reading Michael Behe's book Darwin Devolves

[Shemjaza]

Well wings are not a variation of limbs and feathers are not a variation of scales.

Just untrue. Very similar bones and proteins make up these structures.

And if you study and think. If milk is so poorly tolerated- it should have taken generations of generations of people getting sick drinking milk for evolution to change in order for people to learn to digest milk. Evolution as its proponents keep remining me is not an overnight process. So you need to show X generations getting sick on milk in order to eventually change the population to tolerate and thrive on milk.

There are considerable variations in lactose tolerance in the modern population. Plus, juvenile mammals have the the processes to digest lactose the mutation opens that up for adults as well.

Well what you call "mutations" to add variation almost exclusively is just a shuffling of exisitng information to produce a variant. It is not new previously unwritten information that was added to the genome, just existing info adjusted, much like a child is a combining of mother and father genetic info.

That's the only possible definition of a mutation. Changing existing information IS adding new information.

It's like saying you did't change the information in a book just because the words added or modified still used the same 26 letters.

Information is simply the instructions found in DNA to produce X in a creature. Like people always produce legs, while fish always produce fins for example. That is information. The measuring of the information is a fairly young field of scientific study. It has to do with mapping genomes of creatures.

What about intermediate points like seal flippers?
What about atavisms like snake like snake legs, dolphin limbs and bird teeth?

These things can change. Even in a young field, there should at least be a metric for measuring the central concept. If it isn't measurable then it's just a flight of fancy not a scientific hypothesis.

Evolution assumes a very slow process of changing the DNA to go from theropod to bird or fish to reptile. But they have no empirical evidence that mutations altered the DNA or that the fossil record shows that the varied creatures they place in a line are transitonal forms from one family or genus to another.

Sure they do.

We don't have the actual DNA because it's all gone, but the evidence we have stands.

Structural similarities of skeletons.
Evidence of pre-flight feather structures in theropod fossils.
Modern DNA of families of birds and reptiles forming phylogenetic trees.

Back to positive mutations. Milk tolerance is nothing more that a genetic "switch" going from an off to an on position so to speak. It is not a mutation in that the Gens was altered . and survival of a species is not a change in the microbe to man hypotheses that evolution declares.

It absolutely is a mutation. It's a small inherited change to the genetic structure of many humans that poses a very real advantage to populations living in a post domestication environment.

Can you actually explain what a "real" mutation would be?

It has been shown that nearly all mutations fall on the hermful side of the equation (granted most are nearly benign), and even the most ardent of evolutionary geneticists have declared that all mutations if not toxic to the host- ultimately reduce the viability of the speices which is the opposite of evolution.

That's blatantly untrue. I'm certain you can't back that up.

"all mutations if not toxic to the host- ultimately reduce the viability of the speices"

Nonsense.

 

[Shemjaza]

I see this post has gotten a lot of play and I'm happy about that. I had done some digging into Behe's book this morning while getting ready to respond to the first question that came up here.
p.s. i looked at the index to see if Behe had mentioned "information" or defined it and didn't see that word listed. So I'm assuming he didn't mention it and define it.

Interesting.

Most ID concepts I've read seem to run some some variety of information. Either just stated as "Information can't increase" and "That isn't an increase in information" or given some kind of label like "Specified information".

Chapter 8 discusses professor of biology at University of Oregon Joseph Thornton and his colleagues trying to understand how molecules called steroids interact with their receptor proteins. These work together in a sort of lock-and-key interaction. His group set out to investigate questions related to the evolution of two different kinds of steroid receptor proteins. The genes for them are thought to have arise when an ancestor gene was duplicated in the past. (as I"m reading this, the next few paragraphs are quite technical) Near the end of the discussion, Behe concludes that any changes inferred throughout the evolutionist history of these proteins was modest and that one of the proteins actually became much less capable of binding a steriod than its ancestor. That indicates an evolutionist loss of function, not a progress toward greater function.

I'm not working from the original text, but this is exactly how new functions can develop.

The new mutated steroid receptor gene is no longer functioning at full functionality as a steroid receptor gene but presumably the original copy is working to some degree.

This leaves the new less necessary gene as the raw material for mutation and change.

Evolution is always about re-purposing existing structures. Human's don't have tails, but the tail bone makes a good anchor point for some of the structures in our hips (same as chimps).

They still have little muscles and ligaments that would be useful in a flexible tail, but useless in a rigid tail bone. So it's certainly lost function as a tail, but as a sitting aid for a bigger smarter animal it's great.

Behe then goes into something I never heard of before this book - Dollo's law. Named after Louis Dollo, a nineteenth century biologist, Dollo's law said that if a complex structure was lost in an evolutionary lineage, then it wouldn't reevolve there. Thornton and his colleages decided to find out if you can take a modern steroid receptor protein and find a Darwinian pathway back to the original ancestral one (like taking a metal rod and fashioning it into a hammer and then managing to change the hammer back into a metal rod). Behe's says they couldn't do it. One the protein receptor changed it was stuck there, a confirmation of Dollo's law.

Behe says taht when he read Thornton's report his jaw dropped because he had always assumed Darwinian evolution explained a llot of biology but the results of this changed his mind.

Very strange. I hadn't heard of Louis Dollo either, so I had a look. Stephen J Gould and Richard Dawkins are both proponents of Dollo's Law. Hardly examples of the anti-evolution underground.

Dawkins made the comment:
"really just a statement about the statistical improbability of following exactly the same evolutionary trajectory twice (or, indeed, any particular trajectory), in either direction"

Given that evolution proposes a very great many very tiny random changes as the source of variation, predicting exact changes or sequences seems near impossible.

(Please don't me quoting Dawkins against me. When he talks about evolutionary biology he has a long history of good work. As opposed to his simplistic, attention seeking rants about social issues or religion).

That's all for now. My brain is fried just from writing this. Time to relax and watch Sunday night football

I hope you enjoyed your game.

This seems a reasonably productive discussion. But I haven't actually read the book in question, so it would be reasonable to declare me to be creating an off topic tangent.

Perhaps you should petition the mods to move this thread to the "Creation and evolution" sub forum?

 

[nolidad]

Just untrue. Very similar bones and proteins make up these structures.

Well arms and wings have bones. Arms have scales or hair while wings have feathers. While boht have many similar proteins and collagens etc. They have very different instructions in how to form and grow.

Remember avian bone is hollow while reptiles and men are "solid" bone.

There are considerable variations in lactose tolerance in the modern population. Plus, juvenile mammals have the the processes to digest lactose the mutation opens that up for adults as well.

While there is no intensive studies of why the lactose tolerance shuts off- I have a strong suspicion that it shuts off once juveniles are weaned. In humans the western and ME populations go to other milks and thus that tolerance stays in the "on" position. It is not a mutation, but a simple process that stays on!

What about intermediate points like seal flippers?
What about atavisms like snake like snake legs, dolphin limbs and bird teeth?

These things can change. Even in a young field, there should at least be a metric for measuring the central concept. If it isn't measurable then it's just a flight of fancy not a scientific hypothesis.

All the fossil record and living record shows is that these creatures have existed. It dsoesn't show a very slow process of micro mutations building upon themselves in order to forma new structure over X millenia. These are just unique characters like many others that have no empirical evidence of transition from another family or order.

Sure they do.

We don't have the actual DNA because it's all gone, but the evidence we have stands.

Structural similarities of skeletons.
Evidence of pre-flight feather structures in theropod fossils.
Modern DNA of families of birds and reptiles forming phylogenetic trees.

But the evidence doesn't prove genetic mutation which is the supposed engine of macro evolution.

Structural similarities also speaks of design! similar needs will have similar structures!

Evidence that might be proto feathers! That is the latest. Foir all we know those creatures could be extinct creatures with porcupine like quills! Or are porcupines on their way to getting feathers?

Phylogenetic trees are educated hokum! They just place together creatures with similar genetic traits and say--"See! Evolution at work"! If you look at the most accepted line of transitions from theropods to birds by evolutionists, you will find that many of these so called transitional species came and went long after true birds were on scene according to evolutionary time scales! You cannot be a transition from theropod to bird if you show up long after birds made the scene!

That's blatantly untrue. I'm certain you can't back that up.

"all mutations if not toxic to the host- ultimately reduce the viability of the speices"

here's one from a purely evolutionary perspective:

The Effects of Deleterious Mutations on Evolution at Linked Sites

High mutation rates limit evolutionary adaptation in Escherichia coli

When I go through my video seminars again I will get you the PHD chairs of Genetics names from Harvard and U Wisconsin that say that mutations reduce the viabillity and vitality of a species.

You must remember that over 99.9% of all proven studied mutations fall on the harmful side fo the ledger (though most are nearly benign). There is no known example of a proven "beneficial mutation" that has added new previously unexisitng information to a genome.