(December 6, 2019 at 12:46 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: It's ironic that you mention water Jack. You're asking about the laws of organic chemistry, heredity. Both the sequence and structure of dna are described by them. Briefly (very, very briefly) the double stranded helix is created when hydrophobic bases accumulate in the center of a poly-nucleotide structure which spirals to avoid contact in a tight space mostly full of water. The sequence is determined as hydrophilic phosphates and sugars react with those bases. This is governed by hydrogen bonding patterns, as are the resultant base pairs. Those pairs divide during meiosis, we bump uglies, and voila - a unique dna sequence.You would do better trying to teach algebra to a baked potato
It's not important that there actually are laws which govern the structure and sequence of dna, or even that you didn't realize that there where. What's important is that you imagined that there might not be, lol. In a clockwork universe created by an immensely intelligent designer....you imagined...that genetics wasn't reducible to the organic chemistry that facilitates and constrains it's operation.
That's some brain we've got, isn't it? Makes you wonder about it's creator. In fairness, we see the end product, us- and it's difficult for us to conceive of the underlying process being so simple and elegant. Tumblers in a lock, or..indeed, water flowing downhill. However, that's exactly what's happening..regardless of whether or not there are any gods.
Here's some background, if you find this sort of thing interesting. It goes through the people and processes that contributed to our current model, why others imagined that they would find it some particular way if they could ever look - and the success of the model based on those predictions when we did.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpag...atson-397/
Bringing us around to the next issue (and q)- since we now know that there are laws that determine the structure and sequence of dna...well..why this specific structure, that specific sequence? We can rule out all incompatible pairs or unsound structures - as they would not be present in living things on account of them not being capable of producing them. That would still (hypothetically) leave us with more that just the watson crick model, and definitely more than just our own home grown sequence (or even our carbon based status). We may find that life exceeds the boundaries we find here, but at least in this case of this earth, this environment, and this hereditary story as told by our dna - our model and our sequence was better suited to the conditions. Those unsuited, or less suitable, having been weeded out over billions of years and perhaps even actively suppressed by representatives of the well adapted form.
"For the only way to eternal glory is a life lived in service of our Lord, FSM; Verily it is FSM who is the perfect being the name higher than all names, king of all kings and will bestow upon us all, one day, The great reclaiming" -The Prophet Boiardi-
Conservative trigger warning.