Month: September 2022

THE LOGIC. "In the course of evolution, complicated organisms have descended from much simpler ones. Since the instructions to form an organism are contained in the nucleus of its fertilized egg, this means that the genetic constitution has become correspondingly more complex in evolution." https://lnkd.in/eGfBzxS View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION INCREASE. "If we express this complexity in terms of its improbability, defining the amount of genetic information as the negative logarithm of its probability of occurrence by chance, we may say that genetic information is increased in the course of progressive evolution, guided by natural selection of random mutations." https://lnkd.in/eGfBzxS View in LinkedIn

DATA INCREASE. "Since the genetic information is transformed into phenotypic information in ontogeny, this figure (10(8) bits) must represent the amount of information which corresponds to the improved organization of higher animals as compared to their ancestors 500 million years back." https://lnkd.in/eGfBzxS View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this brief peek into the topic of the improbability of evolution and the emergence of life. This is a bone that many dogs have chewed in, both within science and within philosophy and beyond, because it is a core issue, central to the whole question of biology. Kicking the can into panspermia, life arising beyond earth, simply delays the core question, it does not do away with it. View in LinkedIn

FRESH VARIATION. "Most commonly, a single base is substituted for another. Sometimes a base is deleted or an extra base is added. Fortunately, the cell is able to repair most of these changes. When a DNA change remains unrepaired in a cell that will become an egg or a sperm, it is passed down to offspring. Thanks to mutation, we all have some new variations that were not present in our parents." https://lnkd.in/d9VF6RH View in LinkedIn

ALLELES. "The whole human family is one species with the same genes. Mutation creates slightly different versions of the same genes, called alleles. These small differences in DNA sequence make every individual unique. They account for the variation we see in human hair color, skin color, height, shape, behavior, and susceptibility to disease." https://lnkd.in/d9VF6RH View in LinkedIn

REGULATORY ELEMENT MUTATIONS. "Mutation creates variations in protein-coding portions of genes that can affect the protein itself. But even more often, it creates variations in the "switches" that control when and where a protein is active and how much protein is made." https://lnkd.in/d9VF6RH View in LinkedIn

RANDOM MUTATIONS SUBJECTED TO SELECTION. "Mutations can be beneficial, neutral, or harmful for the organism, but mutations do not "try" to supply what the organism "needs." In this respect, mutations are random — whether a particular mutation happens or not is unrelated to how useful that mutation would be." https://lnkd.in/daGhbNn View in LinkedIn

TWO LEVES OF EVOLUTION. "Protein evolution is not a random process. Scientific evidence suggests that natural selection tinkers with molecular improvements by retaining adaptive peptide sequence." Mantra: natural selection acts on random gene mutation which produces variant proteins, which each have different fitness qualities for their specific environmental niches. First level evolution is random, the second level is adaptive. https://lnkd.in/dXty-vx View in LinkedIn

DIRECTED MUTATION. "The central tenet, that mutations occur randomly, has recently been challenged by the finding of the phenomenon termed adaptive or directed mutation." https://lnkd.in/dxHFHJ7 View in LinkedIn