Posted: May 16, 2012 4:52 pm
Rumraket wrote:CharlieM has this strange habit of linking some obscure article with a number of quotes about how wonderful and complex living systems are, then back it up with some bits of vague and arbitrary declarations like the need for "incredible" organization.
He seems to think this constitutes evidence for something, like his planning for perfection and love thingie or whatever it was. Somehow he just has this deep aversion to randomness. It just can't be probabilistic, it has to be planned. But as I've said before, the thing itself cannot be evidence of it having a planned/"primed" origin.
I have nothing against randomness, its a fact of life. What I am against is an unjustified assumption of randomness due to a prior belief in how things are supposed to operate. To give an example, here is quote from the book, Life Itself: Exploring the Realm of the Living Cell by Boyce Rensberger in 1998:
Whatever the source of the signal, its effect is to work within the nucleus, seeking out the regulatory portions of DNA
that govern the specific gene it "wants" to activate. The signal proteins must find and bind to the regulatory segments to cause a given gene's message to be "expressed" or, depending on the signal, to prevent expression. The sequence of DNA bases that constitute a gene's "on" switch is positioned next to the "go" signal at the beginning of the genetic sentence. Also taking part in the process are other regulatory sequences that are often situated some distance away from the gene. At one time it was assumed that the signal proteins wandered aimlessly within the nucleus until they chanced to bump into their target sequence. Now it is clear that they don't. They grab onto a DNA strand and "walk" along it, "looking" for the sequence - yet another example of the role of autonomous motion in life. Even though the molecule may have to walk a long way to find its gene (many miles in the living-room cell nucleus), the process is roughly 100 million times more efficient than simply bouncing around inside the nucleus.
Why did they automatically assume that the regulatory proteins just bounced around aimlessly? They could have said that they didn't yet know how these regulators found their target but they didn't; they assumed a blind unguided process at work. Their beliefs were found to be unjustified in light of the facts.
If we are not in possession of all the facts would it not be better to say that a certain process might turn out to be the result of random processes but on the other hand it might not.