Saturday, October 21, 2017

Personal Reflection XII - Evolution vs Interventionism

Question - asked on facebook. How do traits based on instinct develop through random processes?

My Answer.

It occurs in stages and cannot be looked at simply through the lens of irreducible complexity. Certain protein structures (driving behavior) in the brain are selected for as they provide adaptive advantage.Later changes that provide for even more selective advantage are selected for on top of these so that the gene pool moves in a specific direction. Add to this Epigentic drivers that influence phenotype expression and you have the basis of the non-interventionist model. Having said this there are still a number of questions that remain unanswered - Foremost amongst these is the role of mutation. If they are indeed random and impact sequence reading (mostly negatively) how are they maintained in a system? For example...adding random letters to a book such as Moby Dick should the book worse not better. Yet this is an analogous process to the role of Random Mutation in ensuring variation. I suspect so-called "Junk DNA' may offer some protection in this regard.

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