It is not just his controversial stance that the Church should dial back its dickishness towards homosexuals that has brought attention to Pope Francis. He has also weighed in on evolution:
Pope Francis on Monday (Oct. 27) waded into the controversial debate over the origins of human life, saying the big bang theory did not contradict the role of a divine creator, but even required it.
The pope was addressing the plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which gathered at the Vatican to discuss “Evolving Concepts of Nature.”
“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,” Francis said.
“He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfillment.”
Francis said the beginning of the world was not “a work of chaos” but created from a principle of love. He said sometimes competing beliefs in creation and evolution could co-exist.
“God is not a demigod or a magician, but the Creator who brought everything to life,” the pope said. “Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.”
This statement garnered a lot of press attention, even though it is close to identical to what past Popes have said. Josh Rosenau provides some relevant quotes.
Rosenau writes:
What’s remarkable is not the acknowledgement that evolution is good science and creationism isn’t, but the notably blunt language: I and other critics of creationism often dismiss the creationist proposals as arguing for “poof” (and ID creationist Michael Behe once referred to his creation model as consisting of “a puff of smoke”) but Pope Francis's dismissing the idea of creationism as “a magician with a magic wand” puts that language on a whole new stage. Francis is not merely dismissing the creation/evolution battle as “absurd,” as did Benedict, but specifically calling out the absurdity of the creationist side. And that can only be for the good.
Politically, I agree with this. It does, however, stick in my craw that anyone cares all that much about the Pope's view of this issue. When he holds forth on the nature of God and His intentions towards the world, he is just making things up. I am not sure why that isn't obvious to everyone.
And while it is nice that nowadays the Church has conceded the obvious with regard to the factual status of evolution, we should note that they were not so sanguine in the decades after the publication of The Origin of Species. Indeed, at that time the Church's authorities and leading theologians were all but unanimous against evolution, at least as presented by Darwin. I provide relevant quotes in this post.
Moving on, Jerry Coyne was unimpressed with what the Pope had to say. His remarks appeared in The New Republic, and concluded like this:
Let us face facts: evolution that is guided by God or planned by God is not a scientific view of evolution. Nor is evolution that makes humans unique by virtue of an indefinable soul, or the possession of only a single pair of individual ancestors. The Vatican's view of evolution is in fact a bastard offspring of Biblical creationism and modern evolutionary theory. And even many of Francis's own flock don’t buy it: 27 percent of American Catholics completely reject evolution in favor of special creation.
The Catholic Church is in a tough spot, straddling an equipoise between modern science and antiscientific medieval theology. When it jettisons the idea of the soul, of God’s intervention in the Big Bang and human evolution, and the notion of Adam and Eve as our historical ancestors, then Catholicism will be compatible with evolution. But then it would not be Catholicism.
I certainly agree with the general tenor of Coyne's remarks, and there is no question that Catholic teaching contains a considerable amount of dubious gobbledygook. I also believe that theistic evolution faces grave theological problems, to the point of being very difficult to defend. But I do not agree that seeing evolution as God's means of creation is anti-scientific, and I definitely do not agree that theistic evolution can fairly be likened to creationism. I briefly discussed this issue in this post. The “theistic” part of theistic evolution is not intended as a contribution to science. The intent, rather, is to accept evolution essentially as scientists describe it, but to see it as well as one part of a larger construct. I think there is no evidence to support the existence of that larger construct, and I do not think that theistic evolutionists make good arguments in defense of their view. But that is different from saying the view is anti-scientific or comparable to creationism.
Meanwhile, the pro-dickishness wing of the Church has not shied away from criticizing Francis. Here's Cardinal Burke:
American Cardinal Raymond Burke, the feisty former archbishop of St. Louis who has emerged as the face of the opposition to Pope Francis’ reformist agenda, likened the Roman Catholic Church to “a ship without a rudder” in a fresh attack on the pope's leadership.
In an interview with the Spanish Catholic weekly Vida Nueva, published Thursday (Oct. 30), Burke insisted he was not speaking out against the pope personally but raising concern about his leadership.
“Many have expressed their concerns to me. At this very critical moment, there is a strong sense that the church is like a ship without a rudder,” Burke said.
“Now, it is more important than ever to examine our faith, have a healthy spiritual leader and give powerful witness to the faith.”
Burke is the current head of the Vatican’s highest court known as the Apostolic Signatura, but he said recently he is about to be demoted. There is speculation he will be made patron of the Order of Malta, a largely ceremonial post.
“I have all the respect for the Petrine ministry and I do not want to seem like I am speaking out against the pope,” he said in the interview. “I would like to be a master of the faith, with all my weaknesses, telling a truth that many currently perceive.”
“They are feeling a bit seasick because they feel the church's ship has lost its way,” he added.
The metaphor of a ship without a rudder is especially inapt. Francis' actions have been the very opposite of rudderless, and that's precisely what Burke and his fellow reactionaries object to. The Church under Francis is not drifting, rather it is moving steadily in a direction to which Burke objects.
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Jason,
I totally agree with your assessment of theistic evolution. As scientists, we do seem to overreach a bit, though, in regards to theological matters. We must remember that science cannot deal with theological questions so long as the theology does not have testable consequences. For example, we can falsify the literal Genesis story - that story has consequences that are testable, such as the age of the earth, the lack of speciation, etc. We cannot falsify the idea that an all-powerful God is the driving force behind evolution. There is no observable difference between a biosphere that developed via divinely-guided evolution and unguided evolution. We must argue against theistic evolution on theological grounds. As you correctly point out, theistic evolution is problematic in this realm.
While the "theistic" part may not be intended as scientific, it certainly seems to have empirically-testable consequences, at least for a lot of those who espouse TE. Francis Collins, for example, argues that human morality is not evolved, but instead that the alleged universality of ethics is evidence of divine law. Pope Pius XII said that Adam and Eve were real people, from whom all humanity descends (and as far as I know this is still official doctrine of the Catholic Church).
Unless one is willing to commit to rigid Deism, it's hard to see how theistic evolution doesn't run up against scientific problems.
Yeah IMO what this Pope is doing is putting church policy back to where it was in the Pius XII an JPII days, before Benedict started supporting ID creationism.
Though I agree with Tulse and Jerry on the Adam and Eve issue. The same encyclical that accepted evolution also asserted that RCC doctrine is that A&E were a real couple from which all current humans biologically descended. This is factually wrong, as far as science can tell. So while the church might have accepted evolutionary mechanisms in a general sense, they have not yet accepted the modern (21st century) factual findings of evolutionary biology.
Polygenism is Problematic – A Catholic Caution on another Aspect of Evolutionary Theory
It would be extremely difficult to square our current understanding of molecular genetics with monogenism.
And lest the weak comment this pope has made about accepting evolution (even with some higher power around), note that he is still pushing exorcism.
http://news.yahoo.com/casting-demons-pope-francis-declares-support-exor…
This guy is a master of public relations but has nothing of substance for a move to sanity in him.
The notion that the big bang requires a creator is very intuitive but fundamentally incorrect. The theory doesn't actually describe the "beginning" of everything, but rather tells us that when looking at the tape in reverse (so to speak) all of spacetime contracts to a very tiny and dense point. Whether this situation was an uncaused beginning-of-literally-everything, or was caused by something else, or is part of some larger pattern of expansion-and-contraction, or a multiverse, or whatever — that's the core of the debate.
As for his line "evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve", that's just a more blatant god-of-the-gaps. "The Big Bang means Someone started it all" seems common-sensical since after all it's a model concerning the entire observable universe, but "Abiogenesis means Someone started it all" is nothing more than "I don't know, so it must have been God." It's an argument with a built-in line of retreat — if a solid model of abiogenesis is proven/demonstrated, the theist can simply argue that God is necessary to establish the sort of universe where that could happen.
Still, I don't want to quibble that the baby steps we're seeing aren't a running sprint.
Sean T,
"we can falsify the literal Genesis story – that story has consequences that are testable, such as the age of the earth, the lack of speciation, etc."
Yeah, but the problem is that you can't lock in on a supposed iron-clad falsification, and ignore the anomalies. Things like this:
"Some of this stuff looks about like driftwood on the beach, but it's 45 million years old...These fossils are chemically preserved at a level you usually would expect to see in something that's only 1,000 years old"
http://pages.jh.edu/~news_info/news/home02/mar02/heilberg.html
We can't, but nobody is trying. That's not how science works. You get that, right?
eric,
"We can’t, but nobody is trying. That’s not how science works. You get that, right?"
Well no, I don't get that at all. Science is about empirical evidence and repeatable experiments. Materialists have somehow managed to excuse themselves of these requirements, and can operate on imagination and fantasy. And I'm good with that because I don't have to answer for having done it.
But, in regards to actual scientific data, what are your thoughts on the article I linked to above?
What are you looking for Phil?
How is that an anomaly? It certainly doesn't fit any creationist model. Still whining about probabilities are we? God you are hopelessly clueless.
What is important is the overall direction in which the Pope is seeking to lead the Church. That direction has been toward progress on a number of fronts.
Something analogous to inertial mass exists in societies and their institutions. An aircraft carrier does not turn like a sports car. A large and ancient organization does not change course like a small and recent one.
It's clear that the Pope is taking a stand against creationism and in favor of evolution. To this he adds the element of divine engagement, but that element is untestable, so it does not conflict.
We can make good use of what the Pope has already said, to fight those who seek to impose creationism and its equivalents on public education and public policy. We should do that as far as possible before demanding he say even more.
Look what he's just given us: the priceless quotes about "magic." If we can't put those to good use, we are frankly pathetic and deserve to lose.
Phil:
Raymond Burke is a well-known dimwitted bully, but he's got a real theological problem. Official Catholic belief would have it that whoever gets elected Pope does so because it is God's will that he win the post - no matter how much politicking, backstabbing, and occasionally poisoning may have gone on behind the scenes - which provides a justification for the relatively recent (and stringently limited) doctrine of papal infallibility. According to what Burke is supposed to believe, God, who knew what kind of personality and opinions Francis had, wanted Francis to be pope. Kind of a dangerous game to set yourself in opposition to him, then!
This site just popped up as a browser ad -http://www.idvolution.org/
It is less than open about who the author is, but appears to be a Catholic creationist. The things he/she finds persuasive are pretty comical, to say the least.
eric,
"its a news release not a research publication, so it doesn’t present what I would call “data” in a formal, technical, scientific sense."
There are all kinds of articles available on the fossils of Axel Heiberg. But I take it you've detected something in the one I linked to that is formally, technically or scientifically wrong. What are you disputing?
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"They point out that modern redwoods need more light than what would’ve been available to these trees."
So the metasequoia that lived long ago could endure 4 months of darkness, and 4 months of round-the-clock sunlight every year, but after 45 million years of evolution, now they can't?
The arctic region 45 million years ago was much warmer. We have no equivalent on earth today of that sort of region (warm yet with pole-like day/night cycles). How does it support creationism to note that 45 million years ago when such ecosystems existed, there were plants in them...but no such ecosystems exist today, so there are no plants adapted to them. Your point is about as relevant as noting that there are no earth-plants adapted to living on mars. Well, we don't have mars-like conditions here and now, so why would we expect to find plants adapted to them?
And I wasn't disputing any of it, my comment about it being a news article vs. journal report is a comment about how much initial respect I give the descriptive coverage. I'd say the same thing about an article on some mainstream topic in Scientific American vs. Science.
Metasequoia are deciduous - no leaves no sunlight no problem. Warmer temperatures bring air with more moisture more rainfall trees can survive less rainfall trees die. Can I make it any simpler for you Phil? I realize temperature is three syllables and deciduous is four, but you can use a dictionary, no?
Phil,
Evolution leads to improvements in organisms, but improvements relative to that organism's environment. When the higher latitudes became colder, they were no longer suitable environments for the metasequoia. In order to survive, modern sequoias had to be adapted to the environment in the temperate zones. Why would you expect to be able to uproot a tree that is adapted to daily night/daylight cycles, plant it in an environment with constant darkness for an extended period and expect that tree to survive? You might as well ask why a fish species that originally lived in an oceanic environment, but later became adapted to freshwater rivers could not live in an ocean today. The answer is the same - the environment changed so the organism changed to fit the environment. That's evolution.
Evolution does not lead to absolute improvements in an organism's functionality. It only leads to organisms that are better adapted to their environments. The modern sequoia is very well adapted to its current environment. That it is not well adapted to an environment in which it no longer lives is not particularly surprising, given 45 million years of evolution.
BTW, I am still waiting to hear how a 45 million year evolutionary timeline is SUPPORTIVE of the literal interpretation of Genesis. Literally reading Genesis results in about a 10000 year timeline since the creation of earth. How is a 45 million year timeline supportive of a LITERAL reading of that book?
eric,
“How does it support creationism to note that 45 million years ago when such ecosystems existed…”
The creation models that I tend to agree with do not accept such dates, and for good reason. This all really boils down to radically different interpretations of the sediments.
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Michael Fugate,
“Metasequoia are deciduous – no leaves no sunlight no problem….Can I make it any simpler for you Phil?”
Actually, your simple explanation addressed the wrong problem. What the researcher in the article said was:
"We don't have plants that can survive under those conditions today, let alone forests," Jahren says. "For a tree to endure four months of daylight is like you or I going without sleep for four months.”
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Sean T,
“Evolution leads to improvements in organisms, but improvements relative to that organism’s environment.”
Yeah, but explanations like this always leave out the necessity of enormous collections of cooperative DNA replication errors to make the evolution happen. This applies to absolutely everything biological, no exceptions. Perhaps if you’d get away from the jargon and try outlining the development of any single feature you care to name, you’d grasp the immensity of the problem.
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“Evolution does not lead to absolute improvements in an organism’s functionality”
You need to rethink this.
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“The modern sequoia is very well adapted to its current environment. That it is not well adapted to an environment in which it no longer lives is not particularly surprising, given 45 million years of evolution.”
But it is a net loss in environmental fitness. And it’s about the only thing you can’t point to as a net change between the fossils and the extant species. Considering some of the things that you probably accept as having evolved in a fraction of that time, that doesn’t speak very well of evolutionary tinkering and strategies.
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“I am still waiting to hear how a 45 million year evolutionary timeline is SUPPORTIVE of the literal interpretation of Genesis. Literally reading Genesis results in about a 10000 year timeline since the creation of earth.”
A literal reading of Genesis indicates, among other things, a catastrophic flood. The evidence indicates that the earth was a much different place before that happened…tropical from pole to pole.
"A literal reading of Genesis indicates, among other things, a catastrophic flood."
And examination of geologic data shows no evidence for such a thing. How do you manage to so readily ignore facts?
Phil:
Your point (which I still haven't figured out) depends on the veracity of the research! You can't possibly use the existence of these fossil trees as some challenge to evolution if you think the research on them is fundamentally flawed to begin with. Talk about cherry picking data!
Ah, I see the problem here: you have a fundamentally wrong view of fitness. It's not a ladder where every mutation or adaptation can be ranked as objectively better or worse. Fitness is an environmentally local measure: a mutation that improves fitness in one local environment may reduce it in another. A phenotype that is better able to survive in high latitude regions ("more fit" for polar regions) may be less able to survive in low latitude regions. The polar bear's fur is a fitness gain in cold regions, but a fitness problem in warm ones - and the exact same thing is likely true of whatever adaptation these trees had to deal with a lack of sunlight.
This is a fundamental problem with creationism's position that mutations can only lead to loss of fitness. That is simply, logically impossible, because the exact same mutation can sometimes result in a gain of fitness and sometimes result in a loss of it (and very often, will just be neutral), depending on the local environment as well as other factors such as an individual's ability to adapt to its circumstances. A leopard born with a black coat is going to suck at daytime hunting...but be better at nighttime hunting. Is that a gain or loss of fitness?
Phil, Mr. Argument from Incredulity. I can't imagine how it can happen - so it can't. Great argument.
Did you know that plants actually grow in the tundra biome now? Well above the Arctic circle? How do you think they cope with all that light in the summer? This is just some ignorant university PR person misunderstanding biology - reminds me of someone else - I wonder who?
Phil,
I'm not sure what you think is anomalous about this. The Axel Heiberg fossil forest is unusually well-preserved, sure, but that's because the way it was preserved is unusual. It grew in a swamp, and periodic floods covered the fallen wood with fine silt and clay. The thing about fine sediments is that they're fairly impermeable to water, and fossils don't mineralize unless mineral-rich water can freely circulate through their tissues. So instead of petrifying, this wood mummified. (Think about the mummies found in European peat bogs.) After that, the Arctic climate changed and the wood spent the last 40-odd million years in a supercooled, super-dry environment that was perfect for keeping it preserved.
Seriously, if you glance through the literature, pretty much nobody thinks that this is some big mystery. It's very cool, but it ain't miraculous.
Now they don't need to, because they don't grow in the high Arctic anyway, because it's too cold. (Sap freezes in the long winters, and trees can't put down roots through the permafrost.) If metasequoia can't even colonize the modern Arctic environment, why would you expect it to be adapted to the Arctic light regime?
Well, you're welcome to argue with the scientific dating methods, but at this point, stratigraphic, fossil, and some preliminary radiometric dating results all converge for the Axel Heiberg site. There was some dispute over whether it was mid-Eocene or early Oligocene, but I believe the folks plugging the early Oligocene date (including Jahren) have now changed their minds. Needless to say, nobody's interpreting it as being a few thousand years old or something.
Unfortunately, that statement is somewhere between hyperbolic and just plain wrong. We absolutely do have plants that can survive under those conditions today; there are flowers growing on Kaffeklubben Island, which is considerably farther north than the Axel Heiberg site is now, let alone where it was when the forests were alive. Those plants have to endure almost five months of daylight.
For that matter, we actually have trees growing within a couple of degrees of the fossil forest's latitude in the Eocene, like the Lukunsky grove. Those trees (larches) have about three months of continuous daylight to deal with.
So while most plants don't like continuous daylight, plenty of Arctic species have adapted to it just fine. For that matter, there are quite a few non-Arctic species that will grow happily under continuous lighting, like roses and pepper plants.
(I'm not sure whether to blame Jahren for this language, though. Reporters mangle scientists' words all the time.)
No, it's not. Your fitness is not improved by traits that would make you succeed in a given environment, if you don't live in that environment anymore. Humans are not less fit than our fishy ancestors just because we can no longer breathe water!
dean,
“And examination of geologic data shows no evidence for such a thing. How do you manage to so readily ignore facts?”
I think this is a case of not being able to see the forest because of all the trees.
You can find different numbers, but generally the estimates of sediments on the face of the earth is between 50 and 100 million cubic miles. On the continents, the average depth is almost 6000 feet. On the ocean floors, it averages about half that. The extremes away from the averages are very impressive.
Inasmuch as sediments are overwhelmingly the result of particulates settling out of water, I don’t think there is a shortage of data to support the idea of a universal flood. Nor is there a lack of fossil evidence which documents the resulting carnage.
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eric,
“You can’t possibly use the existence of these fossil trees as some challenge to evolution if you think the research on them is fundamentally flawed to begin with.”
I don’t really need to refer to much in the way of research. The fossils themselves are an affront to evolutionary ideas. They shouldn’t be there in that condition.
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“This is a fundamental problem with creationism’s position that mutations can only lead to loss of fitness. That is simply, logically impossible”
This is simply not in accordance with what is known about consequential mutations. The noticeable effects are almost always detrimental. In general, DNA replication errors either damage something normal, or the norm prevails in spite of the error. The replication enzymes and other correction mechanisms (which you are forced to accept as chance productions) generally do what they were designed to do, and do it very well.
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“the exact same mutation can sometimes result in a gain of fitness…”
This well illustrates why the narrative about mutations never gets too far away from things like bacteria and fish fins changing color. Random DNA replication errors are the last thing anyone is going to bring up if they are telling tales about dog-sized land animals being transformed into whales.
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Michael Fugate,
“Mr. Argument from Incredulity. I can’t imagine how it can happen – so it can’t.”
Of course. If you lose the ability to analyze things for plausibility, you can just be swept away with the crowd. Find the limits, and measure the claims. It isn't all that difficult.
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“Did you know that plants actually grow in the tundra biome now? Well above the Arctic circle?”
Yeah. I’ve been there many times. Good luck on finding firewood.
Anton Mates,
Thanks for your thoughtful post. I'll respond when I have time.
"Inasmuch as sediments are overwhelmingly the result of particulates settling out of water, I don’t think there is a shortage of data to support the idea of a universal flood. "
Rarely have we seen such unilateral dismissal of modern science in favor of unsubstantiated mythology. Willful denial runs rampant among creationists, apparently.
Anton Mates,
“The Axel Heiberg fossil forest is unusually well-preserved, sure, but that’s because the way it was preserved is unusual. It grew in a swamp, and periodic floods covered the fallen wood with fine silt and clay.”
How do you know that it was strictly fine silt and clay? What about microbial decay?
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“So instead of petrifying, this wood mummified. (Think about the mummies found in European peat bogs.)”
Yeah, but the mummies are supposedly 8,000 maximum years old. These trees are supposed to be 45,000,000.
What do you suppose the Great Pyramid will look like 50,000 years from now? 1,000,000?
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“Now they don’t need to, because they don’t grow in the high Arctic anyway, because it’s too cold.”
Invoking need and necessity implies purpose, doesn’t it?
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“at this point, stratigraphic, fossil, and some preliminary radiometric dating results all converge”
What was radiometrically dated?
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“Unfortunately, that statement is somewhere between hyperbolic and just plain wrong. We absolutely do have plants that can survive under those conditions today”
I’m gonna agree with you about the and the long daylight period. Having spent a lot of time in Alaska, the full sun days there have the sun circling 360 degrees around you, from very low, to not very high on the horizon. At the low point it would be much closer to shaded than sunlit, more like long sunsets. Also, thanks for the interesting links and references.
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“Your fitness is not improved by traits that would make you succeed in a given environment, if you don’t live in that environment anymore.”
It would still be a net loss of information. But whatever the case, it is still only adaptation. These trees, like so many other things, exhibit nothing that looks like evolution towards becoming something else.
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Dean,
“Willful denial runs rampant among creationists, apparently.”
Science is historically characterized by denial of a few renegades being on the right track while the establishment masses flounder in the conventional wisdom. It often has nothing to do with data. It is just what people believing what appeals to them, what they like.
Do a search on one J. Harlen Bretz.
Anton Mates,
I forgot to ask something else. I read where Antarctica during this same perceived period was also quite warm. What would you suppose the equatorial areas were like then?
"Science is historically characterized by denial of a few renegades being on the right track while the establishment masses flounder in the conventional wisdom."
The difference, of course, is that some of those renegades turned out to be correct. The ideas you foolishly cling to have been shown to be wrong time after time. Again, you demonstrate the very definition of science denialism.
dean, what is also true is creationism was the conventional wisdom for thousands of years and the masses floundered in it until Darwin showed they were wrong.
@31: Michael,
What I've never understood is why, or perhaps how better, people can so willfully tone out the science and cling to creationism. Is there a bit of communication needs to be improved upon in science education?
I haven't run into any similar thing from my students, but statistics is hardly a hot bed of controversy.
dean,
“Is there a bit of communication needs to be improved upon in science education?”
Of course there is. A good start would be communicating the method, and maintaining the ability to tune out political, ideological and religious noise. Everyone is biased to some degree by such influences, but the method should overrule these in evaluating the data…all the data. And if there is no data, you can’t substitute ideas. The method, if it is applied, should be committed to testing and exposing poor, wrong or fraudulent notions. But this does requires actually noticing when something is wrong, poor or fraudulent.
The Pope want Physics and Metaphysics to play nice.
Phil:
The vast majority of mutations are neutral and you don't notice them at all.
It's the first thing biologists bring up, because nobody is claiming that that transformation was accomplished by a single mutation or in a single generation. That sort of transformation requires thousands of generations. Saltational claims are part of creationism, not evolution. It's the YECs that claim every land animal descended from critters on boat 4k years ago that have to assert such saltation: mainstream biologists don't.
Secondly, with an estimated 1E30 organisms on Earth (that's 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000), "almost always detrimental" is just fine. Evolution works under "almost always detrimental." With those numbers, we would get a billion positive mutations every generation even if the probability is 1E-23.
Good, because that's not how scientific evolution works. That, ironically, is how theists insist God-guided evolution works. So what you're really arguing here is that God isn't guiding it, because it doesn't appear to be guided towards anything. I'm in agreement.
What you seem to have done here is a pretty classic creationist misconception: step 1 in the misconception is to attribute to evolution the saltationism and directedness that is actually a part of theistic, unscientific ideas. Step 2 is to then claim that such a form of evolution can't happen. You're right, it can't (in the case of saltation) and there's no evidence it does (in the case of guidance). Congratulations, you've put another nail in the coffin of the Noah story, and another nail in the coffin of theistic evolution. But you've completely missed actual evolution.
Michael Fugate,
“…creationism was the conventional wisdom for thousands of years and the masses floundered in it until Darwin showed they were wrong.”
Actually, there were lots of stars in the various disciplines who were creationists; people like Newton, Boyle, Maxwell, Mendel, Linnaeus, Bacon, Pasteur, Pascal and many more. And to be sure, there are lots of very significant contemporary scientists who are as well, but I won’t bore you with names and credentials that might spoil the myth for you.
Darwin didn’t really show anything. He just had an idea. It was not a particularly bright one, as his observations and his theory led him to expect that black folks would eventually be exterminated by natural selection. (Dean, if you have any black students, you should probably steer them way clear of ‘The Descent of Man’. You don’t want to wash the sugarcoat off of evolutionary science.)
But Darwin didn’t know jack shit about the complexity of things at the molecular level. And he never proposed anything as sappy as ancestral amino acids riding in on meteors or sprouting around deep sea vents and accidentally forming themselves into the basis of everything living on this planet. Somewhere along the way, modern science adopted a modern synthesis that flirts with insanity.
eric,
“The vast majority of mutations are neutral and you don’t notice them at all.”
Yes. That is why I used the words consequential and noticeable, and referenced the enzyme utilities whose specific duty is to detect, remove and replace replication errors. I’d still like to hear how you think those proteins evolved, and I’m sure Dean’s students would as well.
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“[Random DNA replication errors are] the first thing biologists bring up”
Eric, I admire your tenacity, and I’m sure if you lived next door, we’d be fast friends. But this is total bullshit. I’ve read piles of papers looking for this, and it never happens. I just finished an email exchange with another recently published “Professor of Evolutionary Biology” asking for papers that deal with the mutations involved in parallel system development. He sent me more E coli pulp. I’ve done this many times, and with several very recognizable names. (Most of the people who publish papers are very approachable, and their email addresses are usually indicated) You are not an idiot by any means. But you don’t need to be an apologist for people who choose to be. You really should be a prosecutor and ask your own questions. I’m tired of hearing about how evolution works after pointing out repeated examples of when it didn’t, and why it can’t.
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“That sort of transformation requires thousands of generations. Saltational claims are part of creationism, not evolution.”
“saltation |ˌsôlˈtāSHən|
noun
1 Biology abrupt evolutionary change; sudden large-scale mutation.”
Well, freakin cool. I’m glad that somebody has finally kicked the props out from under punctuated equilibrium, the big-but-hidden-leaps theory devised to contend with the fact that the fossil evidence confirms sudden appearance, stasis and extinction.
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“With those numbers, we would get a billion positive mutations every generation…”
Yeah, the latest self-impressed prof I talked to mentioned that large populations means more beneficial mutations. Of course he’d forgotten that that larger pops means lower probability of fixation, and increased dilution….the rare twain will never meet. The mutations have to be precisely complimentary, in proximity, and impressive enough to avoid being lost in drift. Random, reoccurring beneficial replication errors in specific genes is an absurd idea on its own. But your theory requires that this happened not just once, but billions of times. Do you not see the madness of this demand?
Phil,
Because this fossil planet material is found between layers of siltstone and mudstone, and bordered with clay partings.
You don't get much microbial decay below layers of mud and clay, because they're largely impermeable to water due to the small size of the sediment grains. Without water circulation, oxygen can't be replenished and you get a locally anoxic environment without much bacterial activity, perfect for preserving soft tissues. The clays may also bind some of the reactive chemicals involved in decomposition. Most of the ancient soft tissue fossils around the world (like the Burgess Shale fossils) were preserved in similar environments.
Sure, and that's certainly unusual. Usually, mummified plant material is eventually destroyed when the bog environment changes in the wrong way. If the peat layers get buried too deep, compression and heating change them into coal (which has actually happened to a lot of the Axel Heiberg forest material; the nicely preserved stuff is scattered throughout coal seams). If the layers get uncovered and exposed to oxygen, decomposition starts back up. And if mineral-laden water can circulate through them, you get "normal" mineralized fossils. But if none of those things happen, then the mummies can last. It's rare, but the Axel Heiberg site isn't unique: there's some unmineralized fossil wood from the Miocene in a cave system in Belgium, and a mummified swamp cypress forest from the Miocene jn Hungary.
Now, in temperate environments, those well-preserved fossils start to break down again as soon as they're dug up, so you have to be very very lucky to notice them first. Those mummified trees from Hungary would be dust in another few years if they weren't transferred to a museum. The great thing about the Axel Heiberg site is that it's super-cold and dry, so the mummified wood will last for a while (by human standards) even though it's been exposed to oxygen again.
The Great Pyramid's sitting out in the open, exposed to wind, rain, sand and tourists. That's pretty terrible conditions for preserving it. That said, there's nothing stopping individual blocks or smaller architectural features of the Pyramid from lasting millions of years; it's just a matter of luck. (Likewise, the whole forest didn't get preserved on Axel Heiberg; just a ton of individual stumps and leaves and things.)
No? I'm talking about ordinary selection pressures--what organisms "need" to do if they're to outcompete their rivals. That doesn't really have anything to do with conscious purpose or intent. If someone says, "In order for it to snow, the air temperature needs to drop below freezing," they're usually not implying that the atmosphere is intelligent and purposeful!
As it happens, Metasequoia is still unusually good at coping with continuous, dim sunlight--but the tradeoff is that it doesn't photosynthesize as efficiently in the intermittent, bright sunlight of temperate zones. That's a big part of why it's extinct in the New World now, where it was outcompeted by Taxodium (bald cypress), which has the same soil requirements but grows faster in the temperate light regime. Taxodium didn't colonize Eastern Asia, so relict populations of Metasequoia hung on there--but they were still fairly unsuccessful, compared to the larches and swamp cypresses, which also do better in intermittent sunlight.
If you can glean some purpose out of that story you're a better person than I--it sounds like a tale of contingency and blind selection to me. Sometimes the global environment favors Metasequoia, sometimes it favors its rivals.
A zircon from a (stratigraphically) contemporary bed of volcanic ash.
The Axel Heiberg formation is sedimentary. Most radiometric methods only work on igneous and metamorphic rocks, because they measure the time from when the rock last cooled and its minerals crystallized out. But if you find a volcanic ash bed associated with a sedimentary formation, you can radiometrically calculate the eruption date from the ash, and that lets you estimate the age of the adjacent sediments.
No problem.
No it wouldn't. Domestic tomatoes don't tolerate continuous light; most wild tomato species do. That's largely due to a difference of a few nucleotides in the alleles of their CAB-13 genes. The difference in information between these alleles is negligible; all that matters is which one leads to faster growth and less damage in a given light regime.
Adaptation is "becoming something else" by definition.
Metasequoia is known as a "living fossil," it's true, but that's precisely because its morphology changes unusually slowly within the fossil record; more rapid change is observable in most other lineages. In fact, there are multiple genetic and chromosomal lines of evidence that Sequoia sempervirens (the coast redwood) is descended from Metasequoia via a hybridization event. So while most Metasequoia populations seem to have persisted fairly unchanged, at least one population became very different, very fast!
Warmer, but not by as much; there was less of a temperature gradient from equator to poles at the time. A lot of explanations have been proposed for this, and probably several of them are partially valid. The most obvious factor is that there were no permanent ice caps, which keep the modern poles extra-cold by reflecting sunlight and blocking oceanic heat transport. Greenhouse gas concentrations were higher as well, reducing the cooling effect of the seasonal ice and snow that did exist.
Re: other stuff,
There were lots of everybody in the various disciplines who were creationists, precisely because it was the conventional wisdom of the time.
No, Darwin expected that black folks, white folks, and all the human "races" of his day would eventually be exterminated by other humans committing deliberate genocide.
And that wasn't based on his theory, but on his observation that the "civilized" races made a habit of slaughtering the "savage" ones. Given that he sailed halfway round the world during the age of colonialism, that's not a terribly surprising conclusion to come to. I'd like to say his fears turned out to be wrong, but it's more like they haven't been completely confirmed yet.
Dude, I'm a black (ok, interracial) student who's read the "Descent of Man." I know when you're making stuff up. You haven't even gotten Darwin's racism right, which is an accomplishment considering how clear the guy was about his views. (Not that he was unusually racist for his time and social stratum--quite the opposite--but he expresses his racism very straightforwardly and unabashedly.)
That's because he didn't know what amino acids and deep sea vents were. He proposed a "warm little pond," which was about as good a setting for abiogenesis as you could suggest at the time. Lucky for us that we've discovered that the world contains warm little ponds and deep sea vents and meteorites rich in amino acids, huh? More and more opportunities for life...
So you asked for papers, he sent you some and you didn't like 'em? What's the problem here?
Saith Wikipedia:
"It is a popular misconception that punctuated equilibrium is a saltationist theory, often mistaken for Richard Goldschmidt's hypothesis of "Hopeful Monsters."[20] However, punctuated equilibrium refers instead to a pattern of evolution where most speciation occurs relatively rapidly from a geological perspective (tens of thousands of years instead of millions of years), but through neo-Darwinian evolution, not by saltations."
Saltation was effectively attacked by Darwin--most pre-Darwinian proponents of evolutionary theory were saltationists--and given the finishing blow when Mendelian genetics was integrated into evolutionary theory.
Lower probability of fixation means more opportunity for two beneficial mutations to enter the same lineage, because more alleles can coexist within the population simultaneously. And there's no need to worry about "increased dilution;" if a mutation is beneficial, it will tend to spread through the population without being diluted. That's what beneficial means.
Lower probability of fixation, remember? Larger populations tend to have weaker drift, so alleles are less likely to become fixed or vanish by chance.
Phil, you demonstrate (in your ignoring of the responses to your objections) that clear scientific explanations for why creationist claims are false cannot get past people who are intentionally dishonest - at least at dishonest as you are.
To the contrary, my experience with the students I've had over the years tells me that they are intelligent enough to realize that Darwin was a product of his times, and that opinions expressed then were representative of the times and not of his ideas about natural selection. They would also be honest enough to not misrepresent what he wrote.
Given your penchant for making things up, and ignoring established science, I find your rant at #33 amusing - in a discouraging way: if people of your ilk are common in the creationist community, there isn't much hope for any real educational progress.
#33 is rich. A creationist lecturing on how to do science. It is do as I say not as I do. Ideology is the only thing driving creationism. Just look at the continuing attempt to discredit evolution by misrepresenting Darwin. As if the originator of the idea is the idea itself.
It is also clear from these exchanges that nothing would change Phil's mind. We have countered every one of his claims about what evolution can or can't do and it has had no effect. Evolution being true will no make one a racist or a eugenist or a serial killer. It won't promote gay marriage or communism or any of the other bugbears of the religious right. It doesn't make or brains any less reliable. A big reason for the continued promotion of a failed idea is, like many other promoted fears from both the right and the left, to make money off those fears and gain power. Fear sells.
Wow. Just, wow.
There is this little thing called selection.... it happens to be handy in increasing representation of favorable phenotypes.....
Phil:
“..this fossil planet material is found between layers of siltstone and mudstone, and bordered with clay partings.”
I don’t think that accurately describes the Axel Heiberg fossils.
“…shallow burial in the Arctic soil has left the forest in a mummified state.”
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,145059,00.html
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“Adaptation is “becoming something else” by definition.”
Not really. All kinds of organisms are adapted to all kinds of circumstances. In my view, this flexibility is not the result of random mutations and selection.
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“more rapid change is observable in most other lineages”
Substitute ‘assumed’ for observable. Morphological fossil comparison is highly presumptuous and extremely sketchy. Don’t get me wrong…I have great admiration for people who can dig up a bone fragment, and recognize what it is. I just think the fact that this is almost always what happens speaks to the fact that missing links are still the reliable norm. Gould was not exaggerating when he revealed the dirty little secret.
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“there was less of a temperature gradient from equator to poles at the time. A lot of explanations have been proposed for this, and probably several of them are partially valid.”
You don’t sound really comfortable with the explanations. I’m not either. If the poles were tropical, the equator should have been a broiler.
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“I know when you’re making stuff up. You haven’t even gotten Darwin’s racism right”
There isn’t much room to maneuver with this. Darwin’s thoughts were in accord with his own theory, and the rationale is even stronger in the modern synthesis. Here is the quote:
“The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”
Any way you look at it, Darwin viewed blacks as lower variants; above apes, but below whites. The evolutionary ‘primitive’ canard stands to reason in a system where the big winners are the ones who prevail in the random mutations lottery.
I’m sorry I brought this up. I loathe the subject.
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“Lucky for us that we’ve discovered that the world contains warm little ponds and deep sea vents and meteorites rich in amino acids, huh?”
Rich, but racemic and incomplete.
“More and more opportunities for life…”
Well, there are laboratories all over the world able to control every conceivable variable; temperature, pressure, concentration, etc., and so far, they seem to be about a half-inch into the light year between the building blocks of life and a single, lousy gene. All that funding and brainpower, and nothing to show for it but hopeful free-thinkers. Definitely not a results oriented enterprise.
I can confess that seeing NASA people cooing over the possibility of water on some moon or planet is a cheap thrill, but only because I noticed that we have water here.
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“So you asked for papers, he sent you some and you didn’t like ‘em? What’s the problem here?”
No, I asked for something that addressed the mutations involved in the parallel development of the various systems behind complex biological features. It’s a waste of time…just personal entertainment.
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“Saith Wikipedia:
“It is a popular misconception that punctuated equilibrium is a saltationist theory”
It’s the same thing, the only distinction being the double talk between the two. PE was simply an attempt to reconcile the glaring fact that the fossil evidence does not support the theory. It is however unique because it doesn’t argue with evidence. It’s a theory that contends with the fact that there isn’t any. Very high-flying stuff.
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“Lower probability of fixation means more opportunity for two beneficial mutations…”
Right. But you have to think in terms of development, really big and impressive, functional evolutionary development.
The chances of accidentally altered alleles being complimentary has to be pitifully low, if not statistically zero. This is what I was asking Professor Fignuts about, but he can’t escape the bacteria trenches, and can’t comprehend the complexity of the problem.
Beneficial mutations are damned rare. The chances of them being compatible are even more rare. This is about exquisite fine tuning….not accidental good results. You can take this out as far as you dare, but the farther you go, the worse it gets.
Let me give you an example that I’d like to corner Thewissen with:
You are an early whale. You are where you are because your ancestors hung around the water’s edge for generations yearning to eat fish…overwhelming selection pressure. But now you are all evolved for life in the big blue, and your co-evolving favorite food slips out of sight into the depths where you can’t see, and you need biosonar. (See what I mean about the relationship between need and purpose?) So, you get a fortuitous mutation that produces a novel protein that is one of many very specialized ones that you will need (for a process that is still not well understood), and let’s assume that there was a sale at Penney’s and you got a bonus DNA replication error in a nearby regulatory sequence, and this protein is neatly expressed in the vicinity of the skull, and now you are on your way to the melon that toothed whales have.
That’s a very generous starting point that spots you millions of years and countless happy mutations. But you still need skull alterations, transmitters and receivers, transducers, a brain receptor/translation/imaging/muscle signal center, a long list of impressive deep-diving physiological adaptations, and the expression control mechanisms for every single detail.
So, what happens next?
"So, what happens next?"
Still stuck on the argument from incredulity - sigh....
You have heard of extinction? Lineages do fail.
In your model a god intervenes, right?
So who is this god? - explain how you know this.
What did this god do exactly? Be specific. Explain whales, for instance.
How did it do it? The Pope says it wasn't magic, but what else could it be? Divinely directed energy using commands? If it were gene mutation - how can you tell if this god had a hand in a mutation?
When? Is it ongoing? Is it happening now? If so why not a mutation to prevent Ebola infection? I think only two solutions are viable no intervention or total intervention - otherwise see above.
And lastly, Why did this god do it? Humans create for many reasons - why would a god create life? why a universe? Put your god on a couch and ask some hard questions. Please explain non-intervention when there is an obvious need. Mystery is not an answer.
I need to ask again, have you ever looked at a whale skull up close? Have you mapped its bones and compared it to a even-toed ungulate skull? Because if you had, you would easily realize it was not "designed" by intelligence. It is a modification of a standard mammal skull. You do know that placental mammals have a very conserved skull structure with all the same bones in the same places. Whales are no exception. Why stick in remnants of hindlimbs in whales and manatees? Is this your god's idea of a practical joke? Another question to ask when it is on the couch.
Phil demonstrates what is a very common tactic: keep denying facts, refusing to look at papers sent to him, and misrepresenting what he reads on his own. Eventually, when people quit dealing with him, claim victory.
Weasle behavior from the start, with no intention of honest discussion.
We can only use Phil's inanity in an attempt to educate others. He really does think if he repeats a lie long enough it will become true. I know he thinks this about us, but he has yet to produce any evidence for intelligent design. His whole argument is he doesn't think evolution is possible, therefore a god did it specifically his Christian God with a capital G. He's keeps trotting out his irrelevant probabilities which eric has repeatedly shown are don't do the heavy lifting that Phil thinks they do. Now he is back with his whale story again - a story to which the fossils say no, along with DNA and comparative morphology. Like whales, he doesn't have a hind leg to stand on.
"Still stuck on the argument from incredulity – sigh….
But Michael, you can shatter my incredulity by just outlining a reasonable developmental scenario that describes the multiple parallel sequences of DNA replication errors that resulted in biosonar. If you don’t like that particular feature, you can select another one.
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“You have heard of extinction? Lineages do fail.”
Well yeah, but the whales didn’t go extinct.
===
dean,
“Phil demonstrates what is a very common tactic: keep denying facts, refusing to look at papers sent to him”
Oh, I think the common tactics are in full view here.
I didn’t refuse to read the papers. I just recognized that they were completely irrelevant because there is an appreciable difference between bacteria and mammals. If you’re trying to apply evolutionary theory to something like the development of the muscle complex in an elephant’s trunk, you have to get away from E coli and think about more elaborate accidents.
I recognize that for you, this might be flirting with monstrous cog-diss, but I think going where even department heads dare not tread is worth the risk.
eric,
“Show me the math on [larger pops means lower probability of fixation]”
It should stand to reason. But when they express fixation probabilities with formulas, they come with several assumptions, and they are usually talking about bacteria populations. The math is nothing like the equations that might express the tensile strength of a particular steel alloy, where values represent the results of actual testing.
That aside:
“One of the most striking results in population genetics is that a new mutation, even if it is favorable and arises in an extremely large population, has a low probability of fixation. This occurs because, when an allele is rare, it is present only in a few copies and therefore has a high probability of leaving no descendants due to the stochastic nature of reproduction. Haldane (1927, on the basis of a suggestion from Fisher 1922) showed for beneficial alleles in an ideal population that the probability of fixation of a new mutation was only ~2s, where s is the fitness advantage of a heterozygote carrying the new mutation. Thus a new mutation with a 1% advantage has only an ~2% chance of eventual fixation and a 98% chance of being lost.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1456843/
You may find more optimistic assessments, but I don’t think you’ll find any shocking deviations.
Phil,
I'm not sure why you think that contradicts my description? The burial was indeed shallow, which is why the peat deposits were not completely compressed into coal. And siltstone, mudstone, sandstone and clay partings are simply the ancient remains of that soil. (Don't be misled by the name; these aren't solid rocks. They're "unconsolidated," meaning that they're loose formations of sediment that come apart easily. Unconsolidated sandstone, for instance, is basically just a buried layer of sand.)
Jahrens describes the geological context of the site in some detail in this open-access paper.
Oh, I misunderstood you. You were saying that you believe in the property of adaptedness but not the process of adaptation. So, not even "microevolution," then?
Yes, yes, and every time a new one is discovered that just makes two new missing links!! on either side of it. I know that argument. I'm not sure why it's supposed to be a problem for evolutionary theory, rather than being precisely what you'd expect given the sparsity of the fossil record, though. I don't have a continuous skeletal record for all my ancestors back to the Stone Age either, but that doesn't mean I didn't have them.
Oh, I'm fine with them--so far as I understand them, not being a climate modeler myself. That's why I mentioned the ones that I can easily understand, like "no ice pack means even warmer poles." That's a no-brainer.
It's just the usual historical reconstruction problem: When there are several different plausible explanations for an event, it's that much harder to pick a particular one as the truth. Of course, it would be silly to conclude from this that the event didn't happen. That would be like me telling you that I went to work yesterday, and you refusing to believe me on the grounds that you can't decide whether I walked, biked, drove or bused!
Why? There's nothing about them being the poles that forces them to be massively colder than anywhere else, you know. Winter temperatures in the modern Arctic are about seventy degrees warmer than in the Antarctic, even though they're equally "polar"; that's the effect of differences in the ice pack and sea/land layout. The Eocene equator was warmer than it is today, with surface sea temperatures up to 95° Fahrenheit or so; it just wasn't as much warmer as the poles were.
No, it's not. In the modern synthesis, all modern humans diversified from a common ancestral population after it diverged from the populations leading to other apes, so it makes little sense to talk about one human "race" being more or less "ape-like" than another. Evolution is a tree, not a ladder.
Yup. Now, note the bit about "man in a more civilized state even than the Caucasian." Darwin is saying that blacks and whites will be eventually exterminated and replaced by more "civilized" humans. And, of course, he is saying that this will happen, not that it should happen--his opinion of colonialism and ethnic cleansing is well known. (But go here if you need a refresher.)
Darwin was absolutely an explicit biological racist--much like the average American conservative up until 1960 or so--but he was neither a white supremacist nor a supporter of racial discrimination. He dined with blacks, trained under blacks, and hosted Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the abolitionist supporter of John Brown and author of "Army Life in a Black Regiment," who is about the only Civil War-era white man I know who wasn't a biological racist.
None of this, of course, bears on whether evolutionary theory is valid or not, just as creationism isn't wrong because Louis Agassiz considered blacks a "hideous," "degraded and degenerate race," and begged God to preserve the white race from contact with them. If we threw out all scientific contributions from people with factually wrong or unethical beliefs, we wouldn't have much left.
I can see why; character assassination is often distasteful. Perhaps avoid it in the future?
Nope, not always racemic; the Murchison and Murray meteorites show chiral imbalances. I'm not sure what you mean by "incomplete" amino acids.
Your expectations are charmingly high, but I'm pretty sure that even really well-funded laboratories can't provide quite as many opportunities for abiogenesis as an entire planet provides over several hundred million years, so I'm cutting them a little slack. Still, the gamut of results from the Miller-Urey experiment to the Spiegelman Monster are pretty sweet for less than a century of research.
Well, thanks for putting the "popular" in "popular misconception," I guess. But no, there's an obvious difference between "the morphology of this species changed significantly in a geologically short period of time" and "my cat gave birth to a dog."
No, not really. You are where you are because your ancestors hung around the water's edge for generations eating fish. Evolution's not about preparing for future successes, it's about building on what was successful yesterday for greater success today. And, of course, your ancestors didn't have to have any particular opinion about their lifestyle, provided they were decently good at it.
Well, let's start with the word "need." Obviously you don't need biosonar to hunt fish, because penguins and otters and seals don't have it and they're doing fine. (Toothed whales probably evolved echolocation to hunt cephalopods, FWIW; they're the main food available in the deep scattering layer.)
Nor do you need all those fancy adaptations you mention to use biosonar. Oilbirds echolocate, and they don't have most of them. Swiftlets, shrews and tenrecs echolocate. (Hell, some humans have learned to echolocate.) Are these species at good as echolocation as bats or dolphins? Heck no. Compared to the "exquisite fine tuning" of dolphins, they're pretty crap. But are they good enough that the ability improves their reproductive success? Yes, because even crappy echolocation is a lot better than no echolocation when you have to navigate in the dark.
So there was never a "need" for a specific adaptation to ward off extinction. (Or, if there was, those species simply went extinct, as most species do.) But if you're an aquatic hunter, it helps to be able to hear better underwater via bone conduction, like Pakicetus. And then it helps to improve your underwater hearing further by adding a fat pad in the lower jaw, like Ambulocetus and protocetids have. And then it helps to isolate your auditory canal from other sound sources via air-filled sinuses, like Basilosaurus has. And then it helps to be able to hear at higher frequencies, like Squalodon, even though those frequencies aren't as high. And it helps to have a somewhat larger melon--no, you don't have to invent that from scratch, because non-echolocating whales already had a fat mass in the same area which provided structural support for their blowhole, as seen in Janjucetus. And it helps to have those special regions of the brain for complex sound processing, and lo and behold we see two periods of brain expansion in early toothed whales and in modern delphinids.
So that's what we have--a gradual series of adaptations in each lineage, none of them particularly vital (at first) or preordained, but each one pushing its possessors a little bit in front of the competition. Which particular mutations produced them? I dunno. But obviously mutations can produce them, unless you think dolphin echolocation doesn't depend on their DNA. Would those same mutations appear again if you reran the evolutionary history of the cetaceans? Doubtless not--only dolphins became dolphins. But whatever would be occupying the oceans in their place, creationists could still point to its unique adaptations and go "Gee, isn't it improbable that those particular traits were evolved?"
OK...why? What reason do you have to think that the muscle complex in an elephant's trunk would have to develop via different mechanisms than did various traits in E. coli? It doesn't mean much to say "bacteria and mammals are different;" of course they're different, but it's not like they obey different laws of physics or something.
And given that elephants are a lot harder to breed in massive numbers for many generations in the laboratory, what model organism would you like to use to test your hypothesis on elephant trunk development?
The passage you quoted doesn't actually say there's a lower probability of fixation in larger populations; it says that the probability of fixation is low even if the population is large. As it happens, the fixation probability for beneficial mutations is generally somewhere between a U-shaped and J-shaped function of population size. There's a high probability of fixation in very small populations--not because the mutation is beneficial, but because the effect of genetic drift is extra-strong, so any mutation might become fixed just by accident. The fixation probability drops to a minimum for "somewhat small" populations, as the effect of genetic drift weakens, and then climbs back up very slowly as population size increases thereafter and the reproductive advantage of a beneficial mutation becomes more reliable. It's certainly true that the fixation probability never gets high again, no matter how large the population becomes, and that's because the mutation always starts in a single individual who might happen to leave no offspring.
The big thing you're missing, though, is that this is the probability of a particular beneficial mutation becoming fixed. Double the population size and you double the total mutation rate, and therefore the total rate of beneficial mutations occurring as well. So even though the fixation probability of each mutation is not much higher, the probability of at least one of those mutations going to fixation becomes much higher, simply because there's a lot more of them!
(Also, a 1% advantage is actually not exceptionally high for a beneficial mutation in most lineages. In a novel environment, bacteria and viruses can experience mutations with fitness advantages of several hundred percent!)
Anton Mates,
“I’m not sure why you think that contradicts my description?”
Well, because I asked you about microbial and you said:
“You don’t get much microbial decay below layers of mud and clay, because they’re largely impermeable to water due to the small size of the sediment grains.”
The fossils in question were first noticed in an above ground survey. They are not in rock. They are in soil, which is not impermeable.
The supposed “Eocene forests” [at the same latitude] “were inhabited by alligators, giant tortoises, primates, tapirs, and the hippo-like Coryphodon”.
http://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2010/01/coal-and-the-fossil-reco…
And there was supposed to be another great warming period later on that persisted long enough for camels to thrive in the high arctic regions:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/06/camel-fossils-arctic-ellesmere…
It seems to me the Axel Heiberg trees had ample time and opportunity to decompose or fossilize according to normal taphonomic expectations. If you don’t see any problems, I won’t beleaguer that point.
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“You were saying that you believe in the property of adaptedness but not the process of adaptation. So, not even “microevolution,” then?”
Adaptation is profusely supported by evidence. The issue is how it occurs. You are stuck with the idea that random DNA replication errors occur that result in adaptive traits.
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“When there are several different plausible explanations for an event, it’s that much harder to pick a particular one as the truth. Of course, it would be silly to conclude from this that the event didn’t happen.”
With the emphasis on plausiblity, that wouldn’t be silly at all. The difficulty in picking one as the truth is because none of them solve the problem, and in this case, a sum of weak candidates still equals a weak conclusion.
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“Rich, but racemic and incomplete.
Nope, not always racemic; the Murchison and Murray meteorites show chiral imbalances.”
Fair enough. I’ll let you tell me what the bias towards homochirality was detected.
_
“I’m not sure what you mean by “incomplete” amino acids.”
How many of the 22 you and I use were found on the Murchison/Murray meteorites?
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“there’s an obvious difference between “the morphology of this species changed significantly in a geologically short period of time” and “my cat gave birth to a dog.”
In practical terms, it is the same obvious difference between abiogenesis and spontaneous generation. One just has a materialist spit shine on it.
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“Well, let’s start with the word “need.” Obviously you don’t need biosonar to hunt fish, because penguins and otters and seals don’t have it and they’re doing fine. (Toothed whales probably evolved echolocation to hunt cephalopods…”
So they evolved it for a reason. Sorry Anton. You’re very smart and fun to talk to, but you just fired the kill shot on the whole idea of evolution being an unguided process. You will never, ever be able to get away from this. There is no way in hell to express evolutionary results without invoking goals. I’ve heard all the noise, and there is an inescapable bottom line: integral systems do not work until they are complete.
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“OK…why? What reason do you have to think that the muscle complex in an elephant’s trunk would have to develop via different mechanisms than did various traits in E. coli?”
The first reason is very simply, scale. Lenski has achieved sainthood by showing that it takes multiple mutations to arrive at something as chicken shit as E coli gaining a lousy transporter that lets them utilize citrate.
The second reason is complexity. An elephants trunk, or just about any specialized feature you can think of, requires multiple systems in order to function.
Your theory depends on extremely rare, random, purposeless errors to provide specifically expressed specialized proteins that result in phenotypical advantages. Any way you slice it, this will require numerous rare beneficial accidents. In the case of complex systems, it is depends on the same thing happening concurrently in many systems and subsystems.
This does not happen, and it could never have happened millions of times.
Phil:
So the answer is no, you don't have any math, and what's more you are already defensively saying you wouldn't believe mainstream calculations based on bacteria anyway. IOW you're going on intuition.
And you cite one quote from 1927 which puts a fixation rate at 2%...which is remarkably high all things considered; higher than I would honestly expect. Such a rate could very easily accommodate evolution. To make evolution untenable you have to hypothesize probabilities with 10-20 zeros in front of them, not a measly one zero (i.e. 0.02).
No, you're just getting this wrong over and over again. Evolution got away from the need for purpose 160 years ago with Darwin.
In this case the scenario would go something like this: proto-cetacians make noise and hear echos. They have kids with slightly varying phenotypes. Within that daughter population, some may be born with better ability to emit echoing sounds, some may be born with a better ability to hear echoing sounds. Both generally catch more fish and leave more offspring. Rinse and repeat. There is no "need" or "goal" at all; just a large population, lots of generations, and random genetic variation.
It is apparent Phil is not "arguing from incredulity", he is denying based on ignorance and unwillingness to learn.
As amusing (in a depressing way) as his comments have been, he's become nothing more than the cartoon stereotype creationists are made out to be.
Phil,
Dodging any positive evidence for intelligent design - oh right - there isn't any. Please come back when you have some.
Intelligent design is simply PR for theocracy - using the same tactics that big tobacco used. They claim that the scientific community is divided by finding anyone with a higher degree to offer dissent - hence the silly list of engineers and MDs on the DI's site. Then claim that more data is needed - the "micro" "macro" two-step and so on. A manufactured controversy that has nothing to do with science.
Let me just add - so which is it Phil - have you been duped by a slick PR campaign or are you in on the lie? Those are the only possible choices - ID is most certainly false because evolution is true. It comes down to why you insist on it being false.
eric,
“So the answer is no, you don’t have any math”
I linked you to a paper specifically devoted to the subject. Here’s another one:
The fixation probability of beneficial mutations
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2607448/
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“you are already defensively saying you wouldn’t believe mainstream calculations based on bacteria anyway.”
That would be a very bad extrapolation, but I’m willing to speculate that low probabilities in microbes would be just as low or much worse in organisms composed of trillions of cells and countless interdependent systems and subsystems.
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“And you cite one quote from 1927 which puts a fixation rate at 2%…which is remarkably high all things considered”
Okay, let’s go with that, and apply it to every mutation in the process of developing a specialty. Before you begin, it might be a good idea to guesstimate how many errors need to occur and how many generations will be involved.
So you pick the system, we’ll go from there.
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“Evolution got away from the need for purpose 160 years ago with Darwin.”
Not exactly, though that was the general objective. But getting away from the language is not so easy. Observing function is observing purpose is observing intent. Humans are generally endowed with conscious thought and some measure of reason. That’s going to be very difficult to displace with ideological announcements about the appearance of design.
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“Within that daughter population, some may be born with better ability to emit echoing sounds, some may be born with a better ability to hear echoing sounds.”
Yeah, but you left out the necessity of the damn mutations again. I reckon that’s a hard habit to break as well.
If you work with this though, you might get on track with the difficulties involved in accidental system assembly. There are improved listeners, and improved emitters, but there is nothing to coordinate the two. It could take millennia for them to hook up. Or they could find find each other, fall in love and have completely incompatible systems. Or worst of all, they could just quit evolving altogether for a hundred million years like the crocs.
All things considered, the most reasonable and parsimonious conclusion is that millions of accidental events are not what is in view in echolocation, or whales.
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“Both generally catch more fish and leave more offspring.”
Is there anything going on like this now? Like with wildebeest or penguins? I get the idea, general health and all, but as far as new features?
Michael Fugate,
“so which is it Phil – have you been duped by a slick PR campaign”
I don’t see much of a campaign. Your theory has been anointed in the textbooks, academia, the government, the courts, and most of what I see on tv and in pop culture.
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“or are you in on the lie?”
Oh gosh, I’m way too lazy and short of time for conspiracies. I mostly just read and ask questions.
"Dodging any positive evidence for intelligent design – oh right – there isn’t any. Please come back when you have some."
HYSTERICAL! Yet you (among other things) are the evidence :)
Phil,
As fossils often are...but the fossil forest layer has been below ground for most of its history, and most of it still remains there. The fossils that were noticed above ground were found in an incision--a cut through several strata, just like the walls of the Grand Canyon.
In brief: This area has been periodically covered by thick (and heavy) layers of ice. When the climate warms enough for them to melt, the ground underneath rebounds upward due to the redistribution of weight. This "post-glacial rebound" (you can read about it on Wikipedia) is uneven, so you get some areas of land popping up higher than others, and previously-buried strata are visible along the edges of these areas.
Like I said, unconsolidated mudstones, siltstones and sandstones are layers of loose sediment; they're not solid rocks. Swear to Athena, this is not a satanic conspiracy of geologists trying to confuse you; that's just how they use the terms!
Unconsolidated mud and clay is soil. And of course soil can be impermeable to water--just Google "impermeable soil!" The difference between permeable and impermeable soils is pretty important if you're a farmer or a landscaper.
Impermeable soils aren't absolutely water-tight; water just can't flow through them at any decent speed, which means aerobic bacteria can't live there because the oxygen they consume won't be replenished fast enough.
If you read the article you linked to, you'll see that this warming was modest; 3.5-6 degrees Fahrenheit above what it is today. The average regional temperature was still below freezing at the time.
Don't think of camels as animals who require a hot climate, just because of the ones in north Africa and Saudi Arabia. Camelids can inhabit very chilly regions, like Mongolia and the Andes.
Nope, I don't see any problems. More importantly, the geologists who actually traveled to the area and studied it don't see any problems, and they've cogently explained why not. In the absence of an evidence-based counter-argument, I'm fine with that.
OK, so what makes you think that none of them solve the problem? I mean, take Huber and Caballero (2011), "The early Eocene equable climate problem revisited." They argue that existing climate models can generally explain the Eocene's global temperature distribution, provided they incorporate the most recent estimates of greenhouse gas concentrations and equatorial temperatures. Now, you don't need to sign off on their conclusion--I doubt either of us is competent to check their calculations. But the paper's been cited ninety-odd times and the general reaction from geologists and climatologists seems to be favorable. So what makes you think that they are so wrong as to indicate that mainstream geology is totally unable to solve this problem?
Varies by acid, but it looks like a number of them had 15-70% more of one enantiomer than the other.
Roughly 8 on the Murchison meteorite and 6 on the Murray meteorite, I believe. Along with a ridiculous number of organic molecules we don't use, of course.
C'mon, you know perfectly well that lots of "reasons" have nothing to do with conscious guidance or intent. Water flows downhill for a reason, flipped coins land on one side or the other for a reason, snowflakes form crystals for a reason. Toothed whales with random mutations that happened to improve their hearing caught more prey and had more babies than ones without, that's all it boils down to.
Of course, if you want to believe that a deity arranged for it all to work out that way, feel free; evolutionary theory doesn't exclude the possibility. It just doesn't require it either.
Hmm, I'm squinting at "rB > C" really hard and I still don't see the goal. Maybe it's hiding behind the inequality sign?
That's funny. I gave you a laundry list of animals, past and present (including humans), whose adaptations for echolocation and/or directional hearing are horribly "incomplete" compared to the awesomeness of a modern dolphin. And yet those adaptations still boost their fitness. Your bottom line seems to have some holes in it.
Wow, did E. coli kill your dog or something? Citrate metabolism is pretty nifty. (Actually, I guess E. coli might have actually killed your dog. Apologies if that happened.)
Anyways, Lenski's work is cool not because it shows that you need multiple mutations for citrate metabolism, but because it shows that those multiple mutations can actually happen.. In fact, a couple of them happened before the bacteria were even brought onto citrate. And this occurred within a couple of years, in somebody's lab. So I'm not seeing your problem with scale. No one's saying elephants evolved their trunks in a couple of years in a single lab.
Of course. So does citrate metabolism in E. coli. And yet it evolved.
"Your theory has been anointed in the textbooks, academia"
Anointed? No, try verified, tested, refined, re-verified, by data and scientists over the years. It is accepted and discussed because it fits the data - there is no need to do as you do, simply deny something happened because you don't believe it.
On the other hand, you haven't presented anything based on science, just your repeated statements that you don't believe what the scientists say. You haven't even explained why you think the foolishness of creationism/intelligent design makes sense. You haven't said why thousands of articles don't amount to any more than a foolish belief, but your assertions, which require some supernatural agent, are not foolish.
We can only hope you don't poison any children with your claptrap and lies.
dean,
Ah, yes. False dichotomy is one of the many logically fallacious weapons in the creationist arsenal. It's also one of my favorites. Why they believe that if evolution is proven wrong, that creationism is automatically proven right baffles me.
Phil:
I'll pick humans. Each human has a handful of mutations and, as shown in that article, across the entire human population we can expect a couple hundred mutations at every possible position, every generation.
I agree that getting away from purpose-like language is not so easy, but that's a foible of English and other human-constructed languages. The world is not required to be purposeful just because English often parses descriptions in purposeful language. The map is not the territory, as they say; do not confuse it for the territory.
If either confers sufficient advantage to propagate through the population, then (a) they don't need to hook up to be useful, and (b) it is statistically inevitable that they will hook up..eventually. And if it takes millenia, then evolution works just fine, because the evolution of cetaceans from land-dwelling mammals has been happening for over 50 million years.
Its very parsimonious with evolution to see that the advantages different lineaeges have generally track what they started with, and not what they would really need. ID would give them what they need. Water-breathing dolphins would be a sign of ID. The fact that cetaceans breath air is not parsimonious with intelligent design. Unless you are willing to just say everything is parsimonious with ID bceause we don't know the designers' intent. But if you do that, you have given up all pretense of having a scientific hypothesis, because you've just admitted no possible observation could be inconsistent with it.
Phil, so duped it is. Do you also smoke cigarettes, avoid vaccinating your children and eating GMO food, and are convinced that carbon dioxide can't possibly be a pollutant or that human fossil fuel use could cause climate change?
You might want to look up "intentional stance" a term coined by Daniel Dennett to discuss the language shortcuts we use that imply agency when none exists.
Also I would suggest that you avoid reading creationist sites - they are skewing your ability to understand.
Let me ask you this, why is it so important to you that evolution not be true? What will be the impact on your life if you accepted the evidence for evolution?
Oh and yeah - where is the evidence again for intelligent design?- you keep avoiding that little detail.
This one always makes me laugh. Steve Fuller, who testified for ID at the Dover trial, has claimed that evolution shouldn't be promoted not because it isn't true, but because it is a science stopper. He thinks science only developed because people believed God exists and wanted to be like God. This was the incentive for developing science - to understand like God understands. We were created in its image - don't you know. If we evolved, then the incentive is gone - might as well be living in caves and eating raw meat. Fuller is a pst-modern - science is just one narrative among many all equally true and equally false. We simply choose the one that promotes our interests.
Phil, I forgot to ask - what are your thoughts on parapsychology? ESP is real, right? Those mean old scientists just won't play along will they. Look how they treated poor Uri Geller. How about morphic resonance? Your dog "knows" when you am coming home, right?
Michael, don't forget to ask about astrology:
On
Mine does - of course, he hears the opening and closing of the garage door.
Phil (continued),
Well, E. coli's a good one. I've seen estimates (see Imhof and Schlotterer, "Fitness effects of advantageous mutations in evolving Escherischia coli populations") of a rate of beneficial mutations of 4* 10^-9 per cell per generation. (The total mutation rate is far higher, of course.) The mean fitness advantage of these mutations was 0.02, which by your estimate means each one has a 4% chance of fixation. Given that there's roughly 100 billion E. coli in the average human's gut, with a generation time of (highballing it) one day, how often should the E. coli population inside you acquire a new beneficial mutation? I calculate 16 fixed beneficial mutations per day. (Roughly, of course.)
The funny thing is that some of those mutations will only be beneficial due to previous mutations, so you'll end up with a suite of coevolved traits that'll look awfully like a "specialty."
Millennia isn't actually a problem when you're talking about a system that took millions of years to develop. Regardless, as Eric says, there doesn't need to be anything to coordinate them. If improved listeners have a reproductive advantage, and improved emitters do too, then their respective mutations are going to spread throughout the population until they hook up simply because they're both so common.
Incompatible how? By and large, if you can produce louder, more directional and higher-pitched clicks, it's going to help with your echolocation no matter how you hear. And if you have more sensitive, more directional hearing with a higher upper frequency range, it's going to help with your echolocation no matter how you emit your clicks.
"Compatibility" is often a difficult concept to apply to echolocation, or sensory perception in general. These are flexible, experience-based systems; I've seen older male dolphins learn to make lower-pitched clicks as their high-frequency hearing weakens with age. Almost any emitter and any detector are compatible when they're both being operated by a brain capable of learning.
Of course, it's possible that our hypothetical two mutants have genuinely incompatible systems--maybe the awesome emitters make clicks that are completely out of the frequency range of the awesome listeners, or something. In that case, you've got divergent selection: the emitters and the listeners are going to be under pressure to evolve in different directions, and to develop reproductive barriers so they don't accidentally hybridize. And that is what leads to speciation!
Crocs don't evolve? Au contraire! In the last hundred million years we've had tiny crocs, huge crocs, fast-swimming marine crocs with flippers, crocs with deep snouts and shark-like serrated teeth, flat-headed crocs, 25-foot needle-nosed crocs, tusked crocs with binocular vision, running crocs with long dog-like legs, and super-weird hoofed crocs with heavy body armor. Thing is, most of the family has gone extinct, and the species alive now are the ones that do what crocodilians have always done better than anyone else: lurk in shallow water and ambush land vertebrates. So they all have broadly similar body plans to crocodilians in that same niche for the last umpty-million years. At the genetic level, though, even these crocs have been evolving just as fast as, say, birds. (Crocodilian hemoglobin structure, for instance, has evolved particularly fast.) They just haven't changed their overall shape much because it's already pretty optimal for what they're doing.
That's easier to answer if we know what qualifies as a "new feature" for you, and how much we would expect to see of its evolution during a human-observable timespan. I mean, I can think of examples in flagellates, skinks, wall lizards, bacteria and finches, but for all I know you'd consider every one of them to be "general health and all."
dean,
I think my dog recognizes the engine of my roommate's car. Not much need to hypothesize ESP in dogs--their ordinary senses are keen, they're smart enough to interpret complex sensory cues, and they spend a lot of time sitting around and waiting for humans to come home and do something interesting. It would be surprising if they didn't become experts at predicting our arrival.
A fellow biologist once had an acquaintance ask her, "So...are animals intelligent? I mean, I know they're psychic, but are they intelligent?" Sigh.
What is truly odd is that we have tried to honestly answer every one of Phil's questions. We have explained why his opposition to evolution is unfounded. We have explained the multiple ways new genes can arise - including ones that appear de novo from non-coding regions. We have explained how beneficial in terms of mutation is relative and dependent on both the genetic and the external environments. We have explained natural selection. We have repeatedly explained why cetaceans are modified land mammals not special creations designed to live in water. I can't think of anything we can't have answered - yet he ignores it all.
Not only that he refuses to answer questions about his pet idea. He won't tell us how we can detect design in a genotype or phenotype. He won't tell us how the designer makes these supposed changes and he certainly won't tell us why certain changes are made and not others. My only conclusion is that intelligent design is a black hole that sucks in all attempts at testing it and spits nothing back out. Of course Phil could prove me wrong, but that seems unlikely given his track record.
Anton Mates,
“Varies by acid, but it looks like a number of them had 15-70% more of one enantiomer than the other.”
Not quite there.
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“Roughly 8 on the Murchison meteorite and 6 on the Murray meteorite,”
So is anyone speculating about how all the cards got in the deck? Surely a meteorite didn’t make it all the way from the circularly polarized light regions and wind up in a deep sea or volcanic thermal interface, right?
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“…lots of “reasons” have nothing to do with conscious guidance or intent. Water flows downhill for a reason, flipped coins land on one side…”
Yeah, but that’s not really the same thing as random, reoccurring DNA replication errors resulting in novel genetic information leading up to a highly refined phenotypical sensory system.
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“…a laundry list of animals, past and present (including humans), whose adaptations for echolocation and/or directional hearing are horribly “incomplete” compared to the awesomeness of a modern dolphin.”
No, an incomplete adaptation would be one that is not fully integrated and functional.
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“Lenski’s work is cool not because it shows that you need multiple mutations for citrate metabolism”
Not at all. E coli has everything necessary to do this. They just couldn’t (with rare exceptions) do it under oxic conditions. This is not blockbuster evolution taking place. It is at best a mild adaptation, and at that probably due to loss of function in a control gene which expresses a transporter enzyme. Liberated from the dishes, the next evolutionary step for Lenski’s bacteria would be reversion to wild type.
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“Well, E. coli’s a good one”
No, it really isn’t. Try something that requires lots of different support systems developing together. Echolocation is a good one to ponder because so much physiology and so many mechanisms are involved, but you can pick most any specialty and have the same problems.
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“as Eric says, there doesn’t need to be anything to coordinate them. If improved listeners have a reproductive advantage, and improved emitters do too, then their respective mutations are going to spread throughout the population”
eric quickly forgets about the rarity of mutations, the actual nature of mutations, and the low probability of fixation of mutant alleles. It is also easy to forget that the more unlikely the scenario, the less likely it is to occur with the monotonous regularity that evolutionary theory demands. DNA replication errors are at best, still errors.
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“Incompatible how? By and large, if you can produce louder, more directional and higher-pitched clicks, it’s going to help with your echolocation”
Louder, more directional, and higher-pitched are separate things. Each would require inestimable numbers of complimentary mutations, heavy on the complimentary. If the broadcast is FM and you have an AM radio, you don’t hear jack.
You’re following the classic apologist tack….trivialize, oversimplify and dismiss. And that’s fine if the object of the game is to excuse a theory until it works. But in reality, there are no shortcuts, no insignificant details, no steps to skip.
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“Crocs don’t evolve?”
Crocs, like dogs, show significant variation. If they dig one up that they think is a hundred million years old, they recognize what it is. They don’t confuse them with anything else.
===
eric,
“I’ll pick humans. Each human has a handful of mutations and, as shown in that article, across the entire human population we can expect a couple hundred mutations at every possible position, every generations.”
Interesting. Maybe that’s why everyone loves mutagens.
===
Michael Fugate,
“why is it so important to you that evolution not be true?”
True or not, in view of eric’s post above, it can apparently enable veneration of things that are abnormal. This seems to be part of a broad general trend.
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"we have tried to honestly answer every one of Phil’s questions"
I guess it must seem like that to you. But I'm a mechanical designer, and in my view, granting incomprehensible creative and organizing power to random accidents is not an honest answer.
Mechanical engineer. That explains thee scientific ignorance.
Phil:
Anton and I have both given you multiple numbers related to the rarity of mutations. Given that every single organism probably has several, they aren't that rare. And Anton has gone further and given you numbers for the rate of beneficial mutations.
In response, you handwave. You don't give any numbers or substantive calculations for your position at all. Evidently, you think you're making a compelling argument by just asserting that (you believe) these things are too rare to produce new species over millions of years, and you expect the rest of us to trust your intuition on this.
Moreover a 2% fixation rate is not particularly low. 0.00002% would be low. 2% means that if it crops up just once in a population each generation, it will likely become fixed within the population within 20-30 generations.
Another non-answer. In #57 you tried to argue that a fixation rate of 2% is too low to allow for propagation of positive mutations, and you asked me to give some numbers for mutation rates. So I showed you that within the human population, there are about two hundred mutations at every place in our genome every generation. A fixation rate of 2% means that 2-4 of those mutations can get fixed every generation. So rather than fixation being statistically impossible as you want to claim, it is statistically inevitable. At a 2% chance, it would be extroadinarily unlikely for none of those mutations to become fixed.
This is because you refuse to understand selection. It is simply analogous to throwing out 1000s of random ideas (first thing that pops into your head) at a meeting and choosing the better ones of the bunch to use and discarding the rest. Why is this so hard?
The important thing is you have a variety of ideas and you don't use all of them - only the ones that seem to fit the problem.
I really would suggest you read Dennett on this - his take is very clear. Don't go in with all of your current biases, do try to open your mind, please.
As a mechanical designer you should at least understand that a designer would not limit good and novel solutions to the lineages in which they first appear. That would be incredibly stupid and pointless. Akin to saying that wheels must only be used on new versions of oxcarts (but not any other vehicle) because the first time you designed a wheeled system, it was an oxcart.
So even if your mechanical design background gives you no real insight into evolution, it should at least help you understand why ID is a terrible hypothesis utterly inconsistent with the observed descent-based pattern of adaptive traits.
Here is a paper that might enlighten by John Wilkins:
http://philpapers.org/rec/WILTSR
The Salem Region: Two Mindsets about Science.
This along with Dennett explains that many engineers are hamstrung by their backgrounds - design means intelligent design, but as both show it is not necessary to understand why something works to make something that does work. Intelligence and forethought are not requirements for design. Wilkins list four things that go into making a creationist: essences as opposed to examples, late adoption of new ideas as opposed to early, deductive thinking as opposed to inductive, and authority as opposed to empiricism.
"This is because you refuse to understand selection."
Partly - I think mostly because he has taken the message of his training - good function comes from good design - and foolishly extrapolated that outside the engineering world to biology. Data play no role in that view, only opinion - which is what he is spouting.
Let me clarify my example lest Phil think intelligence is involved.
Let's say you walk into a meeting and claim there is a problem and you provide no background on the problem - just that there is a problem. Everyone throws out solutions to problems and you try every one of the proposed solutions no matter to find if any work. Most will make it worse, some will have no effect and a few might improve things - probably not a full solution. Repeat every day until problem solved.
It is not how engineers work and it is not terribly efficient, but it will work and it requires no goal be present to the solution generators.
Phil,
Close as it needs to be. One enantiomer doesn't have to be totally absent from the environment in order to explain why life would develop using the other one; it just has to be less common.
Why not? Meteorites deliver around 500 tons of organic compounds to Earth per year in modern times, and the rate was roughly 1000 times higher in the Archaean; I've seen an estimate of 1 trillion tons total of organic compounds delivered to the early Earth from space. Earth was also far more geologically active back then, so there would have been more deep ocean vents and magma-hydrothermal interfaces active at any time. Given that, yup, it's a near-certainty that some meteorites would end up at the right spot.
Of course, they probably didn't need to, since we've identified several abiotic processes (electrical discharges, meteorite & asteroid impacts, iron-sulfur catalysis in hydrothermal vents, etc.) that would generate large quantities of new organic molecules here on Earth. It's that embarrassment-of-riches thing again--multiple plausible sources for the building blocks of life.
I'm aware that you think that. It doesn't have anything to do with your claim that saying "this happened for a reason" somehow refutes unguided evolution, though.
Careful with those goalposts! Evolutionary theory states that "incomplete" adaptations can be fully integrated and functional--they're only incomplete from the perspective of a later, more derived descendant. Oilbird echolocation looks clunky and half-assed if you're a dolphin but great if you're an oilbird!
If you refuse to call any adaptation incomplete unless it's non-functional--well, your words, your choice, but in that case you've defined your own objection out of existence. Evolution doesn't involve any of those adaptations.
Hey, you were the one who said (correctly) that multiple mutations were required to arrive at this ability. So no, the original bacteria didn't have everything necessary to do this. Then it mutated three times in the right way and did have everything necessary. Random mutation, building on existing traits: that's evolution for you.
In other words, it's exactly the amount of evolution we'd expect to see in a small lab population, over a few years.
Not if they were liberated into an aerobic environment with a lot of citrate to eat. (And such environments do exist; Salmonella's been selected for one.)
You suggested we pick a system. I picked one, Eric picked one. You seem to be studiously ignoring the numbers for both.
"Inestimable" why? Anything that affects the density of the forehead affects the directionality of the clicks; anything that affects the rate of air pushed through the dorsal bursae affects the loudness; anything that affects the elastic properties of the bursae and the width of the respiratory tract affects the pitch. Considering that a single mutation is enough to affect the size of the muscles all over the body, or just the muscles in the jaw, there are clearly a ton of ways to get the desired changes.
Right, and then you have divergent selection potentially leading to speciation, as I said. But the thing is, we were talking about two individually beneficial mutations. That implies that they're both backwards-compatible with the existing emission and detection systems in the population, which makes it a lot less likely that they'll be incompatible with each other. If you start with an AM radio system, and make two random small improvements to the broadcast and receiving apparatus, neither of them is likely to turn it into FM!
And I'll say it again: Humans, with vocal and hearing apparatuses that are totally unadapted for that function, can learn to echolocate. Living organisms aren't radios....they are far more flexible, and far better at navigating "incompatibilities".
Well, sure, paleontologists don't get confused. That's because they know their shit. Of course, paleontologists also recognize humans as apes, and birds as dinosaurs, and whales as ungulates, so I'm not sure why you trust them to ID crocs but not the other critters.
That said, if you're capable of looking at Simosuchus or a metriorhynchid and saying "Yep, just a crocodile, nothing to see here", I think you need to go to the zoo more. Those animals and modern crocs are as different as sheep and sea lions.
More accurately, that's why everyone loves sex. Let other people field-test mutations for you, then mate with them if they're doing well and swipe their genes for your kids. Sneaky but effective...
eric,
“Anton and I have both given you multiple numbers related to the rarity of mutations”
Yeah, but I didn’t know quite what to do with his results:
“..how often should the E. coli population inside you acquire a new beneficial mutation? I calculate 16 fixed beneficial mutations per day.”
How do you coordinate Anton’s results with Lenski’s? The Wikipedia article about his experiment says:
“Of the 12 populations, four developed defects in their ability to repair DNA, greatly increasing the rate of additional mutations in those strains. Although the bacteria in each population are thought to have generated hundreds of millions of mutations over the first 20,000 generations, Lenski has estimated that within this time frame, only 10 to 20 beneficial mutations achieved fixation in each population, with fewer than 100 total point mutations (including neutral mutations) reaching fixation in each population.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment
It’s worth noticing that these must be rather insignificant beneficial mutations or Lenski wouldn’t have to estimate the numbers.
You don't really need to, considering that Lenski conducted an actual series of experiments on the subject over several decades, while I dashed off a back-of-an-envelope estimate for a comment thread! But if you want to, it's not hard.
First, I used the fixation probability you provided, and your source mentions that it's only valid for sexually reproducing populations. But Lenski's research uses an asexual strain of E. coli, to make it simpler to reconstruct the lines of descent. Now, asexual populations tend to evolve more slowly than sexual ones, because of clonal interference: if beneficial mutations occur in two individuals who aren't in a single line of descent, neither mutation can go to fixation before the other one goes extinct. (In a sexual population, carriers of each mutation could just mate and produce a baby that had both mutations.) So Lenski's work actually understates how effective evolution is in sexually reproducing species like Homo sapiens...or the wild-type E. coli strains capable of conjugation.
Second, Lenski's cultures house far fewer bacteria than the human gut--they're only a few grams of fluid each. So the effective population size is roughly 10,000 times smaller than it was for my calculation. Fewer individuals, fewer beneficial mutations.
Nah, that doesn't follow. Among other things, each culture contains ~5 * 10^8 bacteria. No one has the resources to genotype every individual cell, so any tally of the population's mutations is going to be an estimate.
Phil:
Anton already responded to this, so I'll just reiterate using different words in order to (maybe) get the point across better. 2% was merely an example we used for comparison. Two simple and obvious explanations for why Anton's back of the envelope calculation doesn't match Lenski's result is (1) the population sizes are different, and (2) Haldane's s does not equal 1% for this particular ability in Lenkski's experiment.
They obviously weren't biologically "insignificant" since they fixated and propagated through the population.
And that really brings us back to the single largest flaw in creationist reasoning: you assume low probability of beneficial mutation = no possible retention through other generations which would allow mutation-on-mutation combinatorial changes to develop novel phenotypes. But this is observationally shown to be false: a 10^8 population can produce 10-20 beneficial mutations in per generation, have only 100-200 of those total fix in the population over the course of 20,000 generations, and this is enough to produce multi-mutational beneficial phenotypical changes.
Anton Mates,
“No one has the resources to genotype every individual cell, so any tally of the population’s mutations is going to be an estimate.”
Fixation “is the change in a gene pool from a situation where there exists at least two variants of a particular gene (allele) to a situation where only one of the alleles remains”. So if fixation has actually been achieved, it won’t require genotyping every cell. Perhaps the ‘estimate’ would be more accurately described as ‘conjecture'.
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“Lenski’s cultures house far fewer bacteria than the human gut–they’re only a few grams of fluid each. So the effective population size is roughly 10,000 times smaller than it was for my calculation. Fewer individuals, fewer beneficial mutations.”
Much fewer apparently with 16 fixed beneficial mutations per day vs 10-20 in 20,000 generations, which should be over 8 years.
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Eric,
“Haldane’s s [increased fitness] does not equal 1% for this particular ability in Lenkski’s experiment.”
Then what was it?
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“which would allow mutation-on-mutation combinatorial changes to develop novel phenotypes.”
That’s the hopeful and optimistic upside. Genetic load is the downside. Given that beneficial mutations are thought to occur at a rate of about 1 per million mutations, which would you expect to be more likely?
Is this how you think metamorphosis in butterflies developed?
Anton,
I forgot to mention that "fewer individuals, fewer beneficial mutations" is something that has to be front and center when considering hyper-complex features developing in animals like whales.
Phil,
You have that backwards. Because fixation implies that one allele is completely gone from the gene pool, you can't know for sure that it's been achieved unless you genotype every cell.
Say you genotype 10,000 cells and only find one allele. Does that mean it's gone to fixation? Well, probably, but maybe not. Maybe the other allele is just very rare, so your sample happened to miss it, but it's present in a few of the other trillion cells in the population. You may be statistically confident that the allele you found is fixed, but you can't be 100% absolutely certain.
If you think that statistics is a communist lie, I guess.
Yes, much fewer. As one would expect from a much smaller and asexual population.
Gerrish and Lenski ("The fate of competing beneficial mutations in an asexual population," 1998) estimate the average fitness advantage of the beneficial mutations in their population as 2.9%. The average fitness advantage of the beneficial mutations that achieved fixation was 10% (the more beneficial mutations were more likely to become fixed, unsurprisingly.)
That said, again, Haldane's formula does not apply to an asexual population no matter what fitness advantage you plug in. You can have an incredibly awesome mutation with a 10,000% fitness advantage and it still may not go to fixation, if there's clonal interference with other comparably awesome mutations. (Note that this doesn't mean the population isn't evolving; it's just not all evolving in the same direction. Fixation rate is not a good measure of the overall rate of evolution in such a population.)
A population geneticist I am not, so don't ask me to derive the correct formula for Lenski's system, but the paper I quote above has a pretty detailed derivation if you want to slog through it. It's basically just a lot of differential equations.
See the Wiki entry on Muller's Ratchet. The short answer is that sexual populations can purify their genetic load through recombination; even if one beneficial mutation and a bunch of harmful mutations occur in the same individual, that individual's descendants will tend to keep the beneficial one and lose the harmful ones.
Asexual populations can't do the same trick, but it turns out that relatively few organisms are completely asexual--most bacteria and protists can still exchange genes in various ways, and this may well be why. The populations that are completely asexual do tend to go extinct eventually, due to accumulated genetic load.
Sure, which is one reason why whales evolve more slowly than bacteria. On the other hand, whales reproduce sexually, so they get to dodge clonal interference and give individual animals the beneficial mutations from several lineages. That fact is also important when considering the evolution of complex features.
Phil:
I don't know. Ask Lenski. I don't really know why you're going down this rabbit hole. Are you trying to argue that because Anton's rough calculation doesn't match the results of a formal experiment, the ToE is invalid?
Given selection, in a population of fully developed (i.e., 'adult') organisms I would expect neutral mutations to be most likely, slightly positive or deleterious mutations to be less likely, and fatal mutations to be almost nonexistent.
You do understand what selection does, right? Its not like every mutation propagates through every generation equally.
There are probably a number of good on-line sources of information about butterfly evolution. I am not one of them. Go read them if you want to understand what we know about what happened when and how. If you asking whether I think the general mechanisms of RM+NS are responsible for them, the answer is yes.
Let me ask you another question: do you think butterflies are somehow unique or special in having genes and metabolic mechanisms that activate partway through their life cycle?
Rabbit hole indeed!
This is Phil's attempt to avoid discussing the evidence for ID by nitpicking evolution. It is a diversion.
It goes back to what John Wilkins was outlining - an appeal to how one wants the world to work versus how it actually does. Just because you want a creator God doesn't mean there is one. Because you are comfortable in a world of design doesn't mean the natural world is analogous. The analogy breaks down because Phil can't distinguish between God-designed things and undesigned things. Something we can do with human design.
It is much like others I have run across who believe in a loving God and want cooperation to run the world. They may accept evolution, but they want none of Darwin's competition and predation. They see symbiosis and think this must be how their God works - not realizing that predation and competition are inevitable in any system.
Or those who think governments and public schools can be run like businesses - governments and schools must serve everybody not just those that are easy or cheap.
Hey, I'm all for nitpicking evolution. That's how the theory was developed and refined to its current level. But you've got to take the time to find out who else has picked the same nits in the past, and what solutions they came up with; otherwise it's just intellectual wankery.
E.g., if I want to argue that evolutionary theory is disproven by genetic load concerns, the first question would be, okay, who quantified the "genetic load" concept in the first place? Dobzhansky, JF Crow, and contemporaries. And what did they think of my argument? Well, they rejected it, and backed up their rejection with decades of logical discussion and empirical research and mathematical modeling. And 99% of the biologists following them ended up sharing their opinion.
So if I want to claim that they nonetheless have it all wrong and my armchair intuition is correct, wouldn't I need to at least read their work in detail, and identify the horrible errors that they all somehow failed to notice? At least if I'm treating this inquiry as a serious search for the truth, rather than some sort of performance art?
Which I always find very strange. Competition and predation exist, whether or not evolutionary theory is true. Evolutionary theory just provides a reason for it. If I was trying to reconcile the existence of pain and strife and death in the natural world with a loving god--well, I can't. But if I could, I think it would be easier to go "Well it had to happen because evolution, and evolution was the best thing God could come up with because mumble mumble theodicy," than to believe that God actually chose to add pain and death to the world just for kicks. Or because he was mad that somebody ate the wrong fruit. That's just depressing.
eric,
“There are probably a number of good on-line sources of information about butterfly evolution.”
Apparently not much about the actual process. I did find this, but it is not much help:
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/the-butterfly-conse…
“there are relatively few butterfly fossils. Those that do exist, like the 40-million-year-old Prodryas persophone, are remarkably similar to modern-day forms”
Stuck in stasis again. That’s a shame.
“Many scientists believe that the specialized association between today's butterflies and flowering plants suggests that butterflies developed during the Cretaceous Period often called the "Age of Flowering Plants," 65 million to 135 million years ago—a time when dinosaurs also roamed the earth.”
I can see why they might believe that…flowers and butterflies evolving together in dramatic codependency. What a mutations show that must have been. They must have been very helpful to each other during the great extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.
“Evolutionary relationships among major Lepidopteran groups are not well understood.”
Yeah, not much to work with. But the cool thing about evolutionary theory is that you can let your imagination run wild. Anything is possible.
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“If you asking whether I think the general mechanisms of RM+NS are responsible for them, the answer is yes.”
Well, I can’t see it, but you have remarkable faith.
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“do you think butterflies are somehow unique or special in having genes and metabolic mechanisms that activate partway through their life cycle?”
It’s a little more than that in my view. Your theory requires errors to alter some unknown form into an animal that has two radically different body plans and lifestyles built into one DNA profile. It isn’t just an adjustment…it’s a complete renovation. Just thinking about the control mechanisms involved to express and regulate all the proteins involved is mind-blowing.
But In your view, science has determined that there are no limits when it comes to random, accidental design, organization, coordination, production, maintenance, etc. I’m comfortable in not having that kind of faith.
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Michael Fugate,
“It is much like others I have run across who believe in a loving God and want cooperation to run the world. They may accept evolution, but they want none of Darwin’s competition and predation.”
A more interesting paradox is that the shrillest voices for evolution sometimes belong to those whose every other thought is towards enforced egalitarianism. You’d think think they’d be demanding survival of the fittest.
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Anton Mates,
“So if I want to claim that they nonetheless have it all wrong and my armchair intuition is correct, wouldn’t I need to at least read their work in detail, and identify the horrible errors that they all somehow failed to notice? At least if I’m treating this inquiry as a serious search for the truth, rather than some sort of performance art?”
Some of the errors are so enormous that they can’t be digested. We live in a world completely characterized by entropy. But this is hostile to grandiose, hopeful notions of self-organization, accidental organization and chance complex assembly. It isn’t possible to reconcile this enigma with natural laws or air-tight rationales, and too painful to really dwell on till it sinks in. It just has to be ignored. It is not about data and evidence. It is about finding a sense of safety in consensus, cliches and jargon, things that enable people to believe what they like, and dismiss things that they can’t deal with.
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“But if I could, I think it would be easier to go “Well it had to happen because evolution, and evolution was the best thing God could come up with because mumble mumble theodicy,” than to believe that God actually chose to add pain and death to the world just for kicks. Or because he was mad that somebody ate the wrong fruit. That’s just depressing.”
It’s somewhat more specific than mumble mumble. The is a published forecast that leaves lots of room for lots more depression.
Speaking of butterflies, some of them, even as larvae, and also some insects, reptiles, fish and even mammals, have false eyes. The one shown in this article is amazing in that it even has a white spot that emulates light reflecting of the simulated pupil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyespot_(mimicry)
They’ve even detected that these are more than just random markings:
“False eyespots are pervasive across a variety of animal taxa and are among nature's most conspicuous markings. Understanding the adaptive significance of eyespots has long fascinated evolutionary ecologists. Here we show for the first time that the size of eyespots is plastic and increases upon exposure to predators……
What is intriguing is the finding that juvenile prey grow larger eyespots and display smaller eyes when continuously exposed to predators. The large eyespot in the caudal area of prey taken together with the smaller eye in the head region give an impression of the true eye being present in the posterior end of the body, potentially confusing predators about the orientation of prey.”
http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130725/srep02259/full/srep02259.html
Smart fish.
Another really peculiar phenomena, really difficult to attribute to random mutations and natural selection, is an awareness of death. There are several animals that feign being dead as a tactic to avoid being further molested by predators. This is really an odd because the prey is depending on the predator having a perception of death as something nasty and repugnant, which of course it is. That’s heavy stuff if you think about it.
http://www.morning-earth.org/Graphic-E/Transf-Mimic.html#dead
No, that's ID creationism. Evolution predicts nothing like a precambrian rabbit (or butterfly, for that matter.) It's creationism that will chalk any possible finding up to God's mysterious ways.
But feel free to correct me. Tell me some observable fact that we could discover - some fossil evidence or phylogenetic relationship or genetic pattern - that would be evidence against ID. I already gave you one example which looks to me like it runs contradictory to the ID hypothesis, but you chose not to respond to it: it makes no sense whatsoever from an engineering perspective to limit solutions to lineages. IMO that is an observation that contradicts ID, because no sane designer would do that. We certainly don't do it. So you tell me - how is that observation consisent with an ID hypothesis?
The point of my question was to get you thinking about the fact that genes for multiple stages of life are a lot older and a lot more common than butterflies. The mechanisms were in place well before butterflies evolved. You are making a wrong assumption in thinking that there was some set of genes for one form, and an entirely new set of genes had to evolve for a second form. That opinion is about as sensible as Ray Comfort's belief that it was impossible for humans to evolve two sexes from one. He's getting the order of evolution wrong, putting a very late speciation event before a very basic and common genetic feature; with butterflies, you're doing the same thing.
So Phil, when will you be publishing your results that show thousands of biologists and other scientists are wrong?
Do you understand the is/ought (naturalistic) fallacy? Show me that you do: analyze your own claim in light of it. What does that fallacy have to say about your claim?
A parent critter has a GAC sequence. It has two daughters, one with the mutated GAT sequence in the same place and the other with a mutated GAA sequence in the same place. How does 2LOT or "entropy" distinguish between the two? How does it prevent one but not the other, and if it allows both, then how can it prevent the development of novel genetic sequences and thus novel phenotypes?
Not to mention, in Phil's universe, it is apparently impossible for randomly moving molecules of water vapor to spontaneously assemble themselves into ordered structures. I wonder if Phil has shared his results with the citizens of Buffalo, NY (which just experienced over 6 feet of snowfall!).
Phil,
Why would you think that? How does one follow from the other?
Why does it matter where we came from or how we got here?
And by the way, cooperation is an important part of evolutionary theory - just like competition and predation are. Sometimes it improves fitness to help others - see game theory. But that is all beside the point - selection is under the radar - organisms don't "plan" to maximize fitness and neither do we. The decisions are not conscious. Understanding evolution and accepting it as true didn't affect the way humans treat each other. Racism, sexism, nationalism, tribalism all existed long before 1859. It really is a tired old creationist trope that racism is caused by acceptance of evolution - what did western Europeans believe about their origins in the 16th and 17th centuries when they were building vast plantations on slave labor?
Only the most ignorant of the ignorant could contend that the world was a better place before 1859 - that introducing evolutionary theory made the world less kinder and gentler.