Ah, agreed. I've become too accustomed to the usual knee jerk responses to mRNA vaccines to have given you the benefit of the doubt, my apologies.

You didn't deal with the argument, just expressed incredulity. You'd need to do quite a bit of learning to understand why it undermines your position, and I indicated where you could start. There's only so much deep learning that can be done in a Slashdot conversation thread. Your position isn't that of domain experts in the field and you're clearly educated enough to have a rational discussion but not trained in philosophy sufficiently to have decided how to approach limits to your own knowledge. Pushing back against anti-intellectualism is about as far as I can take it on a format like this. "I don't understand it and therefor no one does" is an error of reasoning and why a highly technological civilization like ours features specialization where, say, understanding food production is a hobby instead of a life or death skill for most of us.

A careful reading of my two sentence post notes I highlighted which ones were, yes.

I don't think you understood what was said if you think it refutes omnichad's point.

Eh... there's really no mechanism by which they could be more oncogenic than the viral protein they encode is otherwise. You could make an oncogenic mRNA vaccine if you encoded viral enzymes instead of surface proteins, but that'd be a stupid thing to do anyway.

This is a highly obfuscated 'god of the gaps' argument, and why I was directing you to look at the chemical synthesis of the subcomponents of life.

Yeah unfortunately even if it is correct, if the viruses caused subacute infection it wouldn't likely have left any marks in the historical data to look at. If a ubiquitous rhinovirus was the latent cause of 80% of prostate cancer it'd be a lot of dumb luck to figure it out.

Agreed, no one would rationally equate natural selection with random chance without having made several significant errors of reasoning.

You can do TurboTax online, too, but it is hilariously much more expensive than running the fat client.

Talking about genetics when we're talking about nucleotide synthesis is like talking to a ballet dancer about anatomy. You're still on the wrong order of magnitude and making assumptions about what underlays the part you understand. But yes, in general, engineers see engineering where it isn't, like a painter seeing a sunset and thinking about what pigments he'd need to make it.

Right, that's why the code degeneracy is relevant. Once you've figured that part out, the more interesting part is making the nucleotides from one another to begin with. Look up a catabolism/anabolism map for nucleotides; if you don't have a background in biochemistry is will be a bit like reading hieroglyphics but a few months of motivated effort should do if you have significant chemistry background to build upon. It's why the RNA world hypothesis is likely, and elegantly explains what we see now. It is mathematically impossible that a leaf appear de novo from base atoms in my living room, yet it is inevitable that one will form there if I keep watering the plant already there.

Code degeneracy is a mathematical concept, and describes (amongst other thigns) the genetic code itself. While junk DNA is a related concept, it's referring to noncoding segments. Essentially, the patterns we see in life are those consequent to the underlying chemistry, which constrains the possible permutations more than pure random assortment. Essentially, the nonrandom crystal structure of salt is no less impressive and no more the work of inscrutable intelligences.

This isn't true, though, look at how degenerate the genetic code is. Note which parts of the codons don't even matter most of the time and think about what that means.

I can explain, for example, my own origin using science, trivially. The tests are pretty cheap these days for that sort of thing. It gets harder the further back you go, but not impossibly so.

But Slashdot is still up! That ol' Slashdot effect has still got it!