Chris:
>As usual, you are misrepresenting your opponent's views, even after
>(apparently) accurately quoting them. They do not go "offline"; they merely
>become selectively neutral (if they don't produce any significant
>consequences).
How do you know they become only selectively neutral?
>Since we know that large chunks of a many a genome can be
>removed without apparent harm to the resulting organism (at least relative
>to its normal habitat), this hypothesis is not as far-fetched as you make it
>seem.
This is somewhat misleading. Those normal habitats are those in the wild.
The abnormal habitats are artificial environments maintained by the
intervention of an intelligent mind. Look at it this way. You can take a
tiger,
pull out its teeth and remove its legs. But we could keep it alive in a zoo.
That tigers can remain alive in a zoo without legs and teeth hardly tells
us much about what tigers need to survive as tigers. The same thing
holds true of microbes which remain alive in the lab after we take out some
of their genes.
Mike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jan 19 2000 - 09:48:56 EST