January 04, 2006

• First off, good on buddy for charging ahead with his idea, and not being frightened off by the pros. As for the idea itself, it's interesting. It merits some examination, as to explaining why this 'junk' DNA is there. Do I think it works? Perhaps, but not the extent that he might. The foundation of his theory was a sort of Jungian or Joseph Campbell belief in common stories and myths. And he's right that a lot of the scholarship on those stories isn't worth much. It's a stretch to say that DNA encodes those stories, but it may be possible to think as he does that it encodes something much more primal and survivalistic. The example of the woodpecker -- that a starving woodpecker started pecking and discovered a food source, and that that lesson was genetically transmitted -- that example could be easily reconciled within the Darwinian model, that the woodpecker who discovered the food source survived, and that the ones who didn't died. It all comes down to how that information is passed along. Is it genetically encoded, or taught? The old Nature vs. Nurture, as I can see. A Polar Bear needs to be taught its basic survival skills, as do plenty of other animals. The bear itself is perfectly adapted to its environment. If the adaptation DNA was developed, wouldn't the skills DNA be likewise developed at the same time, seeing as how the same animals are passing along both sets? OTOH, there may be something genetic in, say, a baby's recognition of a nipple, something which occurs instantaneously, and never taught. But there could also be something genetic in how Monarch Butterflies take six generations to show up in one place, and one generation to go back to the start, only to repeat the cycle over and over. All of which I offer as a less-informed amateur than this guy. Intuitively, it doesn't strike me that he's way off base, but I think he may be overestimating its impact. I'll shut up now.
• What Capt. Renault said. I think he's on to something, but I don't think it's anywhere near as big as he thinks it is. The scale of his predictions gives him a few Crackpot points, but he's keeping somewhat in the mainstream by at least not claiming to supplant all of evolutionary biology with his miraculous nature's 4-day TEEM cube or something.
• I just don't see what separates his theory from Lamarckism. He doesn't even seem to suggest a new mechanism for how DNA gets modified either. He makes the same mistake creationists do: [quote]This is because NS relies on mutations which are known to be random. While this random mechanism can achieve simple levels of evolution (microevolution), there is a limit to what NS can achieve (I call this 'the random plateau') before it plateaus off. [/quote] The problem is people's inability to wrap their head around long spans of time, and just how much can change over hundreds and thousands of generations. Saying there is a plateau doesn't make it so. I'm going to have to go with crackpot.
• Bah, too much time on other forums, sorry for the newbie [quote] tags.
• I thought Lamarckism was predicated upon behavior modifying the phenotype which gets captured by the genes and passed on. This guy's "TEEM" idea is more about memory encoded in DNA and memory encoding DNA. Hence the Crackpot points, but it is worth thinking about "junk" DNA more.

• [T]o create adaptive inheritable behaviours that include environmental information, like what a particular predator looks like, (information that can only be acquired during its lifetime), then it's essential to provide a means by which acquired environmental information can be encoded into an individual's DNA and inherited via sperm cells to its offspring.

  No, no, no! This is the same mistake that drives others towards Creationism or ID. Random mutations can encode information like what a predator looks like. Consider a predator that, for some reason, has a triangular head. It is attacking three prey, all of the same species. Through random mutation one of the prey has a slight tendancy to avoid or run away from things that are triangular while the others do not. As a result, the mutant prey runs away from the predator while the other prey gets chomped. The mutant prey gets to run off and spawn. Ta da! A fear of triangle-headed predators can be gradually bred into the species, without the need for "teemic" evolution.
• So-called "junk" DNA isn't junk. It's highly conserved. We called it "junk" for years largely because nobody knew what it was - it wasn't genes, it didn't have coding sequences, it seemed to serve no purpose. In 2004 people working on genome projects first began to realize how strongly these sequences were conserved. In evolutionary terms, you don't have strong conservation of anything that is useless. Not sure about this guys opinions, but I am damn sure that there's far less "junk" in our DNA than is commonly thought to exist.
• My junk DNA is mostly penis enlargement stuff.
• Oh and I forgot: There are plenty of non-selective forces at work. Genetic drift, for one. Mutation. Nonrandom mating. There are others. None of these are strictly natural selection, but all can cause changes in gene frequencies and thus drive evolution. Natural Selection proper is the granddaddy, the big one, the driving force. The other evolutionary processes are important in thier own ways, often under limited circumstances (they become more important when populations become small - island effects, bottlenecks, etc. - otherwise the total sum effect of these other forces don't amount to much in comparison to natural selection). Sexual selection can be very important, more so than many other non-Natural Selection pressures. Thus the weird sex characters on many animals, the seemingly maladaptive traits like weighty antlers and other metabolically expensive showy colorful displays of plumage and et cetera. Personally for some time I've been interested in cultural evolution; the idea that in human societies our lifestyle and traditions are what allow us to adapt to an environment (often by adapting the environment itself!) rather than genetic change. We see little differences between humans worldwide, aside from the striking cultural differences. Neat stuff. Don't know if that's a crackpot idea either, but it seems plausible to me. Whether it supplants natural selection in humans... well, our only real predators now are viruses and other communicable diseases, right? We fight these with social changes a lot more effectively than we do with genetic changes. (Gosh I love evolution, don't you? Endlessly fascinating...)
• I know this is true because I totally read Dune like four times.
• Good post, Chy. )))
• Not a crackpot, just wrong. But wrong in quite a fun kind of way. Beyond the obvious problems that there's no suggested mechanism or evidence, there's one compelling reason why this is vanishingly unlikely: teemetic evolution would be so much more powerful than genetic evolution that it would have completely supplanted it, not merely run quietly alongside it. Consider - rather than the gradual process of waiting generations for mutations and mixture to offer up better exploitations of a niche, you're virtually guaranteed vast leaps of progress in every generation. Teemetics, with its far faster and better directed evolutionary progress, would quickly have become the dominant form of evolutionary mechanism. It's the evolution of eveolvability. Once you've got backward-coding DNA, it's not going to stop at giving you dragon myths and cowboy fetishes. It's going to rule everything. Once you start thinking about the hypothetical consequences of a mechanism like this, they just keep coming. Why is it that the instincts of most animals are so rigid? Unlike regular genetic evolution, where you only get one shot at a macroevolutionary jump per organism, with teemetics you can just bang around like a loon until you get lucky - while it suits genetics to be conservative in its rate of change, teemetics should encourage wildly experimental behaviour on the part of most animals. You'd expect to see many more speciation events based solely upon behaviour. Differences in physical characteristics would become of secondary importance. You'd have species called things like Gorilla likesbroccoli and Gorilla reallyhatesbroccoli and Homo frightenedofgorillasshovingbroccoliupyourass. Oh, and humans probably wouldn't exist. Where's the overwhelming evolutionary advantage in symbolic and cultural learning (as c.l.frogs talks about) when teems have been doing the job since the Cambrian explosion? Oh, I'm not sure that it's even correct to suggest that this would be a second process alongside natural selection - it sounds simply sounds like a different mechanism of heritability that could then be subject to natural selection. Differential reproductive success would still be the means by which advantageous teems would become more common throughout the teempool.
• Intelligent Redesign!