The origin of new genes

I don’t know if it has escaped the good doctor but there is no such thing as nonsense DNA, in the qualified meaning of the word. All possible combinations within the triplet actually say something. Either it is any of the 20 something amino acids or start or stop. So any given combination will say something. If that something that is said is beneficial for the survivability and proliferation of the gene is a different question.Further it might deserve a notion to point to the fact that any gene is interacting whit an environment that is ever changing, so that which in one environment is deleterious is in another beneficial, i.e. sickle sell anaemia.Childish analogies with books and computer programs have their severe limitation when they are taken for descriptions of reality instead of figures of speech.

---

/Jerker
*Religions most formidable opponent has always been reality therefore it strives to monopolize truth*

That would depend on the question. No, a gene is a chain of ribonucleic acid. A chain of amino acid is a protein. That would depend for what purpose you would define “gene”. If your aim is to talk about the distribution of hereditary traits over time within a population (i.e. evolution) the definition would have to be something like a piece of DNA “that segregates and recombines with appreciable frequency” It’s the nucleic acid that form triplets that the ribosome read in threes when they use them as blueprints for synthesising amino acids into long chains (proteins). I’m not sure what you mean by “coherent/articulate” but I assume you are talking about proteins that are bioactive (i.e. perform a biological function). Today we know about more than 50.000 functioning proteins coded by DNA and new are discovered as we are speaking. If a human population are to thrive in a malaria infested environment they need the sickle cell anaemia mutation but a by product of this it that a part of the population will become homozygote and thus die by biochemical suffocation.
Life in itself is deadly my deer friend. Most of the processes that take place within and outside the organism are hazardous to its sustainability. The reason there are any organisms at all is that the right mixture of processes can sustain its end product (the organism) long enough to make copies of itself.
Nature lack moral as would any conceivable designer. Nature also lack foresight as the phenomenon of extinction well shows and the same would be true of a designer. I can see no comfort in believing in a creator that either is a pathologic sadist or a complete moron.

---

/Jerker
*Religions most formidable opponent has always been reality therefore it strives to monopolize truth*

I was not referring to particle physics but to the process that has given us all the diversity of life. Natural selection is a poor designer and this nature bear ample proof of, but a designer it is none the less. Mindless and blind but with a logic of its own, if it can proliferate and procreate let it dominate!As for creating matter of our own that is a minor problem with nuclear fission and designing life man have been doing all since she settled in the Indus valley.