jeudi 6 octobre 2022

"But Random Mutations Aren't Really All That Random"


On Thomistic Institute, which has a Theistic Evolutionist stance (inconsistent with confessing that Adam and Eve existed, as they do), one video is put into the service of randomness actually being circumscribed by order. Which Uranium atom will decay when is random, but it is not random that it will become an atom of Thorium (in the case of Uranium 235 becoming Thorium 231), it will for instance not turn into a rabbit. That we very well do know, that is not random at all.

Therefore, since nature is ultimately orderly, there is also - we are led to conclude - an orderly fashion in which mutations in fish could lead to mammals.

In order to go for the problem of this argument, let's take a look at another "answer" argument. Nothing can come from nothing. Famously, Lawrence Krauss and Richard Carrier disagree. On Carrier's view, or explanation of Krauss' view, if at any given "time" (or stage or whatever) there is really nothing, there are also no actual constraints, except those of necessity. Hence from nothing, on this view, everything can come, since the "rule" that "from nothing comes nothing" is one of the things that is neutralised by the "lack of rules" in real "nothing" - I countered among other things that in such a chaotic situation, there was no way for Carrier to preclude that the first thing to spring from such a nothing could be a god, creating or giving birth to other gods and to the world.

Mutations are not random enough for this.

And that is why they are also not sufficiently "random" or "chaotic" or creative to turn fish into mammals.

For instance, the locus mutation is changing one specific "letter" of the DNA, and one of the outcomes possible is that this changes nothing at all. DNA strands are organised into triplets, and for many of the aminoacids that are meant to result from a specific triplet, another triplet with two first "letters" identic to the original one will do exactly the same thing. For alanine any of the triplets GCT, GCC, GCA or GCG will do, in the coding DNA strand base (with triplets not transcribed).

Another is, it changes one aminoacid. It could mean the protein does the same thing, it could mean the protein breaks down, it could mean the protein does a slightly different thing. Like producing red or yellow colours instead of brown or black ones.

Deletion events and reduplication events, provided the triplets are intact would have basically the same kind of results. One or several items less or more of one aminoacid or series of such.

How it could produce a very different thing is ... well, the thing is, if it were possible (I don't know it is) that triplet borders are displaced in a gene, like one or two bases deleted, that would mean lots and lots of triplets were newly formed and lots and lots of triplets were deleted ... and the result would be deleterious, not creative.

Genes are made up of promoter regions and alternating regions of introns (noncoding sequences) and exons (coding sequences). The production of a functional protein involves the transcription of the gene from DNA into RNA, the removal of introns and splicing together of exons, the translation of the spliced RNA sequences into a chain of amino acids, and the posttranslational modification of the protein molecule.


This is from Encyclopedia Britannica.
https://www.britannica.com/science/gene


Perhaps, then, the introns inbetween would lock the displaced triplets inside a sole exon, but in that one exon at least, if the triplets were displaced, it would be dysfunctional. I explored this aspect back in last year:

Creation vs. Evolution : What Could Irregular Deletions Do?
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2021/12/what-could-irregular-deletions-do.html


And if a gene were doubled, why would its correct copy remain correct all the while the incorrect one underwent more and more mutations until it became correctly coding for sth else?

The outcome of such deletion events would be death to the line or no big deal, the thing being muted into a pseudogene or a non-coding part of a gene, changing it from an exon to an intron.

And quite a lot of functions require in fact more than just one gene to be correctly functioning. A few years, perhaps even a decade ago, I saw a meme on what had happened with the blind chiclids in Mexican caves. A chiclid retina requires ten genes, some of them in use during more than one stage of gestation or development in eggs. In the case of the blind chiclids, exactly two of these genes were mutated.

And the chiclids have a retina which takes energy from the blood stream, which takes oxygen and so do the other parts of the eye, and yet the retina cannot do its work.

If you need ten functioning genes to make a function, and if just one mutation at a gene is enough to make it dysfunctional, like just one or two dysfunctional genes can ruin the function, there is no way in which there is an orderly way, because nature is orderly, in which one celled organisms could become more complex. You see, more complexity = more cell types than just one. More cell types = cell types with specialised functions, not there in the one celled organisms. That cannot arise from random mutations. It can only arise from either always being there or being deliberately added. Precisely for the same reason that a scrambled box will involve objects lying in an order that - quoting Fr. Davenport - "minimises gravitational energy" (whatever that means to a physicist). New functions arising would be as impossible as the scrambled box leading to candles standing up in chandeliers.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Bruno
6.X.2022

In monasterio Turris, dioecesis Squillacensis, in Calabria, sancti Brunonis Confessoris, qui Ordinis Carthusianorum fuit Institutor.

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