Wednesday, August 21, 2019

In defense of Darwin


There are number of salient points that were not available to Darwin that cannot be ignored.
They did not come by chance.
My premise is that evolution brought order to the world (universe) without it.
There was economy in participation.
Assimilation of two carbon units, twenty amino acids coded by a few purines and pyrimidines, about 20,000 variants of structural proteins with only levo-rotation (no dextro-rotatoion of sugar molecules) are convincing evidence that it started at one point in modern evolution continued albeit slowly.
But nitty gritty of evolution and diversion of species were determined not by nucleus but by mitochondrial evolution.
Mitochondria were very resistant mutation and they occur once in every 3 to 5 million year intervals.
When that happened drastic changes happened to the primates (erect posture, language acquisition and larger brain) in evolution.
How it happened in ovum is a mystery by all accounts and we do not have mitochondrial data to evaluate.

For example we have giant mitochondria in salivary glands and in yeasts.

Yeast mitochondria can hijack nuclear DNA and that is one way of mitochondrial evolution.
 

 Mitochondria evolved by endosymbiosis.  

Mitochondria originated by a endosymbiotic event when a bacterium was captured by a eukaryotic cell. The organelles have far fewer genes than an independent bacterium, and have lost many of the gene functions that are necessary for independent life (such as metabolic pathways).

 
Why only 20 amino acids not 24 or 40 amino acids?
There is a natural selection strategy of amino acids, what Darwin postulated, without even having a microscope or genetic code.
A really a great thinker.
"The research helps us understand how positively charged peptides could have formed on the pre-biotic earth," says Moran Frenkel-Pinter, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech and first author of the paper. Peptides are made when two or more amino acid building blocks link up, leading to the proteins that make up every organism.
Leman, Frenkel-Pinter and many other scientists in this field find it strange that every living thing on our planet forms its proteins from the exact same set of 20 amino acids.
Why that specific set?
Scientists know there are many more amino acids out there.
In fact, meteorites with up to 80 amino acids have landed on Earth.
"In the prebiotic Earth, there would have been a much larger set of amino acids," says Leman, who also is scientific collaborator at the Center for Chemical Evolution. "Is there something special about these 20 amino acids, or did these just get frozen at a moment in time by evolution?"
The new study suggests that life's dependence on these 20 amino acids is no accident. The researchers show that the kinds of amino acids used in proteins are more likely to link up together because they react together more efficiently and have few inefficient side reactions.


In defense of Darwin

There is a sinister attempt in the past and in the present to discredit Darwin, mathematically.

Simply because he challenged the Church’s single model of creation which is outdated by million (billion of biological evolution) years of human evolution.
Church’s evolution is little over 2400 years and is statistically insignificant in years.
Let me say who I am first.
A pathologist and a critical analyst in data, particularly in Linux.
Luckily I went into research well past my 50 and my supervisor was 10 years younger and he was interfering with my work (actually my writing skills).
I still do not know why.
I called a meeting and unless he stops interfering, I am going to ditch my formal research into the dustbin and got up and walked towards the bin.
Finally I ditched him and made alternative arrangements.
My research was on morphology of placenta, there was nobody in Ceylon who had done any work on placenta and that is why I chose it, for application of formal (it became extensive) research tools.

Statistics in particular.

I mastered statistical tools (borrowed from a Japanese guy) while doing the research.

Luckily my real teacher, the late professor of Pathology Victor Tennakoon had warned me of the outcome of any investigation.
He said without using (long experience over 40 years) any statistics you would discover only 20% of the new and we already know 40% and the rest 40% will never be known.

My gut feeling was that we can hit 90% based on the premise of 50% genetic and 50 environment influence.
Glad to say I had to revise my premise having studied a book “statistics in biology” which is totally different from just numerical statistics.

The writer of the book had studied things similar to what Darwin had observed in his long voyage of 5 years in the Beagle.
That book’s interpretation was similar to my professor.

Roughly 30% genetic, 30% environment and 30% unknown (do not apply god to this portion, it is 100% god intervention), 10% as design error.

In my study figures were 28% (environment or diet), 32% genetics and 40% unknown (what my professor told me empirically, 25 years before my research).

I simply disproved God’s 100% perfection as far as human birth is concerned.

When Darwin recorded his data Genetics was not known or in existence.

Mendel’s plant (he was a priest) observation (pea) was published in early 1900.

Darwin delayed his book simply because Church was on his back.

This may be true for Mendel, too.
The Church’s orthodoxy was at stake by these two men of science.

I say Darwin was a Modern Thinker.

Just see what happened to Bertrand Russel.
He was persecuted by the Church and British.
He was declared dead by the Church while hiding (suffered what we used to call double pneumonia) in China in 1920.
He survived due to nursing care of a good British Nurse.
The Church was flabbergasted.