Allan Miller - so you believe in the intelligence ...Allan Miller - so you believe in the intelligence of Nature as I do then? <br />Nature as a living, intelligent being.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-35959130291795038282011-08-18T16:41:53.972-04:002011-08-18T16:41:53.972-04:00NATURE has a number of strategies for modifying it...<i>NATURE has a number of strategies for modifying itself.</i><br /><br />Why, by golly, yes i does! I think we're all agreed that nature is remarkable. We wouldn't be interested in it otherwise. <br /><br />The point is, if transposons serve a useful function, one would expect to see genomic mechanisms promoting them, and doing things a damn sight better thn the shoddy opportunism displayed.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-24175906271560055322011-08-18T14:48:50.683-04:002011-08-18T14:48:50.683-04:00A few lines down from where Anonymous quoted in th...A few lines down from where Anonymous quoted in the wiki article:<br /><br />"Both classes of transposons may lose their ability to synthesise reverse transcriptase or transposase through mutation, yet continue to jump through the genome because other transposons are still producing the necessary enzymes."<br /><br />So even the wiki article you cited states that genes for the enzyme transposase are contained within DNA transposons (although not all transposons contain a functional transposase gene).<br /><br />However, it is possible that a gene for transposase could exist outside of the transposon if a transposase mRNA is reverse transcribed and inserted into the genome. I suppose a transcribed transposase retrogene could even survive for some length of time in a lineage, if that lineage already contained endogenous siRNA against part of the transposase sequence.<br /><br />Anyways, I suppose that the endogenous siRNA pathway which acts to prevent transposable elements from proliferating counts as a non-transposon-located control system. I don't see how that could possibly count as evidence for intelligent design though.rez_imotobolehthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14503929475062202036noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-20418078110408339532011-08-18T09:01:33.810-04:002011-08-18T09:01:33.810-04:00"So an ID research programme might be to find..."So an ID research programme might be to find a non-transposon-located control system for transposition."<br /><br />How about <b>DNA </b>transposons? <br />http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposon<br />"Class II (DNA transposons): By contrast, the cut-and-paste transposition mechanisms of class II transposons do not involve an RNA intermediate. These transpositions are catalyzed by various types of transposase enzymes. Some transposases can bind non-specifically to any target site, while others bind to specific sequence targets. The transposase makes a staggered cut at the target site producing sticky ends, cuts out the transposon and ligates it into the target site. A DNA polymerase fills in the resulting gaps from the sticky ends and DNA ligase closes the sugar-phosphate backbone. This results in target site duplication and the insertion sites of DNA transposons may be identified by short direct repeats (a staggered cut in the target DNA filled by DNA polymerase) followed by inverted repeats (which are important for the transposon excision by transposase). The duplications at the target site can result in gene duplication, which plays an important role in evolution."<br /><br /><br />NATURE has a number of strategies for modifying itself.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-62239279522713452442011-08-18T05:48:56.944-04:002011-08-18T05:48:56.944-04:00The wordplay over "mutation" is amusing....The wordplay over "mutation" is amusing. A common complaint is that mutations are always bad, so they can't have a role in a creative process of adaptation. So when we have a mutation that causes a loss of function (one of the "bad" kind), we can't use that word because the fact that a change has occurred is not necessarily an indication that it is deleterious. But then, it has never been argued that genetic mutation carries any connotations of detriment without a qualifier. You can get tied up in knots by your own misunderstanding of usage.<br /><br />If it's mutated, it's simply changed. If it's consequently inoperable then that may be good bad or indifferent depending on whether you are rooting for the transposon or the wider genome. <br /><br />An important point to note in all this is that transposons include the genes for transposing within themselves. Yet transposition frequently damages these, at least as far as transposing ability is concerned. If you have a genome-level adaptive need to have transposons, the last place you should keep such assumed 'valuable' genes is in a transposon. It's crap design. So an ID research programme might be to find a non-transposon-located control system for transposition.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-68683640824796245972011-08-17T12:20:57.218-04:002011-08-17T12:20:57.218-04:00Examples of the abrupt changes include the Cambria...Examples of the abrupt changes include the Cambrian Explosion and the explosion of animals in the Eocene. <br />Evolution theory cannot explain the explosion of new species at these points. <br />An additional factor is active. <br />That additional factor is the living being we call Nature.<br /> <br />This thinking accepts common ancestry but is supplemented by the intelligent influence of Nature at key points.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-17265899541597634362011-08-16T23:16:32.017-04:002011-08-16T23:16:32.017-04:00Perhaps PNG will respond. I hope so.
My point is t...Perhaps PNG will respond. I hope so.<br />My point is that evolution theory explains <i>adaptation </i>but cannot explain the origin of new species. <br />The mechanisms of evolution theory are completely insufficient for the origin of new species. <br />A number of scientists have come to that conclusion. <br />And to highlight the point new species appear abruptly. <br /><br />So there must be an additional factor in action, to account for what we clearly see in the fossil record. <br />And that additional factor could be a higher intelligence (eg. Nature) which "made certain significant genetic changes at certain points".Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-24100012649439337052011-08-16T10:15:21.618-04:002011-08-16T10:15:21.618-04:00Hello PNG.
I was hoping you would respond to what ...Hello PNG.<br />I was hoping you would respond to what I posted earlier:<br /><br />Would the situation be resolved if there was common ancestry but the higher intelligence made certain significant genetic changes at certain points? <br />In other words, directed evolution (or more precisely directed development).Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-76811496347165115122011-08-15T22:07:53.539-04:002011-08-15T22:07:53.539-04:00Sorry, In my last answer to Anus. The IDiot I shou...Sorry, In my last answer to Anus. The IDiot I should have written:<br /><br /><i>Anus., Aren't you ashamed for being responsible for that bullshit? Have you no sense of shame? Aren't you ashamed that you built an "argument" on wordplay and ignorance?</i><br /><br />Thanks and sorry for the mess.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-16310525612076129712011-08-15T21:34:05.938-04:002011-08-15T21:34:05.938-04:00Seems that because Larry wrote "are fragments...Seems that because Larry wrote "are fragments or otherwise <b>mutated</b> versions of the original mobile elements," instead of "are fragments or otherwise versions <b>carrying inactivating mutations</b> of the original mobile elements," Anus., the utmost IDiot, thinks Larry is playing an "evolutionist dishonest game." Honest mistakes out of too much familiarity and expectation that people will understand what is meant are not a possibility when it comes to "evolutionists."<br /><br />Anus., Aren't you ashamed that your arguments reduce to imbecilic wordplay? If you aren't you should. Now begone you imbecile.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com