I know this has been stressed in several ways now but let me try yet another way.
Recombining ENGLISH letters WILL NEVER produce a CHINESE book.
Your statement is correct. However, you were attempting to compare recombining English letters into a Chinese book with recombining DNA letters to create new varieties. You were saying that English letters->Chinese was analogous to DNA->new varieties. It was an analogy.
How can mutations (recombining of the gentetic code) create any new, improved varieties? (Recombining English letters will never produce a Chinese book)
If it wasn't meant as an analogy then your statement is irrelevant, so I assume it was.
If we look at a cat or a dog, the DNA letters 'CGA' will be translated into the amino acid
Alanine, these amino acids are combined to form protiens - which are used to build organisms.
One protein is called '
cytochrome c'. You can see one DNA string that will make cytochrome c
here (that is only a partial string, but it is mostly complete).
We can jumble this up, take some away, add some and we can get
this , which I believe is called kinase.
Don't let me confuse you though, nobody is suggesting that cytochrome evolved into kinase, but I'm sure you can see that a bunch of letters like the first lot can be jumbled to say something very different which in turn has a massively different affect on the organism which undergoes this mutation. Imagine an organism which had a string of letters which was the same as the one for kinase, but the last letter was a 'G' rather than an 'A', and for illustrative purposes let us assume that this means absolutely nothing so the DNA doesn't get translated. All it would take would be one mutation (chaging the 'G' into an 'A') and the code goes from meaning nothing to meaning 'build kinase'.
Evolving a whole new character set (like from English to Chinese) is so unbelievably unbelievable we don't see it happen. Maybe one day it will, I don't know, but that the same language is used universally in all organsisms is good evidence of common descent. However, we can see new protien building carried out through mutations.
Some
interesting reading.
This message has been edited by Modulous, Mon, 19-September-2005 02:17 PM