Tim Standish: Simpler systems do not necessarily come first because simple can be a lot harder to come up with than complex. Yes, that seems counterintuitive, but the history of technology bears that out. In some ways you could say the same about art.
Month: March 2021
From Philip Cunningham: The human eye, like the human brain, is a wonder
Which allegedly required no actual design…
Does DNA really have a “half life”? Physicist Rob Sheldon is skeptical
Sheldon: “As a physicist, I would like to point out that biologists are misusing the word “half-life”. DNA does NOT have a half-life of 521 years. Radioisotopes have a half-life, because the nucleus is unstable to natural decay through the weak force (for isotopes of interest).” He goes on to say that the weak force of the universe “is unaffected by temperature, pressure, time, or chemicals.” Not so for DNA.
At New Scientist: “single-celled organism that lacks most of the molecular equipment needed to kick-start DNA replication”
It’s a protist? “Protists are a group of loosely connected, mostly unicellular eukaryotic organisms that are not plants, animals or fungi. There is no single feature such as evolutionary history or morphology common to all these organisms and they are unofficially placed under a separate kingdom called Protista.” In short, just the sort of life form that might be doing something really different. Because nature is full of intelligence, there are probably many alternative programs out there. It all didn’t just somehow happen randomly once.
Discovery of useful “junk DNA” “has outstripped the discovery of protein-coding genes by a factor of five…
At Nature: “Likewise, the number of publications about such elements also grew in the period covered by our data set. For example, there are thousands of papers on non-coding RNAs, which regulate gene expression.” We also learn the possible origin of the term “junk DNA.”
Gregory Chaitin on why human creativity is not computable
Creativity is what we don’t know. Once it is reduced to a formula a computer can use, it is not creative any more, by definition.
Math paradoxes show us that the world we live in is not and cannot be purely naturalist
Robert J. Marks sometimes uses the paradox of the smallest “uninteresting” number to illustrate proof by contradiction — that is, by creating paradoxes
Did beliefs about junk DNA hinder the Human Genome Project?
But wasn’t a vast pile of junk DNA supposed to be one of the Great Proofs of Darwinism in the DNA? Funny, no one suggests that the constant diminution of the pile is evidence against the theory that its presence was supposed to be evidence for. Now why do you think that might be?
How cells signal that they should be killed
Again, a complex signalling system that supposedly just so happened and in this case it doesn’t function for the protection of the cell but for it’s elimination.
Fifty different genes for eye color?
You’ve heard this one before. From the study group: Eye color is “much more complex than previously thought.”
Are Darwin’s loyalists dwindling in number and cultural attractiveness?
Who cares any more about the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? (You can look that up on the internet if you are not sure what it means. On the other hand, maybe you needn’t bother.)
When psychology tries to be a science instead of a mythology…
Gabriel encourages us to see psychology as a mythology and, of course, he is right: “Sigmund Freud’s theories were largely unfalsifiable, and the promissory note that the mind is the brain has yet to be cashed in.” The idea that the mind is just the brain is unfalsifiable too. Beliefs that do not originate in fact are impervious to evidence.
More evidence of fine-tuning in DNA replication
“Just the right amount” over and over in a cascade is still just a big accident, right? That’s if you still want your job at the lab…
Is the mind just a program run by the brain?
Michael Egnor: No. The mind is the opposite of computation. Mental states are always intentional and computation, by its nature, is never intentional.
Dawkins’s claim: “every gene delivers approximately the same tree of life” contested at Nature Portfolio Ecology & Evolution
You know, Dawkins may be losing his shine. New Scientist was making similar types of noise last October. It’s now okay to say when there’s something wrong with this stuff.