A splendid video about evolution

This is exactly the kind of thing I was referring to when I said "highly religious." Not in the sense of church attendance or hymn singing, but in the sense of embracing elaborate metaphysical narratives that aren’t grounded in evidence, yet still somehow feel true or meaningful.

So, Materialism is highly religious then. So is modern Atheism. Fitting, actually.

While you may reject the label, the style of reasoning fits the bill. It’s not about incense and altars. It’s about confidently entertaining explanations for existence that are untethered to what we can actually know. Call it spiritual, intuitive, or poetic if you like.

Materialism and Atheism are also just as untethered from anything we can actually know.

Of course I watched it! Sometimes one has to wade through some sh*t to get to the essence of an argument. I think the DI does a lot of good science, but unfortunately ties it to one particular religious myth.

Arguments like you have to witness evolution as it happens, otherwise it doesn't count.

I don't see a video except for Stadler's video.

It is in this post #97, let me know what you think about it.

What exactly is the waiting time argument?

You are an ardent defender of ID, and the creationists at the DI, but you don't know what that means in the context of evolution?

The argument against evolution is probably best put by Behe:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darwin-Devolves...B079L6RTNT

His quite a subtle argument which shows that natural selection would in fact weaken a species by causing a progressive loss of diversity. This would happen long before a single new protein could be created.

If you are at all interested, I suggest you read Behe's book.

David

Are there any new arguments in that book? Seems to me it is old ID stuff, as all of that, multiple times debunked.

Are there any new arguments in that book? Seems to me it is old ID stuff, as all of that, multiple times debunked.

Yes, there is one argument in particular.

Consider an entire species - e.g. us.

Now imagine that a gene for something - le'ts say haemoglobin, or a protein that is part of the bacterial wall (depending on the species in question) - undergoes a random mutation. There are several possibilities.

1) The mutation does no actual harm. for example, there are 64 possible codons (each codon consisting of 3 nucleotides giving 4^3 possibilities that code for about 20 amino acids, so there is some redundancy. Also, not all points in the protein chan are equally vital. This isn't critical to the organism.

2) The mutated gene may simply not work at all - e.g. modified haemoglobin might not bind to oxygen or might bind too hard - so that it does not release oxygen where it is needed. If this happens, it doesn't matter, if the species is prokaryotic (single celled) one cell dies. In each case a single cell dies but the species on.

3) The damaged gene happens to be fortuitously beneficial for environmental reasons. E.g. a bacterium may receive a mutation that damages a vital protein in a way that leaves it suboptimal but helps it survive some temporary problem - malaria or an onslaught by an antibiotic in my two examples.

4) The random mutation might actually fix a piece of DNA so that it works better than it did before!

It is fairly obvious (I hope!) that mutations of the first two types will be far more common that the third or fourth alternatives - they do no harm to the species, but they don't evolve anything new either.

Mutations of the third kind are considerably less common, but they don't cause evolution, and they can cause catastrophic damage over time - for example people with sub-optimal haemoglobin or bacteria with cell walls that are suboptimal in some way.

It is also obvious that mutations of the fourth type - the ones which might actually improve something - are super rare. I remember once trying to 'mutate' a computer program randomly changing a byte in the executable binary. I didn't have a couple of billion years to run the experiment, but neither does evolution, because type three mutations are much more common. Rather than quibbling with my condensation of his argument, I suggest anyone in doubt should read Behe's book, Darwin Devolved, and we can discuss it from there.

I seem to remember having this discussion on Skeptiko and then again here years back.

David

Yes, there is one argument in particular.

Consider an entire species - e.g. us.

Now imagine that a gene for something - le'ts say haemoglobin, or a protein that is part of the bacterial wall (depending on the species in question) - undergoes a random mutation. There are several  possibilities.

1)        The mutation does no actual harm. for example, there are 64 possible codons (each codon consisting of 3 nucleotides giving 4^3 possibilities that code for about 20 amino acids, so there is some redundancy. Also, not all points in the protein chan are equally vital. This isn't critical to the organism.

2)        The mutated gene may simply not work at all - e.g. modified haemoglobin might not bind to oxygen or might bind too hard - so that it does not release oxygen where it is needed. If this happens, it doesn't matter, if the species is prokaryotic (single celled) one cell dies. In each case a single cell dies but the species on.

3)        The damaged gene happens to be fortuitously beneficial for environmental reasons. E.g. a bacterium may receive a mutation that damages a vital protein in a way that leaves it suboptimal but helps it survive some temporary problem - malaria or an onslaught by an antibiotic in my two examples.

4)        The random mutation might actually fix a piece of DNA so that it works better than it did before!

It is fairly obvious (I hope!)  that mutations of the first two types will be far more common that the third or fourth alternatives - they do no harm to the species, but they don't evolve anything new either.

Mutations of the third kind are considerably less common, but they don't cause evolution, and they can cause catastrophic damage over time - for example people with sub-optimal haemoglobin or bacteria with cell walls that are suboptimal in some way.

It is also obvious that mutations of the fourth type - the ones which might actually improve something - are super rare. I remember once trying to 'mutate' a computer program randomly changing a byte in the executable binary. I didn't have a couple of billion years to run the experiment, but neither does evolution, because type three mutations are much more common. Rather than quibbling with my condensation of his argument, I suggest anyone in doubt should read Behe's book, Darwin Devolved, and we can discuss it from there.

I seem to remember having this discussion on Skeptiko and then again here years back.

David

This argument represents a common pattern in anti-evolution literature - focusing on isolated aspects while ignoring the complete system of mutation, selection, drift, and population dynamics that makes evolution not just possible, but inevitable.

It has been debunked multiple times already.

This argument represents a common pattern in anti-evolution literature - focusing on isolated aspects while ignoring the complete system of mutation, selection, drift, and population dynamics that makes evolution not just possible, but inevitable.

It has been debunked multiple times  already.

What 'isolated aspects' - that analysis would apply to any species undergoing random mutation.

Please give me a link to something that debunks what I have written, or indeed Behe's book "Darwin devolved".

David

This argument represents a common pattern in anti-evolution literature - focusing on isolated aspects while ignoring the complete system of mutation, selection, drift, and population dynamics that makes evolution not just possible, but inevitable.

It has been debunked multiple times  already.

There is no "system" ~ rather, there is a narrative about a system, and no means to independently scientifically reproduce any of the claims.

Besides... a blind, mindless, directionless process isn't even a system ~ it's just a disconnected string of physical and chemical events that cannot build upon each other, because of the independence of each occurrence. Therefore, Darwinism inevitably goes nowhere, because it really is just a bunch of nothing doing... nothing.

Darwinism can never explain the complexity of biological systems, because pure chaos has never led to order. Even deterministic chaos still never leads to highly complex ordered systems.

Darwinism never makes any statements that can be scientifically tested nor verified independently, therefore it is not science, but ideology, perhaps even religion.

What 'isolated aspects' - that analysis would apply to any species undergoing random mutation.

Please give me a link to something that debunks what I have written, or indeed Behe's book "Darwin devolved".

David

Certainly:

Let’s take Behe at his word for the moment that he intends to say that the “overwhelming tendency of random mutation is to degrade genes,” not that random mutation can only degrade genes. He seems to think that the adaptive gains-of-function would be swamped by the more numerous loss-of-FCT mutations. But this is seriously not how natural selection works, for the reasons Lenski was outlining. Anything that is adaptive, by definition, will succeed in making copies of itself.

The point is that gain-of-function mutations don’t need to happen the majority of the time in order to proliferate, any more than adaptive mutations need to happen more frequently than maladaptive mutations to proliferate. This is a serious misunderstanding of natural selection. If there’s a valuable gain-of-function, those genes will make lots of copies of themselves — that’s what it means to be adaptive. This is why Lenski said The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution confuses frequency and importance. So as long as adaptive gains-of-FCT can happen some of the time, there is no problem, let alone a “fatal flaw in Darwinism.” Especially since new functions can be produced through a variety of means, another fact that Behe doesn’t adequately deal with in his book.

I’m not sure why it took us so long to get here, but Behe doesn’t seem to acknowledge that mutation is not the only source of variation. This was the second time, after seeing the title of the book itself, that I thought I must be misunderstanding Behe. How could he be that wrong? I must not understand what he’s actually trying to say, since the idea that mutation is the only source of variation could be cleared up in an introductory biology textbook; and he’s a biochemist at a good university (though it should be noted that he has tenure, which is why he gets away with publishing all his nonsense). But try as I might, I can’t see any indication that he’s using the word ‘devolution’ anything but sincerely; and try as I might, I can’t find any evidence that he thinks there are ways to get variation other than mutation. By ‘mutation’, he probably just means any change in the DNA sequence, regardless of how it changed. If that’s not how he’s using the term, this is a bizarre oversight. I’ve never heard biologists use ‘mutation’ as an umbrella for recombinant shuffling, horizontal gene transfer, random point mutation, and the like. But I’m choosing to be charitable here. After all, Darwin Devolves is intended for a popular audience,

https://emersongreenblog.wordpress.com/2...nt-design/

In particular take notice of the quote in bold. This book is not ‘science’. It’s a religious motivated text that attempts to give god a place in nature.

@sbu

I want very much to debate this with you, but as you know, science is best done in a careful analytic sort of way, so lets try to sort out one or two points.

1)      Are you conceding that random mutations on their own would be limited in power in the way Behe claims, or do you have a counter argument? This is important, as I will explain later in the discussion.

2)      Note that "Darwin Devolves is intended for a popular audience" is meant to indicate that the book is written for non specialists, and that any biological jargon that is used, should be properly explained first. I'm not sure, but I get the impression that your speciality was physics or chemistry, mine was chemistry. I value the fact that Behe's book is accessible to both of us.

3)      As Laird has already pointed out, you seem to be confusing different kinds of religious motivation as you attack my views - the sense that science may need to explain certain things teleologically as opposed to a religious motivation  that tries to tie scientific arguments to specific religious texts and hence to specific religions.

If indeed simple mutations on their own cannot power evolution, isn't that something worth knowing? I mean people talk as if RM+NS can produce absolutely anything (even starting from pre-biotic soup chemistry) - imposing some limits on this process would an interesting start.

I don't want to debate with you in a mud-slinging sort of way, I hope that you don't want that either.

David

Be that as it may, it's clearly a different sense of "religious" to that which David is using. He's clearly talking about religiousness in the institutional sense, relating to those organised faith traditions which have a fixed set of beliefs and rituals, and typically also a formalised clergy and places of worship - traditions like Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Jainism.

"Religious" is a word with different senses. There is even a sense according to which Einstein, an agnostic who rejected a personal God as well as life after death, described himself as "religious", a sense to which he referred as "cosmic" religiousness, based on a sort of awe at "the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought".

We need to be careful not to conflate the different senses of "religious", and recognise and respect the senses in which others are using the term, rather than ignoring those and imposing our own sense onto them. That serves no productive purpose and in fact is corrosive to good-faith discussion.

I hadn't noticed this comment earlier. I understand what David means by "religious," though I wasn't aware the term might be seen as inflammatory.
It probably won't surprise anyone that I subscribe to the philosophy of logical positivism. This view holds that ontological statements are meaningful only if they can be verified through empirical observation or are analytically true (such as logical or mathematical statements).

As such, I reject claims about spiritual dimensions and similar concepts when they assert ontological content, treating them as pseudo-statements, a term originally used by A.J. Ayer (and hopefully not taken as inflammatory in this context).

It probably won't surprise anyone that I subscribe to the philosophy of logical positivism. This view holds that ontological statements are meaningful only if they can be verified through empirical observation or are analytically true (such as logical or mathematical statements).

I have sensed non-physical phenomena on and off for the last 9 years, with some of that phenomena being more stable than others. Some of it has been extremely vivid ~ to the point that I cannot deny that it happened, or explain it away as delusion or fantasy.

As such, I reject claims about spiritual dimensions and similar concepts when they assert ontological content, treating them as pseudo-statements, a term originally used by A.J. Ayer (and hopefully not taken as inflammatory in this context).

Only because you haven't had personal, direct experience of the non-physical, apparently.

If you did have such experiences, would you reject them as delusion or fantasy? If so, you wouldn't be an Empiricist, but a Materialist.

Besides, Empiricism is not the only valid means of looking at the world. There are many means of acquiring knowledge.

I would appreciate if you would stop ignoring literally my every reply to your comments. It starts to feel rude.