Re: What's more important, self-organzation or evolution?

John Harshman wrote:
dkomo wrote:


This was one of the questions I wanted to get answered when I first poked my head into this n.g. a number of years ago. I must say, I have been major big time disappointed. Discussions of evolution have been endless and endlessly repetitive. The received view in biology has been recycled over and over again. Discussions of self-organization in biology have been virtually nil.

Yet, I think there is a way to resolve this question, and the answer IMHO is that self-organization is *way* more important than evolution in producing the phenomenon of life, as can be seen by examining one particular aspect of organisms. What do you think that is?


No idea. Why not stop being coy and tell us all what you mean?


An organism's structure and function is vastly *underdetermined* by its genome. Its DNA governs how protein and RNA molecules are built, when and how much. It doesn't direct where those molecules are to go inside a cell and what they are to do. The cell's self-organizational processes take care of that. In fact, the existence of DNA itself is a result of those processes

Development of a multicellular organism from a single cell to complete adult is an excellent example of self-organization. DNA has a ralatively minor part to play in that. Another example is how brains wire themselves up automatically. The trillions of synaptic connections are not mapped at all in DNA.

All selection can do is pick the most effective self-organized forms, but it does not have detailed control over the tremendous complexity of that organization.


--dkomo@xxxxxxxx

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