
Left side: Drosophila yakuba male fruit fly, right side is a Drosophila santomea male /Eden Wellesley McQueen
The Hox genes are not the big answer many thought:
The role of Hox genes in changing the layout of different body parts during evolution has been challenged by a study led by researchers out of the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Biological Sciences.
Hox genes are vital to developing differences in repeated body parts such as vertebrae, limbs, or digits in most animal species, including human beings. Ever since their discovery, scientists have thought that modifications to Hox genes could be the primary way that the animal body plan has been altered during evolution.
The paper, “Changes throughout a genetic network masks the contribution of Hox gene evolution,” discusses experiments that pinpoint evolutionary changes in a Hox gene, but found that several other genes had evolved alongside it to generate a difference in pigmentation along the fruit fly body plan. The paper was published in Current Biology June 27. “Body plan evolution not as simple as once believed” at University of Pittsburgh
So Hox isn’t the magic Darwinfix after all. all these genes are coordinating their work, almost like the unrolling of a plan. Maybe exactly like the unrolling of a plan.
Paper. (open access)
See also: genomic: Hoxparadox described (2011)
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as to the final sentence in the article:
Indeed the finding that “It takes all sorts of genes working together to generate these phenotypes” is yet another falsification of the modern synthesis and/or Dawkin’s ‘selfish gene’ concept. First, here are few other falsifications of the modern synthesis and/or Dawkin’s ‘selfish gene’ concept.
Dawkins’ ‘selfish gene’ concept is more of less directly based on Darwin’s own ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking about competition. Yet genes, as the article in the OP highlighted, are now found to be anything but selfish. Instead of being ‘selfish’, genes are now found to be existing in a holistic web of mutual interdependence and cooperation (the antithesis of selfishness).
Such ‘holistic cooperation’ is, as should be needless to say, the exact polar opposite of being ‘selfish’ as Dawkins had envisioned with his ‘selfish gene’ concept. (And should, if Darwinism were a normal science instead of being basically a religion for atheists, count as yet another direct falsification of the theory).
Although Darwinists had placed great hope that Hox genes would someday provide them with a line of evidence that could help explain the body plan development of various organisms, the fact of the matter is that Darwinists, with advances in quantum biology, are now shown, with their reductive materialistic framework, to not even be on the correct theoretical foundation in order to be able to properly understand molecular biology in the first place:
Biological form simply is not reducible to the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinists
Moreover, this failure of the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinian evolution to be able to explain the body plan of any particular organism occurs at a very low level, much lower than DNA itself (or any other material particulars that Darwinists may wish to invoke to explain body plans).
In the following article entitled ‘Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics’, which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists’ point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.”
Simply put, the ‘bottom up’ reductive materialistic framework of Darwinian evolution is found to be grossly inadequate for explaining how any particular organism might achieve its basic form. Moreover, to state what should be glaringly obvious, since neo-Darwinian explanations are grossly inadequate for explaining how any particular organism might achieve its basic form, then neo-Darwinian speculations for how one type of organism might transform into another type of organism are based on pure fantasy and have no discernible experimental basis in reality.
Whereas, on the other hand, Theism, especially with these recent breakthroughs in quantum biology,,,
,,,whereas Theism is found to be very well supported in its claim that God has formed each of us in our mother’s womb.
As well, besides quantum information providing direct empirical falsification of neo-Darwinian claims that say immaterial information is emergent from some material basis, the implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious.
That pleasant implication, of course, being the fact that we now have direct physical evidence strongly indicating that we do indeed have an eternal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies.
As Stuart Hameroff notes in this following video, “the quantum information,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
Verse:
A lot of modern genetic determinism comes from the concept of twin studies and similarities being genetic and the difference is also being genetic in someway shape or form
However whenever these things are pulled into question and tested by molecular geneticist they never panned out ever
It is only science media journalists and people like Nancy Seagal who make these remarkable claims but when a molecular geneticist looks at these things they never find the claims to be true
My favorite was the recent drop with the poly genic score showing a failure two genetically track height in Europe
This is not been the first time there is a recent study on 23 and me and ancestry.com they’re really good at predicting the general area of your families origins and traits, but when it comes to specifics both tests were very different from one another and all over the place because they used different genetic databases with different scores
And what keeps happening is when you get all the data together biologically interesting spikes have a tendency to disappear the so-called gene for this and this so called gene for that
I think a course that I took in genetic influence from many years ago back in 2010 still holds true today and I remember going over a lot of predictions that they made in that class about the interplay of environment and genetics and almost all of those predictions came true
Yet on the exact same token people still push genetic determinism and biological determinism trying to re-define what it is and overstate their influences
It’s frustrating and sometimes nerve racking
But nothing is more irritating when you hear such claims like parenting doesn’t matter as much as we thought because genetically your child is going to be a certain way
Even Richard dawkins criticizes this frame of thinking
Worse yet is the comment isn’t as important as we originally thought
Of course parenting your child is incredibly important probably one of the most important things you can do
But when they say that comment they imply that it’s not important at all in genetics are the main factor
In reality it’s just another part of the puzzle all of it contributes
“Plan” is not a good word for them.