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.
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.)
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.
Intelligent Design, being a religious theory, usually carries the implication that the designer was infallible and made no mistakes, unless they were deliberate mistakes.
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).
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.
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.
The real answer is that "intelligent design" is a movement by evangelical and conservative Christianity to reframe Biblical literalism as a legitimate scientific framework.
> 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.
>basically that no scientific truth can be an argument for or against any spiritual claim
Well that's not quite true. Religious people often make authoritative claims about life, the universe and everything based on their beliefs that can shown to be demonstrably wrong with science. While that may not make the unfalsifiable stuff sink, it certain doesn't speak well if your special, divine, or privileged spiritual knowledge results in nonsense and garbage when the rubber hits the road.
> saying basically that no scientific truth can be an argument for or against any spiritual claim.
This is an agument for "NOMA" or Non Overlapping Magisteria. While this is true in the abstract pure Deist standpoint, it's not true for most religions or supernatural belief systems. All Abrahamic regions (for example) make specific claims about the nature of reality that is in direct conflict with science.
And also, in some scenarios people mock the bible for calling a whale a fish in the story of Jonah, when a whale is a mammal. However the people of the time did not distinguish animals like we do. We only started classifying animals like that in the 1800s.
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)
Are we sure that the religious texts themselves make the claims about reality. Is it instead incorrect physical interpretations by followers of the religion of the religious text?
this may or may not be an original thought - but i often wondered if we look at the efforts of Craig Venter and his "synthetic life" if that life form undergoes evolution - potentially even becoming a higher being than that of the creator's species, would it be appropriate to call Craig "God" and an event of intelligent design. I understand this is (currently) something of a far-fetched thought experiment, none the less it's a thought I have gone back to several times.
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 ?
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.
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".
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.
> The counter-argument to many "design flaws" is, as a sibling comment mentioned, they may be "artifacts of the complexity of reality," [...]
I've been trying to answer to this for about 5 minutes and I don't know where to start to untangle this...
The "artifacts of the complexity of reality" is exactly science's position, you can't take that and use it as a counter argument against it. The argument is that while artifacts are to be expected with evolution,
they cannot and should not be expected from an omniscient and omnipotent designer.
The embryology argument doesn't hold water. There is not reason for that nerve to be routed the way it is. In most creatures, it's not an issue, it's a few inches. In giraffes, it's pretty far.
Also, "constraints" seems like kind of a funny excuse when considering a creator who is described as omnipotent.
On the recurrent laryngeal nerve in mammals: A direct route to the larynx already exists through the superior laryngeal nerve. A second path provides redundancy if one is damaged (e.g. by disease or developmental defect)
The nerve innervates the deep cardiac plexus at the bottom, and the esophagus and trachea on its way to the larynx. So the path needs to be run anyway, leaving little advantage to another route.
Gray's Anatomy (the book, not the tv show) says during development the recurrent laryngeal nerve provides "a means of support that would permit the ductus to develop as a muscular artery" which it can do because it "has a greater proportion of connective tissue than other nerves, making it more resistant to stretch." Having a single cell build itself into a giraffe (or human) requires scaffolding along the way, and having the scaffolding that is also reused as a functionally redundant component of its own is better design than if it were not.
Make no mistake, as an explanation this achieves as much as saying "because the Flying Spaghetti Monster wanted a laugh". It does leave a few curiosities about the supposed intelligence of the designer, however, which are unanswered by this non-explanation. It effectively makes the larynx an afterthought in the design process; as if it was only a by-product of the nerve's existence rather than an aim, despite communication and language being so important to humans. But the designer, given omnipotent powers to yield creatures as She sees fit, doesn't think to merely alter the branching points of the nerves instead? This is a very counter-intuitive approach design at the very least.
The article you quoted says "there seems to be no apparent benefit to an extensive routing of the nerve supplying the larynx," but it doesn't mention or address the three reasons I cited above.
> On the recurrent laryngeal nerve in mammals: A direct route to the larynx already exists through the superior laryngeal nerve. A second path provides redundancy if one is damaged (e.g. by disease or developmental defect)
> The nerve innervates the deep cardiac plexus at the bottom, and the esophagus and trachea on its way to the larynx. So the path needs to be run anyway, leaving little advantage to another route.
So the main route between NY and Philly will loop through Chicago. We will build a secondary direct route between NY and philly, but it'll only allow access to certain suburbs not the entire city [1].
This route will connect NY and Chicago on its way there, and NY and philly on the way back.
I certainly don't see any advantage to any other route. not even if I were omnipotent and omniscient could I do that.
>during development the recurrent [....] own is better design than if it were not.
During the building of the NY-Philly-throughChicago route, we will be bringing life and jobs to the local communities, so this is of course GOOD DESIGN.
ps.
[1] According to wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_laryngeal_nerve
"All intrinsic laryngeal muscles except the cricothyroids are innervated by the recurrent laryngeal nerve." so I don't know what you're talking about in (1)
If you need to make deliveries along the whole path from NY to Chicago to Philly, the path makes sense. If the road is necessary to anchor Chicago and keep it from floating away during the development of the United States, that's another reason, although our analogy is becoming strained lol.
If you are missing either of the superior or recurrent laryngeal nerve, you can still speak, although not as well as if you have both. Doctors use this hoarseness as a diagnostic for various chest issues.
United Airlines Flight 232 also illustrates the importance of running redundant cables through different paths. One piece of shrapnel pierced all three hydraulic systems on board, and nearly half the passengers were killed.
Criticisms about organism design would carry more philosophical heft if humans had designed... well... anything that was capable of self-replication. We can't even do it cribbing off of the existing designs yet, let alone design something truly original. And if you cross that bar, there's still a long way to go before we've built something as complicated as, say, a paramecium.
I was talking to my kids about my job a couple of months ago, and showed them the view of source code I usually work with. They laughed and said it was colored funny. I'm not particularly convinced the criticisms of "obvious design flaws" in organisms are any more sophisticated than that.
You are equating your kids' reaction to your code to scientists who have spent their whole life doing science on a topic.
Why does everyone have such strong opinions about biology in particular, there's never doubts about what the physicists say but everyone's an evolutionary biologists
"You are equating your kids' reaction to your code to scientists who have spent their whole life doing science on a topic."
I have a sneaking suspicion calling people who ankle-bite about giraffe nerves and backwards eyes and the one or two other stereotypical complaints "scientists who have spent their whole life doing science on a topic" is, how to put it, comprehensively false.
When humans build anything even remotely resembling an organism that can survive on the same terms as living organisms, I'll pay more attention to the design criticism. Preferably criticism coming from the people who actually did it. Until then, though, even though you misrepresent me (or perhaps rather, badly misrepresent the people making complaints), I'd still stand by the misrepresentation. Today's scientists are still at the point where they are examining the syntax highlighting and hoping to derive insights about the programming. This is not because they have made no progress, but because there is so much progress yet to be made. People complaining about giraffe nerves aren't even that far; they're just repeating propaganda with no understanding, and deserve all the respect such people should be accorded.
Let me give you a concrete metric as to when I'll say we're starting to get a handle on it: When humanity stops systematically discovering that organisms are even more complicated than we thought. When genes could be sequenced, we thought that was going to be it. Then epigenetics. Then the discovery that introns actually aren't as useless as we thought. And so on. Long before we've got it all figured out, we'll stop discovering entirely new sets of dimensions of variation. We clearly aren't there yet, and I see little reason to believe we're even close.
Darwin himself was keenly aware of the danger of arrogance.
One of my favorite quotes from the Origin of Species:
"So profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!"
I think the fact that we have to "imagine" why an intelligent designer would have designed something a certain way brings this idea out of the realm of natural science.
If we assume there is a supernatural force behind everything, then we might as well not do experiments anymore because any result we get might have a wildly uncontrollable variable that is impossible to account for.
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?
A few years ago I read Nick Lane’s The vital
Question, which explored “junk DNA” extensively, in the context of abiogenesis.
The analogy I particularly liked was that they are little turing machines, and the very original stuff of life - indiscriminate, self-replicating, and therefore part of the bootstrap for everything that came after.
> "Geneticists tend to pay attention when LINE1 inserts itself in a bad place, causing cancer or genetic disorders like hemophilia."
But it's not always doing bad, correct? The point being, these random insertions are not only part of the process, they are key. Without deviation these is no evolving.
While I understand the joke this isn't actually true :) A substitution mutation might not have any effect or might just result in switching an aminoacid for a similar one (due to how the genetic code works). On the other hand, a large insertion will likely mess up the gene much more than that.
If you are interested in this, you might also be interested in "promoter genes" which tend to be destructive to the organism they are part of, but which are also very good at promoting themselves, so they survive in the genome despite being harmful. A good book on the subject:
Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements
Indeed. It is this sort of "worm-like" or "near-virus" -like behavior of these genes (transposons, promoters, etc) that made me decide to split the difference between comp sci and molecular biology (bioinformatics) as an undergrad.
Nevermind the mitochondria - the powerhouse of our cells - which is basically believed to be a bacterial companion that our single celled ancestors integrated so tightly with - that it became part of our genome [1].
Mitochondria are indeed thought to have arisen from incorporation of free-living organisms, but interestingly they mostly retain their own replicating DNA that is not incorporated into our genome [1].
1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_DNA
70 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadTo 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.
Because "first-world" country engineers don't do that?
So this genetic entropy caused people to be born gay, for which we should kill them. That sound sound like an imperfect creator.
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.
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?
The real answer is that "intelligent design" is a movement by evangelical and conservative Christianity to reframe Biblical literalism as a legitimate scientific framework.
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.
Well that's not quite true. Religious people often make authoritative claims about life, the universe and everything based on their beliefs that can shown to be demonstrably wrong with science. While that may not make the unfalsifiable stuff sink, it certain doesn't speak well if your special, divine, or privileged spiritual knowledge results in nonsense and garbage when the rubber hits the road.
This is an agument for "NOMA" or Non Overlapping Magisteria. While this is true in the abstract pure Deist standpoint, it's not true for most religions or supernatural belief systems. All Abrahamic regions (for example) make specific claims about the nature of reality that is in direct conflict with science.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/210956/belief-creationist-view-... [2017]
So where are we misinterpreting this one?
http://www.whalefacts.org/can-whales-swallow-people/
You should read the story of Mel [1].
[1] - http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
Not to mention the sneaky embedded assumption that an engineering approach is even the best way to go.
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".
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.
I've been trying to answer to this for about 5 minutes and I don't know where to start to untangle this...
The "artifacts of the complexity of reality" is exactly science's position, you can't take that and use it as a counter argument against it. The argument is that while artifacts are to be expected with evolution, they cannot and should not be expected from an omniscient and omnipotent designer.
Also, "constraints" seems like kind of a funny excuse when considering a creator who is described as omnipotent.
The nerve innervates the deep cardiac plexus at the bottom, and the esophagus and trachea on its way to the larynx. So the path needs to be run anyway, leaving little advantage to another route.
Gray's Anatomy (the book, not the tv show) says during development the recurrent laryngeal nerve provides "a means of support that would permit the ductus to develop as a muscular artery" which it can do because it "has a greater proportion of connective tissue than other nerves, making it more resistant to stretch." Having a single cell build itself into a giraffe (or human) requires scaffolding along the way, and having the scaffolding that is also reused as a functionally redundant component of its own is better design than if it were not.
The inverted vertebrate retina is needed to allow additional cooling through blood flow. This article goes into additional tradeoffs in the design: http://www.quarkphysics.ca/scripsi/vision-of-octopi-and-the-...
so I'll answer from there myself:
Make no mistake, as an explanation this achieves as much as saying "because the Flying Spaghetti Monster wanted a laugh". It does leave a few curiosities about the supposed intelligence of the designer, however, which are unanswered by this non-explanation. It effectively makes the larynx an afterthought in the design process; as if it was only a by-product of the nerve's existence rather than an aim, despite communication and language being so important to humans. But the designer, given omnipotent powers to yield creatures as She sees fit, doesn't think to merely alter the branching points of the nerves instead? This is a very counter-intuitive approach design at the very least.
So the main route between NY and Philly will loop through Chicago. We will build a secondary direct route between NY and philly, but it'll only allow access to certain suburbs not the entire city [1].
This route will connect NY and Chicago on its way there, and NY and philly on the way back. I certainly don't see any advantage to any other route. not even if I were omnipotent and omniscient could I do that.
>during development the recurrent [....] own is better design than if it were not.
During the building of the NY-Philly-throughChicago route, we will be bringing life and jobs to the local communities, so this is of course GOOD DESIGN.
ps.
[1] According to wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_laryngeal_nerve "All intrinsic laryngeal muscles except the cricothyroids are innervated by the recurrent laryngeal nerve." so I don't know what you're talking about in (1)
If you are missing either of the superior or recurrent laryngeal nerve, you can still speak, although not as well as if you have both. Doctors use this hoarseness as a diagnostic for various chest issues.
United Airlines Flight 232 also illustrates the importance of running redundant cables through different paths. One piece of shrapnel pierced all three hydraulic systems on board, and nearly half the passengers were killed.
Come on man seriously? No, what makes sense if you are designing this is to make one direct connection between Ny-Philly and another NY-chicago.
I was talking to my kids about my job a couple of months ago, and showed them the view of source code I usually work with. They laughed and said it was colored funny. I'm not particularly convinced the criticisms of "obvious design flaws" in organisms are any more sophisticated than that.
Why does everyone have such strong opinions about biology in particular, there's never doubts about what the physicists say but everyone's an evolutionary biologists
I have a sneaking suspicion calling people who ankle-bite about giraffe nerves and backwards eyes and the one or two other stereotypical complaints "scientists who have spent their whole life doing science on a topic" is, how to put it, comprehensively false.
When humans build anything even remotely resembling an organism that can survive on the same terms as living organisms, I'll pay more attention to the design criticism. Preferably criticism coming from the people who actually did it. Until then, though, even though you misrepresent me (or perhaps rather, badly misrepresent the people making complaints), I'd still stand by the misrepresentation. Today's scientists are still at the point where they are examining the syntax highlighting and hoping to derive insights about the programming. This is not because they have made no progress, but because there is so much progress yet to be made. People complaining about giraffe nerves aren't even that far; they're just repeating propaganda with no understanding, and deserve all the respect such people should be accorded.
Let me give you a concrete metric as to when I'll say we're starting to get a handle on it: When humanity stops systematically discovering that organisms are even more complicated than we thought. When genes could be sequenced, we thought that was going to be it. Then epigenetics. Then the discovery that introns actually aren't as useless as we thought. And so on. Long before we've got it all figured out, we'll stop discovering entirely new sets of dimensions of variation. We clearly aren't there yet, and I see little reason to believe we're even close.
One of my favorite quotes from the Origin of Species:
"So profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!"
If we assume there is a supernatural force behind everything, then we might as well not do experiments anymore because any result we get might have a wildly uncontrollable variable that is impossible to account for.
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?
The analogy I particularly liked was that they are little turing machines, and the very original stuff of life - indiscriminate, self-replicating, and therefore part of the bootstrap for everything that came after.
Also, more on LiNE. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrotransposon#LINEs
They are a very specialized DNA chunks that retains the absolute bare minimal needs to trick a host to replicate them. They are parasites.
But it's not always doing bad, correct? The point being, these random insertions are not only part of the process, they are key. Without deviation these is no evolving.
Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements
https://www.amazon.com/Genes-Conflict-Biology-Selfish-Elemen...
Nevermind the mitochondria - the powerhouse of our cells - which is basically believed to be a bacterial companion that our single celled ancestors integrated so tightly with - that it became part of our genome [1].
1 - https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-origin-of-mito...