Genes arising from nothing?

I have been asked me to clarify a recent piece of news that has hit the popular science press with headlines like the following:

New genes found that can arise from nothing. (Phys.org, 12/8/2023)

The tenacity of the media (and some scientists) to abuse the concept of nothing is unbelievable. They don’t know that nothing does not exist, and that nothing can arise from what does not exist. This is something that pre-Socratic Greek philosophers did know. (The first to assert this was Parmenides). Twenty-five centuries later, modern man, so proud of the advancement of science and technology, makes the same mistake once and again. In these posts I have often criticized the phrase, common today, that the universe arose spontaneously from nothing, which atheists often formulate to deny the creation and, therefore, the existence of God. This phrase does not belong to science (because current theories do not let us go back to the moment of the Big Bang). As philosophy, it’s just a flagrant proof of ignorance.

The invention of the genetic code

As is well known, the genetic code is the representation of the amino acid sequence of proteins by means of DNA strands. Now, the proteins of living beings are made of 20 different amino acids. However, there are only four different nucleotides in DNA. How can just four bases represent 20 amino acids?

With codons made of two nucleotides just 16 amino acids could be represented. As they are 20, two nucleotides are not enough: three must be used. Indeed, that is what life has done: each amino acid is represented by codons made of three nucleotides. The problem is, three nucleotides could represent 64 different amino acids, rather than 20 (21, considering that there codons mark the end of the string). What is the solution? Obviously, some amino acids must be represented by several codons (this is what is called degeneracy of the genetic code).

The four DNA nucleotides are made of a skeleton of sugar and phosphoric acid, combined with a nucleobase. In DNA there are four different bases:

• Two purines (P): adenine (A) and guanine (G).
• Two pyrimidines (Q): cytosine (C) y thymine (T).

Outstanding problems in the history of life

Gregor Mendel

In a previous article I wrote about the origin of life and related problems. That is only the first of the outstanding issues regarding evolution. There are many more, for we are far from having an explanation for everything that happened during the history of life.

The theory of evolution through natural selection was first proposed by Darwin and refined by his followers when new discovered biological phenomena solved some of the problems posed since the beginning of the theory:

1.      The laws of heredity (Mendel, 1865).

2.      Mutations (Hugo de Vries, 1900).

3.      The laws of genetics (Thomas Hunt Morgan, early twentieth century).

4.      The synthetic theory of evolution (Simpson, Dobzhansky and others, around 1930)

5.      The transmission of inheritance through DNA (Oswald Avery, 1944).

6.      The structure of DNA and the deciphering of the genetic code (Watson, Crick, Rosalind Franklin and others).

7.      The neutral theory of evolution (Motoo Kimura, 1968).

8.      Punctuated equilibrium (Stephen Jay Gould, 1972).

9.      Epigenetics (early twenty first century).

Rosalind Franklin