On Tuesday, January 24, 2023 at 8:01:00 AM UTC-5, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
"If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking on creation I
should have recommended something simpler."
Attributed to Alphonso X (Alphonso the Wise), King of Castile and León 1221–1284, and quoted by J.D. Murray in "Mathematical Biology",
Springer 1989
--
athel cb : Biochemical Evolution, Garland Science, 2016
I would have ditched the nested hierarchy at the molecular level.
Consider influenza viruses. Our annual flu viruses come at us this way:
an influenza virus that is specific for say pigs or poultry exists in that biological reservoir. It infects them but generally can't infect humans.
But occasionally, a small mutation occurs that allows the virus to
produce a weak infection in people. It won't be very efficient at infecting human cells, and won't be as effective at reproducing in human cells,
but it's just good enough to do some reproduction. Most often, this
requires that a person get a large exposure to many virus particles,
say from working around infected pigs.
This infected person will, typically, not be able to produce enough
virus to then infect another person --- something we call human to
human transmission. So the rare inter-species crossover usually
goes extinct in that line of viruses that crossed over.
But sometimes there's a person who the virus thrives in, enough so
that it reproduces well, and where it can evolve to be even better
at infecting and reproducing in human cells. This can lead to more
efficient human to human transmission of the virus and then that
can lead to the beginning of an annual flu epidemic.
One thing that makes this possible is that there is so much similarity
in molecular structure. But that level of similarity isn't necessary
in designed species. We could have a great deal more dissimilarity
between species if genomes were designed.
An immediate consequence of greater dissimilarity would be to make
it much much less likely for viruses to be able to jump between
different species. And that would mean less sickness and suffering.
So if our genomes are designed, it's a cruel designer, or one more
interested in the success of viruses than hosts.
A parallel argument exists for why the Genetic Code (the mating
of nucleotide triplets to amino acids) should not be so highly
conserved in a designed biosphere. If there's a designer of us,
that designer is lazy, cruel, incompetent or a combination of those.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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