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Synthetic DNA About To Yield New Life Forms
mlimber sends along a Washington Post story about the immanence of completely artificial life: "The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial — and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive... Some experts are worried that a few maverick companies are already gaining monopoly control over the core 'operating system' for artificial life and are poised to become the Microsofts of synthetic biology. That could stifle competition, they say, and place enormous power in a few people's hands."
The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial
Yeah, but this will only become a problem in the year 2019, and probably only in Los Angeles.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
That is _imminence_, or the quality of being imminent...
Immanence is almost another entirely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanence
What kinds of organisms will scientists, terrorists and other creative individuals make?
[broken image]
Figure I. SCHEMATIC.
Modified design for a low-pH respiratory engine. 1) monobasic phosphate buffer tank. 2) ADP-GDP reservoir. 3) primary ADP-GDP feed line. 4) NAD/FAD reservoir. 5) pyruvate feed line. 6) Deinococcus culture chamber. 7) ADP-GDP return line. 8) NADH-FADH2 return line. 9) pasteurizer. 10) sodium-potassium pump. 11) NaCl/KCl reservoir. 12) actin filament membrane. 13) myosin-hydroxyapetite cylinder. 14) axle. 15) flywheel. 16) dilute H3PO4 reservoir. 17) intake port. 18) myosin generator. 19) proton pump. 20) ATPase membrane. 21) secondary ATP feed line. 22) electrophoresis cartridge. 23) pH regulator. 24) UV sterilizer. 25) transmission. 26) +12VDC battery. 27) radiator coil assembly. 28) CO2 exhaust vent. 29) fan. 30) phosphate return line. 31) brake assembly. 32) generator. 33) amylase generator. 34) glycolysis chamber. 35) fibrolytic culture chamber array. 36) microcontroller. 37) compost chamber. 38) thresher. 39) lid. Cit. L. Xu et al, Cellulosic Artificial Muscle Engines (2057), Biomech. Eng. Letts. 21 599-612
SPORE hype...
Anything still based on DNA is re-using nature's building blocks. It's like in Photoshop, using the clone tool vs. drawing a photorealistic texture freehand - there's a huge difference. Nature has been searching the space of DNA recombinations for a long time.
How exactly does this blur the boundaries of life? I could see some people questioning if a virus was really alive, but adding more things like viruses wouldn't *further* blur the line, and anything as complex as bacteria would be life regardless of if they were natural or not.
I suppose if you let religion define "life" for you this might cause trouble, but definitions shouldn't be the job of religion.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
How we know is more important than what we know.
They're worried about competition? As in BUSINESS competition? This kind of tech makes me worry more about competition in the true Darwinian sense of the word. What happens when "the Microsoft of DNA" codes an airborn AIDS virus into the system? Kinda puts all that Wall Street crap into perspective, doesn't it?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Just be glad that God hasn't invoked the DMCA on reverse-engineering his DNA Code yet.
who says artificial life needs to be based on DNA? The earliest forms of life probably used RNA instead or one of its cousins like TNA, GNA, PNA or LNA. DNA is only special in the fact that it is missing a key hydroxyl group in the 2 position. this makes DNA more stable because there's no nucleophillic group there toi assist in self-cleavage of the phosphodiester bond. GNA has a backbone of glycerol rather than ribose [RNA] or deoxyribose [DNA]. PNA uses a reperating serine polypeptide backbone and because the whole thing has no charge like DNA does it has a much higher melting temperature [can withstand more heat] which may make it superior to DNA or RNA in some applications in biology. TNA on the other hand, has a synthetic polymerase enzyme that has to my knowledge, been able to create strands 1000 bases long. then there's alternative nucleotide bases, there are similar molecules to the naturally occuring 5 that also can encode for proteins and act in genetic systems. there's a lot that can be done with this, it's just a pity that it will probably be encumbered in patents if and when any of it is realized.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Would you prefer that we place enormous power in everybody's hands? Regardless of their level of skill or ethics?
I am not a manual I am a human being! - The distress call of the TechSupport Badger
That could stifle competition, they say, and place enormous power in a few people's hands
Only if they allow these companies to patent the technology so broadly as to stifle competition. By 'only' I of course mean 'when'.
It's crazy talk anyway. The 'Microsoft of DNA'? To Paraphrase Paul Graham, only if there's someone to bend over and be the IBM of DNA.
Seriously though, that's highly unlikely at this stage unless effective monopolies are granted via patent and maintained in perpetuity so as to prevent any competition from establishing.
Also, right at this moment there's not even agreement in science as to what is required to describe a Core Promoter in all cases, and most definitely no clear idea as to how we should best describe some of the conserved sequences which form it, they're pretty darned variable, and that's just one component of a gene. This is like saying you can build a car but you haven't actually discovered how to make a wheel.
"...a few maverick companies are already gaining monopoly control over the core 'operating system' for artificial life ..."
Roman Catholic Church cites Genesis in Prior Art claim.....
No doubt our good friends at Monsanto would kill to be the main maverick company in question.
It's sad when choosing an installation directory on your own qualifies you as an "advanced user."
Would you prefer that we place enormous power in everybody's hands? Regardless of their level of skill or ethics?
That's effectively the same thing.
What you describe is similar to "security through obscurity," the hope that not enough people will have the knowledge and information needed to cause damage. As soon as one person has the knowledge and power, you have compromised security. The whole point is to design a system that is resistant to knowledge and power.
Unfortunately, since we didn't design the system (biology), there's not much we can do to make it hack-proof. I believe we're still dozens of years away from synthetic life, but once it happens, it might as well be in the power of all people. This isn't something like The Bomb that you can control with access to scarce resources.
I'm not as pessimistic as Bill Joy (ironic last name when he goes off on his "the world is doomed" tear), but I definitely think it doesn't matter whether everybody gets this tech, or only a few get this tech. We're pretty much equally screwed either way.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Considering that many people choose to apply their programming skills in writing computer viruses, should we expect like-minded people to disseminate real synthetic viruses once the technology becomes sufficiently mainstream?
If these companies pop up in California, we know Arni can save us.
Hold it, hold it! We're not quite there yet. It was only yesterday, on the historical timescale, that we discovered DNA and now we are beginning to get some vague ideas about how some of the things actually work. We can even theorize about correcting errors in people's genetic code, but creating a living cell from scratch? Not even the best biologists know more than a tiny fraction of what goes into making a living cell function. IOW, we are far, far out in the world of science fiction here nobody is just on the threshold to discovering how to create living cells from scratch, or even mostly from scratch.
/. will be around. The problem with absurd, sweeping patents will have solved itself by collapsing completely, capitalism is likely to have been left behind as yet another temporary absurdity in human culture, the climate change crisis will have run its course and found its solution, and if humanity is still around, we will have found a role as the guardians and preservers of the planets.
If and when that ever happens, I don't think any of the readers of
If many hundreds of thousands or millions of years from now when humanity is a thing of the past, descendants of the synthetic DNA creatures start debating about whether or not they evolved naturally, or were created by a long-forgotten designer? Of course the former would obviously be a more acceptable conclusion, since the latter creates additional complexity.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It should be pointed out that the technology described is largely fictitious. The best labs haven't even managed to create a single artificial cell, and those technologies ALL use cobbled-together bits stolen from other lifeforms - nothing truly from scratch. There are a few good examples of proteins being engineered to specific functions (mostly DNA binding specificity), but we're ages away from being able to say, "Okay, I want to synthesize a protein that does this random function; here's how I would do it." And as for more complex lifeforms? Forget it. We don't even understand the development process of any multicellular organism in any detail, never mind being able to manufacture our own. So, on the whole, I think this story is akin to worrying about who is going to get control of, say, shrink-ray technology. Scary when it happens, but it ain't happening any time soon.
Yes! Biological patents! Twenty years closer to the realization of Jurassic Park!
Touche. If only I hadn't just used up my mod points.
Coming soon to a search engine near you: Search the Google database of life forms that have been successfully created in the lab to find the one that fits your biotech industrial needs. All open source, will full RNA patterns necessary to generate the cDNA from PCRs.
Er, no, I don't think they would see that. In fact, I don't see how anyone could see that.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Stem cell research is banned because we have to *sit* and *think* about it... Is it good, is it bad... Hmmm... We are not sure so, uhm, let's ban it. Done.
Meanwhile, artificial DNA yields artificial lifeforms, with totally unknown consequences. This is fun! More dangerous than stem cells, but it's fun, sounds like a creppy sci-fi movie! So why ban it?
There may be a "patent troll" of artificial life, but there will be no Microsoft. DNA is, by definition, open source.
-ellie
The DNA code is orders of magnitude more complicated.
The debugging involved in granting super-powers, while keeping the product stable over a full natural life, is going to provide the stuff of horror movies for decades to come.
I don't doubt the power of the human mind to get us there, I'm just saying that we'll be getting there in second gear as opposed to fifth, and with much more mess than the dreamers really want.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
As soon as one could create a lifeform using artifical DNA, they could bypass many ethical arguments for using these organisms as AI control systems because their DNA is not of "natural origin".
Imagine, we probably do not just wire frog or dog brains to robot bodies because of ethical concerns... but if the frog or dog or primate brain came from an artifical DNA starting point, one could argue that there is no ethical challenge.
And given that plasticity of brains, it would be easier to just wire organisms to robot bodies then to create a computer brain from scratch. (See research on speech and robotic/remote controls to paraplegics).
Of course, if there are no ethical limitations for using animals in this way now.... well... the pandora's box might well be opened now.
(I wonder if something like that might end up as an instructable?... Frog-brain controlled robotic model tanks.)
"Life" is a system that transduces energy to maintain local entropy reductions that perpetuate its operation: homeostasis. Recognizable life replicates itself, or is replicated, from identical or nearly identical instances: reproduction.
FWIW, "intelligence" is an information model of the physical world at least minimally accurate and at least minimally inclusive (perhaps solely at initialization) of new information that it adds to itself, and that includes representation of itself in its model.
--
make install -not war
First, it's imminent, not immanent. Rather Freudian slip.
And again, this doesn't appear to me to be synthetic life any more than putting an artificial heart into a person and starting it up is giving them "artificial life". We're taking pieces (important ones), creating them synthetically, and sticking them into a living creature.
And this is a non-trivial distinction. The real question about life is a more metaphysical one: if we come to the point where we can move molecules on large scales like Legos, putting them all exactly where they should be compared to a model single-celled creature (for example), and when we can simultaneously 'insert' all the necessary electrochemical charges in the right places in the right proportions....will that creature 'pop' into living? I guess it goes to one's deep beliefs about whether "life" is something unique and non-physical, something essentially tangential to the chemistry and physics. In a sense it's a question fundamentally about God and the soul.
-Styopa
When I first saw the title, I read it as "Synthetic DNA About To Yield to New Life Forms".
I guess that's about the only time the "overlords" joke really is called for ... and funny! :-)
Uh why don't we first get there before we pat ourselves on the backs about the sheer awesomeness of having gotten there? If I had a nickle for every scientist whose next experiment may very well change mankind and science itself, I'd be a very rich skeptic.
None of the people playing with novel gene coding has the slightest idea how to make anything beyond single-purpose machines with it - no schemes for anything remotely resembling us, our dogs, or the squirrel in the yard. So this whole article's image of mad scientists "composing" new life forms like symphonies is just bad sci-fi, especially in the near to mid-term future. Can we pervert a life form into a machine? Sure. That's what happens when we put a horse before a cart. And perverting a microbe to make oil? Sure. But at that point we've reduced life to machinery, not created life.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I do not think that word means what you think it means: Immanence
Imminence
"Ayn Rand is a bloody socialist compared to me." - Robert A. Heinlein
Somebody needs to kick these reporters in their crystal balls. Wake me up when they stop poising and start crossing, ok? The future is now. The future is bunk.
Washington Post story about the immanence of completely artificial life:
Was "immanence" a typo; a misspelling of "imminence" as the context of the summary seems to imply, or did the submitter really mean?
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Am I the only one here who is seeing parallels between the early stages of synthetic life creation, and the emergence of software in computers. Both started in education, with the "source code" as it were, freely available to everyone. As time went on, software became more commercialized and we ended up with the widespread usage of closed source and intellectual property we have today.
I sure hope there's a Richard Stallman out there to stand up for open source genetics, or a branch of science that can change the course of history will probably end up getting bogged down in lawsuits and patents.
This is how the loudness war is killing music.
Hmm is this life imitating art or what? I am all for learning about DNA. There's a lot to learn that could possibly
help with many cures for genetic diseases along the way. But... to take DNA and sequence it to produce a life form?
We are going to produce monsters along the way. Who knows.. possibly something harmful. I am sure they would start at sequencing bacteria. And we know where this will lead. Some government agency will fund the research, scientists will take
the funding and possibly design a super bacteria. Good can come out of the research as well, such as hydrogen producing bacteria..but heck we all know what happens... look at how the atomic bomb was developed.
Has anyone ever watched the SciFi series Surface???? Ok it's SciFi but the super lizard amphibian creatures were created by
testing synthetic DNA building blocks.
Oh great, just f-ing great!
Imagine creating a special virus that can be passed from person to person. But, when it reaches its intended target (specific genetic code), it assassinates!
I'm just another lowly Slashdotter. You all know damn well I'm not the first one to think of this. I'm sure it's been on the drawing board for quite some time in both the US and Russia. Who knows, maybe such viral assassinations have already taken place.
Life is not for the lazy.
One more question. You're watching a stage play. A banquet is in progress. The guests are enjoying an appetizer of raw oysters. The entree consists of boiled dog...
Don't worry, if it is like the show it will get cancelled after one short season and we will all be safe!
Whoops... I changed my story to say serial killer since that sounded more dramatic rather than a bank robber half way through, but you get the point ;)
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
It will be a long time before there are radical changes in synthetic life. The early wrok will be tinking: combing proteins from different existing lifeforms, changing an amino there, etc.
... "the praying mantis routine" with a bug-woman-hybrid that looks like Natasha Henstridge may be a really good deal!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
> That could stifle competition, they say, and place enormous power in a few people's hands.
You'll pardon me if I don't get excited about the alternative: placing enormous power in the hands of a few people whose primary skill is in generating fear in the masses.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
...is already in the hands of a few people. Nukes can wipe out the life on this planet. With capitalism, it always happens that power goes into the hands of few. What did you expect, something like Blade Runner where even the guy down at the corner in chinatown makes artificial animals?
..."spare faring world nation"... I meant to say "space faring world nation". Apologies.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Do they like the taste of human flesh?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not me, I wanna BE Spiderman. (sans all the wimpy moralistic internal conflict stuff).
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Mycoplasma genitalium, a genetically minimal bacterium that's being used as a model for synthetic life, has 580,000 base pairs. The linux kernel I have running on my machine is 1,764,280 bytes. 4^580,000 is approx. 6.24 x 10^349194. 2^1,764,280 is approx. 1.59 x 10^531101. It looks like vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic holds quite a bit more data than the Mycoplasma genitalium genome - and *it's* compressed. The linux kernel is actually more complicated than some lifeforms.
Of course, the human genome is another matter - 3 billion base pairs.
I hope by the time we start tweaking the human genome seriously we will have figured out how to upload and download brain states. Could you imagine having to live with a beta-test genome for the rest of your life? Fortunately these guys are working on bacteria. Multicellular organisms are bit more difficult to work with - they have to unfold from a single cell, and the other cells have to tell each cell what to do. It's an emergent process, and there is a lot of room for little mistakes to become big mistakes. I get the impression that it's going to be like programing for parallel processing vs. programing for a single processor, only much more difficult. The human mind, despite running on highly parallelized hardware, can't handle parallelization well.
About life, well, I believe the best definition of life so far, is the replicator definition. Basically, if it replicates, it is alive. Viruses (carbon based) would, under this definition, be living creatures. And, honestly, I don't see why wouldn't they... They seem pretty alive to me.. As for computer viruses I would put them in a zombie state. This is because, although they do replicate, they basically clone themselves which is not exactly the same thing at least for life as we know it. The problem resides in the fact that carbon viruses infect other phenotypes replicating machinery with their own genotype. Computer viruses don't. The analogous thing would be, I believe, for a computer virus to somehow inject it's source code into a victim compiler and make it compile it and execute it. I don't know if there is already something like this. I remember of code injection on forms and similar attacks secure-code guys are always worried about and I wonder if it possible... Anyway I'm not a specialist, and everything I said here is from what I've learned in college and from reading... But for anyone interested I seriously recommend Richard Dawkins's books, especially The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The Extended Phenotype. They're written in fairly common language and, with a couple exceptions, can be easily understood by anyone minimally intelligent (I like to believe that that applies to everyone that reads /.). Well, if you're a creationist you'll probably not going to like them.. But then again, you're not minimally intelligent...
For CS guys well take a course on AI and your life will change... You'll start wondering what's the point of actually program something... Why not evolve the damn thing?..
Lintilla.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Mankind isn't smart enough to predict every possible effect of this kind of thing.
Name me one case where mankind has meddled with nature and it hasn't become a total screw-up.
This technology can only lead to trouble. Probably waay more trouble than any previous meddling with nature that mankind has so far done as it the first technology to directly manipulate our core mechanisms in a unreversible and potentially uncontrollable way as genetically modified people also have a right to have kids, so passing genetic modifications on.
Why aren't governments strictly enforcing a complete ban on this technology?
To all you short-sighted do-gooders arguing that this will find cures for every possible disease, PEOPLE HAVE TO DIE of something.
Get over it.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Your running kernel is the output product.
The DNA codebase would be better compared to the git source, comments and all, for that is the state of how the kernel got there.
However, the Von Neuman machine executing the kernel code is a straight-up tinkertoy compared to the cell neucleus, that hard-real-time, 3D chemical wonder.
Counting bytes and basepairs, while not totally irrelevant, is the tip of the iceberg.
My credentials include getting stomped in a biochem course at GWU, so I feel in touch with my ignorance.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Terry Pratchett has in the Discworld-series in 'The Last Continent' a small god playing with these ideas. Leads to an unexpected result, though...
...'And the flaming cows?' said Ridcully.
(quote)
'The what?' said the god, sunk in misery.
'The more inflammable cow,' said Ponder.
'Oh yes. Another good idea that didn't work. I just thought, you know, that if you could find the bit in, say, an oak tree which says "Be inflammable" and glue it into the bit of the cow which says "Be soggy" it'd save a lot of trouble. Unfortunately, that produced a sort of bush that made distressing noises and squirted milk, but I could see the principle was sound...'
(end quote)
First time I read it I just could not stop laughing! Sorry for the spoiler to future readers, but this quote came up so strong that I wonder why noone else has posted it.
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
I'm not saying anything... draw your own conclusions.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
On the same day of the re-re-re-re-release of blade runner, now in the super duper uber funpack version?
All kidding aside, this is really scary, we really arent far enough down the road of understanding to start mucking around with this.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I also forgot that the kernel size is in *bytes* not *bits*, so my babble about how complex the linux kernel is actually a bit of an underestimate. Oh well. At any rate, figuring out what a genome is doing is rather like trying to figure out the program from "The Story of Mel." No helpful comments, and a lot of brain-twisting optimization. Evolution is a Real Programmer. (Junk DNA aside.)
Is the 'execution' of the prokaryote genome really that much different from executing a program on a von Neuman machine? The genome is fairly one dimensional - the cell transcribes a gene, runs the mRNA through a ribosome, adds a lot of ATP, and translates the mRNA into a protein, three bases to the amino acid. The function of the protein is determined by how it folds. Predicting how a given chain of amino acids will fold is non-trivial, but it's not like the cell works out how it will happen. Intramolecular attractions does all the work there.
With a eukaryote, there is a lot of things going into determining what gene gets expressed when, but I'm not sure that happens in minimalistic prokaryotes. (I don't even have the credentials of having flunked a biochem course. I just read a *lot* of pop sci.) Prokaryotes don't have a nucleus. IIRC, we're not even sure that Mycoplasma genitalium makes its own ATP. There is quite a bit of infrastructure involved in turning the information encoded on a hunk of DNA into a working protein, but compared to a modern processor? I'm not sure which would win. I'm not even sure how you would go about comparing - how many transistors equals one protein?
This is additionally why when people go on about 'junk DNA', I scoff. That folding you mention, the vast three-dimensionality of the whole process, is such a big deal that people really don't know jack and need to quit sounding authoritative about it. There will likely turn out to be some purely useless noise, but nature is nothing if not economical.
The other little problem that is underreported is the size of the whole endeavor.
Cells like a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemeare hugely affected by a lone atom, man.
<prediction>I predict we'll eventually discover that the power of the Creator really shows up on the small scale, where we, to our chagrin, simply can't retrace the series of quantum accidents that led to life as we 'know' it.</prediction>
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I've been "doing the zone" for years now. If anything, it's a combination of sensible diet and regular exercise that keeps me in the "borderline" part.
But truth be told? For some things, there just is no magical cure. (yet) No amount of careful eating and exercising will change the fact that, by the time I'm 50, I'll be a full-blown diabetic. I'm going to die, someday, too. In the meantime, I've already postponed the problem for over 10 years. Had I NOT changed my course pretty drastically, my blood sugar would average in the 200-300 range. As it is now, it's usually between 90 and 150.
Thanks for the advice, though.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
You contradict yourself.
There is a suggestion in your prediction that there is a creator of some type which implies that a creator of some value (mass, everything, something) exists and that it is alive. Then your prediction, hypothetically, suggests that it wouldn't be possible to trace the steps leading to life. I put to you that it is a contradiction to suggest in one breath that life exists and in the next that it cannot - that the chicken requires the egg which doesn't exist.
Have a think about that contradiction and thank you for teaching me a new word.
I ate your fish.
Your argument certainly holds true if the creator is required to be contained and constrained within the creation, and maybe I'm guilty of not being more explicit about asserting the opposite case.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
>That folding you mention, the vast three-dimensionality of the whole process, is such a big deal that people really don't know jack and need to quit sounding authoritative about it. [...]You've got the parsing done; now what of the lexical analysis?
The folding is such a big deal that its the focus of a distributed computing project. Working it out is a big, hairy, computationally intensive task. And that's assuming we have all the principles of it down. There is always the possibility that our model will say that the protein will fold *this* way and nature says that it folds *that* way. But Popper and Occam say that we should assume that our model is right until we get new information that kicks it over. So, until we notice some anomalies... If we *do* find anomalies, I seriously doubt its the Creator showing up on the small scale, since I hope that He'd have better things to do. Hand-folding every single protein has *got* to be a thankless task.
Working out the folding is a big hairy mess. But the cell infrastructure doesn't 'know' crap about folding. As far as it 'knows,' it's just stringing amino acids together. Doing the folding is our universe's physics engine's job. A ribosome synthesizing a protein off of a strand of mRNA is just as one-dimensional as a Turing machine going through its tape. Granted, the ribosome has to be fed tRNA, which carry the amino acids, and has to be fed ATP to power the process. But our computers also have power supplies, right?
Evolution also doesn't 'know' crap. To evolution, a protein and the gene that codes for it are all just black boxes. It neither 'knows' nor 'cares' that this heme that transports oxygen is only a few (or one) atom away from this heme which used to be used for sulfur-based photosynthesis (and, indeed, that the gene that codes for the oxygen transport heme is a mutant descendant of the gene for the sulfur photosynthesis heme). Of course, evo-devo probably does care, since the current state of the organism narrows down what ways it can evolve, but that's beside the point.
True genetic engineers *will* have to care about this crap. They'll have to figure out what protein will result from a give gene sequence, etc. I expect it will be really, really difficult. So far, genetic 'engineering' has just been cut-and-pasting genes that evolution has already 'designed.' If we're to the point where we're making synthetic chromosomes, then we might be entering the era of true genetic engineering, where we design new proteins from the ground up.
Maybe we'll even get around to fixing all of those bugs in our anatomy that happened because we we're 'designed' by evolution. Things like inside-out retinas and larynxes that wrap around the aorta. Maybe this Creator of yours really is using quantum-level interventions to influence our evolution. (Nothing in evolutionary theory says that mutations *have* to be random. It's just that random mutations are simple and, in conjunction with natural selection, is sufficient to create pretty cool 'designs.') But, if so, then He ain't fixing things that only intelligent design can fix. Daniel Dennett once said that the best way you can study a designed artifact is to look at the mistakes - to the extent that designs are done right, all designs for the same spec look the same. The difference is in the mistakes. While our 'design' is pretty good on the whole, the mistakes scream "evolution," not "intelligent design." Lots of small changes, not wholesale redesigns.
As far as junk DNA goes, there are two main theories: 1) that it really *is* junk, probably resulting from evolution 'commenting out' a bit of useless code. 2) it plays some sort of non-coding regulatory function. And then there's the third main theory, which says that some is junk, some is regulatory. The simplest assumption is that it is all junk. That way, if we find out that some of it *isn't* junk, we can be surprised and try to figure out what it actually does.
Evolution is economical, but it does need some time to work. If som
What is alive has a nervous system. Did I just make the rules?