a reply to:
Noinden
You can mutate DNA indefinitely but never get a new morphological innovation.
What your are saying is new information, form, and structure arise from natural selection acting on random mutations arising at a very low level
within the biological hierarchy. However, the body-plan formation during embryological development and major morphological innovation during the
history of life depend upon a specificity of arrangement at a much higher level of the organizational hierarchy (Paraphrase from Darwin's Doubt). At
this level DNA alone is not enough. We need new epigenetic information, not only that hundreds of epigenetic mutations would need to occur before any
benefit was realized. First tagging machines need to be built, or adapted from other machines. These machines then need to know where to place the
tags in the entire genome. This would also have to be done for the machines that remove and move the tags. In other words, it is not good enough
merely to evolve the machines. These machines must also know where to place the tags. Then the machines that interpret the tags would have to do so
correctly. They would have to know what the tag means. This is entirely independent of DNA. So obviously the chemistry will be different.
The biological machinery described above is not inheritable unless is evolves in the germline. In the germline it doesn’t do any good. Only when it
is a passed on to the descendants can it help .The epigenetics capability likely won’t help because this capability gives the organism the ability
to respond to a wide range of environmental conditions that probably won’t even occur in the organism’s lifetime. In other words, we must believe
that a statistically impossible capability arose by chance and though the majority of it wasn’t helpful, it was preserved anyway.
Then we go back to Eric Davidon "“There is always an observable consequence if a dGRN (developmental gene regulatory network) subcircuit is
interrupted. Since these consequences are always catastrophically bad, flexibility is minimal, and since the subcircuits are all interconnected, the
whole network partakes of the quality that there is only one way for things to work. And indeed the embryos of each species develop in only one
way.”
Any mutations to the regulatory regions of DNA are always found to be catastrophically bad.
Then we can also go to Johnathan Wells:
"Excerpt: Embryo development (ontogeny) depends on developmental gene regulatory networks (dGRNs), but dGRNs depend on pre-existing spatial
anisotropies that are defined by early embryonic axes, and those axes are established long before the embryo’s dGRNs are put in place.,,,
DNA sequences do not specify the final functional forms of most membrane components. Still less does DNA specify the spatial arrangements of those
components. Yet their spatial arrangements carry essential ontogenetic information. The fact that membrane patterns carry ontogenetic information that
is not specified by DNA poses a problem for any theory of evolution (such as Neo-Darwinism) that attributes the origin of evolutionary novelties to
changes in a genetic program—-whether at the level of DNA sequences or dGRNs."
bio-complexity.org...
All this to say. You are simply using a trivial statement like Macroevolution is just microevolution over time, and then telling everyone the
chemistry is the same? There is no dispute that the chemistry involved in getting from cell to light sensitive cell to eye ball is not just slight
chemical changes in the genetic code.