Philip Cunningham: Darwinism vs biological form
| December 8, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
How Do Organisms Achieve Their Basic Form? That is to ask, how does a single fertilized egg become a elephant, a tiger, a human, or any of the numerous other kinds of animals or plants we see around us?
“The earliest events leading from the first division of the egg cell to the blastula stage in amphibians, reptiles and mammals are illustrated in figure 5.4. Even to the untrained zoologist it is obvious that neither the blastula itself, nor the sequence of events that lead to its formation, is identical in any of the vertebrate classes shown. The differences become even more striking in the next major phase of in embryo formation – gastrulation. This involves a complex sequence of cell movements whereby the cells of the blastula rearrange themselves, eventually resulting in the transformation of the blastula into the intricate folded form of the early embryo, or gastrula, which consists of three basic germ cell layers: the ectoderm, which gives rise to the skin and the nervous system; the mesoderm, which gives rise to muscle and skeletal tissues; and the endoderm, which gives rise to the lining of the alimentary tract as well as to the liver and pancreas.,,, In some ways the egg cell, blastula, and gastrula stages in the different vertebrate classes are so dissimilar that, where it not for the close resemblance in the basic body plan of all adult vertebrates, it seems unlikely that they would have been classed as belonging to the same phylum. There is no question that, because of the great dissimilarity of the early stages of embryogenesis in the different vertebrate classes, organs and structures considered homologous in adult vertebrates cannot be traced back to homologous cells or regions in the earliest stages of embryogenesis. In other words, homologous structures are arrived at by different routes.” Michael Denton – Evolution: A Theory in Crisis – pg 145-146 More.
See also: Philip Cunningham on determinism vs free will
7 Responses to Philip Cunningham: Darwinism vs biological form
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Fact 1: Making anything from scratch requires raw materials and information.
Fact 2: Making the simplest products like pencils and tires requires many times more than 1 GB of data as manufacturers employ thousands of engineers that generate the information necessary in extracting and refining the raw materials, in making the building blocks, in making the tools and the tools that make the manufacturing tools.
Fact 3: The human body is the most complex entity known; more complex than pencils, tires, computers, the whole of the internet (arguably).
Fact 4: DNA in its linear form contains only 1GB of data.
Fact 5: DNA is not particularly well compressed for information – 64 bits (3 nucleotides) encode 20 aminoacids; up to thousands of nucleotides encode a single protein.
Assumption 1: DNA 3D structure and other chemical properties of cells add an unknown amount of information which is also not known how it differs from organism to organism. Until further research proves otherwise, assume this increased information offsets compression inefficiencies from Fact 5.
Fact 6: Human DNA differs from chimp DNA by 1.2% and from banana DNA by 50% while human DNA differs from other humans by up to 0.5%.
Fact 7: Humans differ from chimps in several dimensions including development, anatomy, intelligence, and behavior. Simply describing all these differences take a large volume of data.
Conclusion 1: From Fact 1, 2, and 3 – it takes an unknown yet very large amount of data to store the information necessary to develop a human from zygote to birth.
Conclusion 2: From Conclusion 1 and Fact 4 – the human DNA is grossly inadequate to store the information needed to develop a human from zygote to birth; DNA is not what makes us human!
Conclusion 3: From Conclusion 2 and Facts 6, 7 – humans differ from chimps by orders of magnitude more than the 8 MB of data difference in the two DNAs; DNA fails to support the assertion that humans are apes!
More: http://nonlin.org/dna-not-essence-of-life/
Non-lin: There is a whole cell there in the zygote, which has room for Terabytes’ worth of info embedded in functionally specific organisation. regulatory networks, metabolic processes and more. DNA is patently only part of the story. KF
Nonlin.org:
I absolutely agree.
Unfortunately, I do agree also on this statement of yours:
“If not in DNA, then where exactly is the actual human blueprint? We do not have any strong leads, but we do know that even genetic twins are somewhat different, that epigenetics play a role, that some information is encoded chemically (as in redox reactions and DNA PCR), and that environment and the maternal womb are critical. None of these is a sufficient explanation however. Chemistry is common to all organisms, the environment can vary drastically without affecting the outcome that much (homeostasis), and the maternal womb is itself an outcome of a previous development.”
You say it correctly: we do not have any strong leads.
Your arguments are very similar to a question that I have been asking for many years here: what we know about genetics (and, I would add, epigenetics, which is actually a lot) tells us much about the effectors, and, with the help of epigenetics, also about specific cascades of effectors. But we still understand nothing about the controlling procedures. So the question is: where and how are the controlling procedures written?
In 2003 the italian biologist Giuseppe Sermonti published a book whose English title is: “Why Is a Fly Not a Horse?” His question remains absolutely valid today.
I think that some basic new understanding of living beings is necessary to start solving that problem. And, probably, some basic new understanding of biophysics, and even of physics.
Nonlin.org:
By the way, my compliments for the site. It’s very interesting! 🙂
From one of the articles quoted in the notes: What Do Organisms Mean? Stephen L. Talbott – Winter 2011
If the language of physics and chemistry is inadequate to describe the organism, which language is adequate to describe the organism? Perhaps the language used to say this, 3000 years ago is more than adequate.
@5 … indeed adequate!
@kairosfocus
Does your “There is a whole cell there in the zygote, which has room for Terabytes’ worth of info…” contradict anything I wrote? Are you saying anything beyond “we don’t know”?
Maybe you should read the whole thing: http://nonlin.org/dna-not-essence-of-life/