Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

Why don't you read the whole thread so that you can see what was being discussed?

Why should I (or anyone) adopt your base assumptions? (And please try to resist repeating your mantra that they are based on fact.)


My response, as if you really care, was for @jkmac who commented upon design appearing to have happened "in chunks". The word spiritual serves to differentiate between purely physical, random and undirected versus something that appears to have been designed. So the spiritual element was already in play throughout the discussion.There are some atheists who have speculated about some form of intelligence being involved in evolution (I already mentioned Nagel) but, for most proponents here, trying to constrain a universal consciousness within materialist metaphysics is unnecessary. Something beyond materialism (i.e. spiritual) seems so much more parsimonious - unless you are compelled to limit your thinking to materialism.

I'm not asking you to adopt my base assumptions. I'm asking why you reason the way you do?

Why does each small step have to be beneficial? As long as it's not deadly, it might fix in some portion of the population.

https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpag...ecular-839

~~ Paul

Because without selection at most steps, it you get a huge combinatorial explosion. If each step can go K ways, and there are N of them, you get K^N possible outcomes.  So take K=4 and N=30, you get 1152921504606846976 outcomes - most of which will be nonsense. Darwin himself could have answered your question!

I mean, yes there may well be neutral genetic drift, but the only thing that gives it any reasonable chance of drifting into something useful, is Natural Selection (or, of course an ID based theory).

Also, who is talking about neutral changes? Suppose you want to envisage the changes that supposedly transformed a land based mammal into a whale. Most of the changes would be far more likely to be deleterious until all had happened. I mean what use would a pair of gills be until the creature could live in the water - they would probably be liable to dry out and become infected. Besides, any change of that sort would probably make an animal sexually unattractive to its peers - would you form a relationship with a woman who had webbed feet and gills

David

[Laird]

Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

I happened across this blog while searching for something else. It is quite long and I haven't even finished reading it yet but I felt it might be of interest to others here. So far, I have found myself nodding and smiling as I read it and, whatever your views on evolution, Neo-Darwinism or ID, there are some pretty quotable passages in there, IMHO.

I finally finished reading this blog this evening. I don't regret it. Lots of good food for thought in there. I am more and more convinced that neo-Darwinist evolutionary theory is bankrupt. Here's a quote from the blog that I quite liked re the tarantula hawk, "a gigantic wasp that begins life as an egg inside a paralyzed and buried tarantula, where its mother put it":

Now, some of this may be imagined as evolving by gradual steps (emphasis on “imagined,” which in matters evolutionary is good enough) as required by Darwin. All it takes is enough time. In enough time, anything desired will happen. Of millions and billions of eggs deposited in unfortunate tarantulas, over millions of years, some larvae ate the spider’s vital organs and so died in a rotting spider, not passing on their genes. Others pupated but tried to dig out by going downwards or sideways, thus dying and not passing on their genes. Only those with don’t-eat-the-important-parts mutations and this-way-is-up mutations survived, and so their genes became universal. This we are told.

But…but knowing what a tarantula looks like when you have never seen one, or seen anything, knowing that you need to sting it and just how, that you need to dig a burrow and drag the spider to it, and cover it up, when all of this has to occur in order or the whole process fails….

You have to be smoking Drano.

I'm not asking you to adopt my base assumptions. I'm asking why you reason the way you do?

Oh man, this one takes the cake...

Because without selection at most steps, it you get a huge combinatorial explosion. If each step can go K ways, and there are N of them, you get K^N possible outcomes. So take K=4 and N=30, you get 1152921504606846976 outcomes - most of which will be nonsense. Darwin himself could have answered your question!

Why do you say that most will be nonsense? Neutral theory proposes that most variation is neutral.

I mean, yes there may well be neutral genetic drift, but the only thing that gives it any reasonable chance of drifting into something useful, is Natural Selection (or, of course an ID based theory).

I might agree that ultimately some selection is required to come up with something useful. However, you said:

... each step has to somehow be beneficial.

I don't think each step has to be beneficial.

Also, who is talking about neutral changes? Suppose you want to envisage the changes that supposedly transformed a land based mammal into a whale. Most of the changes would be far more likely to be deleterious until all had happened.

You keep saying this, but neutral theory suggests otherwise.

I mean what use would a pair of gills be until the creature could live in the water - they would probably be liable to dry out and become infected.

Whales don't have gills.

~~ Paul

Because without selection at most steps, it you get a huge combinatorial explosion. If each step can go K ways, and there are N of them, you get K^N possible outcomes.  So take K=4 and N=30, you get 1152921504606846976 outcomes - most of which will be nonsense. Darwin himself could have answered your question!

I mean, yes there may well be neutral genetic drift, but the only thing that gives it any reasonable chance of drifting into something useful, is Natural Selection (or, of course an ID based theory).

Also, who is talking about neutral changes? Suppose you want to envisage the changes that supposedly transformed a land based mammal into a whale. Most of the changes would be far more likely to be deleterious until all had happened. I mean what use would a pair of gills be until the creature could live in the water - they would probably be liable to dry out and become infected. Besides, any change of that sort would probably make an animal sexually unattractive to its peers - would you form a relationship with a woman who had webbed feet and gills

David

Concerning the whale adaptations:
 
From an article by Jonathan Wells at http://www.salvomag.com/new/articles/sal...a-tale.php:

If we wanted to turn a land mammal into a whale, these are just a few of the many changes we would have to implement. Could the changes have happened accidentally, without design?....
How did the features needed for a fully aquatic lifestyle originate?
How would the hind limbs of a sea lion turn into a fluke (which is very different)?

How would a male’s testicles become simultaneously internalized and surrounded by countercurrent heat exchange systems? The streamlined bodies of male cetaceans lack external testicles. Instead, the testicles are inside the body. In most mammals (even sea lions) the testicles are outside the body, because sperm production normally requires a temperature several degrees below normal body temperature. In cetaceans, the testicles are cooled below body temperature by countercurrent heat exchangers. Veins carry cool blood from the dorsal fin and flukes to the testicles, where it flows through a network of veins that pass between arteries carrying warm blood in the opposite direction. The arterial blood is thereby cooled before it reaches the testicles.
Internalization of the testicle could not have preceded the countercurrent heat exchange system, or the male cetacean would have been sterile. Yet there is no adaptive advantage to having a countercurrent heat exchange system around the testicle unless it is inside the body.

How would a female develop specialized nursing organs to inject milk forcibly into her calf? Indeed, why would any of these changes occur? Sea lions are already well adapted to their amphibious lives.

An intelligence could have planned to make fully aquatic mammals and designed these features to actualize the plan. But Darwinian theory says no design is allowed, and that leaves us with little more than a fairy tale about how natural selection could turn swimming bears into whales. 

Then there are the sonar-like echolocation system combining many different systems, neural, cochlear, etc., the deep diving adaptations to prevent collapse of the lungs, it goes on and on. All of these body system redesigns had to be developed and implemented roughly simultaneously in order for the animal to remain viable and survive into the next generation.

I think this thread might be badly named as it seems that, according to Stephen Meyer, Darwin was one of the only ones who accepted that there was a major bug in evolution theory, namely the Cambrian explosion.

The subject title was taken from the title of the article quoted in the first post. I was posting a link.

 What???

All of this yak about natural, Darwinian, Design-based evolution never addresses the Anunnaki manipulation of the homonoid species which evolved into Homo Sapien (of today). As an aside, the homonoids that the Anus did not alter became Sasquatch.

If you were to have this conversation with, say, a Zeta Reticulum, they would remind you of the Anus work and of their own genetic manipulations using human DNA which has produced hybrid races e.g. Sassani people.

They consider these manipulations just as natural as plain ole evolution over time and without any intervention from what we call 'outside agencies'.

I've stumbled across a couple of articles about the problems Monsanto is having with round up resistant weeds. Since they introduced geneticlly modified crops that were also glyphosphate resistant.
Makes me wonder if this might be an example of morphogenetic resonance? In any cace I find the "weeds" ability to find a workaround fascinating.