There is no "tipping point" for adaptive capacity, it is totally imagined

[Gottservant]

Hi there,

So I finally put into words what it is that bothers me so much about Evolution. There are a couple of concepts that Evolutionists have used which taken together, point directly to the problem. One is the tipping point, which is what they use to refer to the environment's weather system heading into decline by (among other things) and the other is "adaptive capacity" which is the idea that there is only so much you can adapt. Why do I say take these together? Because they point to an absence of mechanism that would make Evolution possible.

If there is no tipping point for adaptive capacity, that means the idea of transition from one species to another is completely imaginary. Think about it, if you are going to go from one species to another in gradual steps, do you keep some adaptations to one side for a while and then start to diminish the old ones? Do you make a daring adaptation of some kind and try to make all the others fit the mould? Do you start a sequence of adaptations and then make up the rest of the story as you go along? No. You basically proceed at random until the adaptations you've got "tip you over" into a different species - that's the model they present as sound theory. Except there's a couple of problems: one adaptive capacity is limited (I tried arguing this at length and they just do not listen, not even when I present hard published science that says exactly this) and two, there is no tipping point. Why?

The reason there is no tipping point, is that you are what you are designed to be. There is no room to just change into something else because every corrective process in your body hinges on the idea that you will stay the same. The idea that enough in a certain direction will just "tip you over" into something else is ludicrous, let alone unsubstantiated. Consider the butterfly, it has to make a chrysalis in order to make any kind of transition from catepillar to butterfly, that is a kind of tipping point. You say "well what about the womb?" the womb is what creates you the way you are, no amount of change as to what you put in will spontaneously create something different on the other side. Saying "what about the womb?" is like saying "why doesn't the catepillar start as a butterfly one day?" Surely you can see that is ridiculous?

Yet Evolutionists would have us dress ourselves in the Emporer's clothes. "There is a tipping point" they say "You just have to wait for it" and so you wait, and you wait and you wait AND NOTHING HAPPENS. I mean, if there was no tipping point, why didn't coming up with the theory of Evolution create one? Don't you see? You have to be able to negotiate this imaginary tipping point in some way if you are every going to tweak your Evolution at all. If you can't tweak it, how are you ever going to optimize your survival? Don't even get me started on becoming a new species without some sort of control of your tipping point - that just doesn't make sense.

So look, I'm not trying to create a power vacuum here, I'm sure Evolution can be salvaged. There is such a thing as a continuum of contingencies, whether you think it is evolved or not and such a continuum of contingencies can lead to surprising results. Inference and logical argument rely on a continuum of premises, which is similar, and you can see that arguments of various kinds do arise from such a reality. What I want is for people to stop saying that you can just leap outside of the system at any point in your choosing, by evolving sufficiently differently to everyone else - that is just lawlessness and it is unacceptable. It does not make sense and there is no end to the arguments I can make against it - all it takes is imagination.

However, I have not digressed into endless argument, I am making a very plain observation "there is no tipping point, for adaptive capacity". Without a science of the tipping point, you might as well play golf with the Emporer's clubs.

 

[gluadys]

Hi there,

So I finally put into words what it is that bothers me so much about Evolution. There are a couple of concepts that Evolutionists have used which taken together, point directly to the problem. One is the tipping point, which is what they use to refer to the environment's weather system heading into decline by (among other things) and the other is "adaptive capacity" which is the idea that there is only so much you can adapt. Why do I say take these together? Because they point to an absence of mechanism that would make Evolution possible.


If there is no tipping point for adaptive capacity, that means the idea of transition from one species to another is completely imaginary. Think about it, if you are going to go from one species to another in gradual steps, do you keep some adaptations to one side for a while and then start to diminish the old ones? Do you make a daring adaptation of some kind and try to make all the others fit the mould? Do you start a sequence of adaptations and then make up the rest of the story as you go along? No. You basically proceed at random until the adaptations you've got "tip you over" into a different species - that's the model they present as sound theory.

I don't know where you are getting this from, GS, but it is not recognizable to anyone who understands how evolution takes place. The idea that evolutionary change leads to a sudden "tipping over" into a different species is quite incorrect.


I think this comes again from thinking of a population as if it were a single organism. Try to think in terms of a population of at least 1,000 members (even that is far, far smaller than most distinguishable populations in nature).

So to take your basic question:

"do you keep some adaptations to one side for a while and then start to diminish the old ones?"


No. One adaptation occurs in one of the thousand members of the population in one generation. Another occurs in a different member of the population, likely in a different generation. A third occurs in still a different member of the population in still a different generation. Each of these, in the case of a favorable adaptation, will become a progenitor of a variety within the original population. So after ten generations or so, you will have a single population in four forms: 1. the original, with no adaptations, 2. the group which inherited the first adaptation, 3. the group which inherited the second adaptation, and 4. the group which inherited the third adaptation.

But wait, as long as these are all members of the same population, they can also mate with each other and have children by each other. So some of group 2, for example, can mate with some of group 4, and some of their offspring (not all) can have both the first and the third adaptation. And if some of them mate with group three, some (but not all) of their offspring can have all three adaptations.

So the adaptations can be passed around in various combinations all still in the same species. As long as all the groups still freely take each other as mates, they are still all the same species, even if they have all three adaptations their great-great-great-grandparents never had.

So how do we get new species:

Well let's go back to those four groups we got by introducing three new variations via different members of the population in different generations.

What if something happened to cut the third group off from the other three? What if, for several generations, there was no mating between group three and the other groups? What may happen is that if they meet up with the other groups again, they do not, even cannot mate with them again. They didn't suddenly "tip over" into a being a new species. They just gradually drifted away from their parent species.



So the tipping point argument doesn't work as an objection to evolution, because tipping over into another species is not how new species originate. But this is only clear when you realize that evolution happens in populations. It is not a matter of piling up adaptations in a single organism or even a single lineage. It is a matter of how new variations are introduced into a population and shared via reproduction. And it is a matter of how far they are shared--with everyone in the group or only a subset of the group. In the latter case, the subset may become a new species, in a gradual non-tipping way.

It is really important to visualize the population as a population and watch how genes get shared and swapped as the members of the group mate and reproduce.

The reason there is no tipping point, is that you are what you are designed to be. There is no room to just change into something else because every corrective process in your body hinges on the idea that you will stay the same. The idea that enough in a certain direction will just "tip you over" into something else is ludicrous, let alone unsubstantiated. Consider the butterfly, it has to make a chrysalis in order to make any kind of transition from catepillar to butterfly, that is a kind of tipping point. You say "well what about the womb?" the womb is what creates you the way you are, no amount of change as to what you put in will spontaneously create something different on the other side. Saying "what about the womb?" is like saying "why doesn't the catepillar start as a butterfly one day?" Surely you can see that is ridiculous?

This all has the ring of truth, but it is focused on the development of single organisms one by one. Evolution does not occur in this framework. So although all this is true, it is no argument against evolution, because it is not about changes spreading through a population. No single organism changes its inherited traits between conception and death. The changes have to occur before the new individual is conceived, in the eggs and sperm of its parents.

Yet Evolutionists would have us dress ourselves in the Emporer's clothes. "There is a tipping point" they say "You just have to wait for it" and so you wait, and you wait and you wait AND NOTHING HAPPENS.

No, GS, you are making this up. You never heard this kind of thing from an evolutionary scientist. "tipping point" is not part of any understanding of evolution I have ever heard.

AS in many cases I have seen, it looks like your discomfort about evolution is based on false information about evolution. Most of the reasons you give for rejecting evolution are false reasons, because they don't describe evolution in the first place.

However, I have not digressed into endless argument, I am making a very plain observation "there is no tipping point, for adaptive capacity". Without a science of the tipping point, you might as well play golf with the Emporer's clubs.

I agree, but the lack of a "tipping point" has nothing at all to do with adaptation, speciation or evolution. So it is a vacuous argument that leads to no conclusion about evolution.

 

[Gottservant]

I read what you wrote.

I will consider your argument, but for the moment it sounds like all you said back to me was "the tipping point is not a tipping point (because its a population)".

This is not coherent in the least.

 

[gluadys]

I read what you wrote.

I will consider your argument, but for the moment it sounds like all you said back to me was "the tipping point is not a tipping point (because its a population)".

This is not coherent in the least.

Well, that is not quite what I said. I said that you are right in that the idea of a tipping point is imaginary.

But you said the tipping point argument is used to defend evolution. I say that proposition is also imaginary. The tipping point argument is not part of an evolutionary argument, because it makes no sense when one looks at how evolution happens.


Part of the reason for that is that evolution happens in populations, not in single organisms. There is no way a whole population can suddenly "tip over" into a new species. Nor does a new species begin when one single organism tips over into a new species. The change of a population into a new species is usually a gradual, many-generations long process with no single generation identifiable as the first generation of the new species.

I understand you (like a great many people confused on this matter) have difficulty switching from a focus on a single organism and what happens in a single organism (mutation, new allele, variation in protein expression, variation in inherited characteristic) to what happens in a population (selection of variations, separation of groups, isolation of certain variations to certain groups, genetic isolation, speciation).

The first set of events is necessary for the second, but on their own do not produce new species. The second set generates new species, but there is no one "tipping point" to be identified as where the new species begins.


The connection between them is reproduction and inheritance. Are you familiar with Mendelian genetics?

If we apply Mendelian genetics to a population in which the first set of events is happening to various different members of the population through several generations, then impose a condition of isolation on part of the population, you can see the flow and why there is no identifiable tipping point at which one species becomes a new species. Yet there are new species.

 

[mark kennedy]

I read what you wrote.

I will consider your argument, but for the moment it sounds like all you said back to me was "the tipping point is not a tipping point (because its a population)".

This is not coherent in the least.

There actually is but looking at the whole population over millions, even billions of years is a head fake. It happens in molecular mechanisms and it's usually traits like color, texture, size...that sort of thing. Gregor Mendel was an researching professor about 150 years ago at a university in the heart of the Austrian Hungry empire. He was trying to develop hybrids but they had a tenancy to revert back to the grand parent form (2 generations back, see my signature). He tried a lot of different approaches but his experiments with pea plants picked traits that were either further apart on a Chromosome or on different Chromosomes, this became important later when Chromosome theory finally became a scientific model.

The rediscovery of Mendel's laws of heredity in the opening weeks of the 20th century, sparked a scientific quest to understand the nature and content of genetic information that has propelled biology for the last hundred years. The scientific progress made falls naturally into four main phases, corresponding roughly to the four quarters of the century.

1. The first established the cellular basis of heredity: the chromosomes.
2. The second defined the molecular basis of heredity: the DNA double helix.
3. The third unlocked the informational basis of heredity, with the discovery of the biological mechanism by which cells read the information contained in genes and with the invention of the recombinant DNA technologies of cloning and sequencing by which scientists can do the same.
4. The last quarter of a century has been marked by a relentless drive to decipher first genes and then entire genomes, spawning the field of genomics. The fruits of this work already include the genome sequences of 599 viruses and viroids, 205 naturally occurring plasmids, 185 organelles, 31 eubacteria, seven archaea, one fungus, two animals and one plant.

Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome, Nature 2001

What you are being exposed to in this kind of a discussion is almost exclusively Darwinian. Darwin simply made one long argument against special creation. There are no insights into adaptive evolution from Darwinism and in Evolutionary Biology it's also referred to as 'population thinking'. This doesn't tell you anything about how an adaptation actually occurs. There is a comprehensive way of understanding adaptive evolution but it's in the genomic machinery not in the naturalistic assumptions of Darwinism.

My favorite example is arctic wildlife, many of them simply develop white coats along with changes to their metabolism. There is even an arctic cod fish that developed a whole new gene that creates an antifreeze protein. What is crucial here is that the gene is simply repeats and there must be a molecular mechanism capable of being triggered by the frigid arctic waters. The same thing with other arctic wild life.

There is a tipping point, a fulcrum, a center of balance that drives the changes we call adaptive evolution. What the Darwinian desperately does not want you to realize is that it has limitations and random mutations are the worst possible explanation for them. There are random variations that are essential to the immune system and a lot of other systems, Darwin's famous Finches are a prime example. What they won't tell you is that random variation and errors in the DNA replication process (mutations) are two very different things. This is what I have come to recognize as an equivocation fallacy, pretending that Darwinian evolution and the genuine article of 'evolution' in the life sciences are the same thing. They couldn't be more different.

My advise, for what ever it might be worth to you, is simply this. If you want to learn more about adaptive evolution learn Mendelian genetics and forget about the atheistic philosophy of Darwinism. At the end of WW 2 Communist Russia (USSR) and China pretty much suppressed Mendelian Genetics and it put them way behind, I don't think they ever caught up. It's because they liked Darwinian atheistic materialism but it was never a comprehensive guide to understanding how nature really works.

Hope that helps you get things in perspective.

Grace and peace,
Mark

 

[gluadys]

There actually is but looking at the whole population over millions, even billions of years is a head fake. It happens in molecular mechanisms and it's usually traits like color, texture, size...that sort of thing.

Evolution begins to happen at the molecular level (and there is actually some evolution within the genome itself, but that is a whole different ballgame than the evolution of species); but evolution has not actually occurred until there are population-level consequences. That requires reproduction and inheritance and checking out if the statistical occurrence of different variants has changed.

A change in the statistical occurrence of variants (which is also a change in the distribution of alleles in the gene pool) is the formal definition of biological evolution. This change cannot occur on any level smaller than a population.
Further, it demands the action of the one mechanism you refuse to even acknowledge: selection.


Speciation is the dividing of a gene pool (population) such that part of the original gene pool no longer impacts changes in the other part. With both gene pools changing over generations, you end up with new species.

Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome, Nature 2001

What you are being exposed to in this kind of a discussion is almost exclusively Darwinian. Darwin simply made one long argument against special creation. There are no insights into adaptive evolution from Darwinism and in Evolutionary Biology it's also referred to as 'population thinking'.

Actually, Darwin's key insight is that the adaptations which make a species more adapted over time is natural selection. Note that Darwin is looking at a species here, not at how an adaptation first appears in an individual. He had no idea how that happened.

This doesn't tell you anything about how an adaptation actually occurs. There is a comprehensive way of understanding adaptive evolution but it's in the genomic machinery not in the naturalistic assumptions of Darwinism.

The explanations of genomic machinery are also "naturalistic" (which, by the way, doesn't mean "anti-creation") so that is not the issue. Yes, it is in the genome that the molecular changes produce an adaptation in one single organism. That is how an adaptation initially occurs. But you don't get the evolution of a species so long as the adaptation is not spread through the species. How does it get from one single individual (who probably represents far less than 0.01% of the population) to become a defining characteristic of the whole species?

When you explain that, you have explained evolution.

My favorite example is arctic wildlife, many of them simply develop white coats along with changes to their metabolism. There is even an arctic cod fish that developed a whole new gene that creates an antifreeze protein. What is crucial here is that the gene is simply repeats and there must be a molecular mechanism capable of being triggered by the frigid arctic waters. The same thing with other arctic wild life.

So is this your vision of how evolution works? The same mutation occurs over and over and over again in one individual after an other until all members of a species have mutated? What happened to Mendelian laws of inheritance?

There is a tipping point, a fulcrum, a center of balance that drives the changes we call adaptive evolution. What the Darwinian desperately does not want you to realize is that it has limitations and random mutations are the worst possible explanation for them.

Actually, scientists would be happy to tell you that random mutations do not explain adaptation. What explains adaptation is natural selection. Most mutations do not produce adaptation. Natural selection has the function of picking out for preservation via inheritance those that do.

There are random variations that are essential to the immune system and a lot of other systems, Darwin's famous Finches are a prime example. What they won't tell you is that random variation and errors in the DNA replication process (mutations) are two very different things.

Actually, they will tell you that. You are trying to conflate mutation and variation.

Mutation is a change in genetic information--a change in the DNA sequencing of a gene--that occurs on a molecular level.

A mutation often has no effect on an organism at all. Synonymous mutations do not affect an amino acid sequence and one still gets the same protein. In other cases, though the amino acid sequence is affected, the protein still carries out the same function with no consequences to the organism.

In such situations, you get mutation without variation.

Variation is a difference in the actual character traits of organisms. It occurs at the level of cells and organs and organ systems and visible traits.
Variation is a consequence of some mutations. So, yes, random variation in an organism is a very different matter than copying errors producing mutations in DNA sequences during cell replication.

My advise, for what ever it might be worth to you, is simply this. If you want to learn more about adaptive evolution learn Mendelian genetics

At least that is a good piece of advice. Understanding Mendelian genetics is essential to understanding how evolution works. But he should not follow your example of not carrying through to understanding selection and population genetics and cladistic speciation which are equally essential to understanding evolution.

 

[Gottservant]

If it cannot happen to an individual, it cannot happen.

 

[gluadys]

If it cannot happen to an individual, it cannot happen.

How do you select a variation of an individual?

 

[Gottservant]

How do you select a variation of an individual?

Potentiation alters within the individual, you've heard of "potency", right?

 

[gluadys]

Potentiation alters within the individual, you've heard of "potency", right?

In an evolutionary context, no, I haven't. But it doesn't change the question, nor answer it.

I am ok with calling the alteration within the individual a potency.

But my question is still this:

How do you select a variation (or potency) of one individual? How can you make a selection when only one item is offered?

Unless there is at least one other individual with a different variation (or potency), it is not possible to make a selection.

If you cannot select among the different potencies/variant characters in a population, you cannot change the population--so no evolution and no adaptation of the species.


Basically, what you are focused on is not evolution.

You are focused on "how does new variation occur?"

But new variation is only the beginning of evolutionary change.

 

[Gottservant]

Variation is the seed of Evolution, am I not correct?

So if variation is the seed, is not potentiation the crux?

How do you confuse these two?

 

[gluadys]

Variation is the seed of Evolution, am I not correct?

So if variation is the seed, is not potentiation the crux?

How do you confuse these two?

I still don't understand what you mean by potentiation, so I can neither confirm nor deny that it is the crux.

What I do know is that evolution proceeds through selecting among existing variations. Variations which are better adapted to the properties of the area in which the population lives, which give it better access to food, to congenial habitat, to protection from predators, etc. are selected positively (individuals with these variations are more likely to leave progeny), while the opposite are selected negatively (individuals with such variations are less likely to leave progeny). Over several generations, the effect of this selection is that all newborn progeny have the positive variations and few, if any, have the negative variations. This is change within a species. The characters, not just of one or two individuals, but of all members of the species, have changed in a more adaptive direction.

So, as I see it, variation is the seed and selection is the crux.

I don't know what potentiation is or what it has to do with multiplying a character trait through a species.

What is potentiation and what is its effect?

How does it differ from variation?

 

[Gottservant]

Potentiation alters the nature of the variation.

Selection just sets it in stone once it is potentiated, it is secondary.

If you fail the potentiation test, then what you select for fails also.

Still don't know what I am talking about?

 

[gluadys]

Potentiation alters the nature of the variation.

This sounds like you mean potentiation is the same as mutation. Am I correct?

If not, I still do not know what you mean by potentiation and how it acts differently from mutation or variation.

Selection just sets it in stone once it is potentiated, it is secondary.

This sounds as if a mutation must be successfully expressed as a character trait in a viable organism. IOW, the variation has to have a real biological effect on the traits of a living individual. Only then can selection act on it.

Is this what you mean? If so, I agree.

And this is where actual evolution begins.
This is where we have to move from a focus on a single organism to a focus on the population.

I assume you understand that if potentiation or mutation changes the nature of a variation, it does so in a single individual. No one individual can have a potentiation to express two natures of a variation at once, right?

So why do we call it a variation? Why do we speak of changing the nature of a variation?

Because next to that individual there are other individuals in the population, even in the same family, among its siblings, who have potentiation for a variation of a different nature. Individuals differ from one another. Individuals vary. That is why their differences are called variations.

But a multiplicity of variations (powered by different mutations, or different potentiations) does not make them different species. In spite of all the variations, they mingle, mate, reproduce a new generation which is also marked by a multiplicity of variations. Each individual is unique in the set of variations it expresses.

If you fail the potentiation test, then what you select for fails also.

But what is the potentiation test and how does an individual fail that test?
And how does that change affect the whole population?

The test of variation is selection.
How does the potentiation test differ? What does it consist of?

Still don't know what I am talking about?

No, I still do not know what you are talking about. You have not defined potency, potential, potentiation in any way that I can apply it to living organisms. You have not described how to identify potential or potentiation. You have not told how to distinguish the effects of potentiation from those of genetic change or variation or selection.

So I don't yet know what you are trying to describe in these terms.

 

[Gottservant]

You are nibbling but you are not biting, so I will answer the most potent (sic) of your questions.

The potentiation tests differs from the selection test in one crucial aspect, it must validate the variation in this lifetime.

It is not more complicated than that.

All this talk of populations obfuscates the very direct moral responsibilty to potentiate the correct variations for our children.

And you wonder why I am opposed to Evolution?

 

[gluadys]

You are nibbling but you are not biting, so I will answer the most potent (sic) of your questions.

The potentiation tests differs from the selection test in one crucial aspect, it must validate the variation in this lifetime.

It is not more complicated than that.

What indicates that the variation has been validated?

If it is not validated, what indicates the failure?

All this talk of populations obfuscates the very direct moral responsibilty to potentiate the correct variations for our children.

And you wonder why I am opposed to Evolution?

As far as I know we have no conscious control over the evolution of our species. So how can there be any moral responsibility attached to it?

The idea is even more impractical when we are speaking of species such as earthworms or mushrooms. How can they have any moral responsibility about anything?

 

[Gottservant]

What indicates that the variation has been validated?

If it is not validated, what indicates the failure?

I posit speculatively that there are validation genes, but the basis for my claim is spiritual.

If not validated, genes are excommunicated from the body immediately.

Much like a government, nothing happens genetically without it being ratified in some way.

As far as I know we have no conscious control over the evolution of our species. So how can there be any moral responsibility attached to it?

The idea is even more impractical when we are speaking of species such as earthworms or mushrooms. How can they have any moral responsibility about anything?

You have control of your potentiation through perspective, belief and experience.

 

[gluadys]

I posit speculatively that there are validation genes, but the basis for my claim is spiritual.

OK. since the claim is spiritual, there is nothing science can say about it. However, what science does say cannot be ruled out by a spiritual claim either. God as creator of all, visible and invisible (spiritual and physical) has made a coherent universe where spiritual and physical cooperate. So any spiritual claim (which we have no real way of validating objectively) must be consistent with physical realities we can validate objectively.

It could well be that your posited validation genes are the caretaker genes which regulate the copying process to keep it as accurate as possible.

If not validated, genes are excommunicated from the body immediately.

And what happens to the cell then? Does it die? What are the consequences for the body? Does it die?

You have control of your potentiation through perspective, belief and experience.

Given that potentiation is basically spiritual, that may be.

But it is not evident how that gives one control over one's own mutations, over whether one's offspring live or die or have children of their own, whether one's own descendants will be more numerous than the average for the population of your own generation, or over the evolution of one's species (which depends on all the above factors).

 

[Gottservant]

You're just not looking at the data.

If random mutation was all it took, the results would be all over the place.

There is a coherence of design that is greater than a single interpretation of a single law can account for.

All Evolution explains is that if you shift the selection pressure one way or another, within the boundaries of a very limited adaptive capacity, you cause the speciation of an organism to drift (for reasons that I stress "mutation" does not explain) and if you shift the selection pressure one way or another, outside the boundaries of that same very limited adaptive capacity, you kill the species (for reasons that I stress "mutation" at best accelerates). Nowhere does this justify believing in the butterfly phenomena, whether in this lifetime or the next.

I'm sorry but the idea that it does (justify trans-speciation) is just ridiculous.

 

[gluadys]

You're just not looking at the data.

If random mutation was all it took, the results would be all over the place.

Again, you are thinking things about evolution that are just not so. The theory of evolution is quite clear in agreeing with your statement. Random mutation is NOT all it takes.

As long as you think evolution is preaching random mutation as the only game in town, you are thinking falsely about evolution.

You need to incorporate the processes in evolution that make sure the results are not all over the place. When you leave those out, you have an incomplete and inaccurate understanding of evolution.