8 ms·

The parasite theory is that transposons are rather like early computer viruses that replicated by embedding themselves in other executables: they exist only to

by PaulAJ 8y ago

The parasite theory is that transposons are rather like early computer viruses that replicated by embedding themselves in other executables: they exist only to make copies of themselves in their host genome. This theory is not incompatible with these results. Evolution is not a rational design process. Once a transposon starts replicating it is quite possible for the host genome to evolve to incorporate the transposon in its regular mechanisms. To continue the computer analogy, imagine that some mad programmer decided to practice software reuse by calling a routine embedded in a virus. Now when you clean the viral infection from your computer the mad programmer's app no longer works. But that doesn't mean that the virus isn't continuing to replicate and cause other harm. Aside: this is yet another counter-example to the Intelligent Design "theory"; no sane engineer would have done it like that.

Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
Aren't most intelligent designs actually done by sane engineers filled with quirks like this? Spaghetti code at places, leaky abstractions, hard-coded things, replicating old bugs to make the program compatible with bad OSes or other old software, etc. etc. This could just as easily be an artifact of the complexity of reality, not an argument for- or against "intelligent design". There might be reasons do doubt intelligent design hypothesis, but this one does not seem like one of them. (Also why would it need to be a "sane" engineer? It could have just as easily be a bad junior engineer, that does not produce "perfect" code - just code that works.)
- coldtea 8y ago
  >It could have just as easily be a bad engineer from a third-world country, that does not produce "perfect" code - just code that works. Because "first-world" country engineers don't do that?
  - Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
    I've seen this being statistically significant in hiring people from different parts of the world. There are exceptions everywhere, but there are also certain trends. But I get your point that this information is irrelevant to the question at hand.
    - Satam 8y ago
      JIAN YANG!!!
      - Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
        "Is one of those racist and the other is not? Please don't hack my browser history.". Great show.
    - KenanSulayman 8y ago
      "Incompetent engineers from other parts of the world" seems to be HN's version of Godwin's law
  - kaybe 8y ago
    Sounds like scientists to me, hah.
- GlennS 8y ago
  Intelligent Design, being a religious theory, usually carries the implication that the designer was infallible and made no mistakes, unless they were deliberate mistakes.
  - samuell 8y ago
    Biblical creation theory postulate that a good initial design has had an increasing lot of destructive processes going on after the first man breaking the trust relationship with the Creator. "Genetic Entropy" thus being one of these consequences (there's even a book with that title, by Cornell prof., gene gun inventor and creationist, John Sanford).
    - 79357423 8y ago
      If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them. (Leviticus 20:13) So this genetic entropy caused people to be born gay, for which we should kill them. That sound sound like an imperfect creator.
- Retric 8y ago
  Wait what? Are you arguing that 'god(s)' where and or might be incompetent? Anyway, I don't think ID requires that every mutation was designed, rather that an intelegent agent made at least one adjustment to an ongoing process. The problem is it's not a falsifiable theory because it makes no specific testable predictions.
  - orf 8y ago
    If there is a god you could hardly call him incompetent after creating life. That doesn't exclude hacks or workarounds
    - Razengan 8y ago
      Why a god? Why not many? Humans have been modifying organisms for thousands of years, through selective breeding and cultivation. Does that not count as a form of intelligent design? Is it detectable? If not, who is to say it hasn’t been done with us?
      - krapp 8y ago
        > Why a god? Why not many? The real answer is that "intelligent design" is a movement by evangelical and conservative Christianity to reframe Biblical literalism as a legitimate scientific framework.
        tsunamifury 8y ago
        True, but it is also a science fiction concept that is presented in everything from Prometheus to Futurama.
  - Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
    > Wait what? Are you arguing that 'god(s)' where and or might be incompetent? I get the humor in your question. Yet I would like to comment for the people who might be more seriously interested in this question, that the most enlightened view seems to be that 'god(s)' are not incompetent, but are simply not done yet, they haven't completed the design. That the design itself is not a finished final product, but rather a continuous form of development. If there is such a development, it would be quite logical that one could take any future (or just further in terms of advancement) iteration of some thing (like human genome), compare it to a previous version and make a claim that it's "inferior" or "incompetent". But this is just an assessment of a logical mind. It could just as easily be called an iteration which is perfectly designed for it's time and place and has an irreplaceable role in the grand scheme of things. > The problem is it's not a falsifiable theory because it makes no specific testable predictions. I so wish that more people would understand this. I was trying to point into exactly this by the original comment, saying basically that no scientific truth can be an argument for or against any spiritual claim, that they simply belong to the different areas of knowledge. People who are proficient in either areas of knowledge, are often ignorant to this incompatibility, trying to prove each other wrong. The solution is to recognize the proper way to fuse the two areas, not choose one of them and pretend that it's enough.
zxcb1 8y ago
Couldn't it also be seen as a forking point of accepting (integrating) or rejecting the new element? With maintained or increased fitness the host organism survives. With rejection, the new element becomes by definition a pathogen. From an objective point of view, organisms that incorporate pathogens and survive become more aligned with the surrounding environment, adapted. Evolution is brutal, but is it irrational ?
snarfy 8y ago
> no sane engineer would have done it like that. You should read the story of Mel [1]. [1] - http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
- brohee 8y ago
  Can't help but think a LGP-30 simulator would be the basis for a nice TIS-100 like game...
- ufo 8y ago
  Mel's code is highly efficient and information dense. It's as non-biological as it can get :)
menacingly 8y ago
I'm not usually much of an intelligent design advocate, but approaching it from the angle that we know enough right now to make definitive calls as to the merits of different genetic approaches is hubris _at best_. Not to mention the sneaky embedded assumption that an engineering approach is even the best way to go.
- bena 8y ago
  Then it's just as meaningless. I mean, the claim is that we're so complex we must have been designed. But there are what seems like very serious design flaws in lots of organisms. Giraffes have a nerve that travel up and down their necks only to wind up a few inches from where it should be. Our eyes have the nerves attached on the wrong side, giving us blind spots and a host of other problems. And on and on. You can't hold life up as evidence of an intelligent designer and then when presented with evidence that we're a poor design, counter with "maybe it's smart and we don't know it".
  - rsynnott 8y ago
    Of course, maybe the designer is just incompetent ;)
  - joshuahedlund 8y ago
    The counter-argument to many "design flaws" is, as a sibling comment mentioned, they may be "artifacts of the complexity of reality," especially constraints due to the fact that living things are built up from single cells and need to be functional during the growth process, as opposed to being pieced together like a robot from existing materials. IANABiologist, but I think I've heard that the giraffe nerve has to grow that way due to the way it starts growing, or that there is a rare mutation that doesn't actually grow that way, but it doesn't get selected for, presumably due to some other side effect. There are also counter-arguments related to constraints regarding human eyes... Octopus eyes are supposed to be superior, not backwards with no blind spot, but I think human eyes can see way farther outside of water. (I welcome informed corrections to any ignorance I may be spouting). Essentially, there's a lot of nuance between "maybe it's smart and we don't know it" and "these are definitely very serious design flaws" - whether you think things were intelligently designed, evolved, or intelligently designed via evolution, it seems reasonable to think there may be at least some reasons that a lot of things were selected to be the way they are, and not what may at first glance seem obviously better, at least if you haven't considered all the relevant constraints.
andrei_says_ 8y ago
Intelligence could be different from our understanding and projection of it. I can see the highly structured and mutually influenced movement of galaxies, star systems etc as a type of intelligence. The processes in stars. Are they completely random? The time we’ve spent observing the Sun is insurmountable short in Star time. The ecosystems on Earth with their never stopping intertwined flow of signals and influences. Wheat, corn and soy using humans to take over vast territories. Languages and thought patterns and their disease-like activity often infecting and wiping out huge ecosystems (“let’s kill all the bison!”) and large parts of their host population (genocides, world wars, racism). I am not religious and am certain that the theory of evolution is sound. There’s no bearded guy in the sky tweaking our genome and berrying dinosaurs to test our faith. When I look at the self organizing nature of phenomena, my pattern recognizing brain sees patterns and I can’t but think that the regular definition of intelligence might be too small and might benefit by being scaled up. How is our intelligence different from the ability of species’ genomes to adapt to environments over long periods of time?

by PaulAJ 8y ago

Erlich_Bachman 8y ago

Aren't most intelligent designs actually done by sane engineers filled with quirks like this? Spaghetti code at places, leaky abstractions, hard-coded things, replicating old bugs to make the program compatible with bad OSes or other old software, etc. etc. This could just as easily be an artifact of the complexity of reality, not an argument for- or against "intelligent design". There might be reasons do doubt intelligent design hypothesis, but this one does not seem like one of them. (Also why would it need to be a "sane" engineer? It could have just as easily be a bad junior engineer, that does not produce "perfect" code - just code that works.)

coldtea 8y ago
>It could have just as easily be a bad engineer from a third-world country, that does not produce "perfect" code - just code that works. Because "first-world" country engineers don't do that?
- Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
  I've seen this being statistically significant in hiring people from different parts of the world. There are exceptions everywhere, but there are also certain trends. But I get your point that this information is irrelevant to the question at hand.
  - Satam 8y ago
    JIAN YANG!!!
    - Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
      "Is one of those racist and the other is not? Please don't hack my browser history.". Great show.
  - KenanSulayman 8y ago
    "Incompetent engineers from other parts of the world" seems to be HN's version of Godwin's law
- kaybe 8y ago
  Sounds like scientists to me, hah.
GlennS 8y ago
Intelligent Design, being a religious theory, usually carries the implication that the designer was infallible and made no mistakes, unless they were deliberate mistakes.
- samuell 8y ago
  Biblical creation theory postulate that a good initial design has had an increasing lot of destructive processes going on after the first man breaking the trust relationship with the Creator. "Genetic Entropy" thus being one of these consequences (there's even a book with that title, by Cornell prof., gene gun inventor and creationist, John Sanford).
  - 79357423 8y ago
    If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them. (Leviticus 20:13) So this genetic entropy caused people to be born gay, for which we should kill them. That sound sound like an imperfect creator.
Retric 8y ago
Wait what? Are you arguing that 'god(s)' where and or might be incompetent? Anyway, I don't think ID requires that every mutation was designed, rather that an intelegent agent made at least one adjustment to an ongoing process. The problem is it's not a falsifiable theory because it makes no specific testable predictions.
- orf 8y ago
  If there is a god you could hardly call him incompetent after creating life. That doesn't exclude hacks or workarounds
  - Razengan 8y ago
    Why a god? Why not many? Humans have been modifying organisms for thousands of years, through selective breeding and cultivation. Does that not count as a form of intelligent design? Is it detectable? If not, who is to say it hasn’t been done with us?
    - krapp 8y ago
      > Why a god? Why not many? The real answer is that "intelligent design" is a movement by evangelical and conservative Christianity to reframe Biblical literalism as a legitimate scientific framework.
      - tsunamifury 8y ago
        True, but it is also a science fiction concept that is presented in everything from Prometheus to Futurama.
- Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
  > Wait what? Are you arguing that 'god(s)' where and or might be incompetent? I get the humor in your question. Yet I would like to comment for the people who might be more seriously interested in this question, that the most enlightened view seems to be that 'god(s)' are not incompetent, but are simply not done yet, they haven't completed the design. That the design itself is not a finished final product, but rather a continuous form of development. If there is such a development, it would be quite logical that one could take any future (or just further in terms of advancement) iteration of some thing (like human genome), compare it to a previous version and make a claim that it's "inferior" or "incompetent". But this is just an assessment of a logical mind. It could just as easily be called an iteration which is perfectly designed for it's time and place and has an irreplaceable role in the grand scheme of things. > The problem is it's not a falsifiable theory because it makes no specific testable predictions. I so wish that more people would understand this. I was trying to point into exactly this by the original comment, saying basically that no scientific truth can be an argument for or against any spiritual claim, that they simply belong to the different areas of knowledge. People who are proficient in either areas of knowledge, are often ignorant to this incompatibility, trying to prove each other wrong. The solution is to recognize the proper way to fuse the two areas, not choose one of them and pretend that it's enough.

zxcb1 8y ago

Couldn't it also be seen as a forking point of accepting (integrating) or rejecting the new element? With maintained or increased fitness the host organism survives. With rejection, the new element becomes by definition a pathogen. From an objective point of view, organisms that incorporate pathogens and survive become more aligned with the surrounding environment, adapted. Evolution is brutal, but is it irrational ?

snarfy 8y ago

> no sane engineer would have done it like that. You should read the story of Mel [1]. [1] - http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

brohee 8y ago
Can't help but think a LGP-30 simulator would be the basis for a nice TIS-100 like game...
ufo 8y ago
Mel's code is highly efficient and information dense. It's as non-biological as it can get :)

menacingly 8y ago

I'm not usually much of an intelligent design advocate, but approaching it from the angle that we know enough right now to make definitive calls as to the merits of different genetic approaches is hubris _at best_. Not to mention the sneaky embedded assumption that an engineering approach is even the best way to go.

bena 8y ago
Then it's just as meaningless. I mean, the claim is that we're so complex we must have been designed. But there are what seems like very serious design flaws in lots of organisms. Giraffes have a nerve that travel up and down their necks only to wind up a few inches from where it should be. Our eyes have the nerves attached on the wrong side, giving us blind spots and a host of other problems. And on and on. You can't hold life up as evidence of an intelligent designer and then when presented with evidence that we're a poor design, counter with "maybe it's smart and we don't know it".
- rsynnott 8y ago
  Of course, maybe the designer is just incompetent ;)
- joshuahedlund 8y ago
  The counter-argument to many "design flaws" is, as a sibling comment mentioned, they may be "artifacts of the complexity of reality," especially constraints due to the fact that living things are built up from single cells and need to be functional during the growth process, as opposed to being pieced together like a robot from existing materials. IANABiologist, but I think I've heard that the giraffe nerve has to grow that way due to the way it starts growing, or that there is a rare mutation that doesn't actually grow that way, but it doesn't get selected for, presumably due to some other side effect. There are also counter-arguments related to constraints regarding human eyes... Octopus eyes are supposed to be superior, not backwards with no blind spot, but I think human eyes can see way farther outside of water. (I welcome informed corrections to any ignorance I may be spouting). Essentially, there's a lot of nuance between "maybe it's smart and we don't know it" and "these are definitely very serious design flaws" - whether you think things were intelligently designed, evolved, or intelligently designed via evolution, it seems reasonable to think there may be at least some reasons that a lot of things were selected to be the way they are, and not what may at first glance seem obviously better, at least if you haven't considered all the relevant constraints.

andrei_says_ 8y ago

Intelligence could be different from our understanding and projection of it. I can see the highly structured and mutually influenced movement of galaxies, star systems etc as a type of intelligence. The processes in stars. Are they completely random? The time we’ve spent observing the Sun is insurmountable short in Star time. The ecosystems on Earth with their never stopping intertwined flow of signals and influences. Wheat, corn and soy using humans to take over vast territories. Languages and thought patterns and their disease-like activity often infecting and wiping out huge ecosystems (“let’s kill all the bison!”) and large parts of their host population (genocides, world wars, racism). I am not religious and am certain that the theory of evolution is sound. There’s no bearded guy in the sky tweaking our genome and berrying dinosaurs to test our faith. When I look at the self organizing nature of phenomena, my pattern recognizing brain sees patterns and I can’t but think that the regular definition of intelligence might be too small and might benefit by being scaled up. How is our intelligence different from the ability of species’ genomes to adapt to environments over long periods of time?