Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

Neo-Darwinist evolutionary biology theory and many leading Darwinists (such as Larry Moran and Dan Graur) clearly predict and insist that due to genetic load factors, the math of population genetics, upwards of 90% of our DNA must be "junk".

On the Darwinian prediction of mostly "junk" DNA, from Revisiting the genetic load argument with Dan Graur (in Larry Moran's blog at https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2017/07/re...-with.html ):

"I’ve discussed genetic load several times on this blog (e.g. Genetic Load, Neutral Theory, and Junk DNA) but a recent paper by Dan Graur provides a good opportunity to explain it once more. The basic idea of Genetic Load is that a population can only tolerate a finite number of deleterious mutations before going extinct. The theory is sound but many of the variables are not known with precision.,,,
Let’s look at the first line in this table. The deleterious mutation rate is calculated using the lowest possible mutation rate and the smallest percentage of deleterious mutations (4%). Under these conditions, the human population could survive with a fertility value of 1.8 as long as less than 25% of the genome is functional (i.e. 75% junk) (red circle). That’s the UPPER LIMIT on the functional fraction of the human genome.
But that limit is quite unreasonable. It’s more reasonable to assume about 100 new mutations per generation with about 10% deleterious. Using these assumptions, only 10% of the genome could be functional with a fertility value of 1.8 (green circle).
Whatever the exact percentage of junk DNA it’s clear that the available data and population genetics point to a genome that’s mostly junk DNA."

Graur is so convinced that most of our DNA is junk that he is willing to throw out the whole of the ENCODE human genome project results, because these results conflict with this expectation.

There is in fact an awful lot of non-protein-coding DNA, assumed to be "junk" by the Darwinist faithful. Yet more and more research is revealing that, as ID theory predicts, most of this noncoding DNA does have important functions.

Yet another major prediction of Darwinian theory that has been falsified. Like the suddenness and lack of gradualism and many species with the origin of the animal phyla in the Cambrian Explosion. Of course the Darwinist faithful (for whom the theory is their religion) refuse to do anything but continue to insist that since evolution is true Darwinism must absolutely be true and is unfalsifiable - they have the blind faith that either the new research is invalid or that the explanations are somehow within the theory. In the minds of Darwinists, Darwinism is simply never allowed to be falsified by empirical observation. Needless to say, this not science.

On some of the new research:

Our Cells Are Filled With ‘Junk DNA’ — Here’s Why We Need It, at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2...Vb6l-hKiUn :
 

"Other research advances in the last decade also suggest “junk DNA” might just be misunderstood genetic material. Scientists have now linked various non-coding sequences to various biological processes and even human diseases. For instance, researchers believe these sequences are behind the development of the uterus and also of our opposable thumbs. A study published in Annals of Oncology last year showed that a non-coding DNA segment acts like a volume knob for gene expression, ultimately influencing the development of breast and prostate cancer. And a study in Nature Genetics this year found mutations outside of gene-coding regions can cause autism.

Exploring the role of non-coding sequences is now an area of intense research. Increasing evidence suggests these noncoding sequences might help cancer defeat treatment, and experts now see them as promising tools for cancer diagnosis."

Article by Bernardo Kastrup

https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2019/08/...tions.html

I just saw this article referred to on the Anomalist website and thought it was quite interesting:
"today the idea of random mutations has become so intertwined with that of evolution by natural selection that, remarkably, the overwhelming empirical evidence for the latter is implicitly misconstrued to be evidence for the former."

Kastrup's point is that there isn't - and in the nature of things can't really be - sufficient empirical evidence that mutations are random. He doesn't assert that they aren't random, and can understand people thinking it's reasonable to assume that they are random. But he points out that it's important in science to distinguish subjective views from objective facts.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/andreaskay...346553825/

Another miracle of mimicry - the snake-mimic caterpillar, Hemeroplanes triptolemus, Sphingidae from the Amazon rainforest near Puyo, Ecuador. When disturbed this larva of a sphinx moth expands and exposes the underside of the first body segments, mimicking a snake head with black eyes and even white light reflections from the tops of the eyes. Sometimes it also lunges and strikes like a snake to deter predators such as lizards or birds.

How exactly would that evolve? It somehow evolved by trial and error? So that caterpillar tried hard, and by trial and error evolved the same colors … same head shape … same skin texture … to mimic a snake. There are like millions of possible colors, countless number of possible shapes and skin textures. What is even more difficult, the evolved colors have to match between the particular body and the head part. In other words, you need to have the right colors on the right places – by trial and error.

So, who believes in miracles ? A romantic or an evolutionary biologist?

I absolutely admire Dr. James Tour! What I find hilarious about this video and others pertaining to him is that the arguments in the comments try their best to refute him, but they can not do it. They instead argue that he is a second-rate scientist who doesn’t know chemistry, despite the fact the he is one of the most referenced scientists in the world pertaining to his field. He is not second-rate, he knows his stuff.

A key screenshot from this, James Tour's 1-hour lecture on the mystery of the origin of life and on OoL research (good quality video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU7Lww-sBPg):

"Almost ever chemical synthesis experiment in Origin of Life (OoL) research can be summed up by a protocol analogous to this:

- Purchase some chemicals, generally in high purity, from a chemical company.
- Mix those chemicals together in water in high concentrations or in a specific order under some set of carefully devised conditions in a modern laboratory.
- Obtain a mixture of compounds that have a resemblance to one or more of the basic four classes of chemicals needed for life: carbohydrates, nucleic acids, amino acids or lipids.
- Publish a paper making bold assertions about OOL from these functonless crude mixtures of stereochemically scrambled intermediates, much like Miller did in 1952."

A new, brilliant and expert take-down of modern neo-Darwinism has just come out.

Well-known Yale professor, leading intellectual and computer scientist David Gelernter recently rejected Darwinian evolution in his celebrated essay, ‘Giving Up Darwin,’ in the Claremont Review of Books. This very well thought-out essay has been widely quoted by the media, as well as ID and other websites.  At Quillette, noted battler for scientism and fanatical Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne waded in, giving the usual sort of contemptuous Darwinian response. That should have been the end of Gelernter’s credibility.

But now, paleontologist Gunter Bechly, Brian Miller, and David Berlinski have claimed and used their right of reply, in a brilliant rejoinder that utterly eviscerates, slices and dices, Coyne. It deserves to be further promulgated and widely read. Highly recommended. People like Coyne are used to having their sweeping assertions accepted, not wittily dissected using a rhetorical rapier. This essay is at https://quillette.com/2019/09/29/right-o...rry-coyne/ .

An excerpt:

"David Gelernter accepted the conclusion that there were no putative ancestors of the Cambrian phyla in the preceding Ediacaran strata. He is in good company. So do most paleontologists who specialize in this field. This conclusion is not controversial, and it is obviously at odds with Darwin’s theory. Coyne is unpersuaded, maintaining that, yes, we have found Ediacaran “animals that appear to be arthropods, muscle-clad cnidarians (the group that includes modern jellyfish and anemones), echinoderms, mollusks, and probable sponges.”

This is pure fantasy. Coyne is unacquainted with the facts. There are no Ediacaran arthropods. There are no Ediacaran echinoderms either. Akarua adami, it is true, was initially attributed to the echinoderms. But apart from pentaradial symmetry, Akarua adami lack all of the synapomorphic characteristics of the echinoderms. The Cambrian fossil record contains stem echinoderms in helicoplacoids and homalozoans (carpoids) after all; and we know from reconstructed phylogenetic trees that pentaradial symmetry does not belong to their ground plan. The mollusks to which Coyne confidently appeals as friends of the family? They belong to the Ediacaran fossil genus Kimberella. First described as a jellyfish, Kimberella was later indeed sometimes associated with early mollusks. This attribution remained controversial: several characteristics contradicted it. A comprehensive paper recently reviewed the “problem of Kimberella” and concluded that “the possibility that Kimberella is coelenterate grade should therefore not be excluded.” Although likely a metazoan, they went on to write, “its placement remains problematic; it may be on the bilaterian stem group rather than within the stem group of any particular phylum.”

Another:

"The whales? And in twelve million years? Not likely. The available window of time for the transition from the terrestrial pakicetids to fully marine basilosaurids (Pelagiceti) is only 4.5 million years. This corresponds to the lifespan of a single larger mammal species, as Donald Prothero correctly notes. Prothero is Coyne’s ideological ally. They should be better friends. Short time spans give rise to a generic waiting time problem—a much-discussed issue in mainstream population genetics. It is easy to see why. The time required for even a single pair of coordinated mutations to originate and spread in a population is, at least, an order of magnitude longer than the window of time established by the fossil record. Either the fossil record must go, or the waiting time must go, but they cannot go on together. The whales are the least of it. The emergence of a single pair of coordinated mutations in the human lineage required a waiting time of 216 million years. The separation of the chimpanzee and human lineages took place only six or seven million years ago. These figures are clearly in conflict. This is the standard view, the one held by mainstream evolutionary biologists."
.............................................
"If random mutations cannot explain genetic novelty and complexity, just what can it explain? Not much.

If not old-fashioned Darwinism, then, perhaps, new-fashioned Darwinism—the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, or the Third Way of Evolution? Anything is better than nothing, but Coyne, at least, is on record as a supporter of neo-Darwinism. He is skeptical of the need for an Extended Synthesis and so remains committed to the view that nothing is better than anything.

For a very good reason. No part of the Extended Synthesis—niche construction, phenotypic plasticity, evolvability, epigenetics, hybridogenesis, natural genetic engineering—addresses the explanatory deficits of neo-Darwinism. In accommodating phenotypic plasticity or evolvability, it is neo-Darwinism that presumptively did the original construction work. These views thus embody the better aspects of nothing and anything."

A new, brilliant and expert take-down of modern neo-Darwinism has just come out.

Well-known Yale professor, leading intellectual and computer scientist David Gelernter recently rejected Darwinian evolution in his celebrated essay, ‘Giving Up Darwin,’ in the Claremont Review of Books. This very well thought-out essay has been widely quoted by the media, as well as ID and other websites.

I thought this was rather interesting from the original article:

If Meyer were invoking a single intervention by an intelligent designer at the invention of life, or of consciousness, or rationality, or self-aware consciousness, the idea might seem more natural. But then we still haven’t explained the Cambrian explosion. An intelligent designer who interferes repeatedly, on the other hand, poses an even harder problem of explaining why he chose to act when he did. Such a cause would necessarily have some sense of the big picture of life on earth. What was his strategy? How did he manage to back himself into so many corners, wasting energy on so many doomed organisms? Granted, they might each have contributed genes to our common stockpile—but could hardly have done so in the most efficient way. What was his purpose? And why did he do such an awfully slipshod job? Why are we so disease prone, heartbreak prone, and so on? An intelligent designer makes perfect sense in the abstract. The real challenge is how to fit this designer into life as we know it. Intelligent design might well be the ultimate answer. But as a theory, it would seem to have a long way to go.

It aligns with the shyness of Psi and the scattered reports for afterlife communication (mediums, NDEs, apparitions, etc) and extraterrestrial contact (which in itself at least doubles the oddness).

I suspect that there is something like a Veil, though it need not be a deliberately placed "wall", that makes interaction between that which is "mundane" and that which is "spirit" difficult.

It aligns with the shyness of Psi and the scattered reports for afterlife communication (mediums, NDEs, apparitions, etc) and extraterrestrial contact (which in itself at least doubles the oddness).

I suspect that there is something like a Veil, though it need not be a deliberately placed "wall", that makes interaction between that which is "mundane" and that which is "spirit" difficult.

I agree there is something like a Veil that seems to have been erected to prevent mankind from certainty regarding spiritual reality - paranormal phenomena are notoriously elusive and resistant to being pinned down.

However, I don't really see much of a parallel with the evolution area. Gelernter's criticism of the "God did it" version of ID is well taken, but I think it is more that the agents involved in evolution are imperfect - vastly intelligent and ingenious, with a strong aesthetic sense, but are not all-knowing, and being not omnipotent are not able to overcome the inherent tradeoffs which are as much involved in biological design as in human engineering. And of course they do not have a humanlike value system. One model would be very advanced spirit entities. Another would be very advanced extraterrestrials.

Some more amazing examples of insect mimicry:

I would like to know the detailed history of the evolution of these purely by random mutation plus natural selection.

"Dead leaf butterfly
The underside of this butterfly's wings are truly a remarkable work of evolutionary art; they look just like a dead leaf, with faded browns, blemish spots, even jagged edges. Meanwhile, the upperside of the insect's wings display bright colors more typical of butterflies. If they're looking for mates, they'll flash their colors, but if they want to hide from predators, they simply close their wings."

Another:

"Walking leaf
Walking leaf insects are related to the walking sticks, but are in their own family (Phylliidae). As their name suggests, they have evolved to mimic leaves, rather than sticks, though their long bodies allow them to take the form of a whole leafed branch — so their camouflage is particularly advanced. The camouflage is even down to insect bite marks." 

Courtesy of the Anomalist - here's an article from Quanta Magazine entitled "Inherited Learning? It Happens, but How Is Uncertain":
https://www.quantamagazine.org/inherited...-20191016/