Evoluiton can't account for higher-level animal behaviour

[Aussie Pete]

How do you know it covers the salient points? Have you read the original paper in question?

A simple yes/no is all you need to respond with.



I don't see how that is relevant. I'm asking whether you have read the original paper in question.

Have you read it? Or did you just read someone's (poor) critique of it?

I read the section of the paper relating to the temperature control system. The "poor" critique is by an expert in the field. USAF pilots needed his expertise to ensure that air to air missiles functioned correctly. The "experts" in evolution do not know how closed loop systems work. That did not stop them from making incorrect assumptions and coming to incorrect conclusions.

 

[pitabread]

I read the section of the paper relating to the temperature control system.

In the original paper? Or just the bits quoted on that site?

You're not giving me much confidence you tried to read the paper in question.

The "poor" critique is by an expert in the field.

The relevant field in critiquing a paper on evolution would be evolutionary biology. "Do-While Jones" is not a biologist. He appears to be just an engineer and thus completely unqualified to offer any sort of criticism on anything biological.

And his so-called "critique" is laughably terrible.

 

[Aussie Pete]

In the original paper? Or just the bits quoted on that site?

You're not giving me much confidence you tried to read the paper in question.



The relevant field in critiquing a paper on evolution would be evolutionary biology. "Do-While Jones" is not a biologist. He appears to be just an engineer and thus completely unqualified to offer any sort of criticism on anything biological.

And his so-called "critique" is laughably terrible.

Please point out the errors in his critique.

 

[durangodawood]

I design buildings. I "know how things work" as much as any sumb itch on the internets. Go ahead ask me a question!

 

[expos4ever]

Yes! because he knows how things work. DNA is the most amazing coding system, far more complex than anything man has come up with. And no, such things don't come about by accident. An explosion in a scrabble factory is not going to produce a dictionary.

He knows how “things” work? He knows how computers work, not biological systems. Why should we believe this guy over experts trained in biology? I will be very interested in reading your answer to this question.

 

[pitabread]

Please point out the errors in his critique.

Sure.

The first section on the engineering of open and closed-loop systems isn't particularly relevant. We're dealing with biology, not mechanical engineering.

Second, he makes a number of initial claims about the paper in question based solely on the abstact and appears to be setting up a strawman in the process (for example, talking about a bird "cooking itself" through unfettered BMR). I get the feeling he doesn't really understand the point of the paper, which is to examine how BMR evolved in mammals and allowed them to survive in colder-than-average temperature scenarios. Which given the fact that mammals have generally been successful at diversifying into much colder environments than most animals, makes a lot of sense.

Third, most of his critique of the quoted sections are little more than personal incredulity and arbitrary dismissals. For example, his dismissal of phylogenies as "just stories that evolutionists have made up and published." That's not a real criticism of anything; it's just hand-waving. Likewise, his complaint that the researchers didn't produce any new data is just bizarre.

Fourth, the section where he quotes and criticizes the scenarios in which they identified coupled versus decoupled BMR and T(b) is incomplete. He tries to dismiss the methodology in question by claiming all the scenarios presented result in the conclusion that BMR and T(b) were decoupled. But he clearly isn't describing all the scenarios, as is evidenced by the following linked diagrams from the same paper:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure...n-their-branch-wise-rates-in-a_fig1_335174629

This is arguably his only real attempt to critique anything in the paper itself and it's an embarrassing failure. His interpretation of the quoted section suggests he doesn't understand what he is reading.

Finally, the bottom section "Biological Temperature Control Systems" is nothing more than a giant strawman and argument from incredulity bundled together.

Overall, it's a poor attempt at a critique of something published in Nature. If I were Mr. Jones, I'd stick to my day-job. He's clearly out of his depth when it comes to biology and evolution.

 

[klutedavid]

Wait, what? You actually warn people *not* to go to the doctor?

That is the dumbest thing I've read here in a long time. And that's saying a lot.

edited:

To put this in perspective and why this comment p*sses me off, a member of family never went to the doctor until they got really sick. Turns out they had a form of colon cancer. Had they been getting checkups, could have been caught and treated much earlier. Unfortunately by the time it was detected, the cancer had spread. They died within a month.

That served as a wake-up call for other members of my family, another of which who ended up also getting diagnosed with cancer. However, they caught it early enough that it was treatable and they are still alive today. That was about 10 years ago.

So the advice of "don't go to the doctor", especially for older individuals is not only completely asinine, it's morally reprehensible. I hope you never are faced with losing family members with treatable or preventable diseases due to your misguided and selfish "advice".

I always say it with a smile on my face.

 

[klutedavid]

I edited my above response, because I still can't believe what I was reading. Part of my extended family tends to shun doctors (bit of a cultural thing), but it's resulted in a death that could have otherwise potentially been prevented (cancer that could have been treatable).

I just can't believe anyone would be dumb enough to actually tell people not to go see a doctor. For anyone who is older (e.g. 40+), doing a routine annual checkup can save lives.

Go see a doctor and they will tell you to eat properly and exercise, or they should tell you that.

Yet no one listens to doctors advice, they eat like pigs, never exercise, and drink too much.
You can't tell people what to do.

Most people in their fifties and sixties are visiting the doctor due to self inflicted poor health outcomes.

Most people in their seventies are taking medicine because of ill health.

 

[expos4ever]

Most people in their fifties and sixties are visiting the doctor due to self inflicted poor health outcomes.

Citation please.

Most people in their seventies are taking medicine because of ill health.

Why else would they take medicine?

 

[KenJackson]

I can think of only two areas where regular Joes set themselves over the experts: evolution and climate change.

Climate change alarmist hypocrites have cried wolf too many times over too many decades to be taken seriously by anyone over 16 years old. (So young Greta Thunberg gets a pass. Which is good because she's very entertaining.)

And while there are unlimited details to be learned in the study of biology, enough of it can be learned in a short period to put the lie to what is taught about microbe-to-man evolution. (New species and new genera are observed, but they're not the issue.)

The fact that you don't have to be an expert to know that life was designed was a key thesis in Dr. Douglas Axe's book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition that Life is Designed.

 

[KenJackson]

To put things in context, they discovered 4 functional proteins for binding ATP out of 6x10^12 total sequences. Meanwhile the estimated number of current bacterial organisms on Earth is about 5x10^30. And they've been evolving for about 4 billion years.

These numbers are inadequate. But four out of 6x10^12 doesn't sound very promising for evolution. And those were only very short 80 aa proteins. Would 4 billion years be long enough to find 400 aa proteins? 600 aa proteins? Would trillions of years be adequate?

If evolution were as false as creationists claim it was, the first place you'd hear about it would be industry. Yet instead, we see the theory of evolution being applied to solve real-world problems in biology.

Evolution? When I use that word, I'm referring to microbe-to-man evolution. I've observed many evolutionists are only thinking about new species when they use it. They also have the erroneous notion that lots of little mutations accumulate to form the complex, hierarchical, interdependent systems observed in life.

Michael Behe reveals his research in his most recent book, Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution, that shows evolution produces new species and even new genera as advertised, but never new families, orders or higher taxa. This is because essentially all mutations are damaging. But some damaging mutations are beneficial and are positively selected. But damage can't design new structures, molecular machines or organs.

I accept his findings and am delighted by the clarity. (He never uses the popular terms "micro-evolution" or "macro-evolution", but they would clearly apply.)

So I suspect that the "evolution" you refer to as solving problems is micro-evolution which produces new species and genera. No conflict. No argument.

But my argument stands that the enormity of the universe of protein permutations shows that new proteins couldn't have evolved in merely trillions of years. Your number of 5x10^30 current bacterial organisms on Earth is very interesting, though trivially tiny compared to that universe.

 

[klutedavid]

Citation please.

Why else would they take medicine?

You asked for a citation.

How about we just talk about the consequences of over eating.

In 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults aged 18 years and older were overweight. Of these over 650 million adults were obese. Note please, that this is people over 18 years of age, not so much just fifties and sixties.

In 2016, 39% of adults aged 18 years and over (39% of men and 40% of women) were overweight.

Overall, about 13% of the world’s adult population (11% of men and 15% of women) were obese in 2016.

The worldwide prevalence of obesity nearly tripled between 1975 and 2016.

Raised BMI is a major risk factor for noncommunicable diseases such as:
cardiovascular diseases (mainly heart disease and stroke), which were the leading cause of death in 2012; diabetes; musculoskeletal disorders (especially osteoarthritis – a highly disabling degenerative disease of the joints); some cancers (including endometrial, breast, ovarian, prostate, liver, gallbladder, kidney, and colon).

The risk for these noncommunicable diseases increases, with increases in BMI.

(who.int.obesity and overweight)

 

[loveofourlord]

I believe you refer to natural selection, which supplies a filtering effect to weed out bad changes by selecting beneficial changes.

But how could natural selection apply to the evolution of new proteins? Most proteins have more than 100 amino acid molecules in a specific order and some have more than 1000. A mutation in the DNA of the gene that encodes the protein may result in a change in a particular amino acid.

Would there be a benefit at each mutation along the way toward a new functional protein needed for the progress of evolution? NO! The overwhelming majority of chains of amino acids don't even fold correctly and therefore do nothing useful at all. No benefit. Natural selection has no benefit to select.

So it's up to random chance to get to the new protein. But the fact that there are 10^130 (ten to the 130 power) permutations of even a short protein with 100 amino acids, would seem to rule chance out too. After all, the universe is less than 10^18 seconds old.

Many 'new' genes are just gene duplication that creates a new copy that can mutate at will, platypus venom is a immune system gene duplication, nylonase was the same thing along with others. Your starting with the faulty idea that a gene starts from scratch, thats rarly the case, in fact many cases are just changing what is already there.

 

[klutedavid]

Concur. A reptile has to move around to seek either warm or cool areas to maintain its correct body heat. How does it know to do that? How does it know what "correct" is? And how did it make the jump from a deliberate action to regulate its body heat to a sophisticated, closed loop temperature control system? That is difficult to design for intelligent humans, let alone the totally random process of evolution. Let's call it for what it is: Evolution - myth busted.

Even the concept of a random event is somewhat debatable and I seriously doubt that a random event could occur.

Whether the evolution of one species to another has actually occurred in the past and as a result of some random processes. Seems to be a stretch of someone's imagination, rather than an observable phenomenon in the fossil record.

No one can prove that random events even occur.

If one was to examine the fossil record all that is really visible is sudden death and extinction events. Sure new species appear but they appear suddenly and fully formed in the fossil layers. It is the absence of the many required transitional forms of any species, that is the absence of evidence in the fossil record.

 

[KenJackson]

Many 'new' genes are just gene duplication that creates a new copy that can mutate at will, platypus venom is a immune system gene duplication, nylonase was the same thing along with others. Your starting with the faulty idea that a gene starts from scratch, thats rarly the case, in fact many cases are just changing what is already there.

That's not what I mean by a "new protein". I know about nylonase. It was created with TWO point mutations. I don't know about the other. How many point mutations is it away from it's starting point?

Suppose the next step in the evolution of an organism needs a new protein that's different from it's closest neighbor by 50 amino acids. Natural selection can't help because there's no benefit to any intermediate chain until it's almost correct and complete. Also, there are probably more already-correct amino acids than ones that need to be changed, so it's far more likely to make a bad change than a good one.

Make a few assumptions and do a little math. See if you can produce the correct protein in less than a trillion years. Seriously.

 

[Kylie]

If evolution was useful, then some monkeys or whales, would have higher level reasoning. Our brains are not that big, that only humans have it. We would live on planet with many peer species.

Why would evolution produce that? Evolution doesn't result in things that are neat but have no real world benefits to the creatures that have them. It only produces things that produce immediate results. Our intelligence is a direct result of us being tool users and highly social creatures. Intelligence and curiosity and communication all produce benefits.

 

[loveofourlord]

That's not what I mean by a "new protein". I know about nylonase. It was created with TWO point mutations. I don't know about the other. How many point mutations is it away from it's starting point?

Suppose the next step in the evolution of an organism needs a new protein that's different from it's closest neighbor by 50 amino acids. Natural selection can't help because there's no benefit to any intermediate chain until it's almost correct and complete. Also, there are probably more already-correct amino acids than ones that need to be changed, so it's far more likely to make a bad change than a good one.

Make a few assumptions and do a little math. See if you can produce the correct protein in less than a trillion years. Seriously.

give a example of a amino gene that is 50 amino acids from it's closest neighbor, again most mutations and such are neutral. One example one of the mutations between humans and apes that helped our bigger brains was something like only 14 differences, and there is such a thing as neutral mutations where the mutation results in the same amino acid therefore doesn't actually change it's function.

A mutation can be 2-3 step where there is neutral, this was shown with the citrate mutation in e-coli.

No I know exactly what you mean by new gene, somethign that doesn't actually exist, it's mutations to existing genes, or gene duplication allowing for a new gene to form. Your arguing for me to show something that as far as I know doesn't exist so you can disprove evolution.

Again your right a gene duplication into a new gene may not have any useful genes untill it's changed 5-10 times or more, but guess what, it doesn't need to. SInce the original gene is still doing it's job the new one is able to mutate, and as this gene duplication enters the species, it has more oportunities to change.

Plus there is something that guarantees that a mutation will be beneficial or neutral, in that a mutation to a gene that regulates the brain will likly kill and never fully form if it's harmful, there fore only neutral and beneficial genes will be passed down, increasing the likly hood of successive genes giving rise to something better. PLUS here is something your missing, there isn't 1 way for genes to be useful. Your presuming that the gene had to mutate one way to work, it didn't, for every working version we see, there are many working ones that never appear. Something that requires 14 steps might have only taken 4 if it went a different way.

 

[GrowingSmaller]

You may already know that some experts consider consciousness (in the sense of subjective experiences per above) to be an "epiphenomenon" - something that, while real, plays no causative role in what we do. I get the impression you are taking the opposite view - that our subjective experiences do indeed play a determining role in how we act. Fair enough, that is possible; however, it appears to me that you are simply assuming this to be the case, and are building your case on that assumption.

Interested in your response - this is a fascinating question.

Thanks.

I think if we had no consciousness causing things, then stuff like discourses on phenomenology, and the philosophy of consciousness (lets call it 'c-chatter') would be entirely inexplicable. Even an "ouch that hurts" - it indicates some qualitative pain exists and has a causal role in producing that expression.

If the brain were not influenced by consciousness, in its production of speech acts etc., then we may as well be classed as p-zombies chatting about consciousness but not having it.

If we do that not only is 'c-chatter' (discourses and speech on consciousness) entirely magical (why would a p-zombie begin to chat about consciousness, qualia, mental causation etc.), but also very significantly things like ethics become redundant. I mean, why would a brain unaffected by consciousness chat about it? And why treat people ethically if their expressions of pain etc. are not actually due to consciousness. A machine is a machine, and can be kicked as you like. A HUMAN CAN NOT, and that sense of moral dignity and difference stems from the fact we believe its conscious because of its expressions of it (its 'ouches', 'c-chatter' etc.).

 

[GrowingSmaller]

It sounds to me like the above can be answered by reading up on the concept of emergent properties: Emergence - Wikipedia

Can be, but is it a hand wave or proper science? I get the idea, of emergence, but am not sue how top-down (consciousness to matter) causation would work. Wouldn't it undermine the bottom-up events that lead to the emeregence in the first place?

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Yes! because he knows how things work.

He may know how computer software works, but he doesn't show much knowledge of biology.

DNA is the most amazing coding system, far more complex than anything man has come up with. And no, such things don't come about by accident. An explosion in a scrabble factory is not going to produce a dictionary.

Ah, a new take on Hoyle's 'tornado in a junk yard' trope. It's a tired old PRATT. Seriously, if you don't know how it works, you can't make intelligent comment on it.

"It is better to keep quiet and seem ignorant than to speak and remove all doubt"