I'm currently working out of my New Jersey office, which is to say I am home for Thanksgiving. I just wanted to mention, though, that I have my settings adjusted so that comments are automatically cut off on any post that is more than three weeks old. Comment threads that remain open too long tend to become magnets for spam. That is why the "Pope on Evolution" thread just closed. In most cases three weeks is plenty of time for everyone to say what they want to say, and the conversation tends to break down into a shouting match. However, if anyone who was commenting on that thread wants to continue the discussion, you may do so in this thread.
In general, I put almost no restrictions on what people can say here. As long as your comment is not libelous, is in some way relevant to the post, and conforms to some minimal standard of good taste, I am loath to put any limits at all on what people say.
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Thanks Jason. Happy Thanksgiving!
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eric,
“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’m not sure what you mean. Are you asking for falsifiability?
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“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.”
You’ve lost me here as well.
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“genes for multiple stages of life are a lot older and a lot more common than butterflies.”
You’d like to make this easy and simple, but is just isn’t. Genes, even of they are ubiquitously available as you seem to believe, are a fragment of the picture. It is the immensely complicated controls and regulatory mechanisms which define unique function for similar genes found in different organisms.
Evolutionary theory depends on random accidents to account for the precision and incomprehensible complexity involved in gene expression. This is like expecting train wrecks to improve trains. There is no getting around this, and the problem only grows worse as genomes are unravelled. As a for instance, the Wikipedia entry for Proteomics says this:
“There are many approaches to characterizing the human proteome, which is estimated to contain between 20,000 and 25,000 non-redundant proteins. The number of unique protein species will likely increase by between 50,000 and 500,000 due to RNA splicing and proteolysis events, and when post-translational modification are also considered, the total number of unique human proteins is estimated to range in the low millions.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteomics
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“…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”
You’re still trying to get something free. Sexuality is extremely complex and precisely tuned at all levels in all organisms that have it, starting with gametes. It is not a once-it-evolved-everybody-gets-it deal, and obviously not one-size-fits-all. To assume it evolved just takes for granted billions of happy DNA replication errors, only further complicated because they have to compliment each other every mutating step of the way.
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Michael Fugate,
“You’d think think they’d be demanding survival of the fittest.
Why would you think that?”
Because that’s how evolution works.
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“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…”
But in a truly natural world, there is nothing wrong with these. Ethical considerations are just human constructs. I can appreciate that you might recoil from such things, but there is no materialist basis basis for doing so. You can’t associate moral absolutes with unguided processes.
Well just found out that this online pharmacy https://www.medcare2go.com has very good products.
Phil, Can you name all the moral absolutes and how you know that they are moral absolutes? Can you explain why morality requires moral absolutes? Thank you.
Re: "Evolutionary theory depends on random accidents to account for the precision and incomprehensible complexity involved in gene expression. This is like expecting train wrecks to improve trains."
Speaking as a design engineer, train wrecks do improve trains - not the specific train that crashes, but the overall population of trains. This is in fact how evolution in general works.
I think (and I say that because I could always be wrong) I see there another instance of my basic problem with "Intelligent Design": it is a hypothesis proposed by people who don't understand either intelligence or design (how they work). It seems to me that those making such a proposal should first do a lot of research on intelligence and design work. It is my anecdotal observation that both work by general processes of evolution, consisting of:
A) Random (often accidental - see the cat that invented Lexan by tipping over some beakers in a GE lab) generation of something (chemicals, ideas, designs, ...).
B) A selection process that filters out the ones which work the best (e.g., train crashes).
C) Some form of memory that passes on the more successful ones on to succeeding generations (DNA, books, blueprints, ...).
That is, based on my experience, I see nothing magic about either intelligence or design work (I have seen cars, telephones, computers, and many other things evolve over my lifetime), and no contradiction between their workings and those of biological evolution. We do it faster, but biological evolution has had billions of years, most of those with a massively parallel system (e.g., quadrillions of bacteria trying things and having their train crashes).
Ugh, HTML fail. Jason, feel free to delete the last post. Sorry.
Replying to Phil from the previous thread:
Maybe, but it's what you'd expect considering that butterflies nailed down their ecological niche back in the Cretaceous. Since then, flowers have stayed common and butterflies have kept pollinating them, so there wasn't much reason to massively overhaul their overall body plan. But coloration and senses are another matter; those have evolved much more quickly. For instance, in the last 10 million years or so, Heliconius butterflies acquired a second UV-sensitive visual pigment via gene duplication, which opened up new avenues of sexual selection and let them evolve a more complex color palette.
Actually, fossil plants show considerably less insect damage just after the extinction event, suggesting that many species of butterfly went extinct along with the dinosaurs.
Scientists: "Aspect X of evolutionary theory is well understood."
Creationists: "Ah, they're just ignoring the data and finding refuge in consensus, dismissing what they can't deal with."
Scientists: "Aspect Y of evolutionary theory is not well understood."
Creationists: "See, they're admitting it! Evolution's a sham!"
You can't win...
And yet, the people who do think about it on a regular basis, and study it for a living, think it fits perfectly well into evolutionary theory.
Nonsense, of course there are limits; that's why most of the species that have ever existed are extinct. The limits just aren't where your intuition tells you they ought to be.
Darwin himself knew that survival of the strong was what generally happened, not something we should strive for. As he pointed out, vaccinations and social services for the sick and poor keep the weak from being weeded out...but that's a good thing, because the weak are people. Nature's often a bastard, but "the noblest part of our nature" reminds us that we don't have to be.
The main problem with your speculation here is that many evolutionary scientists, including Darwin, were convinced creationists earlier in their lives. The idea that complex systems couldn't arise by chance had already sunk into them. They just changed their minds later, when that idea didn't fit the evidence in front of them.
Hey, nothing wrong with jargon. I find it useful, and I think you do too--you were the one who brought up "genetic load" and "normal taphonomic expectations" and "racemic mixtures: and "volcanic thermal interfaces." Conversations on specialist topics need specialized language.
Eh, I get enough of that from the news already. Faith-based depression probably enriches some people's lives, but not mine.
Indeed, although you want to be careful about assuming that the adaptive function is to perfectly simulate an eye. That's certainly what these "eyespots" look like to us, with our evolved tendency to spot eyes and faces all over the place, but some studies have found that other predators are equally distracted by any high-contrast marking. The concentric-circle shape of the eyespot may have developed more because it's a simple thing to evolve (you just need multiple chemical gradients radiating out from a single point on the body surface) than because it's particularly effective in deterring predation.
Well, yeah--evolved adaptations are rarely random. (Mutations are random; selection is anything but.) And the damselfish example is awfully nifty.
Actually, this is quite easy to attribute to mutation and selection. In fact, you can actually breed for greater or less proficiency in playing dead, and get significant change within 10 generations. See: "Is death–feigning adaptive? Heritable variation in fitness difference of death–feigning behaviour", by Miyatake et al., 2004.
One particularly interesting result of this study: the beetle populations evolved different frequencies of death-feigning behavior when confronted by a predator, even though the researchers were only selecting for different durations. It's a powerful demonstration of how multiple beneficial traits can evolve simultaneously.
Nope, it doesn't depend on that at all. And it would be kind of weird if most predators perceived death as repugnant, considering that they, y'know, make a living by killing and eating things! Playing dead is much more about exploiting the mental limitations of predators. For instance:
1) Many predators use very simple search strategies to find prey. Think of toads, that will attack any moving object small enough to fit in their mouth. Play dead, and you're no longer in their search image. They don't have the mental faculties to distinguish you from the background.
2) Many predators avoid long-dead prey, because its nutritional value is usually lower and it may carry dangerous diseases. So they won't eat something they haven't killed themselves. Which goes to show that death and disease are anything but "unnatural;" they've been around for a very long time, and animals have specifically adapted to cope with their existence.
3) Some examples of "playing dead" are actually more about playing hard-to-eat. The animal splays out in a posture that doesn't really match that of a typical corpse, but is extra hard to fit down a predator's throat. We naturally interpret it as playing dead--but just as with eyespots, the "common-sense" interpretation of us big-brained monkeys doesn't necessarily reflect the true adaptive function.
Phil,
Evolution is descriptive, not prescriptive. Nobody is saying that evolution provides a model for society. However, even if we were to think of evolution as being prescriptive, what it prescribes is actually the opposite of what you naively think it does. Evolution tells us that those species with greater genetic diversity are the most successful; they are the ones most capable of responding well and surviving any environmental changes. In human terms, that would equate to celebrating racial diversity. It would equate to the idea that all human life is valuable since we never know which set of genes is the one that we'll need to survive an environmental catastrophe. From that point of view, egalitarianism is certainly optimal. It makes no sense to have some individuals living under adverse circumstances that might cause their genes to eventually drop out of the gene pool.
Happy Thanksgiving Jason! This is one of my favorite holidays. Nonreligious and quintessentially North American (to include our Canuk friends to the north...though admittedly they celebrate it on the wrong day. Heh. :)
Now on to ID creationism. Phil:
I did not intend to conjure Popper, but yes I would like to hear a testable hypothesis of ID, including detail as to the mechanism, the 'who what where when how.' Testable here would probably include understanding what evidence would weigh against it, which is related to falsifiability but does not have to be anything like deductive falsification.
Every computer now uses transistors because it was such a good idea, once one person discovered it everyone else used it in their machines. It would have been insane for only AT&T to use them while all other companies kept using vacuum tube computer technology. But in animal genetics, we see the latter sort of pattern: a novel adaptation in one lineage is not used by others. That, to me, is pretty clear evidence against design and for evolution.
Sure, you can use the 'designer's ways are mysterious' defense. But then you've just created an unscientific omphalos-version of ID, because with that premise in place literally any observation becomes consistent with design. So: without that excuse, adaptations being limited to lineages undermines design. Falsifies it, if you will. But with that excuse, ID is not science.
Ironically you got it completely backwards. Yes as far as we can tell it evolved in early eukaryotes and at that point most 'everybody' did get it. What you see in species today is the adaptation of a basic feature in daugter species of a traite that evolved billions of years ago.
And that is also the point about butterflies. Whether its tadpoles growing legs or human puberty or bee larvae stages or butterflies, most every multicelled organism retains some variation of a very early evolved trait: genes that turn on and off during late development to alter the organism at later stages in its lifecycle. As I said before, you are making an error in thinking some catepillar-like species evolved its butterfly stage. The far more likely scenario is that an early multi-stage organism evolved into many different multi-stage organisms, one of which we now call 'butterfly.' The multiple stage genetics predates the species, just as the genetics for sexual reproduction predates pretty much all species that sexually reproduce now.
Phil:
In a truly supernatural world, human prophets claim they deliver non-human-construct ethics but we have no way to tell if they are lying or not. Given that they come up with many contradictory ethics, we know for sure that most of them are lying...and we can't tell the liars (and self-deceived) from the true prophets.
So in a practical sense, religion does nothing to solve the problem of subjective ethics or morality. In both the atheistic and theistic cases, we individual humans have to make a subjective judgment to believe or accept one type of human-communicated ethics, and reject other types of human-communicated ethics. And this is true regardless of whether the origin of the ethics is the human's brain or some divine revelation.
Re: transistors vs. vacuum tubes.
This is a good point about the differences in biological evolution and human design evolution, but in my mind it is not a fundamental difference in the way things evolve but a difference in the speed with which they evolve.
As a young engineer in the turbine department of GE, I was still using an IBM 704 main-frame computer (water-cooled due to the waste heat of its vacuum tubes) at a time about ten years after I had a transistor radio. Soon after, GE started making their own main-frame computers (the GE-600) using transistors. The forms of memory/communication humans have available work much faster than those of biological evolution (mainly DNA). In particular, biological evolution cannot easily transmit improvements across "lineages" (although there are some examples of horizontal gene transfer, and cross-breeding between species).
In general, I am not very sympathetic to arguments for biological evolution which depend on human design work being smarter (the human knee, for example), because in 35 years of design and development work I have seen numerous instances where humans designed things just as stupidly, or worse. The difference is, the clumsy, kludgy, workable-but-just-barely design efforts of humans don't usually hang around for millions of years before something better replaces them.
The more comprehensive argument, it seems to me (but I could always be wrong), is that human intelligence and design work are themselves due to the evolutionary algorithm at work, not something different and magical. How else would creatures developed by biological evolution think and design things?
(Supposing intelligence and design are something different, ID is still not science until it can tell us what they are and how they work. Otherwise, saying "the Intelligent Designer did it" or "I don't know how or why it happened" convey exactly the same information.)
Jim, I think this is correct. Humans societies are the products of evolution. Those societies that are sustainable survive and reproduce (or at least the individuals within these societies do) - developing a moral code and cooperating can help individuals survive and reproduce so that religion as such could be something that has increased fitness.
Phil is thinking in clichés and "survival of the fittest" is one of them. He thinks it means greedy selfishness, but that is not how evolution necessarily works. Living in an egalitarian society may just be the best means to increase survivorship and reproduction and hence fitness - at least locally. This is why we need empirical observation - not just wishful thinking. Cooperation and competition are not mutually exclusive, but processes within functioning systems - whether ecosystems or social systems.
Phil also threw out "moral absolutes" which is just another cliché - like its sisters "objective moral values" and "traditional family values" - which have no real meaning at all. Just ask for a definition like we asked for a definition of intelligent design - you won't get one that is not a trope. Nothing operational. Look how the inanity of the mousetrap, flagella, and immune system examples of "intelligent design" was so soon apparent. There is a good reason why there are few specifics - they will never be able to withstand scrutiny.
Specifics Phil - name your absolute morals - throw them out and let us chew on them.
Stick it to'em Phil!!!
Phil,
And those controls and regulatory mechanisms are almost entirely genetic as well, so equally accessible to mutation and selection. In fact, they make evolutionary change more feasible, since regulatory mutations are generally less dramatic and less likely to be lethal than protein-coding mutations.
Oh god no, sexuality is sloppy and haphazard in a ton of critters. Many organisms, like algae and fungi, don't even bother having two differentiated types of gametes. Some reptiles develop as male or female depending on whether it's warm or cold out, and various populations bounce back and forth between even having sex and being totally asexual. Fruit flies can have between 1 and 4 X chromosomes and 2-4 autosomes, and as long as you have a ratio ~1 between the two, you get a female.
And that's not even counting most bacteria, that just occasionally throw genes at each other and hope for the best.
Things falling down is how gravity works, but that doesn't mean that physicists like to throw people off cliffs!
Phil, we're human. Of course ethics are human constructs--that's why we care about them! If they were handed down by an inhuman intelligence from another plane of existence, they'd have no more psychological force for us than aether theory.
Sure you can--theistic evolutionists do it all the time. Conversely, you can associate guided processes with a lack of moral absolutes, as some Jains and Buddhists do.
Michael Fugate,
“Phil, Can you name all the moral absolutes…”
I can for myself.
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“how [do] you know that they are moral absolutes?”
I only believe that they are.
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“Phil is thinking in clichés and “survival of the fittest” is one of them. He thinks it means greedy selfishness, but that is not how evolution necessarily works.”
Yeah, but you brought this up when you mentioned that “they want none of Darwin’s competition and predation”, Tennyson’s “nature, red of tooth and claw” observation. Now you want to retreat into more cooperative and polite considerations.
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JimV,
“see the cat that invented Lexan by tipping over some beakers in a GE lab”
Actually, the patent fell in favor of Bayer. But, if you see this cat, it will be a picture of him dead at the scene. Phosgene and phenol are both nasty. No more polycarb work for me.
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“We do it faster, but biological evolution has had billions of years, most of those with a massively parallel system (e.g., quadrillions of bacteria trying things and having their train crashes).”
sigh……it will apparently take that long for someone to apply the accidental dynamics theories to something a little more sophisticated than E coli. I can hardly wait.
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“In general, I am not very sympathetic to arguments for biological evolution which depend on human design work being smarter (the human knee, for example), because in 35 years of design and development work I have seen numerous instances where humans designed things just as stupidly, or worse.”
This is very astute. There are lots of articles about emulating the astonishing efficiency and precision in natural specialties. For instance, we don’t build bridges that strengthen as stress increases.
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Anton Mates,
“butterflies nailed down their ecological niche”
It looks pretty much like everything did, or has.
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“And yet, the people who do think about it on a regular basis, and study it for a living, think it fits perfectly well into evolutionary theory.”
Well not really. Studying what is there is not the same thing as accounting for how it got there. Papers like the one you linked to don’t typically address development at all. Saying “JH is a key player in the evolution of metamorphosis” is a far cry from a true accounting of how in hell random mutations supposedly produced JH in the first place. If you know of published work that actually describes the gradual accumulation of replication errors leading up to a finished specialized feature or organism, I’d be more than happy to read it.
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“there are limits; that’s why most of the species that have ever existed are extinct. The limits just aren’t where your intuition tells you they ought to be.”
No, there are no limits. For actual alterations leading to change, the heart of the theory is random, unguided accidents. There is nothing else to appeal to. There can’t be any limits to what errors can accomplish.
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“As [Darwin] pointed out, vaccinations and social services for the sick and poor keep the weak from being weeded out…but that’s a good thing, because the weak are people.”
Well, that’s a noble sentiment, but with raw materialism, ‘people’ are just another taxonomic entry. If someone thinks that the infirm are impeding evolutionary progress, there isn’t a strong rationale to oppose them with.
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“evolutionary scientists, including Darwin, were convinced creationists earlier in their lives. The idea that complex systems couldn’t arise by chance had already sunk into them. They just changed their minds later,”
I think they should have changed them again when the molecular level stuff came into view. Going from nebulous germ plasm to mutating DNA should have generated lots of questions and statistical inquiries. It is too late for that now.
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“I get enough of that from the news already. Faith-based depression probably enriches some people’s lives, but not mine.”
For those faith-based, I wouldn’t call it depression, but definitely anxious and expectant. Some elements of the drama are rather discouraging.
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“The concentric-circle shape of the eyespot may have developed more because it’s a simple thing to evolve (you just need multiple chemical gradients radiating out from a single point on the body surface)”
Oh man…yeah, that’s what you might ‘need’, and multiple chemical radiating gradients is what they have. But acquiring those by way of random DNA replication errors is a little too coincidental. They look like eyes because they are supposed to look like eyes.
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“evolved adaptations are rarely random. (Mutations are random; selection is anything but.)”
This is the axiomatic jargon I was talking about.
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“Actually, this is quite easy to attribute to mutation and selection.”
No, that’s just an easy thing to say, and the only thing that can be said. Awareness of death on the part of both predator and prey cannot easily be attributed to mutations.
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“Phil, we’re human. Of course ethics are human constructs–that’s why we care about them!”
Yeah, but inasmuch as they are just constructs, they are only validated by consensus. If someone decides that the world would be a better place without a particular person or persons in it, you can’t invoke moral absolutes. All you can say is that they violated the consensus.
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Seat T,
“Evolution tells us…”
This is why it is too late to apply probabilities to the theory.
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“species with greater genetic diversity are the most successful…..egalitarianism is certainly optimal.”
You have two opposing things going on here.
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eric,
“I would like to hear a testable hypothesis of ID, including detail as to the mechanism, the ‘who what where when how.’ “
I couldn’t give you satisfactory answers. Nor could I tell you why.
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“a novel adaptation in one lineage is not used by others. That, to me, is pretty clear evidence against design and for evolution.”
I wouldn’t undertake this either. Adequacy and artful novelty are different design parameters. Every feature need not be in every organism.
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“The far more likely scenario is that an early multi-stage organism evolved into many different multi-stage organisms”
No, they didn’t just evolve. They had to develop because countless additional genes and hyper-complex control mechanisms accidentally formed, and were fine-tuned by random DNA replication screw-ups.
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“In a truly supernatural world, human prophets claim they deliver non-human-construct ethics but we have no way to tell if they are lying or not.”
Oh, you can definitely, at some point in time, tell if they were lying. Prophecies exceed mere predictions.
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I hope all of you enjoy a fantastic Thanksgiving day.
"Yeah, but inasmuch as they are just constructs, they are only validated by consensus. If someone decides that the world would be a better place without a particular person or persons in it, you can’t invoke moral absolutes. All you can say is that they violated the consensus. "
That is what humans have always IN FACT said. The legitimation is ALWAYS rhetorical. That one invokes the bible, reason, moral absolutes or consensus is always a rhetorical move. That's always been the job of rhetoric - to get others to accept one's position. We are always IN FACT trying to construct consensus.
Seriously? Which prophecies were shown to be correct? (Verifying biblical prophecy with biblical references doesn't count, you realize, because the writers had a vested interest detailing them as correct.) Or is this just another statement you refuse to support?
Phil,
Nope, Michael just said that "Cooperation and competition are not mutually exclusive." If someone wants to claim that humans are adapted to be only cooperative or only competitive, either way they're gonna run into counterexamples.
To my knowledge, it was a fellow researcher who knocked over the beaker--no deaths resulted--and the cat was an invention of the advertising department. But I'm not sure there's more than rumors to work with here.
Sure, almost by definition, or else it went extinct. But obviously they didn't all do it at the same time--each geological era is marked by some particular groups radiating into new niches. Butterflies are recent compared to dragonflies, but ancient compared to apes or vipers or penguins.
I'm aware that you think that, yes. I'm just pointing out that the people who actually do study it disagree with you.
Don't address development?? Did you even read the abstract? Almost the whole paper is development.
That's because those are two entirely different questions. Juvenile hormone was a key player in insect physiology long before eyespots evolved.
And whaddya know, there's a whole bunch of different types of juvenile hormone and methyl famesoate found in insects and crustaceans (their evolutionary cousins), and a single mutation (altering just two amino acids) can flip receptor sensitivity from the crustacean variant to the insect variant. (See "A mutation in the receptor Methoprene-tolerant alters juvenile hormone response in insects and crustaceans," by Miyakawa et al. in Nature Communications.) Why, it's almost as if these hormone variants are the outcome of a process of evolutionary diversification!
Nah, we already established that you wouldn't be; you didn't even read the Lenski papers. If any feature can be assembled from sufficiently few beneficial mutations that we can observe its appearance in the laboratory in real-time, you will simply refuse to call it "finished" or "specialized."
Conversely, ancient features like the blood clotting system have been mapped out pretty well, e.g. in "The evolution of vertebrate blood coagulation as viewed from a comparison of puffer fish and sea squirt genomes" by Jiang & Doolittle, PNAS (2003), but I suspect you won't bother with that because it didn't occur in the laboratory.
Random events can follow well-defined probability distributions. Some outcomes may be vanishingly unlikely, others outright impossible. Yes, it is in theory possible for one huge-ass mutation to swap a cockroach's genome for a chihuaha's in a single generation, but statistically we really don't have to worry about that.
I'm surprised I have to tell you that, though, since you keep claiming that random mutations couldn't possibly have helped to produce modern organisms.
They're just another taxonomic entry under any worldview, but obviously we don't consider all entries to be equally important. Materialists, idealists and dualists are all capable of distinguishing humans from houseflies, and almost all of them believe that humans deserve more consideration.
This is observably wrong, since Americans who accept evolution are disproportionately likely to support universal health care and other social services for the sick and poor. Leave aside whether you agree with their goals and methods here, although I'm guessing you don't--it's still pretty obvious that most people who accept evolution still have strong rationales for not herding the infirm into gas chambers.
And it's hardly surprising that they do, if you think about it. Even if you believe that helping the infirm impedes evolutionary progress, why would you care? That fact claim has no moral force unless you think we have some sort of overriding duty to encourage evolutionary progress, and very few people believe that. Breeding a better human is simply not as important as caring for the humans that already exist.
It did-–that's basically the entire history of population genetics. The neo-Darwinian synthesis is what came out of that. Lots of questions and statistical inquiries, which led to a new understanding of how evolutionary theory and molecular biology fit together.
Hey, you were the one who said there was "room for lots more depression." Faith-based expectant anxiety certainly sounds more fun, but theistic evolutionists don't seem to have a problem experiencing it.
C'mon, we're talking about circles. Circles are about the easiest shape in the universe to create by accident. Our cancerous moles tend to be circular. Water droplets tend to be circular. Impact craters tend to be circular. If something special happens at point A, and then it diffuses or radiates out in all directions, you get a circle.
I realize that you're committed to denying that just about anything cool can ever occur "by chance," but you're taking it to absurd extremes here. Spots are evolvable.
Again, that's not what the researchers who actually study them have found. See "Conspicuousness, not eye mimicry, makes 'eyespots' effective antipredator signals," by Stevens, Hardman & Stubbins, Behavioral Ecology (2008).
Armchair reasoning can only get you so far in biology. People do fieldwork for a reason.
If there's a term you're having trouble with in there, I'm happy to explain it further. I don't think it's particularly jargon-y,though; selection simply depends on the environment in a way that mutations do not. E.g., if the environment becomes colder, then new mutations for cold tolerance will not occur more often, but they will be more strongly favored by selection when they do occur.
Whether or not that's true (I don't think it is), you don't need "awareness of death" in either predator or prey in order for playing dead to be adaptive. My comment above at #5 has about four paragraphs on that, which you may want to review.
As Pedr observes, that's all you can ever say. Doesn't matter how absolutely absolute you think your moral principles are; there's someone out there who thinks you're absolutely wrong, and there's generally no way for either of you to convince the other. Adolf Hitler and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were never going to see eye to eye, and it's not because they didn't have enough moral certainty.
Most effective moral arguments are based on finding a preexisting point of consensus with the other person, then showing how your position is more consistent with that common principle than their position is. Doesn't always work, of course, and then you have to resort to legal/social pressure or outright force. But if you don't have consensus to begin with, invoking moral absolutes is no help whatsoever. By and large, it just makes you more hostile toward your opponent.
Not sure what that would tell you about whether their ethical claims were true or false. Pavlov made all sorts of accurate predictions about animal behavior, but I wouldn't consider him a paragon of ethical research.
Dean,
“Seriously?”
Yeah, very seriously.
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“Which prophecies were shown to be correct? (Verifying biblical prophecy with biblical references doesn’t count, you realize, because the writers had a vested interest detailing them as correct.)”
Actually, getting killed is not much of a vested interest. You know what they say; people will die for what they believe is true, but only a fool will die for what he knows to be a lie.
All kinds of OT details were closed out at the crucifixion. For something that profane history would validate, the fate of Tyre as recorded in Ezekiel 26 is a good one. If you're looking for something more contemporary, Ezekiel (37) describes the restoration of national Israel, which began in the late 1800’s, came to partial fruition in 1948, and is still a work in progress. It will culminate sometime in the future (Isaiah 11:11) when the Millennium begins, but there are all kinds of disturbing events between now and then. The grotesque and growing specter of Jew hatred is one of many indicators.
I could go on and on, but you don’t have a frame of reference for any of this. You’ll probably be more comfortable if you stick with the same people who will reassure you that T rex soft tissue can last for 68 million years.
So Nebuchadrezzar destroyed Tyre? Oh, wait, no, that didn't happen: Tyre survived the siege and even the agreement after the siege. The "many nations of Nebuchadrezzar" interpretation was only cooked up by apologists (hint: if you have to have a "discipline" called apologetics to explain all the crap in your religion, you have a lot of worthless bullshit in your religion) at the real meaning of Ezekial is justification after the fact, not based on historical items at all. I point out that Ezekial later said Nebuchadrezzar would never defeat Tyre. (Nor could he take Egypt, as it was foreseen he would do to make up for his failure at Tyre.)
Israel? Ezekial saw that it would be close to 2000 years and require the work of men to restore? No, just another of the "many possible interpretations" of these things.
Grotesque and growing hatred of Jews? Don't bother explaining what you mean - 70 years ago and people would describe the claptrap you spew as being the result of brain fever.
Yes, I will stick with explanations of scientists, the very things you refuse to read and acknowledge. I truly don't understand how you can be so willing to lie and misrepresent things (isn't there a commandment against spreading falsehoods the way you do?) - but I will assume that it is one of the stupefying influences on intelligence and integrity devotion to a religion so frequently generates. Hint: if your faith requires a "discipline" named apologetics to explain why so many things in its holy book don't match reality, you've got way to much bullcrap in your religion.
“'Phil, Can you name all the moral absolutes…'
I can for myself."
In other words, "no" (morals for oneself are not absolute).
Anton Mates,
“Michael just said that “Cooperation and competition are not mutually exclusive.”
Yeah, but the competition is somewhat of a basis for natural selection. Some papers I’ve read still seem to struggle with the origin of things like altruism and cooperation.
-
“Don’t address development?? Did you even read the abstract? Almost the whole paper is development.”
Yes, I read it, and no, I didn’t see anything in the abstract that addressed development. The last sentence in the abstract says:
“We discuss how complete metamorphosis may have influenced the molecular aspects of both ecdysone and JH signaling.”
-
“Nah, we already established that you wouldn’t be; you didn’t even read the Lenski papers.”
Sure I did, and before you mentioned it in #84 in the other thread. I said in #82 that “beneficial mutations are thought to occur at a rate of about 1 per million mutations”. That comes right out of the 1998 Gerrish and Lenski paper.
So, if you do know of anything that actually undertakes actual development, I’d like to see that. Gene and sequence comparisons might be great fun, but that is not development.
-
“…you keep claiming that random mutations couldn’t possibly have helped to produce modern organisms.”
Well first, it is not just ‘helped’. The random errors are the whole evolutionary show. That’s where the changes occur…that is the designer. But that aside, I know it is accepted that they have produced everything. I’d just like to understand why anyone would believe this. Such a process would be incredibly sensitive, complicated and sequence dependent. I suspect that is why it is not addressed in the literature.
-
“The neo-Darwinian synthesis is what came out of that. Lots of questions and statistical inquiries, which led to a new understanding of how evolutionary theory and molecular biology fit together.”
It looks more like they had to force-fit the molecular level stuff in, and proceeded without doing any of that. But I’m still looking for those statistical inquiries and results.
-
“Circles are about the easiest shape in the universe to create by accident.”
Yeah, but we’re not talking about ink dripping on paper. These “circles’ are the result of an accidental DNA/RNA/protein definition that results in images that look like eyes. And some are not circles at all. This is interesting reading, especially the frog:
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141112-six-ways-animals-use-fake-eyes
===
dean,
“So Nebuchadrezzar destroyed Tyre?”
No, Alexander. I figured you’d struggle with that.
-
“Grotesque and growing hatred of Jews? Don’t bother explaining what you mean”
I doesn’t take much of an explanation:
“Jews who can do so, leave Europe. Those who do not have the means to leave know they must be extremely careful: it is dangerous again to be a Jew in Europe. It is even more dangerous to be a Jew who supports Israel.”
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3556/anti-semitism-europe
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/07/antisemitism-rise-europe…
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/09/25/the-perfect-storm-of-eu…
http://nypost.com/2014/08/04/europes-new-jew-hatred-is-same-as-the-old/
Since the prophecy about tyre was not about Alexander, and did not occur as described, you are still lying-but that's what your faith needs, apparently. Given your lack of concern for the facts of science it isn't surprising you have the same disdain for history. At least you are consistent in applying your dishonesty.
Phil:
That is what makes ID utterly inferior to the TOE - no matter how flawed you think TOE is, the fact that it has a mechanism and makes testable, confirmed predictions means it is light-years ahead of where ID is. Lack of a satisfactory answer is also why ID has not been taken seriously by the scientific community for the past 20 years, and why its highly unlikely to ever be taken seriously by them (at least until ID proponents can give satisfactory answers...but let's be honest - ID proponents aren't even trying, because the primary purpose of the ID movement is to get the God of Genesis back in biology classes).
And those moral absolutes would be what, Phil?
You do realize that absolute - means universally valid not just individually valid, no?
So what are they? Inquiring minds want to know.
Are you honestly claiming that cooperative systems cannot evolve? and are not part of evolutionary theory? Did not Darwin opine about plant/pollinator systems?
It might be noted that you don't have to be religious to believe that there is something resembling universal moral values. Peter Singer is an atheist, e.g., and certainly believes there are general moral values which exist and which are supported by utilitarianism. While I think the issue of universal moral values is complicated, I would be tempted to say that there are likely limited, universal moral values, or something like it. I would be inclined to endorse the following at least:
Innocent people should not be killed for no reason.
One should not cause unnecessary pain.
Women are morally equal to men.
Cats should not be set on fire for fun.
dean,
“Since the prophecy about tyre was not about Alexander, and did not occur as described, you are still lying”
The prophecy was about [“many nations to come up against thee, as the sea causeth his waves to come up.”] In other words, Tyre would be subject to repeated assaults, the initial one being by Nebuchadnezzar. It isn’t really surprising that he would be mentioned by name since Ezekiel was captive in Babylon and when he was recording the prophecy. While Nebuchadnezzar conquered the mainland city [“they shall destroy the walls of Tyrus, and break down her towers”] he only subjugated those who had retreated to the island fortress. It was left to Alexander to use the mainland ruins to build a causeway to the island [“I will also scrape her dust from her, and make her like the top of a rock”]. Persians had been ruling Tyre for about 200 years when this happened.
===
eric,
“That is what makes ID utterly inferior to the TOE”
Well then you have an utter champion for your worldview, and endless enthusiastic lackeys to tell you how well it works without ever explaining how. Here is a good example:
http://www.science20.com/variety_tap/evolution_rectangular_eye
===
Michael Fugate,
“You do realize that absolute – means universally valid not just individually valid, no?”
Yeah, but not universally acknowledged or accepted.
-
“Are you honestly claiming that cooperative systems cannot evolve?”
No, I’m claiming that DNA replication failures and natural selection are the mechanisms for evolution. It’s up to you to figure out how they produced cooperative systems, or things like this:
“Researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Center for Cancer Systems Biology and their colleagues have produced a new human interactome map, reported today (November 20) in Cell. The map is based on a systematic screen of 13,000 human proteins that uncovered 14,000 pairwise interactions.
This nine-year project likely represents about 5 percent to 10 percent of all the protein-protein interactions that exist…”
http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/41483/title/Illu…
Phil,
Still no answer to the questions about your moral system, eh? Afraid?
so?
Phil,
And since they're not mutually exclusive, so is cooperation. That's what "not mutually exclusive" means. Cooperating with the right allies can give you a huge competitive edge. Thus, corporations.
The "origin," singular, of those things? Because specific instances of altruism can be explained quite well by various evolutionary mechanisms, including kin selection, reciprocal altruism and parental manipulation. True, I have seen some researchers try to come up with a Grand Unified Origin of Altruism, a single mechanism that explains all altruistic behavior in one go, and by and large they haven't seemed very successful. Evolutionary theory doesn't particularly require a single mechanism, though.
In insects, ecdysone and juvenile hormones (JH) are the primary hormones that regulate development.
Would you like to provide a positive definition of "development," before we go further down this rabbit hole? I know what developmental biologists and phylogeneticists mean by the word--and gene and sequence comparisons are at the heart of its study--but you seem to mean something very different.
Except for that small matter of "selection," of course.
Ah, yes. That's why "molecular evolution" has 795,000 hits on Google Scholar, and journals like Molecular Biology and Evolution, Journal of Molecular Evolution, and Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution publish over 300 peer-reviewed papers on the topic every year, and universities and governments around the world are constantly hiring population geneticists and molecular evolutionary biologists. Because nobody bothers to study this stuff.
It doesn't matter, because butterflies and inkblots obey the same laws of physics. The morphogens that produce an eyespot can diffuse out from a central point in exactly the same way that ink does.
Science is about finding common sets of laws that describe many different systems. The moon is not a cannonball, but studying the latter can reveal the laws of gravity that guide the former.
Yes, it is interesting. Did you notice the long section about how "it is conspicuousness, not necessarily eye mimicry, that matters?" And how "butterflies use eyespots as conspicuous, disorientating patterns that put off predators, rather than to mimic the eyes of other animals?"
The point, phil, is that the "prophecy" didn't occur as written. Shoe-horning other events in to make things fit is the lowest of dishonesty. Brining Nebuchadnezzar into play. It is clear that the prophecy's "they" refers to the army Nebuchadnezzar's, not to any old army that might happen to come by in the future (as does the repeated reference to "he").
And - the city was supposed to be completely destroyed, but never was, and is even referenced in Acts.
I'm sure you have more falsehoods to justify your position - but since you are such a lost sink of dishonesty, with no intention of honest discourse (or is it no ability for such?), I won't bother. Keep lying to the science folks though.
I am sure Phil won't pay any attention, but I am going to try again to get through to him on selection. He and many others need to replace their old worn out narratives.
Phil's narrative goes something like this. For millennia, humans believed that gods created the universe and living things much like a potter makes a pot. This god is an agent acting on a passive object shaping it into something from raw materials. Phil believes that 200 or so years ago humans tried to replace gods with natural selection - the "environment" becomes the agent acting on the passive organism adapting it.
Now many people who accept evolution believe this same story. The problem is that it is an inadequate metaphor. Both organism and environment are agents acting on each other changing each other. It is a feedback system. This is completely different than the modern belief in an unchangeable god.
If one looks at old narratives of gods - they are less powerful and intelligent than the modern versions. It more like the difference between a leader of a local community and one of an empire. In an empire the power all flows one way - in a tribe there is give and take and leaders change their minds and are easily replaced - there is no absolute authority. Take a peak again at the Jewish tribal version of a god - notice how their god is affected by human interaction.
The organismal story is one of feedback between molecules, cells, organisms, climate, etc. The physical environment of earth has been profoundly affected by organisms e.g. the increase in oxygen from photosynthesis, increase in weathering of rocks. That organisms are agents changes the narrative to billions of creators rather than the impoverished one of creationists and the misguided authoritarian evolutionists.
I still wish you would read and try to understand the simple story put forth by Daniel Dennett in "Darwin's "strange inversion of reasoning" - it is the clearest account of how you get design without intelligence.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2702804/
Anton Mates,
“Would you like to provide a positive definition of “development,” before we go further down this rabbit hole?”
Yes, I think that is called for. I don’t mean development from a single zygote to millions/billions/trillions of cells in an organism. That is an interesting subject, but what I was talking about is the evo-devo that supposedly produced things like metamorphosis.
-
“Except for that small matter of “selection,” of course.”
Of course, but selection is a small matter until the something is altered by mutations. NS is like a postman with no mail to deliver until the errors occur.
-
“That’s why “molecular evolution” has 795,000 hits…300 peer-reviewed papers…universities and governments around the world are constantly hiring…Because nobody bothers to study this stuff.”
Yeah, the fan club is vast. So there should be piles of papers about the questions and statistical inquiries that put the synthesis on a solid mutations/selection footing. I realize that there are lots of factors and obstacles, but surely with all that publishing going on, someone has tried to outline the series of errors that resulted in a complex organism in its current niche, like a butterfly….or something.
-
“It doesn’t matter, because butterflies and inkblots obey the same laws of physics.”
But it isn’t about pigment. It’s about extremely complex 3D structures in individual cells.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/37573292/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/…
-
“Did you notice the long section about how “it is conspicuousness, not necessarily eye mimicry, that matters?” “
Yeah, I recognized that from the paper you referenced above. But there is a lot more to it:
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/why-eyespots/
===
dean,
“The point, phil, is that the “prophecy” didn’t occur as written.”
Nobody challenges the dates, the details are in the text, and the fulfillments are a matter of secular history. The implications of authentic prophecy are very profound. It means that someone outside of time can manipulate history. That’s why you are, with good reason to do so, whistling in the dark.
Spend some time on the first advent prophecies. They say there are about 300 of them.
===
Michael Fugate,
“I am sure Phil won’t pay any attention, but I am going to try again to get through to him on selection.”
I get selection, and I enjoyed reading the Dennett paper….actually rather sublime. If they ever release it in audio, they should definitely get David Attenborough to do the read.
But the problem with it, and with your post, is that neither he nor you mentioned DNA replication errors. I can easily understand why. It’s like someone horse-farting during the opera…it spoils the drama.
@30
"Spend some time on the first advent prophecies. They say there are about 300 of them. "
I guess Jewish scholars, non-fundamentalist bible scholars, and others are idiots because they just don't see it. What is it called? 'Stiff necked?'
You don't get selection - you just don't. Replication errors - failures to your engineering mind are potential solutions to natural selection. I explained this to you before, but of course you were unable to grasp the concept.
Since you don't know how your god designed, how do you know it wasn't through evolution? You don't or you would explain it to us.
The other thing you need to understand is where you are worried about planning ahead to be more efficient and not waste time and resources. Nature doesn't - it tries everything that comes along - it doesn't have a mind and it doesn't act like it does either. Things we would know will fail, it will still try. Every mutation no matter its origin or its effect will still get tried. That new ideas are random and often will make things worse is not of concern, it is isn't looking for perfection, but relative differences.
Truly if you understood Dennett's paper you would get this.
"You don’t get selection – you just don’t"
You are too generous. It is likely he could if he tried - he simply refuses to make the effort because he "knows" selection doesn't work.
I think Phil is hung up by his inability to think contextually. He thinks that a mutation is always "bad." This is wrong for several reasons. Organisms aren't perfectly designed so there is always room for improvement. A mutation is in and of itself neither "good" nor "bad" - it depends on its environment. It is like getting an exam back and earning 30 out of a possible 100 points. This looks bad, but if the mean were 15 and the high score was a 32 - you did pretty well, relatively speaking. It might even be an A. On the other hand, if you earn a 90 and the mean is 96 and the low score was 90, well not so great. Natural selection works on a relative not an absolute scale.
There is also much built-in redundancy in organisms not found in human-designs. Something I have brought before in this round and Phil has ignored. One needs to understand biology based on how it is not on how one wants it to be.
Still no list of moral absolutes, either. It's like talking to a brick wall.
Phil,
Ok, so if you don't mean developmental biology, do you mean phylogeny? The actual sequence of genetic changes associated with acquisition of a trait? Like Lenski documented for citrate metabolism in E. coli? Or the opsin gene duplication in Heliconius butterflies that led to improved color vision and a new display color palette?
Which is not a problem, since as we discussed on the previous thread, mutations are unavoidable and even beneficial mutations are fairly common.
Well, sure. Google "silk gene lepidoptera phylogeny", for instance, you'll find dozens of papers on that topic alone. You won't find a paper called "A complete list of every substitution that occurred in the 300-million-base-pair-long butterfly genome over a period of several million years, 70 million years ago," of course. That would be a little lengthy, not to mention only confirmable via a time machine.
Actually, it is about pigment. The article you linked to is about structural color, which is another source of color in butterfly wings--but not the one generally responsible for eyespots. (Structural colors tend to be iridescent, which would make them pretty lousy for mimicking a vertebrate eyeball.)
That aside, this still doesn't matter, because the eyespot's overall shape does not depend on the source of color in its individual cells. Rather, it's a matter of which cells differentiate to become colored or not. That depends on their level of exposure to a morphogen...and that can diffuse outward in a circle from a central point. Just like, yes, an inkblot.
Oh, and those extremely complex 3D structures? They're formed from the endoplasmic reticulum, a common organelle which is found in human cells too. The ER already has pretty much the right shape to produce structural colors, because that shape happens to also be optimal for enzyme activity. Butterflies simply took that organelle and tweaked it a bit, allowing it to perform a new function of color display. Evolution always builds on what's already there.
That's a different kind of eyespot than the passage in the previous article was discussing, in a different set of butterfly species. And that's my point--not all eyespots turn out to have the same adaptive function, even if they all "look like eyes" to us.
Pedr,
“I guess Jewish scholars, non-fundamentalist bible scholars, and others are idiots because they just don’t see it. What is it called? ‘Stiff necked?’ “
I’ve had many conversations with observant Jews. Most of them really didn’t know what to do with things like Psalm 22, Isaiah 53 and Zechariah 12. Some had really poor and evasive interpretations, others no clue. The most concise explanation is Romans 11:25 (comp Luke 21:24). But there are lots of amazingly astute Messianic Jews who get it, perhaps indicating that the time frame Paul mentions is in view.
As for the non-fundies, most aren’t orthodox scholars.
===
Michael Fugate,
“You don’t get selection – you just don’t. Replication errors – failures to your engineering mind are potential solutions to natural selection.”
No, I get it. Natural selection doesn’t have a personality and isn’t conscious. It is not an ethereal presence. It doesn’t tinker, have strategies or toolboxes. Natural selection is just organisms ill-suited to their environment dying.
-
“Nature doesn’t – it tries everything that comes along – it doesn’t have a mind and it doesn’t act like it does either.”
Actually, there are natural things that do act like that. There are enzymes that check for DNA replication errors, remove them and replace them. There is a whole suite of these specialized proteins that are devoted to fidelity, and prevent the errors that evolution depends on. Antibodies are designed to identify and combat antigens. They aren’t there to make new gene-flow friends.
The challenge to you would be to actually apply the tenets of your faith, and explain how RM/NS produced such things.
-
“if you understood Dennett’s paper you would get this”
Dennett is about prose, not science. That’s why he avoids mutations. He’s just showing how to develop a mindset that will make the theory work.
-
“A mutation is in and of itself neither “good” nor “bad” – it depends on its environment. It is like getting an exam back…”
No, it’s like finding out you have cancer. Dysfunctional proteins don’t have a suitable context.
===
Anton Mates,
“the opsin gene duplication in Heliconius butterflies that led to improved color vision and a new display color palette?”
I’ve been busy and only got to peruse that article. But as I understand it, the improved vision enabled the butterfly to see the new color. Is that correct?
-
“mutations are unavoidable and even beneficial mutations are fairly common.”
I don’t really think that is an accurate perception, but I also don’t think the numbers really matter.
-
“it’s a matter of which cells differentiate to become colored or not”
Yeah, and that is a matter of controlled expression, which also had to be the results of replication errors.
-
“Butterflies simply took that organelle and tweaked it a bit, allowing it to perform a new function of color display.”
Yeah, but that isn’t just tweaking. That is a very complicated and precise thing for accidental DNA copy errors to accomplish.
-
“And that’s my point–not all eyespots turn out to have the same adaptive function, even if they all “look like eyes” to us.”
Well, my point is that the simulation of eyespots looks more deliberate than accidental. How many failed attempts might there have been before arriving at something like that on a random basis?
Also, I notice they are continuing to struggle with the cooperation deal:
http://phys.org/news/2014-11-game-theory-analysis-evolution-favors.html
Wow. It's rare to see such consistent deliberate dishonesty in one discipline, but to see two groups dismissed by one wave of an ignorant hand in a single post is impressive (in a wow just how out of touch reality can Phil be way).
Well, if you already know that all biologists and geologists are doing biology and geology wrong, it's only natural to conclude that the Jews have screwed up being Jews as well.
Phil,
Except when they do. The sickle-cell mutation sucks...except in the context of malaria. The CCR5-D32 mutation sucks..except in the context of smallpox or AIDS. The fitness effects of these mutations are massively dependent on environment.
Yep. Birds and other butterflies can't distinguish it, so Heliconius species basically have their own private signalling channel.
That's a funny thing to say after you asked for numbers on the topic, and Eric and I provided some, and then you objected that they were inconsistent with Lenski's numbers, and we explained why they were consistent. At what point in there did the numbers stop mattering to you?
And if you're not using numbers, how are you coming up with these various claims about how improbable evolution is? Seems to me that if we want to know whether a trillion butterflies could plausibly evolve an eyespot over a few million years, numbers are going to be kinda crucial.
But not any new mutations. (I know you prefer to say "replication errors" because it sounds more ominous, but not all mutations are replication errors.) Long before they were even insects, butterflies' ancestors already had regulator genes which controlled differential coloration. Butterflies didn't have to reinvent them.
No. Seriously, it's far less complicated and precise than you think. And the reason why is actually pretty cool, so I'm gonna expound on it for anyone who's still bothering to read the comments.
The color-generating structure we're talking about is a gyroid, a kind of minimal surface. Minimal surfaces have that name because they locally minimize their area, which is roughly equivalent to minimizing the energy it takes to maintain them, and so they tend to self-assemble if conditions are good. Dip a wire frame into soapy water, pull it out, and look at the shape of the soap film: that's a minimal surface. You didn't need to specify that shape. It made itself.
But is it plausible for gyroid structures to self-assemble in organic systems, I hear you ask? Oh heck yes. Mix some water and common lipids found in the human body, and the emulsion will spontaneously form gyroids. More relevant to our butterflies, it turns out that cell membranes of many species will spontaneously collapse into gyroids and other minimal surfaces when something goes wrong with the cell--it's stressed, starved, poisoned, or infected. And the endoplasmic reticulum is particularly likely to wrinkle up this way. (See Almsherqi et al. 2006, "Cubic membranes: a legend beyond the Flatland of cell membrane organization," for more on this.)
Now, normally you don't want that to happen in a living cell, because it means the chemical processes on the membrane are compromised. But that's not a problem for the cells on the surface of a butterfly wing...they're already dead, just like the cells of our hair and nails. So all that a mutation--pardon me, an "accidental DNA copy error"--had to do was ensure that those cells died under the right stresses to have their ER membranes collapse into gyroids first.
Even eyespots that don't actually function as simulated eyes? How do you tell the difference between deliberate and accidental ones?
That's not really a meaningful question from an evolutionary perspective; the butterflies weren't "attempting" to evolve eyespots in the first place. Doubtless the vast majority of mutations in individual butterflies did not result in eyespots, but so what? Eyespots didn't have to evolve in the first place. In some butterfly lineages, they never did evolve...but other anti-predator adaptations happened to appear instead.
"Struggle" is a strange word to use for a study which successfully figured out when cooperation will or won't be evolutionarily stable. Especially since the result (cooperation can happen, but doesn't always happen) describes the natural world quite accurately.
What would they have had to find in order for you not to consider this research a "struggle?"
Phil, the list, Phil, the list of moral absolutes. I guess it is in the same category as evidence for ID - imaginary.
The flaw in Phil's argument is of course that it assumes enzymes and other proteins are perfectly designed - then and only then would any and all changes lead to a decrease in fitness. Of course this is false - hence his argument is bogus.
He wants the moral absolutes Phil, give'em to him!!! Your perspective is the authority in this thread and I eagerly anticipate your responses.
Anton Mates,
“The sickle-cell mutation sucks…except in the context of malaria. The CCR5-D32 mutation sucks..except in the context of smallpox or AIDS. The fitness effects of these mutations are massively dependent on environment.”
Yeah, but resistance to a couple of diseases due to something abnormal isn’t really a strong selling point. This is often cited as a beneficial mutation (actually one of the best examples), but it is sort of like treating a bad cough with strong laxatives. It doesn’t cure the cough…it just makes you afraid to cough. This is hardly the kind of thing that would contribute to the development of some biological specialty.
-
“Birds and other butterflies can’t distinguish it, so Heliconius species basically have their own private signalling channel.”
I got to spend some more time with this today. What they are claiming here seems a little too fortuitous to be attributable to accidents since there is an interaction between two randomly acquired traits. I found another paper on this that expressed some skepticism as well:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2890808/
“In PNAS, Briscoe et al. (1) discovered that Heliconius butterflies have two duplicate copies (UVRh1 and UVRh2) of the UV-sensitive gene….Using the branch-site (BS) method of Bayesian statistical inference (2), they identified 28 amino acid sites at which positive selection potentially operated. They speculated that the amino acid substitutions at these sites were important in shifting the maximum absorption wavelength (λmax), because 4 of 28 sites corresponded to the sites in vertebrate color-vision opsins at which amino acid substitutions were shown to change λmax experimentally.”
That’s the problem with gene dupes…they require further accidental alterations. I can see why they are a cherished idea, because it would be easier to alter an existing functional copy than it would be to accident one together from scratch. But duplications would still require further site-specific replication errors to result in an improved protein situation. And these altered genes would still require more accidents resulting in precise regulation.
The paper goes on:
“Then, UV and yellow pigments in the wings of Heliconius butterflies might have evolved. Of course, it is possible that the wing pigments first evolved and then, duplicate genes, UVRh1 and UVRh2, were subjected to positive selection to generate species-specific interaction between UV vision and UV-yellow pigments in the wings. This is clearly a chicken-and-egg problem; however, the first evolutionary scenario is more parsimonious than the second, because the evolutionary change of color pigments in the wings seems to be quite complicated. In the second scenario, it is also necessary to explain why and how the colorful wings would have evolved without the UVRh2 gene in Heliconius butterflies but not in other species.”
It was somewhat refreshing to see someone actually asking reasonable questions. How would you respond to the chicken/egg deal?
-
“…you asked for numbers on the topic, and Eric and I provided some, and then you objected that they were inconsistent with Lenski’s numbers, and we explained why they were consistent.”
I recall there being a considerable disparity between your calculations and Lenski’s estimate. And While Eric’s article celebrated the occurrence of mutations, it didn’t mention any problems associated with the accumulation of deleterious ones. I’m not sure anyone thinks this is a good thing.
-
“At what point in there did the numbers stop mattering to you?”
Oh, they do matter to me. But I’m accustomed to seeing extremely implausible scenarios get a salute without regard to probabilities, like the one above.
-
“Seems to me that if we want to know whether a trillion butterflies could plausibly evolve an eyespot over a few million years, numbers are going to be kinda crucial.”
I agree. But it is easier to just assume numbers like that than to try and apply all the factors involved, like the 98% chance of a beneficial mutation being lost rather than fixed.
-
“Long before they were even insects, butterflies’ ancestors already had regulator genes which controlled differential coloration”
Now, how in hell would you know that? What ancestors?
-
“Butterflies didn’t have to reinvent them.”
You’re trying to get something fantastically complex for free. Evolutionary theory does not deserve those kind of favors.
===
Michael Fugate,
“Phil, the list of moral absolutes”
Like I told you, I can do this for myself. It is not a simple list. A reasonable summary would be the decalogue, but even that would require dispensational clarifications and enhancements. I can do this, but it would take lots of references and explanations, and would serve no purpose. The more important question is whether or not I have lived up to them, and I can assure you that I have not. A list of moral absolutes would be tantamount to an indictment. That being the case, atonement and redemption become the issues.
Well, there you have it. The firm, straightforward clarity that only absolute morality can provide.
"You mustn't barbecue toddlers, for reasons that I can't really tell you right now, but if you have a few hours to spare I can put together a presentation for you, just as soon as I finish annotating my Appendix C: Dispensational Clarifications and Enhancements, and then dwell on my own moral failings for a while. Come back tomorrow?"
Fundamentalism really is more postmodernist than postmodernism, in some ways.
The black & white minds of creationists hold the following belief - if evolution is false, then Christianity is by default true. They are convinced that all they need do is so discredit evolution and the only remaining alternative is Christianity. What a strange world they inhabit. They try every tactic from dissing Darwin to nixing natural selection to denying descent in hopes something will stick. Why stake one's faith on a scientific theory?
Why all the meaningless words like "moral absolutes" or "information" which you can't name or define? For which you have no methodology for uncovering other than appeal to authority? It vacuous and is setting itself up to fail.
Phil,
Please, stop and listen to yourself. You're now claiming that mutations that protect their carriers from malaria, smallpox and AIDS are not significantly beneficial. This is how hard you're fighting the science--you've ended up arguing, "So what's so great about surviving a deadly disease, anyway?"
Even in the modern world, malaria infects 200 million people a year. It kills over half a million of them. But if you live in a malaria-prone region, possessing the sickle-cell mutation reduces your odds of contracting severe malaria by a factor of ten. That's been shown in public health studies, and it's been shown in the lab. You can even splice the gene into mice and it'll protect them from malaria.
If that isn't a strong selling point to you, then you're unsaleable.
Er, no, the paper you link to is not at all skeptical about these traits being produced by unguided evolution. It's expressing doubt that the evolution of the new opsin gene was driven by positive selection immediately after the duplication event, rather than neutral drift. In essence, this paper is arguing that the gene's evolution may have been even more influenced by random accidents than the original researchers believe. Which is the opposite of your position, it seems to me.
(For those who are actually curious about this debate, the original researchers went back and reran their analysis using different and more conservative methods and got the same result. Also, some of those evolutionary molecular biologists that Phil thinks don't existconducted a numerical study of the method, and found that it was more reliable than suggested by the paper Phil linked to. So these responses seem to deal adequately with that paper's criticisms quite adequately. Not that it matters, because, again, none of these researchers are suggesting that the traits in question did not evolve. They're just arguing over the relative roles of selection and drift.)
Which, of course, mutations provide. And because there's still an unmutated copy of the gene active, mutations in the duplicate copy are less likely to be harmful. Evolution has a bigger safety margin to experiment with.
No, actually. Sometimes almost any difference between the versions will result in a functional improvement; the relevant mutations don't need to be in any particular direction.
This is the case with human tetrachromats (usually women), many of whom have slightly better color vision than the rest of us because they carry two different alleles of an opsin gene. Neither opsin version has to be particularly optimal by itself. By the mere fact that they function slightly differently, they can jointly provide more color information than a single version would.
It's a perfectly good point; both the proposed evolutionary scenarios are plausible. (New visual pigments first appearing before new wing pigments, or vice versa.) Offhand, I'd agree with the paper's opinion that visual pigments before wing pigments is more plausible, but new data could push that either way.
Of course, this particular question doesn't actually bear on the original authors' claim that the visual pigment genes were favored by natural selection. Even if the new wing pigments only appeared later, the new visual pigments could have already provided keener discrimination between existing wing colors.
So you claimed, yes. We pointed out why that was not the case, and waited for you to actually do something with Lenski's results (which are obviously far more relevant than my slapdash estimate). Like, analyze them and show where the math is flawed or the data is sloppy? Or something?
Nor did it mention Italian cuisine or lawn bowling. So what? You asked for numbers on beneficial mutations going to fixation, he dug up some numbers, and then...nothing.
Eric and I were applying the formula you cited for loss vs. fixation of beneficial mutations. We just got an answer you didn't like. Fortunately, you can wipe all that away and revolutionize population genetics by running your own numbers! Any day now.
Simple cladistics. Butterflies are arthropods. Pretty much all extant arthropods have a) a multicolored body or b) eyes, and those both require differential expression of pigments, so they must have the genetic architecture to permit that. Ergo, their common ancestor did too.
We also know from the fossil record that lots of primitive arthropods did have eyes and/or display colors, so...yeah. This is not controversial.
The great thing about heredity is that we get a lot of fantastic things for free. Our ancestors paid for them already.
The problem I see with adhering to beliefs based on faith is that it introduces epistemological relativism and reduces all beliefs to a democracy of beliefs. Being based on a faith commitment, there is no way to adjudicate between beliefs. If you introduce an outside criterion, then your belief is no longer faith-based. So, believers tend to resist this temptation. However, in the democracy of faith, all beliefs and actions are the same from an epistemological point of view. Anything based on faith is morally equivalent to anything else based on faith. Every barbarity and every act of kindness are then morally equivalent. Hitler and Jesus are morally equivalent. One cannot therefore condemn Hitler for the liquidation of millions of Jews, Poles, Romani, homosexuals and others because his beliefs were based on an ideology…on faith. You, Phil, and Hitler are morally equivalent. This is a strong statement, but it is implied by the logic of faith. If you accept this, then the most evil person in the world is the simple bible-believer kneeling beside their bed praying to god and reading their bible. Why? Because faith facilitates evil doers. Faith based thinking facilitates ideologues.
Since no evidence is ever allowed to enter into the adjudication, the only way to counter this point is to argue (with rhetoric) that your belief is the correct one. If I argue that disgusting Christian filth like you and all your genetic relations should be eliminated from this planet with the utmost prejudice – because of my faith - then you have no argument against it – except law and custom – and an appeal to our common humanity – which is to admit that you really don’t believe by faith. Why then do you resist evidence provided by science that falsifies your beliefs? Are you ‘stiff necked’?
Not even close. The only people who should be equated with Nazis are Nazis, and there is no evidence Phil qualifies.
I don't think Pedr is actually arguing for that; he's arguing that you would have to conclude that Phil and Hitler are morally equivalent if you accept Phil's worldview. Reductio ad absurdum, sort of thing.
I don't agree with that, mind you. Everybody likes to go, "Well, my morality lets me criticize Hitler harder than your morality," but it's rarely true. Pretty much all of us 21st-century literate folks can come up with unlimitedly strong reasons why Hitler sucked, and Hitler would happily ignore all of them.
Anton;
You could be correct - but when I see someone pull out the hitler/nazi card for something like this I tend not to pay attention to the rest of their point. And if that was the point - it doesn't make sense to me anyway.
Michael Fugate,
“The black & white minds of creationists hold the following belief – if evolution is false, then Christianity is by default true.”
Not at all. A theory can be false and it can end right there. Granted, there are very limited alternatives to work with, which is why this evolutionary theory has been granted immunity from scientific scrutiny. But that’s just because materialists find other possibilities repugnant.
===
Anton Mates,
“Fundamentalism really is more postmodernist than postmodernism, in some ways.”
I don’t follow you here. Because of dispensations?
-
“You’re now claiming that mutations that protect their carriers from malaria, smallpox and AIDS are not significantly beneficial….If that isn’t a strong selling point to you, then you’re unsaleable.”
So I take it you are hoping for fixation? Having the sickle cell trait does provide 60% protection. But then there is a 1 in 4 chance that two sickle cell trait parents will have a diseased child. So no, I’m not sold on the idea that a hemoglobin disorder qualifies as a great evolutionary stride.
-
“For those who are actually curious about this debate, the original researchers went back and reran their analysis using different and more conservative methods and got the same result…”
Yeah, but what they didn’t do was to calculate the probabilities of an accidental vision enhancement occurring in the same genome as a complimentary coloration accident, and resulting in this species having their own private signaling channel.
The Japanese guys noted that “the evolutionary change of color pigments in the wings seems to be quite complicated”. I would think so. And getting just the right mutations in a gene copy to arrive at just the right amino acid substitutions to acquire just the right receptors is a trick as well. I love a good coincidence as much as the next guy, but the odds against stuff like this have be…large.
I’m still curious about the timing regardless of which feature was acquired first. The exclusivity would mean that the first would be useless until the other one showed up, perhaps a trillion butterflies and a few million years later.
-
“gene dupes…they require further accidental alterations.
Which, of course, mutations provide”
Well granted, the theory is altogether dependent on random errors cooperating. But, as a for instance, Drosophila Meg has over 122 million base pairs. Given the most optimistic mutation rates, and those rates relative to accidents that might somehow be helpful, I think there is room for reasonable doubt about mutations being ‘of course’ providers.
Have you ever noticed how evolution depends on extreme long-shots every step of the way?
-
“mutations in the duplicate copy are less likely to be harmful.”
Yeah, but the duplication itself could be.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17386002
“Phenotypic variation and disease phenotypes induced by duplications are more diverse and widespread than previously anticipated, and duplications are a major class of disease-related genomic variation.”
Even in apologetic articles, statistical problems have to be acknowledged:
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0020206
“A duplicated gene newly arisen in a single genome must overcome substantial hurdles before it can be observed in evolutionary comparisons. First, it must become fixed in the population, and second, it must be preserved over time. Population genetics tells us that for new alleles, fixation is a rare event, even for new mutations that confer an immediate selective advantage. Nevertheless, it has been estimated that one in a hundred genes is duplicated and fixed every million years (Lynch and Conery 2000), although it should be clear from the duplication mechanisms described above that it is highly unlikely that duplication rates are constant over time.”
That doesn’t sound very reliable.
In the course of this discussion, I read an article about mutations. It is very good, very instructive in regards to replication enzymes. But I will steer you to the confused point where religion takes over:
“Of course, not all mutations are "bad." But, because so many mutations can cause cancer, DNA repair is obviously a crucially important property of eukaryotic cells. However, too much of a good thing can be dangerous. If DNA repair were perfect and no mutations ever accumulated, there would be no genetic variation—and this variation serves as the raw material for evolution. Successful organisms have thus evolved the means to repair their DNA efficiently but not too efficiently, leaving just enough genetic variability for evolution to continue.”
http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/dna-replication-and-causes-of-…
That is really screwy.
If you honestly try to apply mutations and selection to things like this, it gets really awkward. Perhaps that’s why they don’t mention either one:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/04/us-science-eels-idUSKCN0JI27W…
http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/41580/title/Bat-…
===
Pedr, you’re a really interesting guy.
There has not been a clearer statement that Phil has no clue about science than this statement.
Yes, I am of course engaging in a reductio. I am arguing that adhering to a faith-based worldview makes it impossible to critique another faith-based worldview without bringing in non-faith based criterion. This ultimately undermines one's faith based position. One ultimately then has to be irrational to maintain a faith-based position. Those of us without mind forged manacles know this already.
Pedr,
"Why then do you resist evidence provided by science that falsifies your beliefs?"
Because I spend all kinds of time exploring this supposed evidence. It is not strong, and it is not abundant.
Your view of science is provably inaccurate. You see science as a monolith of objectivity and reason. But to arrive at this perception, you simply invoke rules that permit you to cull people and facts until you have a suitable clergy and suitable doctrine, and a basis for your very impressive faith.
-
“Those of us without mind forged manacles know this already.”
This is the freedom of a prisoner whose shackles were removed when he was locked in a cell.
"Because I spend all kinds of time exploring this supposed evidence. It is not strong, and it is not abundant."
Since you reach that conclusion by not understanding or misrepresenting the science (as your posts have demonstrated), you are starting with your assumptions and biases, dismissing the thousands of people who have studied the issues, and saying "Gosh, I was correct all the time."
Self delusion at its best.
This is patently false; you have never provided a single piece of positive evidence for intelligent design. You have only tried to discredit evolution.
We would need a scientific theory to explain the diversity of life on earth - so it could never end right there. You keep claiming that ideology is the only reason to accept evolution, yet you give no one a reason to accept something else - especially intelligent design. Why would I reject evolution for something that explains everything and nothing - it is useless.
Here is something I am curious about and have never gotten a straight answer from those who believe there is an non-material something. Why is a materialist chemistry acceptable, but not a materialist biology? Why is randomness acceptable as a foundation of chemical reactions? Why don't we just have atoms when molecules are more complex and require energy to create?
Every single creationist I have asked has denied that their god is needed for chemistry, but why? The same arguments trotted out against evolution are perfectly acceptable when applied to chemistry - increases in complexity, 2nd law, etc.
You know, out of curiosity and a thirst for truth, I've spent some time exploring the supposed evidence for evolution and I too found it not strong and far from abundant. Why is that?
Several possible reasons: you didn't understand it: you looked at a source that presented it badly: you looked at an article written for specialists instead of an introductory article: you are just as inclined to automatically dismiss evidence because you "know" it is wrong as phil is.
Which is it?
Or I could just be struggling with the fact that it's not true and the evidence needed to take it from theory to fact is slim to nonexistent. I've watched some of evolution's strongest sellers present their case, and though I try to give them the benefit of the doubt, I can't help but think they're guessing while religiously promoting it (macro evolution) as truth.
I vote for dumber than a post.
99.9% of all biologists, the people who study living systems, are convinced that evolution is the best explanation for the diversity of life on earth. Why is that?
>70% of philosophers are atheists. Why is that?
The less ignorant (more educated) one is the less likely one is to believe in gods and to adhere to religion. Why is that?
I really don't believe the last bit of what is quoted here - and I'm not sure about the first (watched...) bit either.
You know, I've been on a quest for truth for most of my adult life. I've had friends that were pro evolution and simultaneously anti-God, I've had some religious friends who asserted that God is revealed in the person of Jesus. I've been to churches (no mosques or temples unfortunately) and I've had some fun doing what I want, snorting what I want, sleeping with who I want without the fear and accountability of a "God" staring over my shoulder. I've entertained both schools of thought without bias, and one thing I consistently notice are the insults and rudeness demonstrated by some proud atheists who hold that their beliefs are indisputable. Pure anger towards a God they didn't think existed. I never saw this behavior out of the Christians who always showed me a demeanor that I was quite frankly envious of and wanted to aspire to. Michael Fugate & Pedr, I'll hold my judgement and forgive me for being dumb in the presence of your intelligence.
Sure Smut, try to play the tone card - always a sign of not having an argument. Of course you could try to answer the questions I gave you, but that would require thought....
Let me just add that Smut insults every biologist who has spent her or his life studying nature by claiming they are all idiots and that they accept and promote a theory for which they have no evidence only to advance atheism. It is a crap argument and myearlier comment is not an insult, but a fact.
Smut Jenkins:
Your choice of words in your first two comments shows that your understanding of evolution has been heavily influenced by creationist sources. If your curiosity is sincere, you should go to the Talk Origins Index of Creationist Claims and look up the arguments against evolution that you find compelling. Start with claim CA202.
Michael and Pedr seem justifiably convinced that you are not sincere. In response to your third comment, understand that atheists are not angry at any god, but I for one am angry at followers of gods who believe it is OK to deceive to advance their beliefs.
If you want to prove that Michael and Pedr are premature in dismissing your stated desire to understand evolution, visit Talk Origins and come back either with arguments against what you found there or gratitude for showing you the evidence you sought. (Remember that comments will close in a week and a half.)
CA201 is also particularly relevant.
Looking back, I see that it was Dean, not Pedr, who joined MF in doubting Smut's sincerity. My apologies.
Phil,
There are an infinite number of alternatives to work with, actually--even if we limit ourselves to materialist theories, let alone supernatural ones. Coming up with hypotheses is generally far easier than testing them.
Because you can't tell us the difference between right and wrong without an elaborately annotated lecture that doesn't actually exist yet.
Not that I object to that, mind you. I was raised by a philosopher, so I'm all for spinning "common-sense" questions into elaborately annotated lectures. I'm just enjoying the irony.
–
Certainly not, barring further mutations. Because two copies of the sickle cell allele produce the disease, its fitness is density-dependent. Selection stably maintains its frequency at around 10% of the population in malarial regions.
Now, that could change with a gene duplication event, because then you could have two copies of the allele and two copies of the "normal" allele, granting malaria resistance without producing sickle-cell symptoms. Who knows if that'll ever happen, though.
Nope, they didn't. There would be no point in trying; not only is that probability basically incalculable, but even if you knew it, it wouldn't tell you anything about whether these mutations actually occurred. Hypothesis testing doesn't work that way.
The whole point of the Japanese letter you cited was that it didn't have to be "just the right receptors"; genetic drift could have led to any old receptor, and then the wing colors could have been selected to match.
The letter is arguing that it wouldn't be a problem if the first one was useless. They're saying it was produced by genetic drift, and genetic drift makes useless stuff all the time. Cripes, why link to papers you don't read?
(Also, as I said before, a new visual receptor could be useful for discriminating between the existing wing colors, even before new colors were added.)
Of course. Almost all long-term processes do; in a complex system, every shot is a long shot. History is built on improbable coincidences.
Could be, sure. It's far less likely to be than a "de novo" mutation, though. From the paper you cite, it looks like less than half of gene duplications are harmful.
1% of your genes are duplicated and fixed every million years? That sounds pretty reliable to me. I honestly wouldn't have thought duplication was that good at producing useful raw material for evolution.
Seems pretty straightforward to me: really low mutation rates are bad, really high mutation rates are bad, a moderate mutation rate is good. If you read Goldilocks and the Three Bears as a kid, it shouldn't be too hard to wrap your head around.
Sure, and if you can find an article on space travel that doesn't mention the Apollo missions, it proves the moon landings were a hoax. Or something.
For added irony, that the second article you link to (the bat echolocation one) actually does discuss its evolution, and in fact reports on yet another "incomplete" version of echolocation that's been discovered in fruit bats. Apparently they don't even need a vocal apparatus to generate echolocation clicks; they just snap their wings!
Smut, there are many scientists who are theists and members of organized religions and who accept the evidence for evolution. Why is that? Are they really closet atheists? Or are you and Phil clueless about evolution?
Sure I have an argument Mike. Let me just add that atheists insult every Pastor, creationist and/or theologian who has spent her or his life studying "God" by claiming they are all idiots and that they accept and promote a theory for which they have no evidence only to advance theism.
Who's wasting their time, atheists or theists?
I found this on Wikipedia: The World Factbook gives the population as 7,095,217,980 (July 2013 est.) and the distribution of religions as Christian 33.39%, Muslim 22.74%, Hindu 13.8%, Buddhist 6.77%, Sikh 0.35%, Jewish 0.22%, Baha'i 0.11%, other religions 10.95%, non-religious 9.66%, atheists 2.01% (2010 est.).
I have no bias and I would much rather there wasn't anyone up there tallying up my life's deeds, but my inner gut and these stats make me wonder if I should ever seriously listen to an atheist.
To answer your questions about other %'s Michael Fugate, conformity is a good answer for the reason why people might flock together in a particular school of thought (religious included). Nazis, ISIS, pre 20th century Mississippians, etc., teach us how this could happen despite being ass backwards and off in a belief system.
The next time I am arbitrarily looking for a group not to listen to I will get the distribution of eye colors and studiously ignore anyone with brown eyes.
Makes as much sense as #73's comment.
Again, conformity. Theists who believe that macro evolution is fact might just be rolling with the masses. Science and theology are just side interests for me, but I do want the truth and I personally never saw anything to convince me that I came from a monkey. I need to see some bones in transition from one creature to the next (among other things) to get me to join the evolutionists. Not a bunch of "smart people" making a bunch of assumptions about something they never saw.
I'm not looking for a club to join Dean, just the truth. Is there a God or not?
Smut - did you look at the link I provided? Or are you just here to get insulted by atheists? (While lying about your intent.)
Smut - it is up to those who claim there is a god to provide the evidence.
Smut Jenkins,
You were advised to “visit Talk Origins and come back either with arguments against what you found there”. While you are there, you might enjoy Mark Isaak’s outline describing how he can visualize bombardier beetles evolving. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/bombardier.html
You might notice how he doesn’t get mired up in trivialities like random DNA replication errors, but he is writing for suckers who won’t be troubled by such omissions.
===
Anton Mates,
“Because you can’t tell us the difference between right and wrong without an elaborately annotated lecture that doesn’t actually exist yet.”
It wouldn’t be that elaborate. Take the decalogue as a basis. Suspend the sabbath for the times of the Gentiles, but retain the reason for it. Elevate the adultery and homicide commandments to include private infractions that occur in the mind.
-
“There would be no point in trying; not only is that probability basically incalculable, but even if you knew it, it wouldn’t tell you anything about whether these mutations actually occurred.”
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.
-
“The whole point of the Japanese letter you cited was that it didn’t have to be “just the right receptors“; genetic drift could have led to any old receptor, and then the wing colors could have been selected to match.”
Right. There’s no reason for this to be anything but easy and simple.
-
“Almost all long-term processes do; in a complex system, every shot is a long shot.”
Yeah, I think that’s why the doubts about mutations and selection will persist.
-
“History is built on improbable coincidences.”
No, history is built on conscious decisions, and so are systems.
-
“That is really screwy.
Seems pretty straightforward to me: really low mutation rates are bad, really high mutation rates are bad, a moderate mutation rate is good. If you read Goldilocks and the Three Bears as a kid, it shouldn’t be too hard to wrap your head around.”
Yeah, but that’s the problem. Goldilocks had to discriminate between too hard and too soft.
“Successful organisms have thus evolved the means to repair their DNA efficiently but not too efficiently, leaving just enough genetic variability for evolution to continue”.
The obvious problem is that these organisms having to ‘evolve’ the repair mechanisms and find the just-right bed with nothing but random errors. Errors don’t care about evolution continuing, but the accidental replication enzymes do….they want no part of it.
-
“For added irony, that the second article you link to (the bat echolocation one) actually does discuss its evolution”
Not quite. What is says is that “..a solid model for the evolution of the sophisticated laryngeal echolocation employed by microbats remains elusive…”
But the point is that the features in the eels and bats are beyond the scope of accidents and coincidence. This is what I mean by no limits. Nothing will ever be so complicated that it will be an embarrassment at the altar.
I did read your link Walt and thanks. I'm familiar with the definition of "theory" when discussing science, but I still cannot get on the bandwagon with the theory. I haven't seen any convincing transitional fossils and I'm thinking there should be plenty. My Christian friends have some websites they like to push as well so tough to discern who's on point. I'm not here to be insulted by atheists, but look to understand different perspectives.
Smut Jenkins,
"I’m not looking for a club to join Dean, just the truth. Is there a God or not?"
The fact that human history is being steered to a conclusion forecast many centuries ago is the easiest evidence to absorb. We are rather fortunate in that we are living as the players and circumstances of the end-times drama are being staged, with Israel front and center. On the other hand, our position in history leaves us pretty much without excuse if we refuse to notice.
I googled transitional fossil images (and read your suggestion) to see if I missed something Walt, and everything was less than convincing.
You got evidence for gods, Smut? I willing to listen - lay it on the line buddy. It is probably as imaginary as Phil's evidence for moral absolutes and intelligent design, but as GW Bush said "bring it on."
Phil, end times now? - too funny. Chrisitians have been predicting the end times since Jesus was a lad and they have always been wrong. Clueless about science and clueless about your own religion.
Smut,
If you actually did do some reading at talk origins, you must have missed this page:
http://talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/compare.html
This page shows some hominid fossils. If, as you claim, there are no transitional fossils, then all of these fossils on this page should be easily classified as either "ape" or "human" fossils. A transitional fossil, if one exists, should have features of both "ape" and "human" and thus should be difficult to classify.
This page also show the opinion of various creationists as to whether each one is "ape" or "human". Since I don't actually expect that you'll look at the page, I'll provide the spoiler: for many of these fossils, creationists cannot agree as to whether the specimen is an ape or human. If there are no transitional fossils as you claim, why would this be the case?
Phil,
I detect some poor logic in one of your posts. You claim that the fact that the sickle cell trait confers a 10-fold increase in resistance to malaria is not such a great improvement. You argue that this is not really a beneficial mutation because it only provides imperfect resistance to malaria. That, however, is precisely the type of thing that is expected from an unguided evolutionary process, namely imperfect improvements. That is precisely the opposite of what one expects from an intelligently designed system. Why would a designer provide only an imperfect resistance to a deadly disease? Why would an intelligent designer use a mechanism to confer even an imperfect resistance that could cause other problems? Why would a designed system include potentially fatal genetic disorders in the first place?
You think you are arguing against evolution, but your contortions are actually making the case AGAINST your own position. Keep on arguing, Phil!
Phil:
Scientists don't find ID creationism repugnant, we find it useless and (some versions of it) contrafactual*. This is why I've just replied once to your @13 post, in @22, and not since: because once you admit that you have can't give a satisfactory creationist hypothesis and you can't even tell me why you can't give me one (that was what you said in @13), you have essentially left the world of science altogether. At that point, for me, it doesn't matter how improbable you think some evolutionaly sequence is, because you have no testable alternative explanation. The
*Some examples: the flood story is contrafactual. Special creation is contrafactual. The genesis order of creation is contrafactual. YEC timelines for the formation of the earth are contrafactual.
Some other interesting tidbits:
Smut @73:
Very strange how, in a single post, you imply that (relatively low) number of atheists is a reason to reject it, but then go on two paragraphs later to say that conformity is a reason for getting (relatively large) numbers of believers in things. Do you realize your fifth paragraph in @73 is an argument against what you argue in the third paragraph of @73?
Phil @79:
Holy schlamoly! Did I read that right Phil? Your "objective morality" includes mind crimes?
On the question of objective morality, I'll point out that you haven't really solved the problem I outlined in @8: religious "objective" morality claims are just as subjective as nonreligious subjective morality claims, because in both cases it is humans making claims, and we have no objective, agreed-upon way of separating the correct human-claimants from the incorrect ones (or even know if there is such a thing as objectively correct).
Smut: I meant to read more than CA201. What in CA202 did you find unconvincing? Why is it not convincing?
Since I'm here... Phil @79:
Showing you still don't understand or don't accept selection. The environment (and other animals) function as the discriminator, and they don't need any goal or sentience to do so. The process works basically like this: many critters are born with various mutations. Some of those mutations affect mutational rate itself. There is no 'direction' to such mutations: some critters will have mutations that make the rate faster or increase the number per generation, while others will hve mutations that make the rate slower or decrease the number. The families and family lines whose mutational rate leads to less viable childen slowly die off. The ones whose mutational rate leads to more children come to dominate the gene pool. No intelligence needed; just the simple process of species being more or less successful at leaving offspring depending on their genetic characteristics.
This is really not very hard to understand: mutation produces a wide variation of abilities, and the environment around the critter unthinkingly, mindlessly penalizes or rewards the critter for being born with their mutations.
Smut @80:
Sure, let's go with 'Christian friends' as if you really are a neutral third party. Have your Christian friends used their website explanations to find new species? Predict exactly what we may find and where we may find it? Do they help us understand genetic relatedness? Can their websites help us to understand biogeography?
See, good scientific theories and explanations do work. They help us design experiments and decide what experiments to do. They help us decide (for example) whether there will be a Tiktaalik-like fossil worth looking for, and if so, what age of rock we will most likely find it in. If an explanation - like creationism - doesn't do anything like that, because every answer is basically "well, what you will find in the ground is what God put there," then its useless, and no scientist is going to give it the time of day.
Smut, perhaps you can explain what you find unconvincing about fossils and evolution. For instance, why not lay out which bones would be lost and gained in the transition from a bony fish to an amphibian? I am sure you have studied this in enough detail that you know all the bones and muscles so you can understand comparative anatomy, no? Why not lay out all the skull changes in air breathing land vertebrates as they become fully aquatic? This has happened in several lineages, are they all the same? Or how about going from land vertebrates to flying, again something that happened in more than one lineage. But of course you know all this having studied like Jenny McCarthy at the "University of Google", no? What would you expect to see if in your opinion evolution is true, that you are not seeing?
@73
"Sure I have an argument Mike. Let me just add that atheists insult every Pastor, creationist and/or theologian who has spent her or his life studying “God” by claiming they are all idiots and that they accept and promote a theory for which they have no evidence only to advance theism."
I am confused what the term "God" means. What are these thinkers studying? If one 'proves' the existence of a higher being through some philosophical argument like the ontological argument, etc, all one has done is posit the existence of an abstract Archimedian point. One then has to posit attributes that this 'god' has. It is like hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree. The three typical attributes are infinite power, infinite goodness and infinite knoweldge. However, it is a very simple demonstration to show that if these three attributes adhere simulaneously in the defined god, he doesn't have anything to do with our world. There seems to be as many attributes of this god as there are people.
The problem that I have with religion is that it ignores the brute facticity and immense weight of the world that confronts every living thing.
Reality constrains our perceptions, intuition and memory. We constantly interact with the world and the feedback we receive corrects our cognitive mistakes. This is science.
What are the corrective constraints on religious faith 'knowledge'?
Not that I have seen....
So just by being an atheist, he or she insults every theist? Does every Christian insult every Muslim just by being a Christian? How about every Hindu or Zoroastrian?
Are you actually claiming that biologists are all idiots? have no evidence for evolution? and are promoting evolution to advance atheism? I think Ken Miller and Francis Collins might have something to say about that.
I have no problems with people who haven't studied biology not accepting evolution - this is most of the public. I do have problems with people like you and Phil who claim to have studied it in detail and then declare that is all a sham and a conspiracy. A idea without evidence. It is the height of hubris.
There are atheists and theists who want to tie evolution to atheism for political purposes, so what? It doesn't mean it is only a political issue, certainly doesn't mean it is not scientific and without evidence. That some people try to politicize Christianity has no bearing on its truth, if it did then it would be obviously false. To believe that is to take a very cynical approach and can't possibly be true. People are religious for many different reasons and to try to generalize from a small subset give one an incorrect understanding. We even know that there are practicing Christians who are atheists - google that.
Sean T,
“You argue that this is not really a beneficial mutation because it only provides imperfect resistance to malaria. That, however, is precisely the type of thing that is expected from an unguided evolutionary process, namely imperfect improvements.”
Well, it is after all, the biggest float in the beneficial mutations parade.
===
eric,
“Did I read that right Phil? Your “objective morality” includes mind crimes?”
Actually, I don’t recall ever mentioning ‘objective’ morality. I mentioned absolutes, applied to myself.
With some things, the mind is definitely the more important consideration.
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“Showing you still don’t understand or don’t accept selection. The environment (and other animals) function as the discriminator, and they don’t need any goal or sentience…”
Yeah, I get all that. But you missed the problem in the quote from the article. So let’s try again:
“Successful organisms have thus evolved the means to repair their DNA efficiently but not too efficiently, leaving just enough genetic variability for evolution to continue”.
The first important phrase here is “evolved the means to repair their DNA efficiently”. The “means” is referring to special enzymes. And the mechanisms of evolution are DNA replication errors, and natural selection acting on the results of those errors if and when they result in changes in individuals, in populations.
So how did random mutations and selection evolve the “means”?
===
Pedr,
“The problem that I have with religion is that it ignores the brute facticity and immense weight of the world that confronts every living thing.”
That’s an interesting take. I have the same problem with the matchless faith invested in something as sappy as DNA replication errors and natural selection.
Phil,
Now we're getting somewhere! Let us know when you're done.
Not sure why you thought it was notable that they didn't try to calculate it, then?
Could be, though I think religious objections are a much bigger factor. Most people find quantum theory far more counter-intuitive than evolutionary theory...but they haven't been told that accepting quantum theory will send them to hell or turn them into hedonistic savages, so they're still cool with it.
Why can't it be both?
What, all systems are built on conscious decisions? Like, volcanoes and bacterial cultures and hurricanes and neutron stars? I suppose it's metaphysically possible, but I'm not sure what science can really do with the idea...
Bleh, blockquote fail. Ignore the previous comment, please.
Phil,
Now we're getting somewhere! Let us know when you're done.
Not sure why you thought it was notable that they didn't try to calculate it, then?
Could be, though I think religious objections are a much bigger factor. Most people find quantum theory far more counter-intuitive than evolutionary theory...but they haven't been told that accepting quantum theory will send them to hell or turn them into hedonistic savages, so they're still cool with it.
Why can't it be both?
What, all systems are built on conscious decisions? Like, volcanoes and bacterial cultures and hurricanes and neutron stars? I suppose it's metaphysically possible, but I'm not sure what science can really do with the idea...
That's because "too hard" and "too soft" were defined by her subjective comfort level. With mutation rates, "too low" and "too high" are defined by their impact on your reproductive success. Whoever's closest to the optimum will naturally have more descendants than anyone else; no one has to arrange for that to happen.
Enzymes don't care about anything; they're molecules, not people. They do whatever their structure dictates, and their structure is tuned by evolution.
"...this research adds a new piece to the puzzle by indicating that simpler echolocation may play a role in that evolution."
It's easy to miss things when you stop reading halfway through a sentence!
That may be your point, but this seems to be yet another case where the people actually studying those features disagree.
That's because the limits that actually matter aren't about complexity. Complex features are evolvable if you have sufficient time and and a sufficiently large population size. But if you expect that same feature to appear in a couple of generations in a tiny lab population, well, you'll probably be disappointed. Thus, limits.
The same way they evolve anything else? Random mutations alter the structure of those enzymes, affecting how efficiently they repair various types of DNA damage. Selection favors those mutations that push the repair efficiency toward the optimum for that environment.
We've seen this happen, by the way. E. coli strains in the lab have evolved massively improved radiation resistance, mostly due to mutations that made it easier to repair multiple simultaneous DNA breaks. Unless gods/aliens/whoever were secretly mucking around with their genes to freak out the biologists, mutation and selection can accomplish this task just fine.
Your words to me Fugate: "99.9% of all biologists, the people who study living systems, are convinced that evolution is the best explanation for the diversity of life on earth. Why is that? 70% of philosophers are atheists. Why is that? The less ignorant (more educated) one is the less likely one is to believe in gods and to adhere to religion. Why is that?"
Keeping with the spirit, I responded with %'s. You seem to be suggesting that I pay attention to the consensus of your group "the less ignorant (more educated)" people on the planet when trying to determine whether or not God exists. I say what if the rest of the world (in their stupidity) is onto something in acknowledging supernatural intelligence? Most of the world agrees that there is such a thing, why is that? Are the less than 5% of the world's population that are atheists smarter than everyone else? "Why is it that 70% of philosophers are atheists?" I don't know, but pride or excessive love of oneself could be an answer. I admit again that conformity plays a big part in either school of thought, but that doesn't prove the school of thought correct (as history has shown and will continue to show).
Another one of your comments: "Let me just add that Smut insults every biologist who has spent her or his life studying nature by claiming they are all idiots and that they accept and promote a theory for which they have no evidence only to advance atheism. It is a crap argument and my earlier comment is not an insult, but a fact."
I reused your words to ask again: which consensus is the right consensus? If you accuse me insulting biologists, look at yourself in the process because your posts indicate that you don't think believers are all that bright either. The pastors, creationists, rabbis, monks, etc. are spending precious time in pursuit of a higher truth - attempting to access and stay connected to a supernatural dimension and/or being. A good portion of scientists, and a bigger portion of atheists are concerned only with what they can observe and access with their natural senses. Who's "less ignorant (more educated)", and who's going the wrong way on the path to a greater understanding of all that can be understood? Is there a God or not? If there is, I assume that the one who is connected to him is "less ignorant (more educated)" than the one who disregards him and studies the natural world exclusively - much like interacting with an author might gain one greater insight than just reading the author's book alone.
Walt,
I did looked into the info you suggested.
&
Sean T,
I did not ignore yours, but looked at the information on those skulls and I too had a tough time distinguishing the apes from the humans.
However, in response to both of you, the links were not enough to confirm (to me personally) that we evolved from monkeys. I see a thorough case being presented, but nothing thoroughly convincing. I would expect to see all types of fossils that showed conclusively that animals were evolving into others. Bones as indisputable as dinosaur fossils. If the dinosaurs are billions of years older than we are, and we can gather enough bones to assemble an accurate picture of their skeletal structure, why isn't there an abundance of entire skeletons of species in transition? Shouldn't they be all over the place? Shouldn't that famous monkey to man evolution drawing be a reality in a museum some place? The average joe (non scientist) should be able to go to the University of Google and see for themselves conclusively that macro evolution happened - especially if they are being taught that this explains their origin. The skull photos on Talk Origins (along with others I've seen in the past) leave me unsatisfied, wondering about a more complete picture that I assume would be easy to assemble if creatures have in fact been evolving for billions of years. I hear their argument about the changes being tiny and gradual, but there should be much more to go on if evolution wants to exclude itself from being a faith movement.
Michael Fugate: "What would you expect to see if in your opinion evolution was true, that you are not seeing?" More.
Phil,
"The fact that human history is being steered to a conclusion forecast many centuries ago is the easiest evidence to absorb. We are rather fortunate in that we are living as the players and circumstances of the end-times drama are being staged, with Israel front and center. On the other hand, our position in history leaves us pretty much without excuse if we refuse to notice." Can you elaborate? What evidence should be absorbed? How do we know we are living in the "end times" and what exactly should we notice about our position in history? You seem to know much more about both the theory of evolution and Christianity than I do, that being said: are they in any way compatible? Having investigated both, what makes you embrace one origin explanation over the other (if you don't mind my digging)?
Phil:
Are you asking "historically, I want to know the exact sequence," or "how could evolution possibly have done this?"
I can't answer the first. Nobody can. But then again, we don't have to in order for the TOE to be the best explanation and a useful theory, so while the former would certainly be nice to have, its not something scientists cry themselves to sleep about not having.
As to the second, here's an example sequence, all the steps of which are pretty well known to be possible because we see them happening in other cases:
1. an organism has a sequence that codes for enzymes used for some (other) purpose.
2. A duplication error results in a second copy of the sequence.
3. Mutation acts on one of the copies (we will call the mutated one 'sequence 2' just to keep them straight, but it could be either one). This is not particularly deleterious to the organism, since sequence 1 still gives the organism the phenotypic trait that had the original selective advantage.
4. The massive number of 'sequence 2 variants' in the population eventually produce one or more individual with a sequence 2 that can be co-opted for mutational regulation.
5. The individuals with the sequence mentioned in step #4 have an adaptive advantage. So eventually that sequences fixes and propagates through the population via selective forces. Conversely, the individuals with a sequence 2 that impacts mutational regulation in a negative way (i.e., causes them to leave less offspring or less fit offspring) get weeded out of the population by those same selective forces.
As I said above, its not that hard to understand.
Phil:
I am not sure what "absolute, applied to myself" even means. Are you saying we each have our own, different, absolute morality? That sounds like subjective morality to me. Or is there one absolute morality? If the latter, see the problem I outline in @8.
Smut @96:
I don't think native intelligence has anything to do with it. The distribution of smart/average/dumb is pretty much the same everywhere, but different regions have different religions...and they are contradictory. With no single religion being a majority, this logically entails that no matter what the right metaphysics is, billions of people and a majority of humans have it wrong.
So I think both sides should knock off the 'opponents are stupid' schtick - both in terms of saying it (which is rare), and in claiming the other guy said it to them when what the other guy really said was just 'you are wrong' (much more common). Smut, I think your Christian friends [cough] have their metaphysics wrong. That doesn't imply I think they are stupid. Stop claiming the first necessarily implies the second.
I would say that what we observe and access with our senses is pretty much a high priority for most humans, regardless of profession or religious belief. Its why we all get up and go to work (or classes) in the morning - including you, Smut - because we are very concerned with controlling and influencing the state of the natural, physical world around us. The people who aren't concerned with it sit in caves meditating.
As for your only, that is either tautologically true or false depending on what you consider the natural world. Tautologically, atheists aren't going to concern themselves with things they don't believe exist. Atheists may care about what God-believers do, but you're right that they don't spend any time caring about what God will do. That's kind of tautologically part of what it means to be an atheist.
OTOH, if you are trying to imply that scientists and atheists don't care about stuff like love, art, aesthetics, ethics, justice, a sense of wonder, etc... because they aren't "things" the way protons and neutrons are things, well then I think you are wrong; blatantly and obviously wrong, in fact.
Phil,
The link I provided to those skulls was not intended to be definitive evidence in favor of the evolution of humans from earlier ape-like ancestors (not monkeys, BTW). They were intended as a falsification of the claim that "there are no transitional fossils." If you cannot tell whether a fossil is ape or human, how in the world can you argue that it is anything BUT a transitional fossil. I agree that, while certainly suggestive, such skulls by themselves don't necessarily provide definitive evidence of the human evolutionary lineage. Fortunately, the entire human evolutionary lineage does not rely solely on these fossil finds.
Phil,
BTW, that's one of the problems I think that people who oppose evolution generally have. They look at each piece of evidence we provide you individually and claim, probably correctly, that "this evidence is not definitive proof of evolution." While it is true that any one observation is insufficient to demonstrate evolution, when presented with new evidence you conveniently ignore all the previous evidence that was presented. It is precisely, however, the combination of different lines of evidence that is the most convincing argument for evolution. You creationists/IDers seem to miss that point.
Phil,
My apologies. I just realized that I should have addressed the above comments to Smut Jenkins, not you.
How can you find something when you don't know what you are looking for? You want a time lapse movie of life on earth. What is your alternative - if you don't think there is enough similarity in primates to assume common ancestry?
Ignorance is not stupidity, ignorance is a lack of knowledge -not an inability to know. That is the difference and why someone like you who claims to have studied the evidence in great detail and yet shows no signs that you understand any of it can't be called ignorant. You seem to be implying that because you don't understand something, it must be wrong - a very self-centered way of looking at things.
Is there a god? I can't say because god is defined differently by almost everyone - it is a very difficult concept to pin down. I would need a more coherent definition to make a conclusion - something no theologian seems to be able to do. I can easily profess ignorance of gods and the actions of gods - which why I cannot buy ID/creationism; its adherents are equally as ignorant as I am. On the other hand, did life evolve? Do living things share common ancestry? Does natural selection work? I can easily answer yes to all these - it is as certain as any scientific theory can be.
Phil,
I suppose we are talking past each other. I am not so much interested in the intricacies of evolutionary theory via-a-via the bible. I am arguing more fundamentally. To talk about people who study ‘god’ is a meaningless phrase since you have not defined what ‘god’ is. It can only mean people who study how the term ‘god’ is defined and the logical implications of that definition. This is similar to mathematics. You define terms and then derive theorems. It is a leap to say that someone’s definition of ‘god’ refers to something actually existing. Your usage is very ethnocentric as well since roughly half the world’s population is something other than monotheistic.
During the 70’s and 80’s conservative Christians were in a research program loosely known as ‘biblical archaeology.’ This was quietly given up once it became clear that archaeology was disproving most of the stories of the Old Testament.
There are much broader reasons why the monotheisms based on ‘religions of the book’ have been positively falsified. Evolutionary theory is just one small nail in an otherwise nailed down coffin.
Well, Smut, TalkOrigins is probably the most concise resource you'll find. Science can't make things as simple as "Goddidit," so if you don't want to take the time to understand these 17 bullet points, religion might be for you.
If you did read them, what don't you find convincing? You mentioned fossils (and as Sean points out, your conclusion about the skulls implies that they are indeed transitional), but what about genetics? We share 98% of our genome with chimpanzees and a significant percentage with all life on Earth - including plants. (You should be able to find references for that on TalkOrigins.)
Anton Mates,
“Bleh, blockquote fail. Ignore the previous comment, please.”
That’s intriguingly similar to mutations and how they can affect organisms…small errors jacking the works. But you did a masterful job serving as a replication enzyme.
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“Now we’re getting somewhere! Let us know when you’re done.”
That’s plenty.
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“Could be, though I think religious objections are a much bigger factor.”
I don’t think so. Most people with a clear understanding of the how the process is supposed to work will recognize that there is something wrong. Any system dependent on extremely unlikely events is extremely unlikely to work.
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“With mutation rates, “too low” and “too high” are defined by their impact on your reproductive success. Whoever’s closest to the optimum will naturally have more descendants than anyone else”
How would too few DNA copy errors be detrimental to reproductive success?
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“Enzymes don’t care about anything; they’re molecules, not people. They do whatever their structure dictates”
Nice try, and you could probably pull that off if the enzymes didn’t back up and remove errors. How does that work? Are they smart?
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“and their structure is tuned by evolution”
But of course. Evolution cares enough to give us replication enzymes, but it also has to consider future generations.
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“That’s because the limits that actually matter aren’t about complexity.”
Of course they are. That’s why limits of any sort simply cannot be acknowledged. There is absolutely nothing so biologically complex that it will cause a materialist to say that it couldn’t happen accidentally.
===
Smut Jenkins,
“Can you elaborate? What evidence should be absorbed? How do we know we are living in the “end times” and what exactly should we notice about our position in history?”
Smut, it is a very involved, but the centerpiece is Israel. I’ll try to put an outline together. Give me a few days.
As to our position, the prospects for the US are very grim. Russia, Iran, Syria and others are in view (as eventual fodder). But America, by any or all of several means, appears destined to fold very hard…perhaps very abruptly.
===
eric,
“I can’t answer the first. Nobody can.”
Yeah, you have to wonder about how accidents could result in things so complex that the brightest fans can’t even begin to figure it out.
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“1. an organism has a sequence that codes for enzymes used for some (other) purpose.
2. A duplication error results in a second copy of the sequence.”
Oops, game over before it started. No organism replicates without replication enzymes, so no chance for a duplication error. Try again.
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“As I said above, its not that hard to understand.”
Of course. Once you’re working with imagination, there are no boundaries or obstacles. Anything is possible, and everything is clear, because there are no limits.
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“I am not sure what “absolute, applied to myself” even means. Are you saying we each have our own, different, absolute morality?”
No. Everyone chooses their own source for moral definitions.
===
Pedr,
“During the 70’s and 80’s conservative Christians were in a research program loosely known as ‘biblical archaeology.’ This was quietly given up once it became clear that archaeology was disproving most of the stories of the Old Testament.”
Pardon my doubts, but this has the watermark of an atheist pass-around story. Can you provide some documentation? Also, can you provide some examples of disproved stories?
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“There are much broader reasons why the monotheisms based on ‘religions of the book’ have been positively falsified.”
You have a very low threshold for positive falsification.
Phil,
Indeed...which is funny, considering that I like to think of myself as an intelligent designer. Apparently even I can't be empirically distinguished from a random process!
“Now we’re getting somewhere! Let us know when you’re done.”
That’s plenty.
...oh. Ok. Well, it was nice while it lasted.
Something wrong in the theological sense, yes. A couple of different US studies have found that scientific literacy correlates positively with acceptance of evolution...but only in those who are non-religious, or less religious. For the highly religious subset of the population, there's no correlation. (These studies were on Americans, so of course "religious" usually means "Christian" here. Jews, Hindus and Buddhists tend to be fine with evolution.)
In other words, the clearer your understanding of how evolution works, the more likely you are to accept it...unless you have religious objections against it.
Needless to say, the people with the clearest understanding of the process--scientists--overwhelmingly accept evolution.
Among other things, the Red Queen effect.
If your descendants have exactly the same DNA sequences that you do, then they'll have exactly the same loopholes and back doors in their immune system. Parasites and pathogens are always evolving to exploit those weaknesses, so your children and grandchildren will easily succumb to the new and improved diseases. OTOH, if your descendants have mutations, then their immune systems won't work exactly the same way, and the diseases which were adapted to your generation will have to catch up all over again.
Note that this effect isn't really dependent on a population's immune systems getting better over the generations, in any absolute sense. They just have to change a little bit with each generation. Moving targets are harder to hit; that's why your IT guy asks you to change your passwords every few months.
There was a nice demonstration of this effect in roundworms a couple of years ago.
...I'm honestly not sure if you're joking, but no, the enzymes are not smart. And they don't actually recognize "errors;" they recognize various types of physical DNA malformation. A broken strand, a base with an extra methyl group or a missing amine group, a pair of non-complementary bases. These are common signs of physical damage, which can be identified and repaired without knowing anything about the actual function of that DNA sequence.
When a mutation doesn't come with an obvious sign of damage like this--for instance, if a base pair happens to get removed from both strands--then repair enzymes won't fix it. In fact, they'll mindlessly maintain that mutation and perpetuate it for the next thousand generations. Because they're not smart.
Well...yes. That's what natural selection is, right? Traits that give you more descendants are favored.
I just pointed out a limit in the post you're responding to. Complex features are unlikely to evolve in a small population, over a short period of time. That's certainly a limit.
What you're asking for is a limit on complexity alone, that holds regardless of time and population size. And it's true, there's no evidence for that sort of limit. Think of it like this: there's a limit to how fast a tortoise can walk, but there's not much limit to how far it can walk, given time and food.
Phil,
Some places to start if you are actually interested.
Shifting Sands: The Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology, Thomas W. Davis, Oxford University Press (March 4, 2004)
Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?, William G. Dever, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (May 2003)
The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, Neil Silberman, Israel Finklestein, Touchstone; Free Press; Reprint edition (March 6, 2002)
The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel (Archaeology and biblical studies Book 17), Israel Finkelstein, Society of Biblical Literature (January 1, 2012)
Phil,
It's snowing today where I live. I am currently observing a single snowflake. According to accepted scientific theory, this snowflake is comprised of water molecules. Also according to accepted meteorological models, those water molecules existed as water vapor in the atmosphere prior to comprising the snowflake I am observing.
Questions: where were those water molecules yesterday? Why did those particular molecules aggregate to form my snowflake? The important point here is that the accepted scientific models cannot answer these questions. Should I doubt that my snowflake is made of water molecules that were once water vapor in the atmosphere simply because the current scientific model cannot account fully for their whereabouts over the last 24 hours, let alone for millions of years of their "evolution"?
Also a further point: that snowflake is a very complex system. Current models state that this complex system formed from the accumulation of randomly moving water molecules. I thought random accidents cannot produce complex systems, Phil. What gives here?
Further, I thought that you said that improbable events cannot be the explanation for the things we observe. Consider my snowflake. Let's assume for the sake of argument that it weighs one gram. That snowflake includes then (approximately) 3 x 10^23 water molecules. The entire atmosphere weighs approximately 5 x 10^15 kg, and is about 0.4% water (both numbers from Wikipedia article on the earth's atmosphere). That means that there is about 2 x 10^16 kg of water vapor in the atmosphere, which corresponds to about 7 x 10^41 water vapor molecules.
Now, the big question: what is the probability of selecting these particular 3 x 10^23 water molecules in my snowflake from the 7 x 10^41 molecules of water present in the atmosphere? There is a mathematical formula for this computation. When n is the number of total objects from which we can select, and k is the number to be selected, the formula for the number of possible permutations is P = n!/(n-k)!. If you are unfamiliar, the ! is notation for the factorial operation. For any integer n, n! = n * (n-1)*(n-2)...*2*1. This gives very large numbers even for small values of n, so for the values we need to consider, it gives enormously huge numbers. I lack the computational power to compute such large values, but fortunately, we can attempt to get an approximation for the number of permutations. Let's just do an order of magnitude calculations. The value of n!/(n-k)! is actually just equal to the product of the first k terms of the factorial of n. For instance 8!/(8-3)! is just equal to the product of the first 3 terms of the definition of 8!, namely 8*7*6. For our example, then, we see that we need the product of the first 3x10^22 terms of the factorial of 7x10^41. If we reduce this to an order of magnitude calculation, the first 10^22 terms of the factorial of 7x10^41 are all about 10^41 in terms of order of magnitude. Therefore, The order of magnitude of our desired number is (10^41)^(10^23) = 10^(4*10^24), which is an enormous number. It is a number with about an octillion digits.
The point is that the probability of the snowflake I am observing randomly assembling itself from the water molecules available in the atmosphere is much smaller than any probability bandied about for the improbability of any given organism's evolution. Should I then conclude that the snowflake I am observing does not really exist?
Phil:
If you only do it once, sure. If you do it billions of times and the chance of it working is millions to one, you're going to see it work quite often. This is simple lottery math, and it applies to evolution too: the odds of 'winning' may be long, but a high number of tickets purchased makes a 'winner' statistically likely.
We have begun to figure it out. That was the point of the sequence I gave you. What we don't have is videotape of exactly what happened when. If that is your standard of evidence before acceptance, then its ridiculous. On top of that, ID doesn't meet that 'videotape' standard either, so I assume that if that *is* your standard of evidence, you reject ID with as much vehemence as you reject evolution. That would be the rationally consistent thing to do, right?
Where did I say they replicate without replication enzymes? You asked for how an idea mutational rate could arise. I explained how it could arise from selection among variants that have nonideal mutational rates. Your response to is a non-sequitur.
So how is it absolute, if everyone chooses their own source? Your argument is still not making sense to me. As far as I can tell, you state up front that you think morality is absolute, but then every argument you give for that actually supports a subjective notion of it.
Anton:
Personally I like to analogize it to compound interest (because mutations on a previously mutated genome are, in fact, a form of compounding change). Not only is there no limit to the total amount of money you can reach, given enough time, but another point of analogy is that most people drastically underestimate the amount of change that can be achieved over a long period of time. The disbelief in evolution is, IMO, subtly linked to the fact that humans typically underestimate exponential growth.
I think you have to include that the intelligent designer is running chemistry as well as biology. Which is pretty ironic when you see that many of the anti-evolutionists are chemists - like the late Phil Skell member of the National Academy and prominently featured on the DI's dissent list. Also the leaders of the misnamed COPE (Citizens for Objective Public Education) are mostly chemists. It is so clear that this is apologetics; they see evolution as a threat to Christianity not as a threat to education or science.
"You have a very low threshold for positive falsification."
Not really. Look at your bible: There is no real historical evidence for the majority of the things described in the religious books (no great world-encompassing floods, for instance, and no geologic evidence for such, contradict the biblical and other flood myths). Again in the bible: there is no evidence to indicate that the census referenced in Luke was conducted in the manner described, there is the contradiction in timing (which has been "explained away" in all sorts of foolish ways) between the census that did occur happened and the time Luke and Matthew claim for Jesus' birth. It just didn't happen that way. If the response is that story is not meant to be factual but to represent some type of symbolism, it makes it difficult to take it seriously: it is simply a convenient legend. This, of course, speaks not at all to the complete lack of evidence for the existence of any person named Jesus, let alone figure of that name and background as represented in the bible.
Equally strong arguments can be made about the reality of most other major points - and there is the whole point that, despite your desperate gyrations and ridiculous assertions to the contrary, none of the prophecies hold up to scrutiny.
If the basic stories don't hold up to investigation, and prophecies are bogus, you don't have anything to stand on. The fact that you believe they are items of substance explains (to me at least) why you have so resolutely decided to abandon rational and scientific thought when it comes to evolution.
In addition to @112,
There is no archaeological evidence for a Jewish exodus as described in the Hebrew Bible / OT. It is a foundation myth ( Please reference the books I mentioned for the details @108 ).
If there was no exodus, the entire raison d'être for Christianity is gone. It is a myth founded on a myth.
What an entertaining lunch hour googling "end times" - I learned so much about the gullibility of my fellow humans.
One of my favorites - Michele Bachmann
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/michele-bachmann-gops-end-times-f…
Did you know that If you spell out the US President's full name, there are 18 letters and 18 divided by 3 is 6 - 666 is the mark of the beast? That is one of the saner moments in this morass of wackaloonery.
I agree, Michael, and it's nothing new - count the letters in each name of the 40th President: Ronald Wilson Reagan.
@114
It would be even funnier if these people didn't vote. Check out this link on Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Theology
Also see http://www.theocracywatch.org/
There are more than a few of these people in our government. Jim DeMint, who thankfully is gone, is a Dominionist.
The latest revelations from the US government lead to this joke:
How is torture like religion?
They both give you answers to your questions that are overwhelmingly likely to be wrong.
And those answers are believed by people who are certain the answers are perfectly accurate and so (unfortunately) act accordingly.
A rather cynical friend of mine says that if Jesus was a carpenter he must have worked for the government since no evidence of any real work exists.
A brief synopsis with links about recent genome sequencing in birds to look at evolutionary change. One note relevant to this continuing back and forth is a change in a gene which leads to dwarfism in humans also leads to shorter wings in penguins. Shorter wings are an advantage when flying in water compared to air. Once again mutations are contextual - beneficial in some populations and detrimental in others. Not to mention having the same gene in two widely separated lineages....
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/11/birds-evolution-feathers…
Anton Mates,
“…oh. Ok. Well, it was nice while it lasted.”
You sound mildly deflated. If you have a particular point of curiosity, I’ll address it if I can.
-
“If your descendants have exactly the same DNA sequences that you do, then they’ll have exactly the same loopholes and back doors in their immune system. Parasites and pathogens are always evolving to exploit those weaknesses”
I don’t think mutations or mutations rates have anything to do with this. Anitbodies adjust on the fly.
-
“And they don’t actually recognize “errors;” they recognize various types of physical DNA malformation.”
Oh, well that’s different.
-
“That’s what natural selection is, right? Traits that give you more descendants are favored.”
I understand the divinity of natural selection, but we’ve drifted away from the issue. How could mutations generate the replication enzymes?
===
Sean T,
“that snowflake is a very complex system”
It doesn’t replicate itself. If you want to use something inanimate to illustrate accidental biological results, you’ll have to find something like a rock slide that built a castle....or at least a snowman.
===
eric,
“a high number of tickets purchased makes a ‘winner’ statistically likely”
Very poor analogy. Lotteries have a purpose, and willing participants.
-
“Where did I say they replicate without replication enzymes? You asked for how an idea mutational rate could arise.”
No, I asked “So how did random mutations and selection evolve the “means”, referring to the “means to repair their DNA efficiently” that was mentioned in the article. Let me try again.
Once upon a time, there were no replication enzymes, and no replicating organisms. So, to keep things in order, which came first, the enzymes, or the organism that requires the enzymes to replicate?
-
“So how is it absolute, if everyone chooses their own source? Your argument is still not making sense to me.”
It isn’t an argument. Anyone can choose whatever pleases them. They could let Gandhi or Walt Disney decide what their morals should be, or make up their own. Their choice would not preclude absolutes.
-
“mutations on a previously mutated genome are, in fact, a form of compounding change”
That really doesn’t work at all. If it did, E coli would have found a way to utilize citrate long before Lenski.
===
Michael Fugate,
“The rise of the birds began about 65m years ago. A mass extinction – probably caused by an asteroid collision – wiped out most of the larger-bodied dinosaurs, but left a few feathered creatures.”
But archaeopteryx was supposed to be around 150 million years ago, and this one 10 million years earlier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurornis which didn’t have the bony tail. But then that complicates this story http://phys.org/news/2013-08-shortening-tails-gave-early-birds.html
-
“The loss of so many other species freed up vast ecological niches, giving these animals an unprecedented chance to diversify.”
I love that. Charming, in a stupid sort of way.
Do I hear crickets?
Never engage in the actual argument do you Phil? We answer you whines and you just jump to "but, what about this?"
No, Phil is supplying habitual dishonesty.
Phil's words to me: "Smut, it is a very involved, but the centerpiece is Israel. I’ll try to put an outline together. Give me a few days."
Give him a minute, I'm sure he's cookin' up a response to your good book bashing. I too am eager to read his perspective as his side of the argument has my attention.
If you are waiting for a serious answer from him you may want to measure time on a different scale
"But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day." 2 Peter 3:8
Apparently god has trouble with time too.
I've long wondered where cable installers got their scheduling advice. Now I know.
Phil,
Well, after your whole thing about how we need a strong rationale to keep bloodthirsty eugenicists from murdering sick people, I was kind of hoping you'd present a strong rationale. How am I supposed to beat Apocalypse in high school debate class now?
That's a different issue. Vertebrates do have individually adaptive immune systems, but they also have some genetic disease resistance traits from birth, and the latter are (of course) affected by mutations.
And even those adjusting antibodies you mention are the product of random mutation and selection; it's just at the level of individual cells rather than entire organisms.
It certainly is if you're trying to claim that DNA repair enzymes are intelligent.
Go back to my post @95; we've seen mutations improve DNA repair enzymes in E. coli. Why couldn't they generate them in the first place?
How is that a problem for the analogy? Lots of tickets purchased still produces a likely winner, even in a pointless lottery with unwilling participants.
Logically, the enzymes would have to come first. Which implies that any organisms before that point did not require those enzymes to replicate. Presumably they didn't replicate as efficiently or as reliably as modern organisms, but that wouldn't be a problem if there weren't any modern organisms to compete with yet.
It's also possible (though doubtful) that there were no replicating organisms before the first appearance of such enzymes. In the laboratory, RNA replicators have assembled spontaneously from free-floating bases in the presence of a replicase enzyme.
So if unguided evolution doesn't work so incredibly well that all organisms reached perfection long ago, it must not work at all? That's a perfect example of a false dichotomy.
(Anyway, I don't think E. coli had much reason to evolve to eat citrate before Lenski. There's not a ton of citric acid floating around in its natural habitat.)
Yep. Birds existed before the bigger dinosaurs went extinct, but they diversified hugely in their wake. Just like mammals, actually.
yes it did
(Not that it would be a problem for evolutionary theory if it didn't have a bony tail. Different bird lineages evolved in different directions.)
Oh, well, it's gotta be wrong then. We certainly wouldn't expect the evolution of all life on earth to be complicated.
Phil, snark on bird evolution is just another version of the old creationist canard -"if man evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"
How many ways can he misunderstand - I've lost count.
Smut Jenkins,
“You seem to know much more about both the theory of evolution and Christianity than I do, that being said: are they in any way compatible?”
I do not think they are at all compatible.
-
“Having investigated both, what makes you embrace one origin explanation over the other (if you don’t mind my digging)?”
I don’t mind at all Smut. The short version of why I reject natural origins is that I have a limited tolerance for coincidence, and no tolerance for sweeping complicated things under rugs just to fool people into believing accidents can result in miracles. Fantastic research, like that described in this very recent article, further illustrates the staggering complexity involved in managing the information in multi-billion component genomes.
http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/41653/title/DNA-…
To me, if you’re looking for evidence of a Designer, this is having your nose rubbed in it.
-
“How do we know we are living in the “end times” and what exactly should we notice about our position in history?”
As I mentioned earlier, this is a very large subject that begins in Genesis and winds up in the Revelation. I can’t adequately summarize it all in a few paragraphs, but I will do a brief outline, and list some of the current points of interest.
First, on the Tuesday evening prior to the crucifixion, Jesus responded to questions from the disciples about the end times. They were all at the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, and His answers, recorded in Matthew 24-25, Mark 13 and Luke 21 is called the Olivet Discourse. It is easy and interesting to compare current events to the things He mentioned, but in the school of thought that I follow, we only see the similarities as precursory symptoms. He was specifically addressing a particular generation of Jews, the one that will be extant when the things described in the Revelation occur.
Israel is the centerpiece of the end times. Daniel recorded (chapter 9) that:
“Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy.”
It becomes clear that the weeks are about years, not days, as he continues:
“Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times….And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off”
Seven + threescore and two = 69. That leaves one week on the table, but there is a stall between Messiah being cut off at the crucifixion, and this last seven year week. We believe this period is in view here:
“…Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled” Luke 21:24b
We see a clue for the length of this time period in an odd verse recorded by the prophet Hosea:
“After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight.” (6:2)
If days are reckoned as millennia (see Pedr’s verse above, but the NIV loses the urgency of the statement), the two days would be something around two thousand years, and the third day would represent the thousand year period repeatedly mentioned in Revelation 20.
The end of the times of the Gentiles is obviously tied to the reformation of Israel. (Any and all previous historical expectations about end times that occurred prior to this just weren’t paying attention.) Ezekiel records the general development of a nation, and a national identity, being revived in chapter 37. I won’t quote the whole thing, but if you choose to read it, it is important to notice verses 19-22. After Solomon, Israel was split into two kingdoms ruled by his sons. The northern one was called Israel, the southern called Judah. Ten of the twelve tribes were in the north, and two in the south. Israel was conquered by Assyria and hauled away, with no notable return ever taking place. (I wish I had more time to talk about this, but if you’ve heard the phrase “lost tribes of Israel”, that is what is in view.) On the other hand, Judah, the southern kingdom, was eventually conquered by Nebuchadnezzar, and hauled away to what is known as the Babylonian captivity, which lasted 70 years. Daniel and Ezekiel were part of this. The important thing to notice is that Israel is reunited into a single kingdom. Jews as diverse as the Falasha (from Ethiopia) and Bnei Menashe (India) have returned, and will continue to gravitate back to the promised land.
I should mention that quite a few Bible thumpers knew long before 1948 that Israel would eventually be reassembled. But nobody could (or would have let themselves) imagine that it would take the madness of the Nazi holocaust to initiate it. It is sickening, but expected, to see hatred for the Jews again on the rise, but this will serve to further the regathering of the chosen people.
There is a lot more, but that will have to suffice for the restoration of Israel as a critical benchmark. We do however, have other indications that hold our attention and expectations. There are at least two passages that indicate that plots and invasions will take place. One is Psalm 83. You can read the whole thing for details, but if you keep up with the news, you will recognize the sentiment expressed in verse 4 being often repeated by the mullahs:
“They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.”
Another passage is found in the chapter of Ezekiel following the one I mentioned above. Here, a nasty alliance composed of Russian entities, Iran and others are in view. You can find all kinds of things to read about this, and opinions about the timing, but nobody really knows. Time will tell.
One more detail before I note some things that link the end times to other things besides Israel. Not so long ago, Syria was just an obscure place for most people. But just in the last couple of years, it has garnered huge attention. Damascus is said to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, and Isaiah 17:1 makes this very frank announcement about the fate of this ancient city:
“The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap.”
Nobody should be surprised if someone make the wrong move and the IDF or someone else wastes this place.
The end times are linked in several passages to moral collapse. 2 Timothy 3 and 2 Peter 3 note the general indications, quite noticeable now with morality all but upside down. Romans 1:18 and following lists quite a few specific things we are seeing.
1 Timothy 4 specifically notes that even segments of Christianity will become host to grotesque doctrinal departures. Also, 2 Thessalonians 2:3,4 speaks of this:
“Let no one in any way deceive you, for it will not come unless the apostasy comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God”
This also introduces us to two other end times subjects. The first is the antichrist. I won’t go into all that is known, or what is not known about this person. You can find plenty to read, most of it not worth knowing. Later in this same passage, we can figure out that he will only be revealed to those who will be around to endure what he will do.
The second subject is the Temple. There are people in Israel devoted to and prepared for the rebuilding of this structure. There is also an incredibly bitter dispute concerning the site. We will just have to wait and see how this pans out.
That’s about all I have time for right now Smut, but if you are looking to get a toe-hold into this very broad subject, this will give you a search basis. There are lots of good sources, and probably even more charlatans and sensationalists. I can give you some names if you’re interested.
Phil it is amazing how you dismiss the scientists because you claim they don't have proof but make the assumption that a historical Jesus existed, and proceed directly into numerology for your end times twaddle. Where is the proof for this magical jesus? (Dont bother with the fact that none of the stories of the things around his birth align with fact, or that deails of the crucifixion dont either. What proof outside the book of legends known as the bible can you present? After all, no proof means it can't be believed, right?
@131 “but in the school of thought that I follow”
Of course, your post-millennialist and a-millennialist friends will completely disagree with you. Not to mention all the schools of thought over the anti-christ, the tribulation and the rapture.
According to Gordon-Conwell’s Center for the Study of Global Christianity, there are over 41,000 Christian organizations worldwide. You must therefore hope that your eternal salvation does not depend on picking the right one.
Interestingly, a fairly common view today among theologians – you know, those who think about god – is universalism - meaning that Christ has redeemed all creation and everyone will go to heaven – even atheists – whether we want to or not. Therefore, I wouldn’t worry.
I for one, think that Jesus returned in 70 AD for believers. We are descendants of the left behind. According to god, it’s just been two days - being two thousand years. Since we’re the left behinds, we’ll all go to hell – including you Phil – so your belief avails you nothing…it’s just a school of thought, of course, with no more evidence for it than yours. Evidence is for science anyway, not religion.
Thank you Phil. Please do me the favor of sharing the names/websites of people you recommend who might further enhance my understanding.
"The World Factbook gives the population as 7,095,217,980 (July 2013 est.) and the distribution of religions as Christian 33.39%, Muslim 22.74%, Hindu 13.8%, Buddhist 6.77%, Sikh 0.35%, Jewish 0.22%, Baha’i 0.11%, other religions 10.95%, non-religious 9.66%, atheists 2.01% (2010 est.)."
Sorry to post that again, but I have to differ with your cynical friend from your earlier post Dean. Evidently Jesus' most obvious and longest lasting "work" was his ministry. The fact that the earth is overflowing with ministers, churches, believers, etc. indicates that some kind of work was indeed done. With a third of the present world following this person, one might argue that he is the most successful person to ever live based on the sheer volume of people he's influenced. Whoever he was, and whatever he did, he's prospered above every other institution by significant enough a margin that I'm forced to want to know more. All the supernatural stuff people can debate, but it starts getting a little silly when people try and say that there never was (a/the) Jesus.
On those flood myth stories, couldn't an argument be made that the amount of flood stories across different cultures (many containing similar details) might validate that there was indeed a global flood event? It could of got handed down as a story through different families and generations because they were actually descended from someone who was actually on the boat. China, the ancient American Indians, Egypt, all have accounts and they were all geographically spread out enough to make me curious how they might all embrace a flood story if they weren't all connected to it some how. We see pockets of conformity everywhere, but we know from the statistics listed above, from our debate here and everywhere else that people have a tendency to disagree just as much as they agree. If several cultures from geographically distant locations agree on a global flood event, one might have happened.
As for geological evidence for such an event, I've done some research - at the University of Google - and found a few possible repercussions of a global flood: whale fossils in deserts, animals suddenly/catastrophically killed while eating or giving birth, aspects of the grand canyon, seashells on mountain tops, fully erect trees preserved in sedimentary rock - to name a few. The ark itself could be frozen solid in Mt. Ararat (Genesis 8:4), or maybe used as much needed fire or building wood. It seems, according to the bible, that God is in the business of hiding things/treasures. All of us are in a perpetual life long state of discovery, and it could be that sometimes things are just hidden for a time and have yet to be discovered - like those definitive missing links between animals as they were evolving into others.
Walt,
You said: "Well, Smut, TalkOrigins is probably the most concise resource you’ll find. Science can’t make things as simple as “Goddidit,” so if you don’t want to take the time to understand these 17 bullet points, religion might be for you." Whatever the truth is, that is what's right for me. I can get through this life without having every single answer and detail about when and how "God did it", but I can't allow myself to be ignorant about his existence if in fact he exists.
Maybe the similar genetics you brought up are something worth considering when trying to link apes and humans together as family, but the average person may need more than that if they're going to agree with the theory that we actually are related. Under the "God did it" umbrella of creation, maybe common genetics are a sign of having the same designer who used similar codes/blueprints to program life? Maybe the similarities prove a common creator rather than ancestor - or both. Evolution is the only other choice (that I'm aware of) outside of the "God did it" explanation. I also see that it can (in some cases) give one the license to exclude God from creation and embrace atheism. What is the argument an atheist uses to support their belief that God doesn't exist? Something more substantial than: "I (we) haven't seen him, so therefore..." or the chicken/egg argument.
Or, a more realistic view: many centers of commerce and civilization sat near rivers, and rivers everywhere flood.
"Evidently Jesus’ most obvious and longest lasting “work” was his ministry. The fact that the earth is overflowing with ministers, churches, believers, etc. indicates that some kind of work was indeed done."
No, not at all. People cling to things for many reasons: family teaching, history, lack of education, or a complete rejection of looking at the world with a curious eye - like Phil.
"I’ve done some research – at the University of Google "
I spot the problem with your "research" right there. You've come away no more informed on the science of geology than the typical vaccination denier who claims vaccines cause autism. Your "research" has glossed over the impossibilities of having a ship large enough to hold the animals (not to mention their food) while made of wood to withstand the stresses: the impossibility of having it large enough for the animals in the first place, the impossibility of a small group of people dealing with the mass of food and waste that would be generated - and scores of other problems: how did they avoid having carnivorous animals eat - well, any of the other passengers? How did the animals move from the resting place of the ark to the rest of the world?
This is aside from the fact two contradictory versions of the flood story had to be massaged together to get the version you recognize from Genesis. Those versions state different reasons for the flood, different lengths, different instructions on how noah is to choose animals, and different stories about how everyone left the ark. Much of this difficulty is waived away with the "they are both valid, the differences simply represent different moral points" hand-waiving always used to distract you from the internal contradictions of these stories ("don't worry about the internal contradictions in what these people whom we consider the perfect source on other items, they really still mean the same thing here").
So no, the fact that people believe things is not an indicator that a person, mortal or god, named jesus actually existed. Note that we have historical for many other, lesser, players from the time he is alleged to have lived, but the only mention of him are the books of the bible - non written contemporaneously.
As Phil has demonstrated, hard core belief in religion (end days, "veracity" of prophecies, belief in signs of the end days) requires one to abandon much of modern science and declare that thousands of biologists, geologists, physicists, chemists, and others, are all wrong because of - well, nothing more than your say so. In short, like he has, you abandon your intellectual integrity.
Since you've said you're not a fan of Talk Origins, here are a couple of links to sites that talk about the problems with thinking there really was a biblical flood.
The first one is a little old but well written.
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSimanek/6flood.htm
This is thorough (although I will admit the formatting is well below optimal).
http://www.chem.tufts.edu/science/franksteiger/elders-flood-report.htm
This is telling: religion relies on people saying "I really don't care what the detailed answer about the world are: if I can hear a message I like then I'm good." It is also a little distressing then, like Phil, facts and science won't mean anything to you, as you are pre-dispositioned to ignore them.
The second item I note has been raised before: You are engaging in a faulty decision process. Even if all of the science work is discovered to be wrong, that in no way
a) Means that the only other explanation involves a creator
b) It in no way means that even if some magical creator is involved, it will be the one you choose. I could believe, for example, that Zeus is actually the real creator and, like one of the interminably badMission Impossible movies Tom Cruise has cursed us with, has spent the last few thousand years disguising himself and hiding his tracks, waiting for some pivotal world plot point to come forward. Poo-poohing that doesn't work: I can say "Aah, but Zeus is so powerful he can hide it from you." (You yourself allude to this idea when you say "God is in the business of hiding things/treasures": I say: no, it's Zeus who does that: the God you believe in is a feint made to divert attention from himself.)
You are correct when you say that you have to choose what is right for you: nobody can (or should) change that. But as Phil (and most other creationists and Discovery Institute folks) demonstrates, following the strict creationist word leads to a very ignorant world view, and much of reality indicating that everything you believe about the world and how it works is wrong.
Anton Mates,
“after your whole thing about how we need a strong rationale to keep bloodthirsty eugenicists from murdering sick people, I was kind of hoping you’d present a strong rationale. How am I supposed to beat Apocalypse in high school debate class now?”
You can’t win that debate. They are advocates of natural selection, and they can accuse you of abandoning the methods of nature and adopting religious sensibilities.
-
“Vertebrates do have individually adaptive immune systems, but they also have some genetic disease resistance traits from birth, and the latter are (of course) affected by mutations.”
But we are only inheriting 100-200 mutations per generation. Using Lenski’s number (for lack of any other number, feel free to substitute) only 1 in a million could be beneficial. So it might take thousands of generations for a helper to occur. I don’t think we should be expecting mutations to help us out.
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“It certainly is if you’re trying to claim that DNA repair enzymes are intelligent.”
I didn’t claim that, I just asked if they were smart. But any way you look at it, if the check and repair enzymes detect a flaw, remove it and replace it, this is obviously not just a chemical reaction.
-
“we’ve seen mutations improve DNA repair enzymes in E. coli. Why couldn’t they generate them in the first place?”
Well maybe they could. And maybe horses could grow wings and fly to Saturn. But probably not. They are very complex, and each enzyme has a specific function. Before you write them off as accidental productions, maybe a review is in order.
http://quizlet.com/4032717/dna-replication-flash-cards/
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“How is that a problem for the analogy? Lots of tickets purchased still produces a likely winner, even in a pointless lottery with unwilling participants.”
Well, this depends of the particular lottery. If there is a winning ticket printed, then this is not a random game because a winner was intended. On the other hand, it this is a lottery whereby the participants choose number sequences, there may or may not be a winner. That’s better, but an open random system still doesn’t really approximate getting a functional protein. And you still need to have attendants whose job is to make sure that there is no winner. These would be the enzymes.
-
“Logically, the enzymes would have to come first.”
No, that doesn’t work. Enzymes this complex, even assuming that they could form accidentally, are not going to be sustained by the selection fairy while they have nothing to do. Sorry, but this is not a union job.
-
“any organisms before that point did not require those enzymes to replicate.”
They didn’t? Then I’m sure you can produce evidence of those kind of organisms. To the best of my knowledge, the leanest gene set for any replicating organism is around 250, and there are none that I have ever heard of that do not depend on those enzymes.
-
“Presumably they didn’t replicate as efficiently or as reliably as modern organisms, but that wouldn’t be a problem if there weren’t any modern organisms to compete with yet.”
No, that would be a problem. Competition doesn’t have jack to do with replication.
I think we might have arrived at a critical juncture here where we are no longer involved in what science has actually discovered. This is theory-protecting faith.
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“So if unguided evolution doesn’t work so incredibly well that all organisms reached perfection long ago, it must not work at all?”
It sure looks that way. If E coli and Salmonella diverged 102 million years ago, you’d think that since they replicate every 20 minutes that they’d have at least found the chicken-shit mutations that would let them use genes that they already had before the divergence. To put this in perspective, you believe that a dog-sized mammal became sperm and blue whales in a fraction of that time. Sorry, but it’s your theory. You have to stick with it.
-
“Yep. Birds existed before the bigger dinosaurs went extinct, but they diversified hugely in their wake.”
I’m not so sure. I know that’s the story, but after reading about the bird fossils, there seem to be some doubts about the interpretation, and even the authenticity of the fossils.
-
“yes it did”
But that just doesn’t look like a bird. And I’m not the only one who noticed that birds don’t have tails, or forearms and claws. I also didn’t see feathers in that particular fossil. Did you? Maybe this was just a case of seeing what you want to see.
Also, I did see at least one scientist who was not 100% convinced that this Aurornis fossil is not a fraud. When I was in Beijing, I bought a Rolex, and now I’m starting to wonder if I didn’t get ripped off.
===
Pedr,
“Of course, your post-millennialist and a-millennialist friends will completely disagree with you. Not to mention all the schools of thought over the anti-christ, the tribulation and the rapture.”
Yeah, I’ve had lots of very irritating conversations with them, but only a very few with universalists. You could call them all disposalists. They want to feel the thrilling importance of taking a doctrinal position, but they have to get rid of the plain and simple indications of the text to arrive at their conclusions. They are easy culls.
-
“You must therefore hope that your eternal salvation does not depend on picking the right one”
Sorry, but it has never been a matter of picking. It is about being chosen. This is really frustrating for those who decide to be excluded, but Acts 13:48b is a fantastic reversal in perspective concerning the interaction between faith/belief/trust and ordination. You can review if for yourself, but don’t misunderstand your side of the equation. If you lose, it is because you make a conscious decision to be a loser.
===
Smut, you are going to be just fine. I will put together some names for you.
Smut,
I suppose so, although you could probably make a similar case for Julius Caesar (two thirds of the present world uses the Latin writing system), Karl Marx or Alexander the Great.
It also seems a little weird to describe this as as a success for Jesus personally, considering that a) most of the world converted long, long after he died, and b) Christianity has been wracked by endless schisms and infighting since its foundation. How many modern Christians live in a way that remotely resembles what Jesus recommended for his followers? (I'm not saying they should live that way, I just think he'd be about as baffled as any other 1st-century dude if he looked at modern humanity.)
Not if you sort those stories out a little more carefully, I think. Yes, there is absolutely a family of related Noah-ish flood myths (angry gods, divine help given to one or two people who build a big boat, etc.), but they aren't found worldwide. They're pretty obviously Indo-European in origin, and you don't find them in other cultures except after extensive contact with missionaries. (The Biblical version doesn't particularly seem like the "original," either; in fact, it's rather unusual in being so monotheistic. Almost all the other versions involve a conflict between the gods.)
You do find myths about floods all around the world, granted, but they are often very, very different than the Noah/Deucalion/Ut-Napishtim story. For instance, in the main Chinese flood myth, the flood lasted for two generations and did not cover the whole Earth, so everyone didn't die but lots of people had to relocate. And the flood was ultimately contained and reversed by human emperors, who built dikes, walls and a drainage system!
So I don't think these myths particularly reflect shared memories of a single global flood. It's more that every human culture living anywhere near a river has experienced repeated, catastrophic local flooding, and that's not something people easily forget. Granted, there certainly has been massive global sea level change within the lifetime of the human species, and that could have found its way into our myths, but I tend to think any actual historical information would have been lost by now. Myths evolve pretty fast.
I'd also point out that there are other very common mythical themes around the world, like the earth/universe being surrounded by a giant snake, or the world being hatched from a giant egg. It's a bit hard to explain those as distorted history!
Smut,
"With a third of the present world following this person, one might argue that he is the most successful person to ever live based on the sheer volume of people he’s influenced."
One pretty easy way to gauge the impact of particular people is to survey the historical best-seller list. This is a pretty good chart, and a good site.
http://carm.org/manuscript-evidence
Only the selected few are saved? So much for the loving god mythology. Sure you'll be find smut, as long as this god had included you in the select few to be saved: if not: perhaps you'll get a postcard while you burn in hell.
What a load of dishonest crap phil.
More apologetics (apologetics = frantically devised lies to explain the internal discrepancies of religious documents and their lack of agreement with documented history). Amusing.
Atheists do not need to support their belief that a god does not exist; theists need to provide evidence that a god exists. The fact that a third of the world identifies as Christian could just as easily show that an ideology that gives hope to oppressed will flourish in a world ruled by an empire like Rome. A lot of people argue ad populum, but that does not make it valid.
Even if Phil's forthcoming Nobel prize-winning paper conclusively demonstrates that natural selection is impossible, it wouldn't prove the existence of a designer. (@Phil: after the Rapture, can I have your Nobel medal?) A new theory would be needed - a valid one.
A valid theory is one that could be proved wrong. How could Phil's theory of a designer be proved wrong? Or your "maybe" questions about genetics that rely on the existence of a desinger? Or how about this one?
It's not a valid theory, because there is no way to falsify it. (But don't believe the Young Earthers who insist it was created last Thursday.)
Wouldn't we need to know something about "God" before we could make any conclusions? "God" means so many different things that it is impossible to know what the word refers to.
Please forgive my sloppy phrasing of the first sentence of #141. Although many atheists believe that no god exists (based on the lack of a testable definition of God, much less evidence to support one), atheism means only that one does not believe that a god exists. Even those atheists accused of being the most strident say that they are open to the possibility, but find it highly unlikely to be true.
In the interest of accuracy, I found an update to the manuscript chart I linked to above.
http://www.equip.org/article/the-bibliographical-test-updated/#christia…
Dean,
"The second item I note has been raised before: You are engaging in a faulty decision process. Even if all of the science work is discovered to be wrong, that in no way
a) Means that the only other explanation involves a creator"
&
Walt,
"Even if Phil’s forthcoming Nobel prize-winning paper conclusively demonstrates that natural selection is impossible, it wouldn’t prove the existence of a designer."
What theory or possible explanation could exist outside of "God(s) did it" or Big Bang/coincidence/evolution? It's all either intentional or unintentional right? Is there a 3rd idea I missed that we could toss around?
Dean,
"b) It in no way means that even if some magical creator is involved, it will be the one you choose."
What if Phil is right when he says: "sorry, but it has never been a matter of picking. It is about being chosen"? Is it possible that there is an invisible God who woos/calls people and draws them in?
I dont know if this is what phil meant or not. I am familiar witg the concept of "the select" people being saved. That is a closed set: god has chosen (selected) the people he will save and if you are not among them you are screwed: no new memberships are given out.
Yes, Smut, your dichotomy of intentional/unintentional might be accurate. Nevertheless, falsifying the theory of evolution by natural selection would not rule out other theories that do not rely on intention.
If you are going to assert that the universe is designed with intention, you must provide evidence. Falsifying theories is an essential part of science, but so is the construction of new theories.
As to your other point: with God, anything is possible. Seriously, if you posit the existence of an ineffable being, you can say anything you want about it and when challenged, claim that God is beyond human understanding (yet you know that your interlocutor's understanding is wrong).
dean,
“Or, a more realistic view: many centers of commerce and civilization sat near rivers, and rivers everywhere flood.”
Yeah, but there is a little bit more to it than that. You also have to have realistic views on things like the Tapeat Sandstone that was supposed to be laid down a billion years ago.
-
"Only the selected few are saved?”
“the concept of “the select” people being saved. That is a closed set: god has chosen (selected) the people he will save and if you are not among them you are screwed: no new memberships are given out.”
Elect, not select. But like I was telling Pedr, some people find this subject very aggravating if they perceive that they have been slighted.
Basically, since it involves two parties in an exclusive, individual, one-on-one covenant, it is about two perspectives. God’s side of the deal is complex as it includes things like foreknowledge, predestination, calling, ordination and election, not to mention adoption, justification, etc..
From our side, it boils down to ‘he that believeth’. Except for that, it’s pretty much an all-God show. Everything is provided.
===
Smut,
“Is it possible that there is an invisible God who woos/calls people and draws them in?”
That is the deal, almost word for word.
Yes elect, my bad. It is difficult to keep the names for policies made by non-existent supernatural beings straight.
But in the end: if this loving gods die doesn't come up with your nimver you are screwed.
"But in the end: if this loving gods die doesn’t come up with your nimver you are screwed."
Well, there definitely is an option for winding up screwed, but it isn't about God rolling dice. You get to choose whether you have a destiny or just a fate.
But I'm a Bible thumper, so that's just what I believe. You have your own faculties, and you can choose to go with the scientists who think it is important to establish your common ancestry with carrots and chickens. I just don't have the wherewithal to do that.
Phil,
Well, pretty clearly someone can, because eugenics is a dirty word these days and virtually no one advocates murdering sick people in order to cleanse our gene pool. The debate has been won. It just wasn't won by appeals to absolute, transcendental morality.
I don't know what the proper number is, but I suspect the beneficial mutation rate would be much higher for systems that fit the Red Queen model, than for Lenski's system. The whole idea is that a lot more mutations become beneficial when your environment includes parasites, pathogens and predators adapted to prey on you. In Lenski's research system (the one we've been talking about), the E. coli did not have any such challenges in its environment. It just had to eat and reproduce as fast as possible.
Lenski did some other experiments with E. coli strains that were infected with parasites, but I don't know what all he found there.
Well, even if we use Lenski's number, those generations are occurring in parallel; in a stable population, the average organism has a thousand descendants after only ten generations. So some of your descendants will pretty quickly get born with a beneficial mutation, and that could mean they're the only ones left standing the next time some horrible plague sweeps through.
What's the difference?
Nah, chemistry can do that just fine. Hell, my conditioner removes structural flaws in the hairs of my head, and I'm pretty sure it's not powered by magic.
Not that my conditioner's remotely as impressive as DNA repair enzymes! But the enzymes have been in development four billion years longer than the conditioner, so that's to be expected.
Yes, and again, we've seen random mutations improve the ability of these very same, very complex enzymes to carry out their specific functions. We know they're complex; we know they have functions. That simply doesn't make them unevolvable.
What? Most lotteries are intended to result in winners; they're still random, because nobody knows beforehand who will win.
Who said anything about complex enzymes? The enzymes we have now are as much a product of long-term evolution as the rest of us. The first enzymes would be nothing more than molecules that happened to accelerate one another's replication rate. We've seen this happen in the lab, see "Highly Efficient Self-Replicating RNA Enzymes" by Joyce and Robertson (2014). Two types of RNA replicator spontaneously began cross replicating, catalyzing each other's reproduction far faster than either could do on its own.
Plus, if an abiotic process is producing enzymes "accidentally," they don't need to be selected for yet. Because they're already sitting out there in the environment! The replicator can evolve the ability to synthesize its own enzymes later.
<blockquote“any organisms before that point did not require those enzymes to replicate.”
They didn’t? Then I’m sure you can produce evidence of those kind of organisms.
Sure, Google for self-replicating RNA enzymes.
You're thinking of entire cells, which are probably way more complex than the earliest replicators. There's a difference between "top-down" approaches, that start with modern cells and try to slim down the necessary components, and "bottom-up" approaches, that start with just a few types of molecules.
Of course it does; we've known that since Malthus. Just about any organism could multiply and take over the world, if not for other organisms getting in the way--eating it, infecting it, competing with it for resources. Crappy replicators would do just fine in a world that didn't have anything better.
Like I said, that's a classic false dichotomy. What if evolution just works kind of well? What if it can achieve mild improvements easily enough, but perfection is out of its reach?
Why would you think that? You don't think mutations do anything useful!
But yes, maybe those mutations have occurred in other E. coli populations in the past. But since those bacteria weren't growing on a citrate-rich lab medium, the mutations weren't very beneficial, so they didn't become widespread. Or maybe they were beneficial but still went extinct due to random drift, which, as you like to remind us, gets rid of most beneficial mutations.
Or maybe those mutations haven't ever occurred in the past. You'd need a lot more than 102 million years--or 102 billion years, for that matter--for a bacterial population to experience every possible mutation.
Yeah, and what you're doing is equivalent to asking, "so why didn't all dog-sized mammal species evolve into whales?" The answer is simple--they didn't all experience the same mutations, and they weren't all in the same environment under the same selection pressure.
Rerun mammalian history and there's no guarantee that we'd get whales a second time. Rerun E. coli's history and there's no guarantee that we'd get citrate-munching mutations, inside or outside the lab.
C'mon, you just spun your argument 180 degrees! When you introduced Aurornis into this thread, you were complaining that its tail was too birdlike for its pre-Archaeopteryx status. Now it's not birdlike enough?
Yes, Aurornis has a lot of non-birdlike features. It also has a lot of birdlike ones--rigid feathers, a breastbone, a backwards-pointing pubic bone, and a host of other minor skeletal stuff. What more would you expect from a transitional fossil between birds and other dinosaurs? As you pointed out, Aurornis is a little earlier than Archaeopteryx, so its being slightly less birdlike makes total sense.
Yup. See the dark regions of fine parallel lines around the base of the tail, and the neck and chest? Those are feathery plumes. Aurornis doesn't seem to have had flight feathers, though, and it probably couldn't fly. The overall trajectory of feather evolution in dinos was from fine down (for warmth) to plumes (for display) to asymmetrical feathers (for flight).
Again, you were the one who brought up Aurornis as a supposed contradiction to...uh, something some sciencey person said about evolution. If Aurornis is a fraud, then it's not in a position to contradict anything, so who cares?
To be clear, I doubt it's a fraud, and the scientist who's expressing skepticism doesn't seem to think it is either; they just want to make absolutely sure. But it just doesn't matter that much in the big picture; we've got fossils of forty other feathered dinosaur species, so the overall story of bird evolution is gonna be the same whether Aurornis is a legitimate part of it or not.
Phil,
Yes, universalists ( universal reconciliationists ) are not liked by most Christian leaders because it undermines their fear mongering and puts a stop to all the time and money being redirected towards their churches.
I have often pointed out to conservative theologians, that universal reconciliation is the only way to logically reconcile evil and a monotheistic god's infinite goodness.
Christianity feeds on fear. Without the sin, guilt, absolution cycle, it would collapse.
Phil, like most other creationists is just rehashing debates that were resolved decades to centuries ago. Ever read about vitalism, Phil? I thought not. Enzymes are just chemistry nothing more - compare organic v. inorganic catalysts. What I find interesting is that PhD chemists are perfectly happy with randomness in chemistry, but reject it in biology. Why? Genesis trumps reality - if God had revealed something about chemical reactions, then they would be believing that. Since God didn't, they can be scientists on every day but Sundays and perhaps Wednesday nights. It is a pre-enlightenment worldview believing that if the Bible says something, then anything contradictory is de facto wrong. The enlightenment thinkers wanted to see what would happen if supernatural intervention were not assumed - where would the data alone lead them - hence science was born with its reliance on replication and repeatability. A major breakthrough that people like Phil are still fighting a la Don Quixote. The problem is Phil is unwilling to face up to the consequences of his beliefs - if God is intervening and controlling, then God is either doing this all the time or Phil should be able to tell us when, what, how and why. He can do neither.
Well, Anton has done a good job of replying to Phil's counter-questions to me, so I'll let those go.
Smut @134:
Then that designer is either evil, lazy/impotent, or inscrutable, because the common codes make us humans susceptible to animal diseases (and vice versa). If making us susceptible to such diseases was intentional, the designer is evil. If the designer didn't intend it but didn't bother (or couldn't) change it, he's lazy/impotent. And if he's inscrutable, you have just undermined any basis for following the prima facie lessons of the bible, since following them requires the assumption that God is a clear communicator whose general desires can be known through his actions.
Phil:
Which is a terrible criteria from so many angles.
1. It fails those who lived without knowledge of God or Jesus - born in the wrong place, or wrong time, or who died too early.
2. Its capricious and arbitrary - we do not understand love to require some contractual acknowledgement before we behave in good ways towards those we love. Yet your conception of God seemingly does. Let's take the example of a kid about to touch a hot stove. Does it make any sense to say "well, I will help once that kid acknowledges my presence?" No! We would never condition that act of giving help and preventing harm on such an acknowledgement, that would be monstrous! Yet your God requires it before helping to save us from an infinitely worse fate than stove-burned fingers.
3. Its also arguably too merciful on the believing monsters amongst us.
4. Lastly, the whole concept of saving-from-hell implies some complicity on God's part in creating hell or permitting it to exist in the first place. God is omnipotent, right? So why not [snap fingers, poof!] no hell? How could even merely permitting hell to exist be seen as benevolent? Or is God powerless to change it?
Well locally you'd be considered a heretic. The elect are chosen by God by some unspecified (probably unknowable, according to them) process, and no amount of groveling (or love and devotion to god, as christians would call it) will get you into the group if you aren't already placed there. Everyone else is condemned to hell because of some strange relationship to the sin everyone is born with and has the inability to shed, and god's reminding of his love through his condemnation. That is true for people in that particular religion, those born outside of it, etc. As has been noted, the notion of a loving god is impossible to reconcile with the monster of the old testament (who never really went away in the new testament), and who has no qualms about condemning the majority of the world's population to the worst horrors christian mythology has to offer simply because he can. Describing that god as a psychopath would be too kind.
And yes, I will go with the people who have a data driven, factual, supportable of the universe and our world, and remove myself from the uneducated who deny reality because their favored book of mythology tells them to.
eric,
Do let me know if you'd rather I held off on replying to those, so you have time to respond first. I know it's not terribly polite to jump into someone else's conversation.
A couple of additional responses to Smut:
Sure, could be. But it's the specific pattern of similarities that points to common ancestry.
In other words, it's not just that humans and chimps are similar in a lot of ways. It's that we're similar in a lot of ways that neither of us shares with, say, monkeys--and then us, chimps and monkeys are similar in a lot of ways that we don't share with dogs--and then us, chimps, monkeys and dogs are similar in ways that we don't share with alligators or fish. And so on. This pattern of nested similarities fits very naturally into a tree diagram, which suggests common ancestry.
And you don't have to be an atheist or indoctrinated by modern science to notice this. We've used nested tree diagrams to describe the diversity of life since Linnaeus, who lived long before Darwin and was no atheist! The pattern just jumps out at you if you compare enough organisms to each other.
Now, could you explain this nested similarity pattern through intelligent design instead? Of course! You can reconcile intelligent design with any possible set of evidence, because it makes no predictions; that's why it's nonscientific. In particular, Richard Owen came up with a hypothesis of "archetypes," where the Creator basically imagined all the species in a hierarchical, tree-like fashion before he created them. Something like, "Okay, I want to make birds...and while I'm at it I want some of those birds to be parrots...and while I'm at it I want some of those parrots to be cockatoos...and let's have the cockatoos be black and sulfur-crested and so forth. Now, go up one level, and I want some of the other parrots to be macaws..."
The thing is, while this is logically possible, it's not very satisfying to most people because it seems needlessly complicated. If you're gonna believe that God arranged everything so that it would look like there was evolution from a common ancestor, why not just believe that evolution happened? With or without God's help, as you prefer?
Oh, there are tons of alternatives. There's an infinite number of possible explanations. Within western science, we've had spontaneous generation, Lamarckian transmutation, and orthogenesis (progressive or directed evolution.) In most of the traditional south Asian belief systems (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, etc.) and some ancient Greek models, the universe is cyclic, and plants, animals and humans have been reincarnating and going extinct again for trillions of years. Aristotle and (I believe) the Baha'i propose an infinitely old, steady-state universe which has always been filled with forms of life.
And then there are any number of creation myths</, many of which involve life forms condensing out of chaos or entering our universe from a previous world.
And almost all of these origin models I've mentioned are compatible with "god(s) did it," "the innate laws of nature did it," and "nobody did it, it just happened."
Coming up with hypotheses to explain Life, The Universe and Everything is easy. The hard part is testing them!
Jeez, I'm HTMLing like an alpaca this week. Close link! Close link!
Michael Fugate,
"Enzymes are just chemistry nothing more – compare organic v. inorganic catalysts."
I can't really process that. Why is there a reaction if I pour vinegar on soda? Just chemistry?
Nope. You're more knowledgeable than me on these issues, and I probably won't be visiting every day over the next few weeks anyway.
"Needlessly complicated" is the least of its problems. "Incredibly stupid" and "actively malicious" are two better descriptions, IMO. Its incredibly stupid because the designer seems to be not-using design elements he's used in one lineage in other lineages. What sense does that make? And malicious because, as I noted above, genetic similarities leads us, his supposedly most beloved creation, to being vulnerable to crossover diseases.
Phil:
Holy cow are you serious? Yes, it's only chemistry. Here is a discussion of it, and below is the overall reaction (apologies for any plaintext issues):
NaHCO3(s) + CH3COOH(l) → CO2(g) + H2O(l) + Na+(aq) + CH3COO-(aq)
Are you seriously questioning the ability of organic chemical reactions to produce carbon dioxide gas (among other things)?
Geez, I hate to be a science snob but if people are graduating from mainstream liberal arts universities thinking the vinegar+baking soda reaction requires vitalism, maybe they need to make 1-2 years of chemistry a general requirement
eric:
That's a thing?
Anton Mates,
“Well, pretty clearly someone can, because eugenics is a dirty word these days and virtually no one advocates murdering sick people in order to cleanse our gene pool.”
I’m not as confident as you are about that.
-
“The whole idea is that a lot more mutations become beneficial when your environment includes parasites, pathogens and predators adapted to prey on you.”
Yeah, but that’s sort of the problem. It’s just an idea.
But what’s interesting is that in terms of cell count, only about 10% of what we are composed of is actually us. We are involved in all kinds of symbiotic interactions.
“The human body contains trillions of microorganisms — outnumbering human cells by 10 to 1. Because of their small size, however, microorganisms make up only about 1 to 3 percent of the body's mass (in a 200-pound adult, that’s 2 to 6 pounds of bacteria), but play a vital role in human health.”
http://nih.gov/news/health/jun2012/nhgri-13.htm
That must have involved lots of the mutations you mentioned. I wouldn’t even call them beneficial, more like….friendly.
-
“ “It certainly is if you’re trying to claim that DNA repair enzymes are intelligent.”
I didn’t claim that, I just asked if they were smart.
What’s the difference?”
Well, I just asked, because they do seem to have a purpose, measured responses, and different roles for different enzymes. It’s rather like an artillery crew.
-
“We know they’re complex; we know they have functions. That simply doesn’t make them unevolvable.” “
There are also quite of few of them, and their roles are sequential and coordinated. These are all good reasons to think they never formed accidentally. This is beyond ordinary long shots. This is requiring miracles. That is not science.
-
“Plus, if an abiotic process is producing enzymes “accidentally,” they don’t need to be selected for yet. Because they’re already sitting out there in the environment!”
With nothing to do except disintegrate!
-
“The first enzymes would be nothing more than molecules that happened to accelerate one another’s replication rate.”
I’m sure they appreciate your permission, but enzymes are proteins. Even slightly damaged proteins can become dysfunctional. The likelihood that a whole suite of functional replication could form accidentally in tandem when there were no nucleic acids to replicate is preposterous. If you propose that those accidentally formed first, you have the same problem in reverse.
-
“You’re thinking of entire cells, which are probably way more complex than the earliest replicators.”
Yes, and they are also the only thing inside the boundaries of actual science. Anything beneath full-blown cells is evolutionary fairy tales.
-
“Just about any organism could multiply and take over the world, if not for other organisms getting in the way–eating it, infecting it, competing with it for resources.”
But none of this has anything whatever to do with an organism replicating.
-
“Or maybe those mutations haven’t ever occurred in the past. You’d need a lot more than 102 million years–or 102 billion years, for that matter–for a bacterial population to experience every possible mutation.”
Yeah, that’s the point I keep trying to make when something with multiple parts or systems has to evolve. It isn’t realistic. But hang on to that very lucid thought.
-
“what you’re doing is equivalent to asking, “so why didn’t all dog-sized mammal species evolve into whales?” The answer is simple–they didn’t all experience the same mutations, and they weren’t all in the same environment under the same selection pressure.”
And that would be a deluxe bummer if you loved seafood and were stuck hanging around the edge of the water watching the fish, just out of reach.
-
“Rerun mammalian history and there’s no guarantee that we’d get whales a second time.”
I really liked Gould. I don’t think he ever got it quite back together after spilling the truth beans about stasis.
-
“C’mon, you just spun your argument 180 degrees! When you introduced Aurornis into this thread, you were complaining that its tail was too birdlike for its pre-Archaeopteryx status. Now it’s not birdlike enough?”
That was my fault. I took that sorry artist’s rendering in the Wik article seriously. Does that look like a lizard tail to you? They could have passed that off as a dove of some sort. I actually think this happens a lot with evolutionary icons. The one shown here is perhaps a little more fun, but still looks awfully fluffy if you’re trying to find all those feathers in the fossil image. They look more like hairs. http://www.nature.com/news/new-contender-for-first-bird-1.13088
===
Pedr,
“Yes, universalists ( universal reconciliationists ) are not liked by most Christian leaders because it undermines their fear mongering and puts a stop to all the time and money being redirected towards their churches.”
I think it might have more to do with the fact that they are just making up their own rules. You only have to miss about all of the Bible to recognize that. Try Matthew 7:21-23 if you want to get a better feel for who will make the cut, and who won’t.
===
eric,
“Well, Anton has done a good job of replying to Phil’s counter-questions to me, so I’ll let those go.”
Oh. Well I was wondering where you were gonna go with the enzymes first/organisms first deal. Based on your theory, I was anticipating nowhere.
But let’s try something a little further down the road.
Stomachs use really strong acid. It is in fact so strong, that the stomach will be damaged if the acid breaches the layer of mucus that protects it. Now I know that the idea of irreducible complexity has been thoroughly discredited to your satisfaction, but we all still know that individual parts serve a purpose on their way to accidental integration.
So here are the questions:
Which system developed first…the acid production, or the mucus production?
What purpose did each serve as their interim function?
-
“the whole concept of saving-from-hell implies some complicity on God’s part in creating hell”
Oh, without a doubt He built the place, but hell is a temporary place, like jail. You’re probably thinking of the lake of fire.
===
dean,
“Well locally you’d be considered a heretic. The elect are chosen by God by some unspecified (probably unknowable, according to them) process…”
Either their theology, or your perception is completely fouled up. I suspect it is your perception. Get me an email address for their pastor and I’ll find out for you.
Thanks for that perspective Anton, and the wiki link, wiki link, wiki link :)
I guess what I was getting at was that the only 2 explanations (that I'm aware of) involved either: a). Intelligent/intentional design or b). non intentional "design" without intelligence
I assumed that there were other theories throughout history, but figured that they would all fall into one of those 2 categories.
"“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?” Lewis Carroll
To me, that quote sums up the Christian believer.
I suppose I have decided to choose my beliefs rationally but live my life irrationally,
For more on that: The Retreat of Reason: A Dilemma in the Philosophy of Life, Ingmar Persson
Happy Hanukkah to all...
Enzymes are catalysts: they aren't a reactant or product but rather help reactions take place. Many reactions take place without catalysis and I don't see why a polymer replication couldn't (occur in the absence of a catalyst). So personally I wouldn't be surprised if the first replicators did not use replication enzymes. However we don't know whether they did or not (another possible scenario is that the first replicators used abiotic organic compounds as catalysts - i.e. their replicaton was catalyzed by compounds existing in their environment. However, as Anton said, the big problem with your point about enzymes is that you're thinking of entire cell organisms, assuming evolution claims such things sprung de novo from inorganic compounds. That's not what evolution says an its not what modern biologists think happened: they tend to think the earliest replicators were much, much simpler than the single-celled organisms we see on the planet today.
Acids serve so many chemical and biological functions I don't think anyone could name them all. But just as one example, weak acids can serve as buffering agents, keeping the pH of a mixture at a relatively constant value. There are many, many, many effective adaptations using acids or providing a fitness advantage for acid production that don't use mucus.
Between your comment about the vinegar reaction, your not knowing what an enzyme is, and your not understanding what acids can do, I'm pretty confident at this point that you have no, zip, zero knowledge of biochemistry that would be relevant to assesing the probability of some system evolving. You're simply stringing together technical terms you don't really understand and making a series of arguments from incredulity out of them - you don't understand how chemical systems work, so you don't believe they can work without divine intervention.
Smut Jenkins:
The problem with your parsing is that neither of those terms are really hypotheses or theories, they are categories of potential hypotheses and theories. So, there could be many distinct 'natural' explanations, and many distinct 'design' explanations too. Because of that, evidence that undermines any one 'natural' explanation does not automatically lend support for the 'God designed it' idea.
The classic historic example of how this false dichotomy can lead people astray is the precession of the perhelion of Mercury. NM couldn't account for it...and this was an unexplained problem for over 60 years. So, during the time between the discovery of the problem and the discovery of relativity, would people have been justified in saying "natural exlanations don't explain it...must be angels pushing Mercury around or some other divine design"? No! This evidence undermining NM was not evidence of design; it turned out to be evidence supporting a non-design scientific theory that at the time they couldn't even conceptualize, couldn't even imagine. Well, the same(latter) reasoning is true today, of evidence that creationists may claim undermines evolutionary theory. Any evidence undermining the TOE (and for the record, I view this as a hypothetical argument) would not be evidence for design any more than evidence undermining NM was.
A decent analogy of chemical reactions is to think of a bolt and a nut. If a bolt is in a hole it will hold two pieces together like a fender onto a frame of a car. The bolt is unstable because simple vibration or driving over a pothole can jar it out. If I put a nut on the end it is much more stable. Random vibrations will still loosen the nut and it can come apart, but takes years versus a day or so. If you wanted to get the pieces apart, you wouldn't wait until they randomly fell apart even though they inevitably would. You would use a tool like your fingers or something with a bit more torque like a wrench or pliers. The wrench and pliers can be used over and over again. The fit doesn't even need to be perfect - a metric wrench can be used on non-metric bolts.
Chemical bonds and reactions are much like this. Atoms have electrons and certain configurations of electrons are stable. If you look at the right-hand column of a periodic table you will find the inert gases which are non-reactive for the most part. Other atoms will be stable (lower energy state) when they have the same number of electrons which the inert gases do - atoms do this by sharing. A carbon atom has 6 electrons and a stable neon atom has 10. If a carbon atom shares 4 electrons it will be like neon and more stable than a free carbon atom. A glucose molecule 6 carbon, 6 oxygen, and 12 hydrogen atoms - a stable configuration - when in the presence of oxygen gas will eventually convert into carbon dioxide and water. This is very, very slow, but still spontaneous, and will happen because carbon dioxide is a lower energy - more stable state than glucose is. If we add a catalyst to the solution the reaction will happen almost instantaneously. The catalyst acts like the wrench in applying torque to glucose molecule making the electron sharing less stable. The catalyst like the wrench doesn't change and can act over and over again. This reaction releases energy (spontaneous) - but there needs to be enough energy in the system to destabilize the electron sharing and get the nut turning so to speak. A catalyst simply reduces the amount of energy needed to destabilize the system. Once destabilized, the atoms will immediately enter into new configurations.
There is no living thing needed to make these things work - just basic chemistry and random molecular movement.