"that fact, alone, destroys the central assumption of selfish-gene theory" Part

STARTING WHERE this left off:

Replicating like a crystal is, therefore, totally inadequate to the task.  So, what happens?  What happens is simply marvelous.  Organisms ensure that, normally, that degree of DNA damage does not occur.  And how they do it is ingenious and only living systems can do it.  Each and every one of those errors is corrected by the living cell, itself, employing many DNA cutting and splicing proteins to do the job.  And the outcome is so accurate that it can reduce an actual, crystal-like error rate of one in ten to the four to one in ten to the ten. that is a one million fold change.  

And only a living cell, not DNA alone, can achieve this.  To use Richard Dawkin's language, "the replicator DNA" is not, therefore, separate from "its vehicle" the living organism.  And that fact, alone, destroys the central assumption of selfish-gene theory.

I will break in here to say that I don't understand one of those sentences but I won't insert what I think he probably meant without being able to look into it more.  What I think is obvious from what he said is that DNA, if it "self-replicated" like a crystal (as is imagined by the central dogma of molecular biology and every claim that built on it) would have an error rate that couldn't produce a viable organism but that DNA as it is really replicated by the cell has those errors of such non-biological reproduction corrected at an amazing rate and at an amazing speed BY THE LIVING CELLS. I will forego the argument that such a process cannot happen without intelligent choice being involved, though I think what follows makes that more obvious.  What I will point out in that regard is that the merely seeming simplicity of such things WAS THE MAJOR SELLING POINT OF CLAIMS OF ATHEISM THAT RESTED ON THAT NAIVE CONCEPTION OF THE BASIS OF LIFE, foremost in the so-simple-as-to-be-cartoonish presentation of first Darwinism and then neo-Darwinism.  And, I will point out, that anyone who thinks they sense that such a thing would require intelligence to carry out that operation, as it really is, has every right to think that.  Especially with what Denis Noble and his colleagues discovered, as he continued with.

Not only does the living cell perform this miracle, if you want to call it that, of the preservation of its DNA sequence, it can choose to regulate the error correcting process.  If the error [correction rate] is down-regulated the result could be many, many new DNA sequences from which the living organism can choose.  It can even choose which part of the genome to protect and which to change.

This was shown many, many years ago by a very famous Woman geneticist, Barbara McClintock.  Her experiments in the 1950s on the plant maize showed that this ability to change a genome when the plant, or the organism is under stress is universal.  Under stress  all organisms can, as it were, spin the wheel of chance in the hope of finding a solution to the problem of survival.  Bacteria can also do it, that was shown by the bio-chemist James Shapiro. In fact, all organisms can do it.  They use this ability to regulate degree of the correction of the genome to generate new sequences when they need to do so.

I call these processes the harnessing of stochasticity, control of stochasticity, control of chance. It is the control of chance enabling organisms to be creative.  The article was published in the journal Interface Focus in 2017 and has consequences in evolutionary biology and in the philosophy of choice in organisms.  A series of articles that I published in the last five years, they can be downloaded from the website as my slide shows.

That gives openness and flexibility to living organisms.  

Because it is dependent on naturally occurring stochasticity, it is very different from the openness and flexibility of solid state computers made of silicone and metal. Because we, the living organisms, are the natural miners of chance this enables us to be so creative in what we do.  Enable us to be creative?  Could that also happen in our nervous systems?  You bet it does!

Again, not only does it destroy the central assumption of Dawkins' theory, it overturns any such theory that depends on the belief in an all-powerful of DNA as a total determinant of physical bodies and of minds.  FAR MORE IMPORTANT THAN THAT for the continuation of life in the world and human history, it totally overturns huge parts of the basis of current and often extremely dangerous human culture and law and politics, the product of that double-edged sword, the "public understanding of science."  Much of that saturated in the naive and now overturned lore surrounding a cartoonish, iconic conception of what we imagine "DNA" to be and do.  DNA doesn't replicate itself, it can't even maintain its own integrity, which is accomplished by the enormously complex cellular structures and chemistry which are not created out of DNA.  

Remember that such important molecules as the fats that account for so much of so many of the cell's structures and chemistry are not coded for in DNA.  After I started learning such things that were known even quite a lot earlier during my lifetime, I was astounded at how much of the presentation of biology in my high school and university years seemed to entirely ignore such basic facts that all organisms that reproduce sexually inherit an entire egg cell with those structures along with the genetic material in the sperm cell.  What structures the sperm cell also contributes to the new organism, apart from DNA is, as well, worth considering because just about all presentations of such "public understanding of science" entirely ignores those facts.   Selfish-gene theory is only one of many such theories that are or have recently been current in science and in the college-credentialed "public understanding of science."  Including that dangerously believed in by those in the law and sitting as judges and "justices."  Everything from the homicidal "Darwinian economics" that was the pseudo-scientific basis of Covid-19 non-policy during the Trump regime and of the Swedish government to Neo-Nazism as seen in the screeds and scribblings of William L. Pierce are among the earliest adopters of that just as Nazi "race hygine" (eugenics)  and Lebensraum theory was based on earlier iterations of natural selection and similarly naive conceptions of biology.  

The fact that the cell chemistry that is independent of the DNA molecule is necessary to maintain the structural and functional integrity of the molecule does, really, overturn the entire line of neo-Darwinism, which includes the most extreme form that Dawkins and his colleagues have made the conventional view of evolutionary science since the 1970s, including his selfish-gene dogma.  An entire field which has representation in science departments of universities around the world and which has real and very bad consequences in the popular understanding of science, rests on a basic fallacy which science has known about since more decades than Dawkins and his colleagues have been active in public science.  That alone tells you there's something seriously wrong with the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy and with the integrity of science.  And why the lag time in changing thinking to keep up with new discoveries is so dangerous.  It's not only that progress in science is measured in the deaths of scientists and professors who refuse to adopt new findings overturning their conception of their science, the retaining by the general public of what they were sold as valid science in their youth and, especially through the mass media but which was overturned has a deeper and potentially more dangerous effect. 

 That PBS and the BBC have sold neo-Darwinism so hard, along with its distortions in the popular understanding of science - and Lord only knows what things like the cable channels and cabloid like internet "documentaries" have done with that - has a really dangerous political effect.  I doubt the high-up Nazis had any more developed an idea of what the university professors were telling them about natural selection than your typical non-specialist high school or college student has about such matters, today. But, as can be seen in the notes of the Wannsee Conference, in which Reinhardt Heydrich gave a natural-selection argument to advocate for murdering every Jew they could, such a "popular understanding of science" can easily be genocidal.  Lord protect us from the Republican-fascist conception of such things are, what the Stephen Millers' conception of science is, or the likes of the Peter Navarro's idea of scientific fact.  If you don't think such as those are capable of recapitulating what came out of the Wannsee Conference with other groups targeted for genocide, you are far less intelligent than you like to think you are.  Watch the movie Der Untergang and listen to what came out of the mouths of Hitler and Goebbels - based, as I have read, on the reports of those who were there in the bunker with him- for an easily accessed example of what can come of a smattering of science among the ignorant with power.   I'd love to know what Stalin's or Mao's or Pol Pot's conception of science was because I think it would explain a lot.

I had originally written this as a far longer piece but I don't want to load even more on the important ideas of Denis Noble than he might welcome so I will post most of that material in a second part to this post.