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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (593228)	11/11/2010 7:40:57 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1579142

Its not just that the genetic code is complicated, its that its a code at all. There's no natural reason why three nucleic bases should be a codon and there's no natural reason why a particular codon should designate a particular amino acid or the message "STOP". Since you are in such awe of the genetic code because it so complicated.. Though the genetic is complicated and we SHOULD be in awe of it. For example, its designed to minimize transcription errors: >>>> Recently, scientists from the University of Bath (U.K.) and from Princeton University worked to quantify the error-minimization capacity of the genetic code. Early work indicated that the naturally occurring genetic code withstands the potentially harmful effects of substitution mutations better than all but 0.02 percent (1 out of 5000) of randomly generated genetic codes with codon assignments different from the universal genetic code.16 This initial work overlooked the fact that some types of substitution mutations occur more frequently than others in nature. For example, an A-to-G substitution occurs more frequently than does either an A-to-C or an A-to-T mutation. When researchers incorporated this correction into their analysis, they discovered that the naturally occurring genetic code performed better than one million randomly generated genetic codes. They also found that the genetic code in nature resides near the global optimum for all possible genetic codes with respect to its error-minimization capacity.17 Nature's universal genetic code is truly one in a million—or better! The genetic code's error-minimization properties are actually more dramatic than these results indicate. When researchers calculated the error-minimization capacity of one million randomly generated genetic codes, they discovered that the error-minimization values formed a distribution where the naturally occurring genetic code's capacity occurred outside the distribution.18 Researchers estimate the existence of 10(to the 18th) possible genetic codes possessing the same type and degree of redundancy as the universal genetic code. All of these codes fall within the error-minimization distribution. This finding means that of 10 (to the 18th) possible genetic codes, few, if any, have an error-minimization capacity that approaches the code found universally in nature. Obviously concerned about the implications, some researchers have challenged the optimality of the genetic code.19 The teams from Bath, Princeton, and elsewhere, however, have effectively responded to these challenges.20 <<<<< reasons.org --------------------------------------- I was asking you if during your life had you ever thought that DNA, RNA, genome from various life forms would be decoded.... This happened so long ago - I was only one at the time so wasn't thinking much about it. I do think there is an additional code or codes involved in DNA (beyond the one that encodes recipes for building proteins) and hope it or they will be deciphered someday. ----------------------------------------- Wouldn't that put the decoders on the same intellectual plane as your ID?? Sort of. Every other code we know of was designed by an intelligent mind. Though the genetic code is a real prize winner: "DNA is like a software program, only much more complex than anything we've ever devised." Bill Gates ----------------------------------------- Do you have a religious explanation for single cell living species having 200x more DNA than humans? It's 300 times and the bacteria in question is a giant one (visible by the human eye) that lives in some fish's intestine. And coral has a longer genetic code than humans too. The length of DNA seems to be directly related to the size of the cell. I see no religious implications. There seems to be a lot of duplication in that bacteria's DNA for an unknown reason. ------------------------------------------------ Does your ID learn through evolutionary iterations or is everything designed by special order? ID doesn't imply that everything biological is specially designed. In theory, all life could be descended from the first living cell with changes being made as a natural selection and other reasons.