[ExI] Evolution - Nature versus Nurture, but random noise as well

[William Flynn Wallace]

Can't remember the link, but I read something recently about what changes
could occur in the womb and they were many, some accounting for differences
between twins.  bill w

On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 11:48 AM BillK via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Nature Versus Nurture? Add ‘Noise’ to the Debate.
>
> We give our genes and our environment all the credit for making us who
> we are. But random noise during development might be a deciding
> factor, too.
> March 23, 2020
>
> <
> https://www.quantamagazine.org/nature-versus-nurture-add-noise-to-the-debate-20200323/
> >
>
> Quotes:
> Nine-banded armadillos always have litters of identical quadruplets.
> Researchers are now taking advantage of that system to study
> nongenetic sources of variation among individuals.
>
> Everything not chalked up to genetic control tends to get attributed
> to diverse environmental factors, ranging from nutrition to stress to
> idiosyncratic social interactions. It’s a line of thought that
> “suggests that it must be something outside the organism,” said Kevin
> Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin.
>
> But proof abounds that this is not entirely true. Identical human
> twins who share both a genome and a home don’t look or act exactly the
> same. A mutation that causes a disorder in one might not in the other.
> Twins even have different fingerprints.
>
> Research is making it ever clearer that these differences can’t all be
> written off as unexplained environmental effects.
>
> Which leaves noise — the random tremors and fluctuations that
> characterize any biological process. “Noise is inevitable,” said
> Andreas Wagner, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Zurich,
> “an inevitable byproduct of life.”
>
> “The genome is not a blueprint,” Mitchell said. “It doesn’t encode
> some specific outcome. It only encodes some biochemical rules, some
> cellular algorithms by which the developing embryo will
> self-organize.” Molecules bounce around and interact in a cell,
> binding and pulling apart and diffusing at random. The processes that
> make proteins and turn genes on and off are subject to this “molecular
> jitter in the system,” as Mitchell calls it — which leads to some
> degree of randomness in how many protein molecules are made, how they
> assemble and fold, and how they fulfill their function and help cells
> make decisions.
> etc.
> _______________
>
> Long article, but worth a read.
>
> BillK
>
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