Origin and evolution of the genetic code

By: James V. Kohl | Published on: January 21, 2016

Origin and evolution of the genetic code: the universal enigma

Excerpt:

…it appears essentially certain that the evolution of the code involved some combination of frozen accident with selection for error minimization.

My comment: This claim from 2009 failed to address anything currently known to serious scientists about the Schrodinger’s claim from 1944, in What is Life?

Indeed, in the case of higher animals we know the kind of orderliness they feed upon well enough, viz. the extremely well-ordered state of matter in more or less complicated organic compounds, which serve them as foodstuffs. After utilizing it they return it in a very much degraded form -not entirely degraded, however, for plants can still make use of it. (These, of course, have their most power supply of โ€˜negative entropyโ€™ the sunlight)

My comment: The claim from 2009 also failed to address anything currently known to serious scientists about the Dobzhansky’s claim from 1973, in Nothing in Biology Makes Any Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.
Excerpt:

…the so-called alpha chains of hemoglobin have identical sequences of amino acids in man and the chimpanzee, but they differ in a single amino acid (out of 141) in the gorilla. ( p. 127)

My comment: The claim from 2009 also failed to address anything currently known to serious scientists about supercoiled DNA in the context of the Structural diversity of supercoiled DNA.
Conclusion:

Our data provide relative comparisons of supercoiling-dependent twisted, writhed, curved, and kinked conformations and associated base exposure. Each of these structural features may be differentially recognized by the proteins, nucleic acids, and small molecules that modulate DNA metabolic processes.

My comment: In the forward to What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches (Canto Classics) Reprint Edition by Roger Penrose, who co-authored with George F.R. Ellis and Stephen Hawking, Penrose asks:

How often do we still hear that quantum effects can have little relevance in the study of biology, or even that we eat food in order to gain energy?

My comment: How much longer will the serious scientists who have linked nutrient uptake to hydrogen-atom transfer in DNA base pairs allow teleophobic pseudoscientists to claim that:

…it appears essentially certain that the evolution of the code involved some combination of frozen accident with selection for error minimization.

See also: A universal trend of amino acid gain and loss in protein evolution
Excerpt:

We cannot conceive of a global external factor that could cause, during this time, parallel evolution of amino acid compositions of proteins in 15 diverse taxa that represent all three domains of life and span a wide range of lifestyles and environments. Thus, currently, the most plausible hypothesis is that we are observing a universal, intrinsic trend that emerged before the last universal common ancestor of all extant organisms.

See also:
On origin of genetic code and tRNA before translation
RNA-amino acid binding: a stereochemical era for the genetic code
Absolute binding-free energies between standard RNA/DNA nucleobases and amino-acid sidechain analogs in different environments
Cross-species conservation of complementary amino acid-ribonucleobase interactions and their potential for ribosome-free encoding
My comment: How much longer will teleophobic theorists continue to ignore everything known to serious scientists about ecological variation and nutrient-dependent ecological adaptation, which is controlled by the physiology of reproduction in all living genera?


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