From Veronique Greenwood at Quanta:
In a monumental set of experiments, spread out over nearly two decades, biologists removed genes two at a time to uncover the secret workings of the cell.
And what did they find?:
In all, they found 550,000 pairs that, when removed, result in sickness or death. This network of genetic connections reveals a previously hidden scaffolding that underlies the operation of the cell. “The complete picture,” Boone said, “clearly shows a beautiful hierarchical structure.”
Over here are the genes involved in taking out the cell’s garbage, and over there are the genes responsible for its metabolism. Zoom out from one cluster of genes, and you’ll find the ones involved in the larger process the cluster is nested in. Zoom out from those and you’ll find all the ones that function alongside them in the same compartment of the cell. There’s something vertiginous in this view of life, a feeling that all the layers of complexity that let the organism thrive are there to look through, just as they were laid down by evolution. [colour emphasis added – News] More.
Laid down by what? evolution? Then evolution must be functioning as some sort of designer, architect, or lawgiver, not as the outcome of natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism).
The Toronto researchers are already thinking about another big project: knocking out trios of genes instead of pairs. Many of their cells with two genes missing did not show any particular change from normal. But with a third gene removed, more cells will fail. Even if the groups test only a targeted set of genes to start out with, the group could uncover potentially thousands of new interactions.
Doubtless more beautiful hierarchical structures to come.
See also: Why one microbiologist decided to openly acknowledge design in nature
and
Self-organization: Can we wring information from matter — shake the bit out of the it?
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Very interesting.
That’s exactly the reason why single gene knockout experiments cannot be considered a final test to assess function, and sometimes seem to contradict data from sequence conservation.
Of course, in the complex network of gene interactions, many functions are redundant. Redundancy is a function itself, and a very important feature of good programming and of safety and efficiency of the design, especially in very complex structures.
Sequence conservation remains the best positive indicator of function, because sequences that are preserved by negative selection for hundreds of millions of years must necessarily be highly functional and constrained. Knockout experiments can only reveal the tip of the iceberg of functional complexity in biology.
Here is another study on yeast that falsified Darwinian claims from another angle:
gpuccio @1:
Excellent point. Right on target, as usual.
Here’s a common example of redundancy as an important component of good design:
BTW, biological systems have been around a little longer than airplanes, right? 🙂
from a friend:
Not sure I’ve got the maths right from the Quanta article.
The author says that the team were testing pairwise knockouts among 4800 inessential genes and generated 550,000 deleterious tests among 23 million unique pairs of genes (I assume they performed 23 million unique pairwise tests, which is pretty impressive).
On the face of it this suggests that in any 100 randomly selected pairs of inessential genes, knockout is likely to be deleterious in roughly two cases. Seems pretty low to me – though if the genes are “inessential”, then a low number is presumably to be expected.
Also, 23 million variants is surely a tiny fraction of the total possible number of gene pairings among 4800 loci. Isn’t that 2 to the power of 4800? Which is a number too big for my calculator to handle.
The article is extremely interesting in all respects. O’Leary’s specious misrepresentation of the science is not.”
As to “beautiful hierarchical structure underlying cell’s biology”, the following study is of interest. The regulatory network of a e-coli is found to be much more elegant than the operating system of Linux:
Along that line, it is also found that bacteria ‘solve optimization problems for collective decision making that are beyond what we, human beings, can solve with our most powerful computers’
And also along that line, here is, according to a Darwinist, a ‘horrendously complex’ metabolic pathway chart of a ‘simple’ cell:
As to trying to tag the number of ‘essential genes’ for biological life, i.e. for self replication, these following studies are of interest:
Even the most stripped down bacteria imaginable, gives us every indication that life was Intelligently Designed
As to their claim “if the researchers had pared DNA from a different bacterium they would probably have ended up with a different set of genes”, I hold that there is virtually no doubt that they would have ended up with a different set of genes if they had started with a different bacteria.
Of related interest, here is a paper that calculates total number of possible distinct patterns of interactions of yeast to find the ‘the interactome search space’. Needless to say, the paper finds that Darwinists are on the wrong side of the science once again.