One biologist thinks that only DNA is really a code. David Coppedge disagrees.
Biologist Jonathan Wells has listed six codes used by cells: the genetic code, the epigenetic code, the membrane code, the sugar code, the RNA splicing code, and the bioelectric code. Geoffrey North, on the other hand, writing for Current Biology, contends that there is only one code, because all the others ultimately derive from DNA. Who’s right?
“As each eager new candidate comes along, it is invariably dubbed a new second genetic code — never a third or fourth genetic code…. Why is this? In the contemporary parlance of the internet age, a kind of crowd-sourced opinion is being made, a thumbs down to the claim, which, if truly meaningful and useful, would surely be taken up into general usage, to become the second genetic code. I would suggest we accord the one, universal genetic code its deserved special place by not nominating others to join it in a list.”
So is multiplying codes a taxonomic trick, a violation of Occam’s razor? Lest we be accused of standing by our ID colleague regardless, let’s look at some other information about codes in living things and then reason about what makes a code a code.
David Coppedge, “In Life, Not One Code but Many” at Evolution News (May 19, 2022)
Meanwhile, other codes are being found all the time, as Coppedge notes, listing some.
Bioelectric code:
Responding to Geoffrey North’s view, he notes,
But it seems fair to categorize codes separately if they contain unique information and produce unique results. Even if histones are built from DNA, once they are assembled, they no longer rely on the genetic code. They follow their own rules of tagging genes with “tails” made of other molecules. Transcription factors and their pulsations, similarly, act apart from the language of DNA triplet codons. How much more the sugar code, membrane code, and bioelectric codes that are not even made up of amino acids?
David Coppedge, “In Life, Not One Code but Many” at Evolution News (May 19, 2022)
You may also wish to read: Researchers: Cells organize themselves in our organs by increasing in volume when tissues bend. “The fact that this increase in volume is staggered in time and transient also shows that it is an active and living system,” adds a researcher. Once again, we are expected to believe that such a system can just develop in a gradual Darwinian fashion.