Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

I was just thinking today about the "Quantum Fathers" and their views on various facets of reality.

Really shows the decline in academia's intellectual standard that the materialist evangelicals have perpetuated.

I do think it will be interesting to see what the eventual response is to ID, I suspect it will be along the criticisms I've suggested - that the assumption of designer should be done with proximal causation in mind.

I do need to rank the designers of biological "fine tuning", haven't forgotten, just have to read up more on Ufology.

[Laird]

A short and remarkably inadequate rebuttal was published in Journal of Theoretical Biology (JTB), of the paper by Hossjer and Thorvaldsen that is described above

"Remarkably inadequate" is a good description. I'm not even sure that it qualifies as a rebuttal, since it fails to engage with the actual argument of the paper (which I've just finished reading for the first time), and seems even to misrepresent that argument.

By the way, just from a moderation perspective, would you mind awfully truncating the two articles (the original "rebuttal" and the rebuttal-of-rebuttal) and linking to them, rather than quoting them in full, so as to adhere to our Guidelines for reproducing external content (in particular guideline #1, unless one of the exemptions there applies)?

Interesting that there is an insect that has actual gears:

This Insect Has The Only Mechanical Gears Ever Found in Nature

Joseph Stromberg

The gearing is an elegant solution. The researchers’ high-speed videos showed that the creatures, who jump at speeds as high as 8.7 miles per hour, cocked their back legs in a jumping position, then pushed forward, with each moving within 30 microseconds (that’s 30 millionths of a second) of the other.

The finely toothed gears in their legs allow this to happen. “In Issus, the skeleton is used to solve a complex problem that the brain and nervous system can’t,” Burrows said in a press statement.

The gears are located at the top of the insects’ hind legs (on segments known as trochantera) and include 10 to 12 tapered teeth, each about 80 micrometers wide (or 80 millionths of a meter). In all the Issus hoppers studied, the same number of teeth were present on each hind leg, and the gears locked together neatly. The teeth even have filleted curves at the base, a design incorporated into human-made mechanical gears because it reduces wear over time.

Water can appear to be “fine-tuned” for life

In their study published in early 2018, Hajime Tanaka, John Russo, and Kenji Akahane—all researchers in the Department of Fundamental Engineering at the University of Tokyo, in Japan—tried to tease apart what makes water unique among liquids. It’s got anomalous properties, like expanding when cooled below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, which explains why lakes freeze downward, from top to bottom, rather than up. Normally frozen solids are more dense than their liquid equivalents, which would mean that frozen chunks would fall to the bottom of a lake instead of staying on top. Water also becomes less viscous compared to other liquids when compressed, and has an uncanny level of surface tension, allowing beings light enough, like insects, to walk or stand atop it. Since it’s these distinctive features among others that power our climate and ecosystems, water can appear to be “fine-tuned” for life.

The researchers, with the benefit of supercomputers, were able to tweak and untune a computational model of water, making it behave like other liquids. “With this procedure,” Russo said, “we have found that what makes water behave anomalously is the presence of a particular arrangement of the water’s molecules, such as the tetrahedral arrangement, where a water molecule is hydrogen-bonded to four molecules located on the vertices of a tetrahedron,” a shape of four triangular planes. “Four of such tetrahedral arrangements can organize themselves in such a way that they share a common water molecule at the center without overlapping,” Russo said. As a result, when water freezes, it creates an open structure, mostly empty space and less dense than the disordered structure of liquid water, which is why water props ice up. Both highly ordered and disordered tetrahedral arrangements give water its “peculiar properties.” The paper’s title spells this out: “Water-like anomalies as a function of tetrahedrality.”

It seems like the "appearance" of fine-tuning, purpose, even consciousness keeps inconveniently showing up where Physicalist types were hoping to find the opposite...

This research is valuable because it is delineating a computational model of bio-information.  It still is focused on the physical, with information coming only from physical evolution, rather than including mental evolution, as well.

RNA world has been the hope of a physical answer.  This paper is all over its flaws.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-e...ists-argue

 
Perhaps most importantly, an RNA-only world could not explain the emergence of the genetic code, which nearly all living organisms today use to translate genetic information into proteins. The code takes each of the 64 possible three-nucleotide RNA sequences and maps them to one of the 20 amino acids used to build proteins. Finding a set of rules robust enough to do that would take far too long with RNA alone, said Peter Wills, Carter’s co-author at the University of Auckland in New Zealand — if the RNA world could even reach that point, which he deemed highly unlikely. In Wills’ view, RNA might have been able to catalyze its own formation, making it “chemically reflexive,” but it lacked what he called “computational reflexivity.”

“A system that uses information the way organisms use genetic information — to synthesize their own components — must contain reflexive information,” Wills said. He defined reflexive information as information that, “when decoded by the system, makes the components that perform exactly that particular decoding.” The RNA of the RNA world hypothesis, he added, is just chemistry because it has no means of controlling its chemistry. “The RNA world doesn’t tell you anything about genetics,” he said.

. “More and more bits of evidence are accumulating,” Lancet said, “that can make an alternative hypothesis be right.” The jury is still out on what actually transpired at life’s origins, but the tide seems to be turning away from a story dedicated solely to RNA.
“We should put only a few of our eggs in the RNA world basket,” Hofmeyr said.
Jordana Cepelewicz is a staff writer at Quanta Magazine who covers biology.

Let's get into it.  Here is the real state of affairs in biological evolution. http://www.science.auckland.ac.nz/people/p-wills
Hint: its not neoDarwinism.  

 Origin of genetic coding

There is an enduring problem concerning the way in which information can gain meaning in material systems. The actual occurrence of one specific pattern (when many were originally possible) must become causally connected to a choice among some otherwise unrelated set of outcomes. Genes are nucleic acid sequences (linear patterns) that are causally connected, through sets of biochemical events, to the construction and maintenance of specific organisms. How did this connection arise? The synthesis of proteins with amino acid sequences that are accurately specified by nucleic acid sequences is the most obvious pathway whereby information stored in molecular systems finds meaning. The complicated process of ribosomal translation, the execution of the genetic code, is a primary mechanism whereby genetic information is expressed in functional form. My research focuses on the way in which the machinery necessary for the processes of genetic coding could have evolved through thermodynamically driven stages of self-organization which became progressively more complex, in terms of not only the biochemical machinery involved but also the computational steps necessary.

In my simple worldview, electro-chemistry is the physical structure track of development.  And in a parallel track, mental outcomes build informational objects that are the structural basis of organic regulation (meaningful functions).

This research is valuable because it is delineating a computational model of bio-information.  It still is focused on the physical, with information coming only from physical evolution, rather than including mental evolution, as well.

RNA world has been the hope of a physical answer.  This paper is all over its flaws.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-e...ists-argue

I don't think this has any chance of revealing a mindless unintelligent mechanism behind evolution. Just an example (paraphrased for brevity):

Now, 24 years after Behe’s book Darwin's Black Box was published, it is still the case that there simply are no peer reviewed research studies that provide an evolutionary model to explain the origin of the bacterial flagellum, or how it is not irreducibly complex. Despite numerous research studies (mainly into unravelling the details of the mechanism, increasingly revealing that it is an extremely complex irreducibly complex system including the assembly subsystem). If there was, then all the Darwinists would have to do is reference all those studies. Yet that remains the one thing missing in all of the articles and comments.

In just this one example, the problem that the flagellum presents for Darwinists has only gotten much worse, not better, as more scientific evidence has come along.

As exemplified at the 2016 Royal Society conference on the problems of the New Synthesis Darwinist theory, it is not an argument anymore that Darwinist processes can't make complex functional systems; it is an observation that it does not.

In just this one example, the problem that the flagellum presents for Darwinists has only gotten much worse, not better, as more scientific evidence has come along.

Do you mean that there have been peer reviewed papers published regarding evolutionary explanations for other aspects of biology, with the flagellum as among the standout exceptions?

Do you mean that there have been peer reviewed papers published regarding evolutionary explanations for other aspects of biology, with the flagellum as among the standout exceptions?

There has been a paucity of such papers to my knowledge giving detailed (and that is essential) step-by-tiny-step accounts of how the natural forces of RM + natural selection produced any irreducibly complex biological mechanisms or systems. Please let me know if you find some. According to the source linked, there haven't been any for the flagellum through 2019. That certainly also applies to other prime examples cited by Behe such as the blood clotting system. The Darwinists simply generally ignore this sore thumb sticking out, testifying to the status of their theory as not science (since it is unfalsifiable and essentially a statement of metaphysical belief). There is even a paucity of speculation, with what is furnished mostly consisting of simplified "just-so" stories prominently featuring wildly speculative stories about "co-option". The researchers mostly concentrate on unravelling the details and mysteries of biological systems and as a practical matter ignoring the Darwinist doctrine.

A new article in Aeon, attempting to cleverly smuggle what is essentially conscious intelligence into New Synthesis Darwinism: Kevin Land and Lynn Chiu, “Evolution’s engineers”. All this talk still doesn't solve the mystery of the origin of irreducibly complex biological systems and machines. It all gets down to the details of each supposed small step of the Darwinist process that is claimed to have formed the finely engineered biological system - whether it is even slightly plausible. Like the poster child of this - the bacterial flagellum. Of course, the Darwinist evolutionary biologists never actually propose a detailed plausible pathway - just fanciful "just so" stories.

For instance, with bird evolution:

"The (adaptive fitness) landscape is represented by a 3D surface, with the well-adapted birds with good size-and-tail-length combinations living it up on the peaks, while the poorly adapted birds scrape out a living in the valleys. The region with the highest peak represents the creature with the optimal body size and tail, best able to survive. A population of birds will have a range of characteristics, with each combination a different point on the landscape – and through natural selection, the population will gradually converge on the traits best suited to the local habitat, represented on the adaptive landscape as the population climbing a local fitness peak. But there’s more than one way to get to the top of an adaptive peak: you can change your traits to help you reach the summit, or you can move the mountain so that it comes to you …"

This elegant prose cleverly invokes conscious intent (anathema to Darwinists) while carefully avoiding mentioning the fundamental problem pointed out by ID that the genetic differences corresponding to the adaptive mountain tops and hill tops are almost always much too far apart genetically to be bridged by less than some multiple and extremely low probability combination of random with respect to fitness mutations or other genetic changes. Where the great majority of such unplanned by intelligence random with respect to fitness genetic changes are deleterious. The fitness peaks are genetically far too much apart for the species to by random mutations successfully jump across the fitness valleys and chasms without the line dying out. This is the basic random search problem.

These organisms must be pretty smart to be evolution’s engineers. Never mind; keep talking, maybe people will be taken in and believe that Darwinist processes actually can invent complex biological machinery.