In today’s Phys.Org news page, we hear about a three nucleotide change in the organism “Trypanosoma brucei, a parasite that causes sleeping sickness in Africa and Chagas disease in Latin America.”
Immediately after “transcription”, via a completely unknown mechanism, a three nucleotide portion of the intron associated with …… is replaced by three different nucleotides. Here’s what they say:
“These are changes for which no chemistry is known and has never been described. We don’t know what enzyme is involved and that is the million-dollar question: What mechanism is doing this? We haven’t a clue,” said Juan Alfonzo, professor of microbiology at The Ohio State University and senior author of the study. . . . .
Alfonzo sought to identify the intron, a specific segment of RNA, that needs to be removed before the tRNA can participate in the selection of the right amino acids during protein production. . . . ..
The trouble was, Alfonzo couldn’t locate the intron that he knew was there. After multiple attempts, he found that the intron’s sequence in this organism changed after transcription, the point at which a copy of RNA is made from a DNA sequence as the first step of gene expression.
This edit – hard to find because of its odd nature – consisted of a change to three nucleotides, the molecules that form DNA and RNA. Because of its rarity and unusual nature, it is called a noncanonical edit.
“It’s noncanonical because it is not typical. It is completely not typical,” Alfonzo said. “And for the first time, we show the biological significance. We show that if you don’t edit, you don’t splice. This editing is required for splicing, and splicing is required for functionality. Otherwise, cells die.”The editing described here is a swap of three nucleotides for three others that, according to the rules of biology, do not belong where they end up. This is why it looks like a mistake.
In order to live, you must ‘splice.’ In order to ‘splice,’ you must edit. But the ‘edit’ must take place immediately—not through Darwinian or Kimurian ways (neutral drift). And the ‘edit’ is ‘noncanonical,’ which means they don’t know how it happens. And, it violates the “rules of biology.” (But, at least they have a ‘word’ for it: noncanonical. You have to have words if you’re going to be a Darwinist, words like, co-option, convergence, exaptation, spandrels, noncanonical, etc, etc.)
The more they look, the more complex life appears. The more they look, the more laughable the Darwinian paradigm becomes. Where (and when) will it all end? Hopefully, soon.