[ExI] Tim May and DNA

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Thu Feb 7 22:17:56 UTC 2019


On Thu, Feb 7, 2019 at 2:06 PM William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:

 >> but there is reason to think much of the genome really is nothing but
>> parasitical junk at least from our point of view  john
>
>
> *> Do we suppose that all that junk consists of efforts by DNA to
> accomplish something that ultimately failed and were replaced by other
> efforts?  bill w*
>

The only thing DNA wants to accomplish is to get into the next generation,
one way to do that would be to convey some sort of survival advantage to
the phenotype but another way would be to have no effect on the phenotype
and just hitchhike through the generations as a do nothing freeloader. The
junk could have originally come from RNA retroviruses that use the Reverse
Transcriptase enzyme to insert part of their RNA genome into the host's DNA
genome.

Another possibility is the junk may have once done something useful to the
phenotype but over time Evolution found that trait no longer conveyed any
survival benefit so it was switched off but not removed. It's as if you
kept rewriting a book but never erased anything and just put the 99 older
versions in brackets, so when your book was finally published on page 1 you
told the reader to ignore everything that was inside the brackets and just
read the last version that was outside the brackets. A  intelligent
human editor
would object to this skeme because your book would end up being 10 to 100
times thicker than it needed to be, but Evolution doesn't object because
Evolution is not intelligent.

John K Clark
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