Evoluiton can't account for higher-level animal behaviour

[SLP]

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.

Unsupported assertions are so yesterday's creationists.

 

[SLP]

Biological unique properties of the human brain. It's not larger that make it unique.

So we can perform the same analyses with a Commodore Vic20 that we can with Deep Blue? Good to know.

It's functionally different than animal brains

We have animal brains, silly.

 

[SLP]

When talking about different degrees of the same functions, sure. Humans do communicate in a more complex fashion. But that doesn't mean the underlying processes of communication are unique to humans.

As for empathy, I think this says it all:

One of Washoe's caretakers was pregnant and missed work for many weeks after she miscarried. Roger Fouts recounts the following situation:

"People who should be there for her and aren't are often given the cold shoulder--her way of informing them that she's miffed at them. Washoe greeted Kat [the caretaker] in just this way when she finally returned to work with the chimps. Kat made her apologies to Washoe, then decided to tell her the truth, signing "MY BABY DIED". Washoe stared at her, then looked down. She finally peered into Kat's eyes again and carefully signed "CRY", touching her cheek and drawing her finger down the path a tear would make on a human (Chimpanzees don't shed tears). Kat later remarked that one sign told her more about Washoe and her mental capabilities than all her longer, grammatically perfect sentences."​

Washoe (chimpanzee) - Wikipedia

I met Roger at a meeting many years ago. He presented some videos of chimps doing things (cognitive and 'emotional' tasks) that were thought top be solely human activities. That there are still humans that just lump them all in with 'animals' says more about us than them.

 

[SLP]

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.

I saw what you did there...

The overwhelming majority of lottery tickets are not winners. Depending on the game, if you get some numbers correct, you get some money - more numbers, more money. All the numbers - jackpot.

So it's up to random chance to get to the new protein.

With your obvious in-depth background in biochemistry and biology, tell us all what constitutes a "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.

Right - because each "new" protein (whatever those are) is the result of a one-off, pure "random chance" arrangement of amino acids.

And you learned that where?

 

[SLP]

The assumption is that along the path to the protein that's needed for the next step in evolution, each "stepping stone" functional protein is beneficial at that time. But for example, if the eye hadn't yet evolved, what benefit would rhodopsin provide? It would be just as worthless as a chain that doesn't fold correctly.

This is a very common problem in creationist arguments - you failed to bother to learn about the thing you are using as an argument.

You ask "...if the eye hadn't yet evolved, what benefit would rhodopsin provide?"

Have you Googled rhodopsin? Checked out a few of the returns? Gone on to look up, maybe, the phylogeny of rhodopsion, or maybe looked into the protein family it belongs to? Any of that stuff?

In about 2 minutes, I found this paper:

Ostrovsky, Mikhail Arkadievich. “Rhodopsin: Evolution and comparative physiology.” Paleontological Journal 51 (2017): 562-572.​

in which we can see this figure:

It would appear that rhodopsin was doing fine BEFORE eyes came along. It is a member of a pretty common (and very old) protein family - the G-protein coupled receptor gene family.

Your query is thus rendered moot. Lesson learned?

 

[SLP]

That's right. My views don't matter. I know.

But I'm fascinated by evolution because I'm still shocked to see that so many intelligent, knowledgeable people have been duped into having faith in the indefensible. You don't have to have a PhD to see that science has been twisted to support it.

I no longer take offense when I read things like this - working, as I did, for 5 years as a graduate student doing original research on these issues.
Now, I just shake my head at the prominence of the Dunning-Kruger Effect among creationists with no science background, desperate as they all seem to be to prop up their failing faith with pseudo-certain proclamations.... and chuckle a bit as I expend the 5 minutes or so typically required to debunk their proud rhetoric.

 

[SLP]

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.

And on top of that, most proteins (and thus the underlying genes) are members of families, and are not 'de novo' proteins, but are the results of duplications/modifications/rearrangements of the 'original' proteins.
Odd how frequently creationists ignore or do not understand this.

 

[SLP]

Really? What controls it? Don't tell me natural selection.

Mutation is governed primarily by replication error. Some sequences of DNA are more prone to error than others - repetitive sequences, for example.

And whose definition of evolution are you using? At last count there were 7. Evolutionists can't agree on a definition.

There are creationists that think the universe is less than 10,000 years old (YEC), and those that accept that it is billions (OEC). They use the same source material. I'd think you might be a bit humbler.

I got that from "Science against Evolution", site set up by a computer scientist who worked for the military, including the AIM-9 missile. He's a genuine genius. And very funny.
Science Against Evolution Official Home Page

Actually, he has major issues, perhaps even some mental ones. He refers to himself as "we", for example.
Also, he makes a lot of silly errors and relies on analogies (bad ones) when he cannot understand the biology. Like where he compares phylogenetics to grouping metal brackets - and thinks he made a great point. He is also obese and looks like a dumpy old drunk, yet has mocked the appearance of a female scientist by comparing her to a chimp. Good Christian fellow. Bad source of information.

Here is an example of one of his failures -

Gene Duplication
More of the same.

On several occasions we [see - there is that weird "we" thing] have said that new genetic information cannot arise by chance. Jeff disagreed. He said,

Actually new information can appear in the genetic code by gene duplication. An interesting article outlines a study of Colobine monkeys and a gene duplication. The study was done by Jianzhi Zhang of the university of Michigan. Gene Duplication Adapts To Changing Environment.​

We replied,
“genetic code by gene Actually new information can appear in the genetic code by gene duplication. Jianzhi Zhang An interesting article Actually new information can appear outlines a study of Colobine monkeys and a gene duplication. The study Actually new information can appear was done by Jianzhi Zhang of the university of Colobine monkeys Colobine monkeys Michigan.”

We hope he got the point. Random repetition of words does not increase information. If you buy two copies of USA Today, you won’t get any more information than if you just bought one. Furthermore, the redundant words tend to increase confusion, not knowledge.
​

I underlined and bolded Pogge's blunder.
Pogge - the "genius", according to you - thinks that he can directly apply his computer software knowledge to biology. If you think he has a point there, then you know as little about how genomes operate as he does.

 

[SLP]

Since 1996, it has been Science Against Evolution's objective to make the general public aware that the theory of evolution is not consistent with physical evidence and is no longer a respectable theory describing the origin and diversity of life.

That web site sure looks like it was made in 1996. It's even using <FONT> tags!

The dudes a Boomer with an electrical engineering degree and is a biblical literalist who thinks analogies are evidence.

'Nuff said.

 

[SLP]

Many evolutionists have little idea of how things work in reality. Try this for a paper on how cold blooded creatures "evolved" into warm blooded.

When You’re Hot, You’re Hot!

I know something about temperature control. The people who wrote the paper obviously do not. Equally uninformed are the people who published it.

Right - and you know this because some dumpy old misogynist bible kook said so.

You're so smart that you think a creationist with zero knowledge of the relevant science said so - doesn't help your cause much.

More of your new hero's stupidity:

Chimps Are Like Us

Your hero writes:

… the draft sequence was announced but not formally published in 2003. Now the team, led by Robert Waterston of the University of Washington (UW), Seattle, confirms in Nature the oft-cited statistic that on average only 1.23% of nucleotide bases differ between chimps and humans. … The total genetic difference between humans and chimps, in terms of number of bases, sums to about 4% of the genome. That includes 35 million single base substitutions plus 5 million insertions or deletions (indels), says Waterston. 1​

Four Percent Difference!
That’s right. Waterston says that the total difference is 4%, which somehow confirms the 1.23% average. We are still trying to figure out that math!

If there really is only 1.23% average difference between human DNA and chimp DNA, how much average difference is there between two different human DNA molecules? Certainly it must be much much less than 1.23%. If that is true, how can DNA evidence be used in a court of law to convict criminals?

​

See what he did there? Poor old creationist Pogge - cannot understand that 2 different things are being discussed - and has a hard time understanding English, I guess.

You see, the 1.23% is referring to base-by-base comparisons. If we include the number of individual bases in indels (which are, in fact, 1-time mutational events), then the number is increased to 4%.

Let me show you -

We compare these two sequences:

1 ATGGTCCGTC
2 ATGGTCCGTG

Note that they differ by 1 base - we would say these sequences are 90% identical, since they differ by that 1 base.

Now, let's compare these two sequences:

1 ATGGGTGTGTGTGCCGTC
2 ATGGTCCGTC

Whatever shall we do?
A creationist would say that they stop being similar after ATGG.
A knowledgeable person that is actually trying to understand what is going on would look at the sequences and notice something. See, we understand that there are mutational events called indels (for 'insertion/deletion') in which potentially large numbers of bases are added or removed in one shot, so they might try this:

1 ATGGGTGTGTGTGCCGTC
2 ATGG-------------TCCGTC

Hmmmm... We can now see that the two sequences, where they 'match up', are 90% identical, but there is also an insertion of 8 nucleotides.

So is that more likely to be a 1 mutation event, or 9 individual mutation events?

Pogge will have us believe that we must count them all individually, hence his inability to understand that humans and chimps can be 1.23% different in base-to-base comparisons, yet 4% different in total numbers.

Poor Pogge - so certain that he is correct (heck, he worked on missiles! how can he be wrong bout anything???) about everything. Poor poor creationist layfolk - so impressed that Pogge worked on missiles that they will buy his nonsense without thinking. ...

 

[SLP]

Because they will end up on a long list of drugs that will only kill them in the end.

Makes perfect sense - why, if those old people never took drugs to treat their health problems, they would live to be 900, like Noah didn't.

 

[SLP]

Yes! because he knows how things work.

Not DNA.

DNA is the most amazing coding system, far more complex than anything man has come up with.

So how can Do-While Pogge understand it?

And no, such things don't come about by accident. An explosion in a scrabble factory is not going to produce a dictionary.

Totally on-point and apt analogy.... which thus counts as evidence...

 

[SLP]

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.

ever heard of the fallacy of appeal to false authority?

 

[SLP]

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.)

Ok, cool - so while the bible is very long, enough of it can be learned in a short period to put the lie to what is taught about dust-to-Adam creation.

Thanks - you made it so I don't have to waste too much time.

 

[SLP]

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.)

His "findings" - you mean you agree with his opinions because they prop up your religion.

Your science background is...?

 

[SLP]

That's not what I mean by a "new protein".

Then what DO you mean?

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?

What does that even mean?
How many point mutations is human rhodopsin 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.

Why would an organism 'need' this?

Natural selection can't help because there's no benefit to any intermediate chain until it's almost correct and complete.

How do you know that?
Assertions are cool creationist tools, but we need more beef.

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

The totally hypothetical one that you dreamed up with unrealistic "required" alterations?

"Seriously"?

You seem to like big numbers - what are the odds that 1 million trillion grains of dust of the ground were morphed by speaking into the trillions of organic molecules required to make a fully-formed adult human male?

 

[SLP]

Natural selection selects organisms with features that give it a benefit for survival, but that can't happen on the long path to a new protein. It would have to pass through many states that don't have any benefit. There's no "selection pressure" when there's no benefit.

Natural selection can't help evolve new proteins. (Note that little tweaks of a couple amino acids might be called "new", but it's not a new protein.)

Why do so few creationists understand things like genetic drift, or neutral variation?

I guess that is one of the shortcomings of 'just knowing enough' to think you know enough.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

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.

Evolution tends to produce results that are good enough for survival/reproductive success but no better - additional functionality that does not enhance survival/reproductive success is an unnecessary resource drain, particularly cognitive functions, which are very energy demanding.

There are exceptions to what seems necessary, such as exotic plumage in birds, but this is a feature of sexual selection, which selects on indirect measures of fitness.

Early humans were able to take advantage of additional calorific resources made available by cooking and the technology to aid co-operative hunting, which gave them the extra calories to support brain development and feeding children through an extended infancy.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Nice post thanks! AFAIK emergent systems have a "novel statistical signature". Meaning I think, that the top level behavious of the flock for instance becomes the best, easiest way to to talk about all those birds.

Exactly.

Still I'm having issues though, because mind is an new ontological property, and in all other cases of emergence, the behaviour is merely on the physical plane.

If you consider mental activity as a set of processes, neural activities in the brain, the reification simply becomes a convenient way of talking about their emergent property (mind itself).

Of course, it doesn't answer the question of how a certain set of neural processes have self-awareness, but neither does any other hypothesis, and many of them introduce additional properties, or whole new ontologies, that need explaining in their own right.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

If there is rational attraction to being, then there is a force (i.e. being responsible for ourselves) acting on us that causes a movement towards the source of that force (i.e. existence, the world, the universe). Such that properly or appropriately responsible action draws us towards existence.

If there is irrational attraction to being, then life forms are drawn towards existence by means of irrationality (random mutation) and purely physical feedback (natural selection). Life is again drawn towards existence, but in a non-conscious or non-rational way.


Two distinct models. Dualism again.

Any comments?

I don't know what this means; it seems too vague to comment - what attraction? what force? rational in what way (and how)? irrational in what way?

Life forms aren't drawn towards existence. They produce a lot of variations and some are better able to reproduce than others. In the long-term, most just die out, becoming extinct.