A Challenge to the Supremacy of DNA as the Genetic Material
Excerpt: “One sentence from the news release grabbed me: “The result is evolution from simpler to more complex and diverse organisms in both form and function, without the need to invoke genes.” Instead, Drs. Annila and Baverstock invoke thermodynamics.”
My comment: Dr. Lewis:
Thank you for providing an information source that may lead others to acknowledge the importance of how two adjacent nucleotide changes can result in antibiotic resistance sans mutations.
If the change is biophysically constrained by nutrient uptake (as suggested by Annila and Baverstock), and the nutrient sometimes is DNA (as suggested by me), that may change… well, everything.
See for example: DNA as a Nutrient: Novel Role for Bacterial Competence Gene Homologs cited in “Human pheromones and food odors: epigenetic influences on the socioaffective nature of evolved behaviors.”
The epigenetic influences (e.g., on the physical landscape of DNA) are obviously biophysically constrained, which suggests that evolved behaviors include only those that could best be consistently described as “ecologically adapted” behaviors. Ecologically adapted behaviors are consistent with Darwin’s ‘conditions of life.’ Constraint-breaking mutation-driven changes in behavior are not!
I think that biological fact is why Annila and Baverstock (2014) cited “Physiology is rocking the foundations of evolutionary biology.”
Like some biologists, some chemists and some physicists, they probably realize that the biophysically constrained physiology of reproduction is nutrient-dependent and pheromone-controlled. However, unlike many theorists, they may not have excluded the role of DNA as a nutrient. Thus, explaining ecological adaptations in the context of the thermodynamics of intracellular signaling and organism-level thermodynamics finally may begin to make sense to theorists who have insisted that mutations somehow do something that results in species diversity.
See also: Nutrient-dependent / Pheromone–controlled thermodynamics and thermoregulation
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Addendum: Dr. Baverstock has since made Annila and Baverstock (2014) available at the following link, which opens the pdf of Genes with out prominence: a reappraisal of the foundations of biology.
Excerpt: “Treating ecosystems in terms of thermodynamics Schneider & Kay [50, p. 167] argue that ‘life is a response to the thermodynamic imperative of dissipating [energy] gradients’.”
My comment: That clarity will make it much more difficult for theorists to tout anything associated with their experimentally unsupported views on how randomness somehow led from the external environment to the organized genomes of species from microbes to man.
An additional comment is still pending “Your comment is awaiting moderation. May 4, 2014 at 1:36 am
Maternal nutrition at conception modulates DNA methylation of human metastable epialleles and Genetic Interactions Involving Five or More Genes Contribute to a Complex Trait in Yeast link the nutrient-dependent differentiation of cell types in individuals of all species from ecological variation to pheromone-controlled ecological adaptations via conserved molecular mechanisms of signaling and sensing, which are manifested in Chemosensory Communication of Gender through Two Human Steroids in a Sexually Dimorphic Manner
