Re: [asa] The Multiverse - Physics or Metaphysics?

I was listening to an interview on NPR last week with a geneticist
regarding one of the discoveries that hit the headlines in the last
couple of weeks (fat gene? I don't specifically recall).
What I think I hear the interviewee say in an offhanded comment was that
workers in the field don't really routinely think in terms of
differentiating "genes" from proteins.

Did I hear this right, and would someone with specific knowledge care to
comment further. If this is about right, there seems to be a
not-quite-correct tendency to consider genes which code for proteins as
distinctly "other" than the proteins themselves, like beads on a DNA
string.
Are the DNA structures more like (or the same sort of structures) as the
proteins they code for in this sense? JimA [Friend of ASA]

rpaulmason@juno.com wrote:

>Is real science imagining some RNA world that doesn't exist and even if it could it would have to convert to DNA. So we need to deal with the complex DNA code, it's replication and protein synthesis need to all been i place for life to go on. There are not just 2 proteins but doesn't that need to be the right shape just to translate genes into proteins. Without that there is no replication, no life to select.
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>RNA or any replicating molecule has to eventually get to DNA that has the information to make proteins that help it replicate itself and and . The odds of getting just two genes that code for two proteins to work together seem to exceed what is possible with just 10 to the 115th rolls of the dice so to speak. To get two protein that fit together or work together -
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>a protein can be 100 to over 10,000 amino acids long - 2 proteins at 100 each - there are over 10 to the 200th different ways to arrange those amino acids. Remember there are only 10 to teh 115th events in all time - even if every one of them was a different configuration 10 to the 115th only tests a small number of them. It would be hard to get even one protein of 100 that was functional.
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>It's just like language - it's impossible to get even two lines of sensible text by chance - 100 letters or so exceed the 10 to the 115th = impossible.
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Received on Sat Sep 8 21:02:59 2007