. . . here (at 194) in his amazing engineering thread as he responds to Dionisio:
>>Dionisio:
He goes on, in 201:
>>By the way, let’s comment some more on this interesting issue of development, always in the light of the results presented in this OP.
Vertebrates are considered as a subphylum of chordates: chordates with backbones.
So, in a sense, the basic body plan is set up in chordates, with the appearance of the notochord, and other features.
As we know, phyla correspond to basic body plans. But, strangely enough, they all appear very “suddenly”, during the so called “Cambrian explosion” (approximately 541 – 520 million years ago).
We know well all the debates about that amazing event. Of course, neo darwinist have tried their best to hypothesize that the explosion is not an explosion at all, and that the true information for all those new body plans was being “manufactured” more gradually during the previous times. And so on.
But the evidence of the fossils remains what it is, and I don’t think that our “polite dissenters” have succeeded in explaining away the “almost miracle” of the Cambrian events.
However, with vertebrates we are apparently observing an event slightly later than the Cambrian explosion itself. The emergence of a very important (for future developments) subphylum in the well established phylum of chordata.
That allows to localize better the emergence of the new information, to somewhat later than the Cambrian, but anyway well more than 400 million years ago.
Now, if we judge from the following natural history, it seems that the emergence of vertebrates was a very successful innovation: indeed, chordates not vertebrates are a rather small bunch of organisms today, while vertebrates are, in comparison, one of the main representative groups of animals, from many points of view, even if we don’t consider the side aspect that we, as humans, are part of it.
So, it is rather interesting to observe, according to the data presented in the OP, that the transition to vertebrates was a very exceptional “jump” from the point of view of some specific functional information in the proteome, certainly the biggest step we can observe in the accumulation of human conserved protein information. In that sense, it is a much bigger step than the simple appearance of the phylum chordata, with the appearence of more than twice human conserved information (3,708,977 bits vs 1,685,550, not corrected for redundancy).
If we want to make hypotheses about that interesting fact, we could probably reason that the new body plan of vertebrates includes at least two major innovations that will be very important in all the future natural history of that branch:
1) Cephalization, and in particular the gradual development of the brain, and therefore of all new functiona connected to that
2) Adaptive immunity, which appears for the first time in jawed vertebrates.
Both these innovations have a common denominator: they are linked to the appearance and development of two very complex regulatory systems, both aimed to a very complex and nuanced interaction with the outer environment.
IOWs, they are both, in different ways, complex systems that process information from the outer world.
That is an important concept, because it bears a fundamental implication:
If the bulk of the huge informational jump that appears in the vertebrate proteome is really linked to the premises for the development of the central nervous system and the brain and of the adaptive immune system, then it is perfectly reasonable to think that much of that new information must be strongly connected, as one can expect in any big and complex system that mainly processes information and reacts to it in very complex and nuanced modalities.
Another way to say it is that, in that huge informational jump, a great part of the total information can be expected to be irreducibly complex.>>
Sobering issues, well worth headlining and inviting further discussion. Let’s see if objectors to design thought have a good, cogent and plausible counter-case that is suitably empirically well-grounded in actual observations rather than ideologically loadesd reconstructions of the inherently unobservable remote past of origins. END
PS: I have been very busy RW.
Thank you for summarizing that interesting discussion.
I will summarize it even more.
1) Nobody knows how morphogenesis is controlled and guided.
2) Moran is no exception to that.
3) “Experts” are no exception to that.
4) However, according to Moran (and, unfortunately, he is probably quite right): “experts do not see a need to encode body plans and brain in our genome”
5) You and I, and probably some more sensible people, do see that need.
6) So, it seems, the problem is not about what we know, but about what we see as a need.
Now, I notice that Moran says:
“experts do not see a need to encode body plans and brain in our genome” (emphasis mine)
OK, that can mean two very different things:
a) Experts do not see a need to encode body plans and brain in our genome, but they think that body plans and the brain are encoded elsewhere
OR
b) Experts do not see a need to encode body plans and brain anywhere.
I will not ask Moran what he really meant, because I think it unlikely that he would respond. So, I can only guess.
I would say that he means b). Why? Because, if he means a), I could probably partially agree, and that is a rather unlikely situation, IMO.
Now, a) just means that the procedures are encoded elsewhere. That is probably true, at least in part. That “elsewhere can still mean two different things:
a1) At some epigenetic level, that we can imagine
a2) In some other way, that at present we cannot even imagine
Well, I believe that all of that is true. The procedures are encoded in the genome, both at the level of proteome (see my OP here, for that) and at the level of non coding DNA (Ouch! Moran will not like that). And they are also encoded at many epigenetic levels. And they are also encoded at other levels that at present we cannot imagine.
But there is one certainty, for me: they are encoded somewhere.
Because, you see, most neo darwinists would rather go with b): they really believe that those things are not encoded anywhere.
Now, while you and I certainly find that idea completely absurd, let’s try to understand what they think.
The best, and most honest, admission about that, in my memory, was made by Piotr, some time ago, in a discussion that was exactly about the procedures for cell (and tissue, and organ, and body) development. He said, if I remember well:
“I think it’s just the memory of what worked”.
OK, that’s a very honest statement of a neo darwinian perspective. But, as it is honest, it includes a precious little word: memory.
Now, you and I, having some love for informatics and programming, know all too well that “memory” is not a vague concept.
Memory of information must be stored to survive and be available. And that requires, in our human experience, some storage medium. Usually some physical (and often expensive) storage medium.
IOWs, no memory storage medium, no party.
So, I would like to ask Piotr (if he still reads this blog, that is unlikely), or Moran (if he likes to answer, that is unlikely), or anyone else:
Where and how are the procedure for cell (and tissue, and organ, and body) development stored?
Because, you see, they are certainly available in some way, otherwise how could the embryo of any organism generate the full body?
I suppose that the most likely argument of any neo darwinist, at this point, would be that those procedures must, after all, be very simple. A few HARs, a few hundred, at best a few thousand, nucleotides, and the deed is done.
Done? The human body plan? The human brain and nervous system? The whole immunology network? And so on, and so on?
You and I, having some love for informatics and programming, know all too well a very basic truth: very simple programs require some limited memory to be stored, but very complex programs require a lot of memory.
So, is the information for human brain really so simple? Is it like squeezing, say, Windows 10 in 1-2 KB at most?
OK, we know that the biological designer must be very good, but so good?
Ah, but I forgot: neo darwinian evolution can do practically anything: even miracles, provided we don’t call them miracles! >>