Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

A slight time-slip here. Lyall Watson in 1974:

Under ideal conditions in which no bacteria are killed by viruses or white blood cells, none would ever die. For a bacterium there is no death from old age and no corpse except when it is actively destroyed. So for the most simple collections of living matter to be enclosed within a single cell, death is a meaningless construct. Evolution seems to have moved from totally dead inorganic matter to everlasting self-replicating life in a single step. The complication of a flexible life-death relationship seems to have been a refinement that was added later for some other reason.

How far did we get in 47 years in addressing this?

"Evolution seems to have moved from totally dead inorganic matter to everlasting self-replicating life in a single step."

From The Romeo Error: A matter of life and death

A slight time-slip here. Lyall Watson in 1974:


How far did we get in 47 years in addressing this?

"Evolution seems to have moved from totally dead inorganic matter to everlasting self-replicating life in a single step."

From The Romeo Error: A matter of life and death

It's the biggie as far as I am concerned.  How did inorganic matter become alive?

It's the biggie as far as I am concerned.  How did inorganic matter become alive?

Thru the action of mind.

I would argue that mind existed before bodies.

Modern science has buried NS + RM = Evolution.  It was buried, not by thought experiments and philosophy, but by the hard data.  There is no mystery in the data, and it is clear that information science and physiology has found means for evolution that includes organisms actively gaining information for their own benefit purposefully.

I think I'd challenge that. I think modern science has tried to give the impression that it has something new to offer rather than plain old RM+NS, but every mechanism has to contain selection in order to drive it. For example, there is the concept of genetic drift - the idea that parts of the genome just evolve for a while without selection operating. Clearly if you think about it, the drift process will generate a vast explosion of variants, and selection then must cut in to 'find a winner'. Then you have to ask yourself how that varies from RM+NS.


Even though I am not a Christian, I do think the Intelligent Design crowd have a much clearer alternative to Darwin and RM+NS, that you should certainly consider. For example:


https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darwin-Devolves...132&sr=8-1

The problem is that Darwin's theory really should have collapsed when DNA was discovered to encode proteins, 3 bases per amino acid residue. A typical protein consists (before folding) of  a chain of 200 (say) amino acids. As you move away from the correct encoding of a protein to one with one mistake, then two etc, the functionality of the protein rapidly fades.

That means that until mutations have produced a new protein almost completely (a combinatorial explosion if ever there was one) natural selection cannot influence the outcome. That leaves you with RM which is useless.

Like most of the ID books, Behe's book is a fascinating read and does not veer off into religious discussion.

I think I'd challenge that. I think modern science has tried to give the impression that it has something new to offer rather than plain old RM+NS, but every mechanism has to contain selection in order to drive it. For example, there is the concept of genetic drift - the idea that parts of the genome just evolve for a while without selection operating. Clearly if you think about it, the drift process will generate a vast explosion of variants, and selection then must cut in to 'find a winner'. Then you have to ask yourself how that varies from RM+NS.


Even though I am not a Christian, I do think the Intelligent Design crowd have a much clearer alternative to Darwin and RM+NS, that you should certainly consider. For example:


https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darwin-Devolves...132&sr=8-1

The problem is that Darwin's theory really should have collapsed when DNA was discovered to encode proteins, 3 bases per amino acid residue. A typical protein consists (before folding) of  a chain of 200 (say) amino acids. As you move away from the correct encoding of a protein to one with one mistake, then two etc, the functionality of the protein rapidly fades.

That means that until mutations have produced a new protein almost completely (a combinatorial explosion if ever there was one) natural selection cannot influence the outcome. That leaves you with RM which is useless.

Like most of the ID books, Behe's book is a fascinating read and does not veer off into religious discussion.

What do you mean by "contain selection" ?  It doesn't sound like anything logical to me.  How can selection be contained?

What do you mean by "contain selection" ?  It doesn't sound like anything logical to me.  How can selection be contained?

What I mean is that all these supposed variants on Darwin's theory ultimately rely on selection to winnow the genetic alternatives.

What other mechanism can they propose? They can't credit Rupert Sheldrake's Morphic Fields, or intelligent design (BTW not necessarily by a single omniscient deity). What you need to design the biochemistry of life is a mind, which must inevitably be desembodied.

The trouble with selection is that it just can't really work in most cases. If you think about my hypothetical protein with 200 amino acid residues, that is approximately analogous to a sentence of 200 letters because there are 20 amino acids and 26 letters of the alphabet. So take this sentence from my original comment:

"The problem is that Darwin's theory really should have collapsed when DNA was discovered to encode proteins, 3 bases per amino acid residue. A typical protein consists (before folding) of  a chain of 200 (say) amino acids."

A single protein is about as complex as that sentence, And Darwin's theory says it can arise by a processor random mutation followed by a selection of the fittest. However random mutation will produce gibberish most of the time and there is no selective difference between one gibberish sentence or another!

Intelligent Design proposes that living organisms have to have been designed - really just as nobody would look at a computer, or even a mechanical clock, and propose that it could be produced by random processes.

David

A single protein is about as complex as that sentence, And Darwin's theory says it can arise by a processor random mutation followed by a selection of the fittest. However random mutation will produce gibberish most of the time and there is no selective difference between one gibberish sentence or another!

David

Darwin wrote before random mutation was proposed.  ????   Have you read any of the articles I posted in this long thread that offer peer-reviewed evidence as to the actual causal pathways for bio-coding to drive life?  I would be willing to discuss anyone of them with you. 

I take the word selection to mean: outcome, as a behavioral outcome or as electrochemical outcomes.  Are you using the term, as a shorten version of NS (natural selection)?  Or do you have a special meaning?

I don't speak for the authors and not from any position of expertise.  What seems most to differ in our views is the acceptance of old model of a "ghost and a machine".  It is something that needs to be replaced.

Rather than the machine being the male dancer, with the ghost hanging along for the ride through time and space, I see  the information processing center as the natural alpha source.  The body, responses to command and control signals from the central processing identity.  It was the regulation of the DNA/RNA/Ribosome programs that built all aspects of the body.  In an informational view - each self is at the center of an informational environment.  Not a ghost - but a substantial active unit of life.  Plans drive bodies.  The plan for bodies being grown exists before a body. 

I am glad you have joined this discussion (again) because I am conscious that I have joined a very long discussion part way through.


Why did the ghost in the machine need replacing so badly?

I mean, to take an argument from the ID community, if an archaeologist digs out a relic, he has to try to decide whether it is artificial - i.e. Intelligently Designed, or natural. An object such as the bacterial flagellum, which has multiple parts and uses energy to spin, sure looks like it is designed, and an archaeologist who unearthed something that complex would undoubtedly accept it was artificial, but science seems to desperately want to avoid that obvious conclusion and try to prove the opposite.

I think a true scientist would want to assess the evidence and come to the most likely conclusion, not the one that has been derived from  dogma. The dogma that mind was not involved in the creation and evolution of life came from a schism with the Church, not from some deep scientific insight. Those DNA/RNA/ribosome mechanisms that you refer to are deeply self-referential. The DNA/RNA codes for the very proteins that compose the ribosomes, which in turn decode the RNA derived from the relevant genes (encoded in DNA).

It is mind-bogglingly hard to see how that scheme came into existence without a mind to figure it all out on a large whiteboard (so to speak), followed by a lot of time at a chemistry bench (again so to speak).

Yes there are people talking vaguely of a third way in biology, but I think that exploring ID would be a great starting point (even if it wasn't the end point), except that it would be hard to publish the research because of the above mentioned dogma derived from the split with the Church.

Unless you reject (or drastically reinterpret) most of what is discussed on this website - NDE's Other death-related phenomena, OBE's Mediums, reincarnaion, etc you surely have enough evidence to conclude that the mind can separate from the brain, and may therefore have preceded it - so why fight so hard to avoid concluding that it created life in the first place?

Why did the ghost in the machine need replacing so badly?

The meme of "ghost in a machine" casts the narrative in the light of -- "real" machine and a imaginary signal source.

Impossible to recover from such a scenario, one where mind counts.  The signal source needs to be processing the "real" stuff in concert with physical events.  In a marketing context  --  the information age needs to be grounded in the culture.  The ghost in the machine needs to go out of style because it feels old and not relevant.

Can't you tell that: RM + NS = New Species, is boring nonsense to me. If you think you can post someone or a paper - in the last year defending it with research - please post it.  Seriously - I would read it.

The facts have forced current research publication's from defenses of "mutations are random to fitness" pieces.  Nonrandom bio-informational process maps, documented by data, have opened many pathways for bio-information to cross genetic barriers.  

Today -- Physicalism's last stand is the -- "mind comes from neurology" meme.

The meme of "ghost in a machine" casts the narrative in the light of -- "real" machine and a imaginary signal source.

Non-physical is not the same as imaginary.

The facts have forced current research publication's from defenses of "mutations are random to fitness" pieces.  Nonrandom bio-informational process maps, documented by data, have opened many pathways for bio-information to cross genetic barriers.  

Today -- Physicalism's last stand is the -- "mind comes from neurology" meme.

Sorry, I suspect that is a lot of jargon to cover up the same problem - scientists can do that , sometimes without even realising what they are doing.

Every gene contains a lot of what the ID community call specified information (to distinguish it from Shannon information etc). Each gene depends on this information, and as I have pointed out, it is very sensitive to changes in that information.

My question to you, is where exactly does the information contained in the DNA for a gene actually come from originally? If you prefer to leave the origine of life as unknown, then think about any gene that we posess and that an amoeba (say) does not - where did the information for that arise?

I mean if you think of it in terms of computers, a computer would do nothing without some information (software) to kick it off (the operating system), and we know where that comes from - programmers - but where did the information to construct any of the thousands of proteins (never mind other information) come from?

David