On 1/11/2011 11:02 AM, Warp wrote:
> Darren New<dne### [at] sanrrcom>  wrote:
>> ID is certainly testable: We've found no irreducibly complex substructures,
>
>    Even if there *are* irreducibly complex structures in biology (which
> I wouldn't be surprised if they existed) it still doesn't mean it could
> not have formed by natural means. "Irreducibly complex" does not mean
> "impossible to build" (because it would be outright *impossible*, duh).
> It simply means that the structure cannot be formed by simply adding each
> individual part one at a time. However, it can be built by having additional
> helping structures which are later removed as obsolete.
>
>    The classic example is an arc made of stones: Remove even one single
> stone, and the whole arc collapses. The arc is irreducibly complex.
> However, that doesn't mean the arc is impossible to construct: First
> you build a supporting frame, then add the stones, then remove the frame.
> Nothing says this cannot happen naturally. (In fact, evolution often gets
> rid of parts that become useless over time because they only consume valuable
> resources for no benefit. Thus, just because a supporting part is not anymore
> there doesn't mean it was never there.)
>
This in fact happens. We can even, in many cases, parse out what those 
*where*, sometimes by finding those extra structures still intact in 
other species. And you are dead wrong on the later, evolution **keeps** 
masses of junk, whether it produces a benefit or not. The reason it does 
has to do with the difference between some single cell organisms, and 
multi-cell organisms. The single cell do not, in general, contain 
mitochondria. Their genetics are often **far** more streamlined, because 
they can't afford to carry junk around, which doesn't do anything, for 
the reason you describe. It costs resources. Having a sort of "power 
plant" in the cell, whose genetics are 100% geared at producing excess 
amounts of energy, over what is absolutely needed by themselves, allows 
the rest of the genome, in the main cell, to be very sloppy in its 
operations, copying, cleanup, etc. Anything with such an internal power 
plant can afford to keep lots of stuff that does nothing at all, and 
only gets rid of things that are actively defective, usually not by 
deletion, but just by shutting them off, so they do nothing. This allows 
for what, in a single cell, would be egregious errors, such as making an 
exact copy of a sequence, then later having that sequence get mangled 
into a unique function. Its way harder to manage that if you can't 
afford extra copies lying around, where your energy input is drastically 
damaged, if you allow such a copy to happen.

Mind, "allow" in this context means that the cost gets high enough that 
the cell can't function *with* the change in it, and dies, without 
replicating. Again, if you have something producing *excess* energy for 
you, and nothing but that, you can afford to make single, several, 
dozens, hundreds, of copies, even if they only happen one at a time. The 
result is masses of new functions all derived from the same base code, 
many "irreducible", because over time a) they developed unique 
properties and functions, and b) at some point the support needed to 
make them work at all became redundant and was either deleted, shuffled 
into dead code, or co-opted for/by one of the other copies, which still 
needed it.

In any case, no, evolution doesn't have a garbage collection function, 
as such, and as long as you have all the extra energy resources, doesn't 
delete things in at any major rate. To put it another way... If single 
cell organisms had life cycles like ours, 100 years, and only limited 
offspring, they would "evolve" a lot slower than us. They only reason 
they do evolve faster is *purely* because they produce populations in 
the millions in minutes, or hours, instead of thousands of years. From a 
"cost" standpoint, they can only afford to keep things that actually 
help them, if it involves a new copy of the gene sequence, nor can they 
afford to keep it around, if it stops doing something useful. Most of 
their "changes" are, as a result, point mutation/deletion/addition, not 
the copy of whole sequences.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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