Coevolutionary information, protein folding landscapes, and the thermodynamics of natural selection
Excerpt: “…maintaining the structural integrity of the folded state is an important constraint on evolution.”
My comment: It will become more common for evolutionary theorists to misrepresent the link from the biophysical constraints on protein folding, which require nutrient uptake. Many theorists realize they cannot take the approach that Masatoshi Nei did in his book Mutation-Driven Evolution. Nei concluded: “…genomic conservation and constraint-breaking mutation is the ultimate source of all biological innovations and the enormous amount of biodiversity in this world.”
His conclusion was quickly countered in the context of how ecological variation leads to biophysically-constrained nutrient-dependent ecological adaptations in species from microbes to man.
See for example: The evolutionary origin of form and function. Conclusion (with my emphasis): “The evolution of multicellular organisms with complex forms and functional abilities can be accounted for based on a fundamental tenet underpinned by the second law of thermodynamics, with natural selection acting on the ability of the organism to transduct energy (nutrient) most efficiently from its ecosystem by deploying that form and those functions. The information that gives rise to form and function is dispersed throughout the organism in the constituent cellular phenotypes and derives mainly from the interactions between information bearing proteins. The concept of a gene, beyond a means of specifying the amino acid sequences of the peptides from which the proteins are formed, is both mostly unnecessary and possibly misleading.”
The genetically predisposed ability of an organism to acquire nutrients and “…to transduct energy (nutrient) most efficiently from its ecosystem…” is innate. It is not an evolved ability. The concept of genes is not one that can be explained in terms of how they evolved because they didn’t. Nutrient-dependent protein-folding and specific amino acid sequences are required before the concept of a gene can be incorporated into theories. Nevertheless, evolutionary theorists describe the ability of organisms to efficiently transduct nutrient energy from their ecosystems in terms of mutated genes, natural selection, and the evolution of biodiversity. Simply put, they start with genes in an ecosystem and continue with their evolutionary explanations as if the genes and the ecosystem automagically arose and continued to evolve.
However, if they do not continue to portray the nutrient-dependent energy transduction as if the entirety of the ecosystem somehow evolved, nutrient-dependent protein folding cannot continue to be portrayed as if it were somehow random, or the result of natural selection for something that must occur after the de novo creation of the molecular mechanisms that allowed the first organisms to acquire and to transduct nutrient energy from their ecosystems as they adapted to ever-changing conditions or died of starvation.
Serious scientists are beginning to address the pseudoscientific nonsense of theorists who invented their ridiculous theories and continue to present them in the context of natural selection that somehow happens to result in biodiversity outside the context of amino acids, genes, and ecosystems. For example, Starvation-Induced Transgenerational Inheritance of Small RNAs in C. elegans puts the brakes on evolutionary theory with experimental evidence that shows how unlikely it is for any species to mutate genes that are naturally selected to somehow result in biodiversity before the organisms of the species starves to death.
System-wide Rewiring Underlies Behavioral Differences in Predatory and Bacterial-Feeding Nematodes fast forwards what is known about nutrient-dependent pheromone-controlled ecological adaptations by placing them into the context of ecological variation, and linking it via conserved molecular mechanisms of epigenetic effects to the morphological and behavioral diversity of nematodes. Simply put, “The patterns of synaptic connections perfectly mirror the fundamental differences in the feeding behaviours of P. pacificus and C. elegans”, Ralf Sommer concludes. That conclusion integrates what is currently known about ecological variation in nutrients and biophysical constraints on nutrient-dependent thermodynamically controlled cycles of protein synthesis and degradation in organisms from microbes to man and places the physiology of their reproduction into the context of the metabolism of nutrients to species-specific pheromones that control the physiology of nutrient-dependent reproduction via amino acid substitutions and cell type differentiation in all cells of all individuals of all species.
A model for that exposed the ridiculous ideas of theorists about mutations and natural selection that lead to the evolution of biodiversity in the context of the pseudoscientific nonsense they always have been.
Nutrient-dependent/pheromone-controlled adaptive evolution: a model
A 5.5 minute video clip from my August 2013 presentation of the model can be viewed here: Nutrient-dependent / Pheromone-controlled adaptive evolution: (a mammalian model of thermodynamics and organism-level thermoregulation)
