Compensation of Growth & Genome Length

Had a long debate with a local 'philosopher'. He's no creationist but he's in love with Stephen Wolfram's cellular automata thesis and he uses it to attack evolution as we know it (NDT). He said that NDT does not cover issues of complexity increase and developmental economy. For the first I offer the argument about gene duplication, and he responded by asking who's doing the change of function. For the second he asked for evidence & references if NDT did cover developmental economy (Darwin's Compensation of Growth).I also want to know if there is evidence of a trend of increase in genome size... he said there is, given the fact that there are complex life-forms living today...

Andya, if you really think modern evoltuion theory actually tackles the hard ask questions of the origins of complexity, new organs, new cellular systems and new biochemical pathways then you have been mislead. They would be on the first pages of any evoltuion text if there were any such success of evoltuion. Evolution is great at explaining bird beak shape changes and bacterial resistance - all based on modifications to existing genes.Genome size? Genomes on average are bigger for higher life forms but the graph has a lot of noise. Bacteria have much smaller genomes than humans. But fly and worm genomes are only about 3 times smaller than our genomes (by gene number). It also depends on whether you include junk DNA or not and/or count it by gene number etc.[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 09-09-2002]

Evolutionists have certainly tackled the origin of biochemical pathways for example:Krem MM, Cera ED.
Evolution of enzyme cascades from embryonic development to blood coagulation.
Trends Biochem Sci. 2002 Feb;27(2):67-74. Review.
PMID: 11852243The study of the evolution of many other genetic and cellular systems is still in its infancy due to the huge amount of work that is needed to dissect deveopmental pathways. Even well studied systems like sex determination have huge gaps when it comes to many protein/protein and gene/protein interactions. Working out the origin of a system is impossible unless you actually know what all the bits are and how they work!.