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Well, what explains the climate? The mineral composition of the earth? (etc.) Sure, if that were different, so would be the climate. But the climate is severel

Well, what explains the climate? The mineral composition of the earth? (etc.) Sure, if that were different, so would be the climate. But the climate is severely under-determined by that composition -- if you drive it by a different sun, a different meteor strike, etc. it would be radically different. Take the same genome and biochemically intervene on the conception, pregnancy, development, etc. of an animal. My claim would be that for a wideclass of such interventions the very same genes will do radically different things, producing quite different kinds of animal. Likewise, after birth, different ecologies will make significant differences/etc.

pfdietz 2y ago
Every aspect that makes humans human (or mice mice) was produced by evolution, and therefore must be based on genetics. That's because evolution only acts on information encoded in genes (no, epigenetic information doesn't count). Denying this is basically being a creationist.
- jltsiren 2y ago
  There is a side channel for information: the human (or the mouse) itself. A genome is, among other things, a recipe for making X, assuming that you already have X. But if you don't have X and don't know what it looks like, it's not clear that the genome contains enough information to make X.
  - ghhyfx 2y ago
    Right, some information is encoded in the egg. You can't take human DNA and put it in a mice egg. And then you have the womb which itself directs growth in the first stages. DNA is the machine code, but you need a compatible computer to run it.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      There is some information in the cytoplasm, but how much? Human nuclear DNA encodes something like 8 billion bits of information; mitochondrial DNA a bit more (although there are many copies of mitochondrial DNA in a cell). The specific sequences of all the proteins and such in the cell is a consequence of DNA sequences; it's not a separate (or transmissible) information pool. That human DNA produces a human when in a human cell doesn't mean the rest of the cell is carrying significant amounts of information, just that that's the environment in which the DNA has evolved to operate.
      - mjburgess 2y ago
        A piece of clay comes from a mountain and is pressed into a mould, then thrown into a river and melts, it lands at the end on a rock, squished. Why is it that shape? To say, "because of the chemical composition of the mountain" is, at the very least, foolish. Organic lifeforms are self-modifying clays that are pressed into environmental moulds. Genes play both a far more complex, and far simpler role, in this than the mid-20th C. eugenicist biological science supposed. A pseudoscience that still predominates in how people think about genes, and in many downstream research areas (eg., https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-rev... )
        pfdietz 2y ago
        The problem is none of that is information in the sense of something that can be acted on by natural selection. If it isn't copied from generation to generation, it's can't be molded over generations by differential survival of variants.

pfdietz 2y ago

Every aspect that makes humans human (or mice mice) was produced by evolution, and therefore must be based on genetics. That's because evolution only acts on information encoded in genes (no, epigenetic information doesn't count). Denying this is basically being a creationist.

jltsiren 2y ago
There is a side channel for information: the human (or the mouse) itself. A genome is, among other things, a recipe for making X, assuming that you already have X. But if you don't have X and don't know what it looks like, it's not clear that the genome contains enough information to make X.
- ghhyfx 2y ago
  Right, some information is encoded in the egg. You can't take human DNA and put it in a mice egg. And then you have the womb which itself directs growth in the first stages. DNA is the machine code, but you need a compatible computer to run it.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    There is some information in the cytoplasm, but how much? Human nuclear DNA encodes something like 8 billion bits of information; mitochondrial DNA a bit more (although there are many copies of mitochondrial DNA in a cell). The specific sequences of all the proteins and such in the cell is a consequence of DNA sequences; it's not a separate (or transmissible) information pool. That human DNA produces a human when in a human cell doesn't mean the rest of the cell is carrying significant amounts of information, just that that's the environment in which the DNA has evolved to operate.
    - mjburgess 2y ago
      A piece of clay comes from a mountain and is pressed into a mould, then thrown into a river and melts, it lands at the end on a rock, squished. Why is it that shape? To say, "because of the chemical composition of the mountain" is, at the very least, foolish. Organic lifeforms are self-modifying clays that are pressed into environmental moulds. Genes play both a far more complex, and far simpler role, in this than the mid-20th C. eugenicist biological science supposed. A pseudoscience that still predominates in how people think about genes, and in many downstream research areas (eg., https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-rev... )
      - pfdietz 2y ago
        The problem is none of that is information in the sense of something that can be acted on by natural selection. If it isn't copied from generation to generation, it's can't be molded over generations by differential survival of variants.