Page 46 - The Origin of Life and the Universe - International Conference 2016

The Origin of Life and the Universe

It should be apparent and Dr. Rana also pointed this out, that natural
selection is non teleological. It’s his blind watchmaker reference. It’s not
goal-oriented, it’s not being driven towards a specific goal or a specific
purpose. It is simply natural selection done through the blind process that
cannot foresee which mutations might one day provide the ability to
thrive in a different environment or in a more complex organism. This is
a very important element in the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theory:
that evolution including microevolution is non teleological.
I find this to be one of the biggest and most confusing problems that
people face when they talk about evolution and specifically about cellular
and molecular biological processes. It actually leads them to endow the
organism with the teleology of the organism’s own design. The organism
becomes self directing towards some explicit goal, present or future. And
others endow molecules or segments of DNA with an intention to survive
and propagate. Perhaps you’ve heard of “selfish genes”. At heart, this is
imaginative story telling effect to captivate an audience. At worst it is
utterly nonsensical and ridiculous. Either way it is not scientific. In fact,
it's counterintuitive to what we know is true about scientific mechanisms
and processes. But cells and organisms are so richly endowed with
complexity and adaptive capacities and variations that it is hard to describe
such layers of complexity without resorting to language like this which is
often wrongly employed.
So the third category of evolution is microbial evolution. Microbial
evolution refers to the process of unicellular organisms such as bacteria,
archaea, simple eukaryotes, yeast, etc. as they rapidly reproduce and adapt
to changing environments via selection of beneficial micro evolutionary
mutations and promiscuous gene swapping. So bacteria and other single
cell organisms can actually gain genetic information through three different
mechanisms. The first is one called conjugation. Conjugation occurs
when bacteria come and contact with one another, and one bacteria
transmits genetic information to a different bacteria. The second type of
horizontal gene transfer or exchange of genetic information is transduction.
Transduction is vector-mediated. Viruses that infect bacteria can carry
genetic information into the bacteria and if it’s a temperate virus it re-
mains in the bacteria without killing the bacteria and the bacteria can