Possible falsification of Darwinism via gene data

[The Barbarian]

The problem here is, as a Christian, we know there was a band of water above the Earth, that likely absorbed all those cosmic rays, thus making the creation of carbon 14 nearly impossible. There could be carbon in this band of water, but most rays would be absorbed by the water itself.

Turns out, existing water vapor stops almost all of it. But it doesn't do a thing for C-14 production, which happens above any water that might be around the Earth. Nitrogen exists above the level of water, and it is the nitrogen that is converted to C-14 by cosmic rays. There's also some C-14 produced by ionizing radiation in the Earth where there are nitrogen atoms.

The Lake Suigetsu data shows that over 60,000 years, the levels changed somewhat, but not by very much.

 

[Doctor.Sphinx]

Sure, if by "uniformitarian assumptions" you mean, "the assumption that nothing has ever been different in the history of the universe". Since no one believes that, why bring it up?

It was a common belief amongst Evolutionists at one stage. I guess this is another case of Creationists leading the way.

Are you reading what I'm writing? Because you seem to have completely ignored what I've told you repeatedly. No one "presumes" or "assumes" what the baseline ratio was. It's measured, using samples of known age. This is not a difficult concept. Am I conversing with an actual human here, or with a robot that's outputting programmed soundbites? You sure don't seem to be engaged with what I'm telling you.

If you weren't there (and you weren't), it's assumed.

Utter nonsense.

This game leads nowhere.

The most reasonable reading is that you have no idea how C14 dating is done and that the professionals who do it for a living do.

Actually, it's that you aren't aware of (all) the assumptions inherent in the method you expound.

 

[The Barbarian]

[quote[sfs said: ↑
Sure, if by "uniformitarian assumptions" you mean, "the assumption that nothing has ever been different in the history of the universe". Since no one believes that, why bring it up?[/quote]

It was a common belief amongst Evolutionists at one stage. I guess this is another case of Creationists leading the way.

Nope. Long before Darwin explained how evolution worked, uniformitarians were discussing how catastrophic changes work. Even Lyell, who first realized the principle, acknowledged sudden changes. Uniformitarianism merely means that the universe has always worked by the same rules.

Actually, it's that you aren't aware of (all) the assumptions inherent in the method you expound.

There are entire books written on the pitfalls and necessary precautions for C-14 analyses. You've merely assumed that scientists aren't aware of them.

 

[sfs]

It was a common belief amongst Evolutionists at one stage. I guess this is another case of Creationists leading the way.

Creationists have contributed precisely nothing to this field.

This game leads nowhere.

Since you're not responding to what people are actually writing, yeah, that's true.

Actually, it's that you aren't aware of (all) the assumptions inherent in the method you expound.

And yet the only assumptions you've pointed out are ones that you invented, ones that have nothing to do with how dating is actually done.

 

[sfs]

So, change occurs over time—everyone agrees with that. However, assigning one cause for all change is fallacious and it leads to incorrect beliefs.

Evolutionary biologists do not assign one cause for all change; you seem to be attacking a cartoon version of evolutionary biology, one which you've constructed yourself. As i already said, "evolution" is the change -- it's not the cause for the change. There are various causes for the changes that we call evolution. And evolution in turn is a cause for other changes.

Most evolutionists and also creationists agree that if you selectively breed wolves you can eventually get a poodle. But you cannot do the reverse. Why not? The answer resides in the genomes. It is well-known that all dogs have less “genetic diversity” than wolves. What does this mean? It means that the genome of the wolf contains more diversity of alleles (aka gene forms) and perhaps even higher numbers of genes as well as higher orders of complexity in epigenetic DNA regions. So, the change from wolf to dog has been a “downhill” slide, genetically speaking.

I don't see any reason to label the loss of genetic diversity as "downhill", but if you like, fine. Yes, both strong selection and population bottlenecks cause the loss of diversity, so it's easy to observe "downhill" change. On the other hand, if a population increases in size, its genetic diversity increases; this is trivial to observe in the lab and is easily seen in the wild as well. So "uphill" changes (by your definition) also occur all the time. And many of the changes are adaptive ones -- also easy to observe.

Darwin’s proposed “tree of life” would necessarily require many many uphill genetic events, i.e. from prokaryote to eukaryote. How did that happen? It is ludicrous to offer “evolution” as an answer to that.

Well, yes, it would be ludicrous to offer evolution as the cause of evolution. Again, the change over time is evolution, which has causes: mutation, genetic drift, natural selection.

The term “genetic erosion” describes the “downhill” processes which have undoubtedly occurred over time in many different “kinds” or continuums of life. Yet, where did all of these “kinds” originate from? Appealing to gene/allele-destroying processes such as selection and bottlenecking etc. in order to explain a requisite gene-building (and epigenetic-building) process is fallacious.

We don't have to speculate. We can look at closely related species and see exactly where new genes come from. Often its from copies of existing genes that have subsequently mutated -- probably the biggest single source. In animals, at least, it's often from transposable elements that have copied themselves to a new location. Some of the time it's from mutations to existing non-coding sequence that have also undergone mutations. We can look at the two genomes and see the changes that must have occurred -- and they're all changes that do occur all the time through the usual processes of mutation.

 

[sfs]

My prediction is that IF Darwinism is correct, the ancient wolf genome compared to a modern wolf genome should follow the general outline of Darwin's (and other evolutionist's) so-called "tree of life". In other words, the evidence should support the notion of naturalistic generation of progressively more complex and useful genomes.

I already told you what the expectation would be based on evolutionary biology; you don't get to decide what the predictions of the theory are. I want to know your prediction, based on what you think is true.

 

[WisdomSpy]

If the above does not fit your definition of "useful" and "complex", then feel free to specify what you mean with respect to these terms.[/QUOTE]

The semantics can certainly be misunderstood. Think about the mutation that caused cycle cell anemia. Yes, this is an example of real evolution. Some might call it an advancement in usefulness and complexity. True, it is mildly useful to individuals living in certain environments. Yet, it is hardly a step in the direction of, say, moving a cell from prokaryote to eukaryote. Behe records the history of millions of generations of various genomes and concludes that none of the wizardly mechanisms (i.e. gene duplications, etc.) “did much of anything” for any of them. The AIDS virus remains only an AIDS virus, despite millions upon millions of generations. Lenski’s bacteria remain bacteria, without a newly-formed enzyme, structure or pathway (citrate utilization is an inherent part of the Krebs Cycle—look it up).

A multitude of tricky semantics and colorful jargon does not equate to an actual mechanism that could build entirely novel gene forms and add them to cells in an astonishingly rapid fashion, so that natural selection could begin working. Stop and think about it—“evolution” is supposed to be “undirected” and “purposeless”. Hence, we should expect that the genes (and epigenetics) which product eyes and ears and noses might just as likely arisen in the postulated “last universal common ancestor” (LUCA), which is thought to have been a single-celled life-form similar to bacteria or eubacteria. We have no evidence for this. Why is it that all the right genetic and phenotypic traits magically appear at only the “right” places along the so-called tree of life?

So, admit it—if you ran into a person who won the lottery every day for a decade—you would not believe that it happened “naturally”—you would know that some intelligence was unlawfully inserted into the system. Yet ironically, evolutionists believe that zillions upon zillions of mutations just happened to occur at just the right times and sequences… and that the zillions of faulty mutations, many of which could not be touched by natural selection, nevertheless mysteriously disappeared.

Think about this: every cell in your body has the genetic information to produce hemoglobin, yet only just the right cells do. Now, if the cells at the tip of your nose or your big toe produced hemoglobin, you might appear a bit odd… but natural selection would have no cause to remove you from the population. So, why don’t we see millions upon millions of such odd things in nature? It’s all just far too coincidental for supposed random and accidental and undirected processes.

 

[WisdomSpy]

Evolutionary biologists do not assign one cause for all change; you seem to be attacking a cartoon version of evolutionary biology, one which you've constructed yourself. As i already said, "evolution" is the change -- it's not the cause for the change. There are various causes for the changes that we call evolution. And evolution in turn is a cause for other changes.

I don't see any reason to label the loss of genetic diversity as "downhill", but if you like, fine. Yes, both strong selection and population bottlenecks cause the loss of diversity, so it's easy to observe "downhill" change. On the other hand, if a population increases in size, its genetic diversity increases; this is trivial to observe in the lab and is easily seen in the wild as well. So "uphill" changes (by your definition) also occur all the time. And many of the changes are adaptive ones -- also easy to observe.

Well, yes, it would be ludicrous to offer evolution as the cause of evolution. Again, the change over time is evolution, which has causes: mutation, genetic drift, natural selection.

We don't have to speculate. We can look at closely related species and see exactly where new genes come from. Often its from copies of existing genes that have subsequently mutated -- probably the biggest single source. In animals, at least, it's often from transposable elements that have copied themselves to a new location. Some of the time it's from mutations to existing non-coding sequence that have also undergone mutations. We can look at the two genomes and see the changes that must have occurred -- and they're all changes that do occur all the time through the usual processes of mutation.

You said; “We can look at the two genomes and see the changes that must have occurred”. This represents circular reasoning, a classic error of logic. Stop using the retrospectiscope and think from evidence-to-conclusion rather than from conclusion-to-evidence. You are saying that you observe certain similarities between genomes… and then, because you have pre-determined that you believe in evolutionary origins, you propose a mechanism that might explain the similarities. I have a better idea: Instead of such post-hoc construction of ideas, please tell me one single example of where a genome was witnessed to do the wizardly things suggested (i.e. gene duplication followed by mutations which fortuitously turned only one of the gene copies into something substantively different, thus producing an entirely novel gene and product (structure or enzyme)). Michael Behe reviewed and studied millions upon millions of generations of various genomes (the AIDS virus, malaria, humans with cycle cell disease and trait, mosquitoes, Lenski’s bacteria and others) and he didn’t find that any of the typically-theorized wizardly mechanisms did anything of any significant consequence. The kind of "evolution" that actually has real evidence to support it has distinct limits. If your theory requires you to believe in zillions upon zillions of incredibly unlikely and coincidentally "just right" occurrences, largely devoid of the "not so just-right" stuff... then perhaps you need to reconsider your theory.

The way I see it, Darwin made some observations and he began to tell a story, an idea, a hypothesis, a theory. The problem has been that so many people have simply fallen in love with the story, because they want to believe it, and they keep adding to it, without having the actual data which would be needed to prove it (I am speaking about ORIGINS here, not simply downhill genetic change over time).

 

[WisdomSpy]

Evolutionary biologists do not assign one cause for all change

Actually, what I meant was that they do, in the sense that they ascribe evolutionary origins rather than considering the possibility of origins by creative design... followed by downhill evolution. Of course, this has changed since various prominent scientists began to believe in ancient aliens who "seeded" life to earth, etc. But somehow, the God of the Bible is not allowed in some of their theorizing. Wonder why???

 

[WisdomSpy]

On the other hand, if a population increases in size, its genetic diversity increases

This is a common mistake. Population size absolutely does not equate to genetic diversity. Once alleles are lost from the population genome, how do you suppose they magically appear again? They don't. You can eventually get a poodle from a wolf but not vice versa. When the genetic diversity is lost, it is lost and does not magically reappear. A very different kind of diversity may appear, but the previous diversity is lost. The fact is that "evolution" is very good at destroying genes and it is good at causing extinctions. If the idea of evolutionary origins were correct, an opposite, "up-hill" mechanism would need to exist... and one which would need to be exceedingly prolific... hence, we should be able to witness it in action today. Where is that mysterious "gene machine"? Don't mistake the mere tinkering with genes which occurs with some mutations as if that equates to an entirely novel gene form generation or acquisition.

 

[WisdomSpy]

So "uphill" changes (by your definition) also occur all the time. And many of the changes are adaptive ones -- also easy to observe.

The concept of adaption that you refer to improperly assigns some kind of intelligence to organisms. A brown bear with relatively short hair did not move to the arctic circle and then decide to adapt by rowing long white fur. Genes for various traits must be present in an ancestor's genome, which have the potential to produce offspring with various different phenotypes, depending on the shuffling of the gene-cards that sexual reproduction does. Certain phenotypes then may "fit" a certain environment better, and hence be "selected", as it were (also a term which is easily misunderstood). In reality, the bear with long white fur may have sought out the environment which suited it. This is very different from suggesting that the environment CAUSED something to change within the bear. (I recognize, of course, that certain genomes indeed have limited ability to change certain things in response to the environment. Perhaps the immune system is the best example. Yet, this ability depends upon an incredibly complex interplay of many genes and epigenetic elements. Where did they come from? Certainly not from the environment or from "adaption". Just like the word evolution, adaption is merely an observed effect, not a cause.

 

[The Barbarian]

If the above does not fit your definition of "useful" and "complex", then feel free to specify what you mean with respect to these terms.

The semantics can certainly be misunderstood. Think about the mutation that caused cycle cell anemia. Yes, this is an example of real evolution. Some might call it an advancement in usefulness and complexity. True, it is mildly useful to individuals living in certain environments.

More importantly, it means those with the trait (heterozygotes) will leave more descendants than those who don't have it at all, in any area where malaria is endemic. But recently a new mutation has appeared, which provides good protection against malaria, with less damaging results for homozygotes.

This is the way evolution works. Gradual increases in fitness.

Yet, it is hardly a step in the direction of, say, moving a cell from prokaryote to eukaryote.

That was apparently a very difficult step. Took over a billion years.

Think about this: every cell in your body has the genetic information to produce hemoglobin, yet only just the right cells do. Now, if the cells at the tip of your nose or your big toe produced hemoglobin, you might appear a bit odd… but natural selection would have no cause to remove you from the population.

Actually, it does. Any such function that doesn't aid survival has a metabolic cost, and thereby tends to disappear. Like eyes in cave fish, which are an extreme example (eyes have a very high metabolic cost).

Let's test your ideas. What exactly in living things, do you think could not have occurred by mutation and natural selection?

So, why don’t we see millions upon millions of such odd things in nature?

We do. You, for example, unless you're one of those rare people missing it, have a tail. It's vestigial and hidden in your body, but it's there. And it's not in any way essential; some people lack one, and usually never know it, unless an x-ray happens to show it.

It’s all just far too coincidental for supposed random and accidental and undirected processes.

That was Darwin's great discovery. It's not random. Would you like to learn how?

 

[The Barbarian]

The concept of adaption that you refer to improperly assigns some kind of intelligence to organisms.

If you think so, you haven't listened to anything he's said.

A brown bear with relatively short hair did not move to the arctic circle and then decide to adapt by rowing long white fur. Genes for various traits must be present in an ancestor's genome, which have the potential to produce offspring with various different phenotypes, depending on the shuffling of the gene-cards that sexual reproduction does.

No. Mutations are the way new traits emerge. Consider humans. Adam and Eve could have had no more than four different alleles for each gene locus between them. Yet most human genes have dozens of alleles. The rest must have evolved by mutation.

 

[WisdomSpy]

I already told you what the expectation would be based on evolutionary biology; you don't get to decide what the predictions of the theory are. I want to know your prediction, based on what you think is true.

You seem to be suggesting that I do not have the right to interpret evolution theory. I have considerable formal and informal education regarding it. I also have conducted considerable amounts of original research regarding mutations and how they might affect genomes. I would be happy to share the information of how you could reproduce this same kind of research, using some free online resources. Perhaps it would be best to start a new thread for this purpose.

Regarding my prediction, I believe that the "ancient" wolf genome will possess more genes and less pseudogenes than a modern wolf, as well as dogs. Why? Because, if God (or ancient aliens, if you prefer) created the first wolf-dog "kind" with the apparent plethora of traits that were not expressed initially, it would make sense that these traits would be expressed over time, with great variety, as the genes got shuffled and reshuffled. It would be natural for genomes to go "downhill", so to speak, in the process. The fact that dogs exhibit so many traits which wolves do not means that phenotypic novelty does not necessarily equate to the generation of new genes... it can occur simply by the shuffling of existing genes.

 

[Job 33:6]

If the above does not fit your definition of "useful" and "complex", then feel free to specify what you mean with respect to these terms.

The semantics can certainly be misunderstood. Think about the mutation that caused cycle cell anemia. Yes, this is an example of real evolution. Some might call it an advancement in usefulness and complexity. True, it is mildly useful to individuals living in certain environments. Yet, it is hardly a step in the direction of, say, moving a cell from prokaryote to eukaryote. Behe records the history of millions of generations of various genomes and concludes that none of the wizardly mechanisms (i.e. gene duplications, etc.) “did much of anything” for any of them. The AIDS virus remains only an AIDS virus, despite millions upon millions of generations. Lenski’s bacteria remain bacteria, without a newly-formed enzyme, structure or pathway (citrate utilization is an inherent part of the Krebs Cycle—look it up).

A multitude of tricky semantics and colorful jargon does not equate to an actual mechanism that could build entirely novel gene forms and add them to cells in an astonishingly rapid fashion, so that natural selection could begin working. Stop and think about it—“evolution” is supposed to be “undirected” and “purposeless”. Hence, we should expect that the genes (and epigenetics) which product eyes and ears and noses might just as likely arisen in the postulated “last universal common ancestor” (LUCA), which is thought to have been a single-celled life-form similar to bacteria or eubacteria. We have no evidence for this. Why is it that all the right genetic and phenotypic traits magically appear at only the “right” places along the so-called tree of life?

So, admit it—if you ran into a person who won the lottery every day for a decade—you would not believe that it happened “naturally”—you would know that some intelligence was unlawfully inserted into the system. Yet ironically, evolutionists believe that zillions upon zillions of mutations just happened to occur at just the right times and sequences… and that the zillions of faulty mutations, many of which could not be touched by natural selection, nevertheless mysteriously disappeared.

Think about this: every cell in your body has the genetic information to produce hemoglobin, yet only just the right cells do. Now, if the cells at the tip of your nose or your big toe produced hemoglobin, you might appear a bit odd… but natural selection would have no cause to remove you from the population. So, why don’t we see millions upon millions of such odd things in nature? It’s all just far too coincidental for supposed random and accidental and undirected processes.

What more would you want to see from evolving bacteria but the fixation of beneficial mutations resulting in increased fitness over their ancestors?

The "right" direction is life and the "wrong" direction is death. It's as simple as that. In some cases the "right" direction changes from left to right and back to left. So if anyone ever did claim that mutations only went in a "wrong" direction, then by default mutations would also occur in a "right" direction when the mutation reverts or results in an opposite affect.

The most I can make out of this response above is that you would need to see bacteria sprout arms and legs before you would believe that life evolves.

 

[Job 33:6]

Back to the subject...

In the case of evolution observed over 60,000 generations (lenskis experiments) resulting in increased fitness and novel genes mutating (and the subsequent fixation of beneficial mutations) within the genomes of the test subjects, why specifically are the mutations observed in his experiments and the resulting genetic makeup of the test subjects, not more complex or more useful to the bacteria theyve become a part of? The bacteria have had many beneficial mutations fixate through time, and have been superior to their ancestors one generation after the next.

And keep in mind, this has nothing to do with aids or Luca or endosymbiosis or any of the other random topics you threw into your previous response.

 

[The Barbarian]

You seem to be suggesting that I do not have the right to interpret evolution theory.

You don't get to say what it is. You can criticize it, or propose changes, but you don't get to redefine it.

Regarding my prediction, I believe that the "ancient" wolf genome will possess more genes and less pseudogenes than a modern wolf, as well as dogs. Why? Because, if God (or ancient aliens, if you prefer) created the first wolf-dog "kind" with the apparent plethora of traits that were not expressed initially, it would make sense that these traits would be expressed over time, with great variety, as the genes got shuffled and reshuffled. It would be natural for genomes to go "downhill", so to speak, in the process. The fact that dogs exhibit so many traits which wolves do not means that phenotypic novelty does not necessarily equate to the generation of new genes... it can occur simply by the shuffling of existing genes.

A new study shows that friendliness in dogs is associated with the same genes that make some people hyper-social.

The study, published this week in the journal Science Advances, found that structural variations in three genes on chromosome 6 are correlated with how much canines socialize with humans. An analysis of DNA from two dozen animals revealed that these genes look very different in dogs than they do in wolves.
...
They found mutations in three genes that were much more common in the hyper-social canines, most of which were dogs. These three genes are called GTF2I, GTF2IRD1 and WBSCR17, and have also been shown to cause an increase in social behavior in mice and are believed to do the same in humans.
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-dog-friendliness-genes-20170719-story.html

Mutations, and new alleles. Apparently, other mutations affect neural crest cells that change a lot of characteristics we see in dogs as opposed to wolves. These never existed in wolves; they appeared in dogs.

 

[sfs]

You said; “We can look at the two genomes and see the changes that must have occurred”. This represents circular reasoning, a classic error of logic. Stop using the retrospectiscope and think from evidence-to-conclusion rather than from conclusion-to-evidence. You are saying that you observe certain similarities between genomes… and then, because you have pre-determined that you believe in evolutionary origins, you propose a mechanism that might explain the similarities.

And what you are saying is that we should ignore all the actual evidence and instead look for something we shouldn't see -- magical changes occurring in a single generation.

Gene duplication happens. We see it in the lab and in humans. Smaller mutations happen. We see them, too. Such mutations happen to duplicated genes. We see that, too. Some of those mutations are adaptive. What you're saying is that when we see example after example of very similar species with what look exactly like duplicated genes, we should pretend not to know about those processes. Why?

 

[sfs]

Actually, what I meant was that they do, in the sense that they ascribe evolutionary origins rather than considering the possibility of origins by creative design... followed by downhill evolution. Of course, this has changed since various prominent scientists began to believe in ancient aliens who "seeded" life to earth, etc.

Virtually no scientists think ancient aliens seeded life on Earth.

 

[sfs]

This is a common mistake. Population size absolutely does not equate to genetic diversity.

Population size doesn't equate to genetic diversity; it leads to genetic diversity.

Once alleles are lost from the population genome, how do you suppose they magically appear again? They don't. You can eventually get a poodle from a wolf but not vice versa. When the genetic diversity is lost, it is lost and does not magically reappear. A very different kind of diversity may appear, but the previous diversity is lost.

Mutations produce genetic diversity. In larger populations, they lead to larger genetic diversity. You're the one who defined uphill and downhill in terms of genetic diversity. A strange choice, but it was yours. Will new genetic diversity be identical to old genetic diversity? No, but since both sets of diversity are produced by mutations, they'll be functionally equivalent.

If the idea of evolutionary origins were correct, an opposite, "up-hill" mechanism would need to exist... and one which would need to be exceedingly prolific... hence, we should be able to witness it in action today. Where is that mysterious "gene machine"? Don't mistake the mere tinkering with genes which occurs with some mutations as if that equates to an entirely novel gene form generation or acquisition.

According to you, I'm not allowed to introduce the (abundant) evidence for how new genes form because the entire process can't be seen in a single generation. Of course, the entire process couldn't occur in a single generation, so your demand suggests a desire to engage the actual evidence.

Starting without an assumption of common descent . . . why do so many species-specific genes look exactly like the results of gene duplication? Why do so many of them look like transposons? Why do many of the rest have DNA that looks highly similar to noncoding DNA in a similar species? Based on observations like these, the two choices would seem to be that new genes really are the result of evolution, or else they are produced by a biological designer whom we have never observed, one who designs only by tinkering with existing DNA, copying it and changing in exactly the same ways that evolution would, and doing so by an unknown process that has also never been observed. Your claim is that the latter is the better explanation. I don't think so.