Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

Surely if you apply that criterion, you could close down just about all discussions and leave them to the experts, who may have lots of pressures on them not to reveal the unvarnished truth. 

We can all think, and it seems to me that most evolutionary steps cannot be driven by evolutionary change. In terms of the paper you quoted, there simply aren't any peaks (or troughs) on the fitness surface until you get close to something useful. 

If you are considering making 50 changes (say) to an existing gene to make a new one with a new function, then there are approx 4^50 ways that can fail. Natural selection (NS) can't possibly 'help' to keep that process on track, because until you get very close to a useful end product, the intermediate changes don't leave a functional gene.

Even if you postulate intermediates that are somehow useful (I guess that is what your linked paper does), unless they are useful in the same way as the end product, I can't see what that buys you. If you tried to evolve a car using 'usefulness' as your fitness criterion, and on the way you got something like a smoothing iron - how would that help you to end up with an evolved car.

The more I think bout it, the mechanism for evolution of life on earth is an unsolved problem. Maybe Darwin could think of traits and genes as fairly simple things, but now we know they require strings of hundreds of bases to define them, how the hell does it happen?

Lots of wiggle room to believe whatever suits ones fancy is what happens when not experts opine, such as yourself.

Surely if you apply that criterion, you could close down just about all discussions and leave them to the experts, who may have lots of pressures on them not to reveal the unvarnished truth.

Radin has mentioned this, that scientists will send him information about potential Psi effects in results they fear to mention for the sake of their careers. I can't help but look askance at such persons, given the stakes, but then how many have the courage of a Sheldrake to turn from the kind of lucrative consulting career a Cambridge/Harvard trained scientist might enjoy for the sake of Truth?

The pressures may simply be internal as well:

Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time? 

When a star scientist dies, outsiders often tackle mainstream questions in the field by leveraging new ideas that arise in other domains.

Anyone who took the trouble to look through this thread would know that nobody here is pushing the biblical view. It is the old tactic of lumping together ID and Biblical Creationism to make an easier target and a quick dismissal. Even a quick scan of the article in the very first post should make that clear. Here's a quote from that article (such a pity this needs repeating over and over)...

I do think, in fairness, there is a strong motivation among some ID advocates to preserve a place for God.

However this to me seems like a great error, as elucidated by [Catholic theologian] Feser there is nothing [definitively] of God to be found in ID:

Signature in the cell? 

Now, it doesn’t take much thought to see that we’d think the same thing about finding “Made by Quetzalcoatl” imprinted in every cell.  I doubt that any Christian ID theorist would propose that “there is only one thing we could reasonably conclude” from this, viz. that we should renounce Christianity and take up Aztec religion.  More likely such an ID theorist would conclude that someone, somehow -- a New Atheist biotech cabal, maybe, or the devil -- was trying to shake everyone’s faith in Christianity.  Or he might just conclude that no intelligence at all was responsible for it, and that his cognitive faculties were massively malfunctioning.   Whatever he would conclude, though, the occurrence in human cells of the phrase “Made by Quetzalcoatl” would not by itself be doing the main work. 

But the same thing is true in the “Made by Yahweh” scenario.  The reason the reader I was quoting thinks (like many other people no doubt think) that the “one thing we can reasonably conclude” in such a case is that Yahweh put the message there, is that he already believes on independent grounds that God exists, that he is the cause of living things, that he revealed himself to the ancient Israelites as Yahweh, etc.  And those independent reasons are what's really doing the heavy lifting in the thought experiment, not the “Made by Yahweh” stuff.  Some secularist who thought he had good independent reasons to think that Yahweh does not exist might conclude instead that the whole thing was a gag foisted upon us by Erich von Däniken’s extraterrestrials, or by a cabal of Christian biotech whizzes -- or maybe that it is just a massive cognitive malfunction on his part, caused by his excessive fear of the Religious Right.

“But those wouldn’t be reasonable interpretations of such an event!” you say.  Well, maybe, and maybe not.  The point, though, is that you’re not going to know from the event itself, considered in isolation.  If we’re to judge that Yahweh, rather than extraterrestrial pranksters, hallucination, or some other cause, was behind such an event, it is considerations other than the event itself that will justify us in doing so.  In short, we could take “Made by Yahweh” to be a sign from Yahweh only if we already have, on other grounds, good reason to think Yahweh exists and is likely to send us messages by leaving them in cells.  And in that case the occurrence of the phrase in the cell would not be giving us independent reason to think Yahweh exists. 

(See also Where's God?)

OTOH, the nobel physicist Josephson did suggest we all read Signature in the Cell at the end of one of his lectures about his own ideas...was years ago so but I'll try to find which one that was...

1. I’m not sure where you see value in discussions among people who don’t know what they’re talking about. There are plenty of interesting discussions to be had by referring to useful/valid information.

2. The idea that scientists are under pressure not to reveal the unvarnished truth is incorrect. Whether or not “experts” are, speaks strongly as to whether or not someone can be regarded as an expert.


It is highly unlikely that someone with knowledge and experience would agree with your characterization of evolution. So where’s the value in discussing what would be considered a caricature of evolution?

Linda

Well I suppose everyone finds kicks in different things. If Nbtruthman, and I want to share our totally baseless ideas about evolution with other consenting adults on this site, what is the harm in that? Although you clearly support the idea of evolution by natural selection, it doesn't sound as if you have any great ideas how to explain how it works in a world where mutations happen on a string of hundreds of DNA bases. 

Perhaps you might like to join us in some baseless speculation.

I'd still like someone to explain how natural selection can operate on the gene for a potentially useful protein, when, say, another 40 steps are needed to reach a useful product. I'd also love to know where the various proteins that make up the first ribosomes came from. In a world before life, natural selection doesn't seem to have much meaning.

I'd still like someone to explain how natural selection can operate on the gene for a potentially useful protein, when, say, another 40 steps are needed to reach a useful product. I'd also love to know where the various proteins that make up the first ribosomes came from. In a world before life, natural selection doesn't seem to have much meaning.

Maybe this would help? ->

Without a Library of Platonic Forms, Evolution wouldn't work

In an ever-changing Darwinian world, species incessantly spew forth new species whose traits can shade into one another. The 20th-century biologist Ernst Mayr called Plato the ‘great antihero of evolutionism’, and in fact it was Mayr who replaced the essentialist concept of species with a modern biological alternative, based on individuals in the same population that can interbreed.

But as has happened many times before, Plato might have the last word. We just need to look deeper than the ephemeral appearance of living things.

OTOH:

The Neo-Platonic Argument for Evolution Couldn’t Be More Wrong

The question Wagner believes he’s answered is: “Since mutation is random, how does natural selection ‘know’ how to find its way in the very, very large library of possible forms?” As he says: “Without these pathways of synonymous texts, these sets of genes that express precisely the same function in ever-shifting sequences of letters, it would not be possible to keep finding new innovations via random mutation. Evolution would not work.”

Yes it would! Natural selection does the work of “walking” a population through the library, and it is the combination of a random process (mutation) and a non-random one (selection) that yields evolutionary change. But the library doesn’t exist before natural selection “walks” through it. The analogy is misleading: It is better to think of a library that is created (and partially destroyed) moment by moment as life evolves. There is no mystery here, and there hasn’t been for about a century. Thinking in terms of libraries and Platonic Forms is simply not helpful to the biologist.

Wagner is forced to compound the unnecessary complexity of his solution by trying to answer a further mystery: “So nature’s libraries and their sprawling networks go a long way towards explaining life’s capacity to evolve. But where do they come from? They exist in a world of concepts, the kind of abstract concepts that mathematicians explore. Does that make them any less real?”

I don't know if Wagner wrote a response, I'd have to dig deeper...I do think it is a bit odd Massimo doesn't really mention his long love affair with Mathematical Platonism which strikes me as dishonest...

Just to confirm the the bankruptcy of Darwinism in explaining the Cambrian explosion, I previously posted (#843) about new research that establishes that thousands of new genes would have been necessary for the origin of animals. This work was in a new paper (at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04136-5), summarized here . It's title is "Reconstruction of the ancestral metazoan genome reveals an increase in genomic novelty”. They conclude that “many new” genes were necessary during the origin of animals. According to the paper, for the origin of the Bilatera (animals with symmetrical left and right sides), an additional 1580 gene groups were required.

Of course the Darwinians here will carefully avoid addressing the science of the problem, preferring to keep jabbing at the supposed Christian Creationism connection, and suggesting that because those here are not professional evolutionary biologists we can't intelligently discuss the issues. Guess why this position. Don't bother them with the science, with the details, because with them this is a losing proposition. They will carefully avoid the problem of explaining the origin of 1580 new genes during the transition to the Cambrian, especially if as the other new research shows, it took approximately 400,000 years. Needless to say, there is no sign in the fossil record of any precursors despite many places where conditions were excellent for preservation of small animal fossils. Nothing has ever been found despite very much assiduous digging over the century and a half since Darwin's day.

Well I suppose everyone finds kicks in different things. If Nbtruthman, and I want to share our totally baseless ideas about evolution with other consenting adults on this site, what is the harm in that?

The harm is in the Illusory Truth effect, and the Continued Influence effect.

Basically, it makes you more likely to regard false information as true, and make it difficult to update your knowledge away from falsehoods. You have more success if you avoid false information in the first place.

Linda

Of course the Darwinians here will carefully avoid addressing the science of the problem, preferring to keep jabbing at the supposed Christian Creationism connection, and suggesting that because those here are not professional evolutionary biologists we can't intelligently discuss the issues. 

Well, I didn’t just make this up. I have watched you guys discuss issues on which I do have expertise (medicine and research methods), and the results are awful. I have no reason to think you will somehow perform differently on any other subject, especially given that you fall prey to the same methods which led you astray previously.

Linda

Well, I didn’t just make this up. I have watched you guys discuss issues on which I do have expertise (medicine and research methods), and the results are awful. I have no reason to think you will somehow perform differently on any other subject, especially given that you fall prey to the same methods which led you astray previously.

Linda

Well, as I expected, the prediction of my last post has come true.

Just to confirm the the bankruptcy of Darwinism in explaining the Cambrian explosion, I previously posted (#843) about new research that establishes that thousands of new genes would have been necessary for the origin of animals. This work was in a new paper (at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04136-5), summarized here . It's title is "Reconstruction of the ancestral metazoan genome reveals an increase in genomic novelty”. They conclude that “many new” genes were necessary during the origin of animals. According to the paper, for the origin of the Bilatera (animals with symmetrical left and right sides), an additional 1580 gene groups were required.

Of course the Darwinians here will carefully avoid addressing the science of the problem, preferring to keep jabbing at the supposed Christian Creationism connection, and suggesting that because those here are not professional evolutionary biologists we can't intelligently discuss the issues. Guess why this position. Don't bother them with the science, with the details, because with them this is a losing proposition. They will carefully avoid the problem of explaining the origin of 1580 new genes during the transition to the Cambrian, especially if as the other new research shows, it took approximately 400,000 years. Needless to say, there is no sign in the fossil record of any precursors despite many places where conditions were excellent for preservation of small animal fossils. Nothing has ever been found despite very much assiduous digging over the century and a half since Darwin's day.

What do you think of certain potential cases of [non-local] information transfer - for example bacteria exceeding the expected rate of adaptability? (I believe there are extant cases suggesting this, but for our purposes let's assume they're hypothetical.)

Would such a thing be enough to account for these issues? Could Psi effects account for them?

Or does it take some kind of top-down guidance in your view, whether that is God or Tutelary Spirits?