My Darwin Challenge

[AV1611VET]

LOL, what 'truth' is that?

John 14:6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

A fellow Ducati rider here?

Que?

Nope, sorry. If you understand the demands placed by functional coherence and what is actually required in order to posit actual evolutionary change then you will understand that this has never been observed and never will be observed

Really, ha?

How did we turn the thing on the right into the thing on the left, if not by evolutionary processes?

And that is, off course, just one example (which I choose because it is rather easy to comprehend).

anymore than it has been observed that a troop of monkeys banging on typewriters have been observed to have produced "methinks its a weasel".

Monkeys on a typewriter as an analogy to evolution, is nothing but a blatant strawman.
In banging randomly on a keyboard, there is not concept of competition for limited resources, fitness, inheritance, natural selection,...

So an argument that goes "because monkey's don't type an english sentence by randomly stroking keys, biological evolution is impossible", is nothing but fallacious nonsense.

Akin to "gravity doesn't exist, because hammers float in the space station".

Supposedly one emerged from the other

Yes, that's the idea of abiogenesis - which as nothing to do with what happened afterwards.

How first life originated is rather irrelevant to what happend to life once it existed.
Wheter first life was created through a natural process, gods, your single god of choice, extra-dimensional aliens or whatever-else-your-imagination-can-produce... it doesn't change one iote to the very real and very observable processes of evolutionary biology.

Just like it doesn't matter how matter came into existance - it still has mass and still exerts gravitational forces.

No matter how life came to be: it exists and behaves in certain ways and we can observe and study those processes.

by an as yet undetermined natural process (magic?)

No, "magic" is like the polar opposite of "natural".

which could well be the same as yet undetermined natural process that causes novel funtionally coherent non-adaptive forms to arise throughout the development of life on earth.

No, evolutionary processes aren't undetermind. Instead, they are rather well understood and have been for several decades / centuries.

They are, in fact, even actively used every day in breeding programs and agriculture and such. This is why you some horses' sperm costs a lot more then other horses'. Because we actually understand how genetics work and how it determines the fitness, qualities and looks of off spring.

If evolution isn't a real process, then why would the sperm of one horse cost more money then the sperm of another horse?

Nevertheless the natural processes identified, that life is subject to, are insufficient to explain the observed effect.

No, they are not.

There is nothing in DNA that can't be accomplished by the known processes of mutation + selection + inheritance.

 

[Jimmy D]

John 14:6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

Right, anyone with any intellectual curiosity must be a heathen!

 

[[serious]]

Would Darwin's, The Preservation of Favoured Races pass peer review today?

If not, why is he so venerated if he was so wrong?

Like, if common descent was never previously postulated and he, in the present day postulated it? Yeah, I bet that would get some play.

If instead you mean would a book from the 1800s get published as a journal article in 2016, no, probably not. It's a book instead of an article. Different things.

 

[AV1611VET]

Right, anyone with any intellectual curiosity must be a heathen!

We are all sinners.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Really?

That clear, huh?

If Darwin's brood hadn't denied it, would you?

But they did:

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/ladyhope.html


Sir Francis Darwin (1848-1925)

"Lady Hope's account of my father's views on religion is quite untrue. I have publicly accused her of falsehood, but have not seen any reply. My father's agnostic point of view is given in my Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. I., pp. 304-317. You are at liberty to publish the above statement. Indeed, I shall be glad if you will do so. Yours faithfully, Francis Darwin. Brookthorpe, Gloucester. May 28, 1918."

Do the math.

You've been here long enough to know.

I have, and it seems that you edited my reply a bit. Not a wise move. That implies that your answer to this question:

"Are you claiming that your God is an unjust God?"

Would be yes.

So why one Earth would Darwin be in hell? Just because he did not go along with your personal version of Christianity? Or any version for that matter. That is still not a legitimate excuse.

 

[Speedwell]

They both face the same problem however; that of a credible explanation for the functional coherence of novel biological forms.

Actually, the concept is quite a simple one. Take, for example, the evolution of the forelimb of a small mammal into a wing. There are no qualitative changes involved, only quantitative. However, as you correctly observed, a number of traits must evolve in parallel to produce the transformation. All of the traits involved exhibit constant reproductive variation--the length of the digit bones, the angle of the joints, the amount of webbing between the digits, and so on, all of these fluctuate constantly from one individual to another. The reason that they can evolve together in a useful way is just this: the selective environment in which a trait is found includes not only the external environment in which the creature lives, but the other evolving traits of the creature as well. Consider a population of proto-bats: they will have various lengths of finger bones and various amounts of webbing between the fingers, with individuals exhibiting all possible permutations of these two traits throughout the population. A proto-bat with longer fingers and more webbing will fly better that an individual with longer fingers and less webbing, or with more webbing and shorter fingers or with less webbing and shorter fingers. Thus, the two traits evolve in a favorable way together, evolutionary variation of one trait providing selection pressure on the other, and vice versa, combining to produce selection pressure on the other traits involved as well.

 

[AV1611VET]

But they did:

Of course they did.

They had a reputation to protect.

Pretend I'm Mike Tyson and, after I'm gone, a well-known reporter circulates the story that he visited me, and I told him those first-round knockouts were staged.

You can either choose to believe it, or you can hoot & holler that the reporter is wrong.

Your choice.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Of course they did.

They had a reputation to protect.

Pretend I'm Mike Tyson and, after I'm gone, a well-known reporter circulates the story that he visited me, and I told him those first-round knockouts were staged.

You can either choose to believe it, or you can hoot & holler that the reporter is wrong.

Your choice.

They had facts to protect Why would you believe an obviou liar? She maligned Darwin's character for no good reason at all.

 

[AV1611VET]

Why would you believe an obviou liar?

What makes it obviou?

She maligned Darwin's character for no good reason at all.

Either that, or she led him to Christ before he died.

 

[Subduction Zone]

What makes it obviou?Either that, or she led him to Christ before he died.

Nope, why are you making such vile and baseless claims about Darwin? There seems to be no reason to claim that he lost his mental faculties towards the end.

What makes it obviou?Either that, or she led him to Christ before he died.

Again, no. His daughter does not even believe that the "lady" ever saw Darwin. She too denies this attack on Darwin's character:

. These attempts to fudge Darwin's story had already been exposed for what they were, first by his daughter Henrietta after they had been revived in 1922. "I was present at his deathbed," she wrote in the Christian for February 23, 1922. "Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case she had no influence over him in any department of thought or belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think the story of his conversion was fabricated in the U.S.A. . . . The whole story has no foundation whatever."

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/hope.html

How would you feel if someone made the claim that Paul recanted his vision of Christ on his deathbed? It seems far more likely for that to have happened.

 

[AV1611VET]

His daughter does not even believe that the "lady" ever saw Darwin.

She would make one doosey of a guard, wouldn't she!?

Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness.

Looks like she kept close tabs on her father.

Probably didn't want him sailing off again?

 

[Anguspure]

Que?

How did we turn the thing on the right into the thing on the left, if not by evolutionary processes?

The 2 things are seperated by a series of breeding steps (by an intelligent agents). This may be evolution in the sense of observed change but is a very different thing from a natural process inventing a new thing, which is the "fact' the evolutionists believe happened in order to bring about new taxa defining homologues.

Monkeys on a typewriter as an analogy to evolution, is nothing but a blatant strawman.
In banging randomly on a keyboard, there is not concept of competition for limited resources, fitness, inheritance, natural selection,...

All of the above defines natural selection. For example many thousands of generations (more generations than there have ever been of any mammal species) of observation for natural selection of the E.Coli bacterium have revealed nothing new. Certainly the bacterium mutate and vary at extremely high rates in order to meet the conditions of the environment but nothing new has been observed and they are still E.Coli bacterium.

How first life originated is rather irrelevant to what happend to life once it existed.
Wheter first life was created through a natural process, gods, your single god of choice, extra-dimensional aliens or whatever-else-your-imagination-can-produce... it doesn't change one iote to the very real and very observable processes of evolutionary biology.

You have demonstrated in your post that what you are referring to here is the effect of Darwinian Natural Selection tinkering with pre-extant biological forms to allow survival within a given environment.
This process has only been shown to have originated in something new (I was wrong when earlirer stated that it could never happen, forgot about this one) in the case of Malaria developing resistance to Chloroquine.
But even if you could come up with another half a dozen examples of the same amino acid / genetic change this would still be vastly insufficient to explain the observed effect of the whole biological world.

No matter how life came to be: it exists and behaves in certain ways and we can observe and study those processes.

Once again you refer to Natural selection which although a fact of nature does nothing to explain the effect of biological invention.

No, "magic" is like the polar opposite of "natural".

Natural describes an observed principle or cause. Magic would be where no cause has been observed such as an invention of a functionally coherent thing without the input of an intelligent agent.

If evolution isn't a real process, then why would the sperm of one horse cost more money then the sperm of another horse?

Animal breeding involves intelligence.

There is nothing in DNA that can't be accomplished by the known processes of mutation + selection + inheritance.

Its invention or the invention of any new thing added to it all is definitely one thing that can't be accomplished

 

[Anguspure]

Actually, the concept is quite a simple one. Take, for example, the evolution of the forelimb of a small mammal into a wing. There are no qualitative changes involved, only quantitative. However, as you correctly observed, a number of traits must evolve in parallel to produce the transformation. All of the traits involved exhibit constant reproductive variation--the length of the digit bones, the angle of the joints, the amount of webbing between the digits, and so on, all of these fluctuate constantly from one individual to another. The reason that they can evolve together in a useful way is just this: the selective environment in which a trait is found includes not only the external environment in which the creature lives, but the other evolving traits of the creature as well. Consider a population of proto-bats: they will have various lengths of finger bones and various amounts of webbing between the fingers, with individuals exhibiting all possible permutations of these two traits throughout the population. A proto-bat with longer fingers and more webbing will fly better that an individual with longer fingers and less webbing, or with more webbing and shorter fingers or with less webbing and shorter fingers. Thus, the two traits evolve in a favorable way together, evolutionary variation of one trait providing selection pressure on the other, and vice versa, combining to produce selection pressure on the other traits involved as well.

But why pentadactyl? Why not 6 or 7 or 4? Why not 20? Why has this specific feature been preserved from the the very earliest examples of the taxa over 100s of millions of years with no precedence? Clearly (for the structuralist) a principle is being observed that transcends any adaption, and not just in this one area but over a number of taxa defining traits that display little or no adaptive adavantage or display an irreduceable complexity or simply display a level of functional coherence a bit beyond that which could reasonably be explained by any known natural effect.

Furthermore your description is quite simplistic as if animals are moldable like clay.
They are not.
You are aware, I am sure of the very many physiological and genetic changes that have to occur before a nub sticking out of a mutated, or varied creature becomes a functional limb of any kind, changes that may not even obviously apparant have any apparant relationship to the eventual adaptation.

The nub would need to be preserved in a population of creatures over many generations through many varied environments and competing with other mutations within the population, and perhaps for generations serving no adaptive advantage at all.
Remember that at each stage the process has no foresight, if there is no direct adaptive advantage for the population at any given step there is no reason whatsoever for the feature to be selected for and in fact it is more likely to be deselected from the population as a mutation that reduces survivability.
The difficulties can be demonstrated to be insurmountable.

Given the observed rate of genetic variance and the high rates of functional coherence exhibited in even very basic life forms, It is completely incredible that this would happen even within one population of living things over 100 times the time frame given let alone being an explanation for life as we see it.

I have been accused of being incredulous in the past as if that was something to be ashamed of. But a realisation of how fantastically improbable the suggestion of unguided origin and development of biology is, only confirms to a very deep level the original scepticism I had for a theory that competeted with what my own mind has always been telling me from the beginning.

 

[Speedwell]

But why pentadactyl? Why not 6 or 7 or 4? Why not 20?

Because the basic body plans were aid down quite early in the history of life and no longer exhibit reproductive variation. Therefore, they will not evolve any more as such. That is why when a specialized limb proves advantageous, it evolves from an existing structure.

Furthermore your description is quite simplistic as if animals are moldable like clay. They are not.

No, they vary and are selected. And yes, my example was simplistic, as befits a chatroom discussion--the real situation is much more involved, with many factors to be taken into account. But my little story expresses the principle clearly, I think, and is not wrong for being simple. As it happens, incalculable years ago when Noah and I were in school, the head of the biology department was a widely recognized expert on the evolution of bats and showed us a few things. He was also, by the way, a member of the religious order which owned the college, and there was never any indication that his faith was compromised in any way by his scholarly pursuits.

You are aware, I am sure of the very many physiological and genetic changes that have to occur before a nub sticking out of a mutated, or varied creature becomes a functional limb of any kind, changes that may not even obviously apparant have any apparant relationship to the eventual adaptation.

The nub would need to be preserved in a population of creatures over many generations through many varied environments and competing with other mutations within the population, and perhaps for generations serving no adaptive advantage at all.
Remember that at each stage the process has no foresight, if there is no direct adaptive advantage for the population at any given step there is no reason whatsoever for the feature to be selected for and in fact it is more likely to be deselected from the population as a mutation that reduces survivability.
The difficulties can be demonstrated to be insurmountable.

Quite right, and the reason that the theory of evolution predicts that such a thing would not happen.

 

[David_M]

She would make one doosey of a guard, wouldn't she!? Looks like she kept close tabs on her father.

Probably didn't want him sailing off again?

You really don't have anything to bring to the table do you? Silly questions followed by asinine one liners really is all there is to see from you now.

You used to be better than this, have you reached the point that you have realised that you have no valid arguments to put forth?

 

[AV1611VET]

Silly questions followed by asinine one liners really is all there is to see from you now.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me!

 

[TLK Valentine]

Would Darwin's, The Preservation of Favoured Races pass peer review today?

Many parts of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life would probably pass peer review today... some parts would not.

Just because you only ever say one thing doesn't mean he did.

If not, why is he so venerated if he was so wrong?

He's not. He just gets credit for getting the ball rolling, as it were.

When one rides a bicycle, one does not venerate their old training wheels.

 

[HitchSlap]

Would Darwin's, The Preservation of Favoured Races pass peer review today?

If not, why is he so venerated if he was so wrong?

And here I've been thinking the entire field of biology is predicated on Darwin's "big idea."

 

[David_M]

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me!

QED. Nothing more to bring.