Would it count?

[philadiddle]

YECs say that micro evolution happens everyday but that we never observe macro evolution. My question is, in your opinion, would the accumulation of many many micro evolutionary changes count as macro evolution?

 

[laptoppop]

Dr. Behe's new book "The Edge of Evolution" explains why the little changes make sense, but the big ones do not. Quite a good read, that makes a compelling case for limits in how far variation can go.

His cases document the actual evidence we have from populations in the tens or hundreds of billions and tens of thousands of generations.

 

[Deamiter]

Dr. Behe's new book "The Edge of Evolution" explains why the little changes make sense, but the big ones do not. Quite a good read, that makes a compelling case for limits in how far variation can go.

His cases document the actual evidence we have from populations in the tens or hundreds of billions and tens of thousands of generations.

Does he outline where the line between 'big' and 'little' changes should be drawn? When his rather infamous examples of the eye and the flagellum have been shown to be evolvable via a number of smaller changes that each introduce a selective advantage has he described whether these features are considered large (impossible) or small (evolvable) and how he justifies such a conclusion?

I guess citing a rather new book without summarizing the content is just a bit useless here. I mean no offense -- I'm just hoping you might be willing to summarize his main points or link to an article that summarizes the points so I don't have to run out and purchase/read a new book tonight in order to be involved in this discussion.

A more direct question -- have you in your following of ICR and ID in general found any attempt (in this book or elsewhere) to define the boundaries beyond which mutations cannot change the traits of a population? Surely such a central claim has been carefully documented though I've never seen anything beyond "micro happens, macro can't."

 

[laptoppop]

Yes, I'm still absorbing the biology and math, but he demonstrates that a change requiring a single mutation is much much more likely than one requiring a double one. That's why, for example, bacteria do not generate the same resistance against a drug cocktail than a single drug. Even with the incredibly huge populations, the double mutation is extremely rare.

The end result is that the various changes in higher animals that evolution presupposes are not viable mathematically because they require multiple gene mutations simultaneously.

If you do a web search, you'll find a bunch of "reviews" both positive and negative, along with Behe's and others response to those reviews. Personally, I prefer to have the source material and read the reviews from both sides.

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=4119
http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/A3DGRQ0IO7KYQ2/ref=cm_blog_blog/002-3538181-1753646

 

[Mallon]

Dr. Behe's new book "The Edge of Evolution" explains why the little changes make sense, but the big ones do not. Quite a good read, that makes a compelling case for limits in how far variation can go.

Behe believes in the common ancestry of all life (i.e., common descent from a single cell).
There seems to be a disconnect.

 

[laptoppop]

No, he describes how it is impossible with the direct actions of God. Really puts the T in TE.

 

[philadiddle]

laptoppop,

I'm learning biology on my own so my knowledge is quite limited. I'm not familiar with all the things talked about in those reviews so I'm going to ask a simple question. If the protein-protein binding thing Behe talks about is the edge of evolution, what exactly does that limit? Does it mean all dogs could evolve from a common ancestor? What about grouping foxes in with them? What about raccoons? Bears? And down the list of ancestors we go till we get to the first mammals, could a group of mammals have evolved into all the mammals we have now? I could continue on further but I think you get the point. So, since Behe is talking about limits on the molecular level, my simple question is this, how does that apply to macro evolution as I asked in the questions above?

 

[philadiddle]

No, he describes how it is impossible with the direct actions of God. Really puts the T in TE.

So it's a God of the gaps argument? Great...Christians sure needed more of that to bolster their reputation.

 

[laptoppop]

In essence I think Dr. Behe is not being logically consistent -- I don't think he's taking his conclusions all the way to their finish. Once he has falsified naturalistic evolutionary processes, he's still not willing to dismiss common ancestry.

 

[Deamiter]

Yes, I'm still absorbing the biology and math, but he demonstrates that a change requiring a single mutation is much much more likely than one requiring a double one. That's why, for example, bacteria do not generate the same resistance against a drug cocktail than a single drug. Even with the incredibly huge populations, the double mutation is extremely rare.

The end result is that the various changes in higher animals that evolution presupposes are not viable mathematically because they require multiple gene mutations simultaneously.

If you do a web search, you'll find a bunch of "reviews" both positive and negative, along with Behe's and others response to those reviews. Personally, I prefer to have the source material and read the reviews from both sides.

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=4119
http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/A3DGRQ0IO7KYQ2/ref=cm_blog_blog/002-3538181-1753646

Of course, this entire argument assumes that both mutations must happen simultaneously. I've never read of a professional evolutionist claiming such a thing (straw man?). In fact, scientists go to great lengths to try to discover what individual mutations could have happened in what order so that each mutation would confer a reproductive advantage on its own. Note that to get from a fish to a human in one step would take so many mutations so as to be impossible. However, one mutation at a time (or occasionally more -- remember we each have over a hundred unique mutations!) can do the job nicely.

Of course, this is done with limited success since our understanding of genes and the full effect of any particular mutation is still in its infancy. However, I AM sure that the only people working on multiple simultaneous mutations (and apparently assuming they would be necessary?) are creationists and apparently now Behe in their attempts to fight the evil of evolution.

As with any probability argument against evolution, it's important to remember that humans were not the ultimate goal of evolution. Yes, any particular mutation is unlikely, but that mutations will happen is a certainty. We know the human genome will be different tomorrow and in a century as new mutations and selective pressures change the frequency of different alleles. A better question might be, "given over a hundred unique mutations per individual, what is the chance that humans will be significantly similar to current humans in a million (10, 100 etc...) years?"

I also find it interesting that people are so quick to laud Behe for his arguments concerning the possibility of macro-evolution but simply ignore his acceptance of the scientific consensus regarding the age of the Earth and common descent. You'd think that a single man's unpublished (in peer-reviewed journals anyway) musings would be regarded a bit more critically considering that creationists are so quick to jump on Dawkins' philosophical position as evidence against evolution. Meh, it's a whole mess of logical fallacies to begin with, but I just think it's interesting that you pick and choose the beliefs of scientific experts and simply assume that they haven't "taken their musings to their logical conclusions" when the experts don't agree with your preconceived conclusions about Biblical interpretation.

I mean, I don't think the guy is being logically consistent either, but I wonder why a guy like you who I know to be rather intelligent doesn't critically question arguments that begin with bad assumptions like, "in order for evolution to happen, multiple mutations must have happened simultaneously and they don't."

 

[philadiddle]

Although, I admit I'm not actually sure what Behe thinks. IIRC, in "Darwin's Black Box" the conclusion is that God made the first cell with all the information for all the life we see today. He thinks that evolution could not have created the life we see on it's own, but rather, that God had to put all the information there in the first place. Now he fight's against natural processes creating new functions so that he can keep God in the picture. Correct me if I'm wrong (because I may be wrong) but that sounds like a God of the gaps argument. Like every other God of the gaps argument, one a scientist gives a natural explanation for what Behe attributes to God, ppl like Richard Dawkins will go "Ha, told you there was no god!"

 

[laptoppop]

Read the book, bro - its worth it.

 

[Mallon]

No, he describes how it is impossible with the direct actions of God. Really puts the T in TE.

So, he cannot fathom how largescale microevolution leads to macroevolution, therefore God did it? That sounds like bad science and worse theology to me.

 

[Deamiter]

Looking into the links you provided, I am amazed that Behe does indeed seem to have dropped the claim of irreducible complexity as the problem with evolution. As Dawkins put it:

We now hear less about “irreducible complexity,” with good reason. In “Darwin’s Black Box,” Behe simply asserted without justification that particular biological structures (like the bacterial flagellum, the tiny propeller by which bacteria swim) needed all their parts to be in place before they would work, and therefore could not have evolved incrementally. This style of argument remains as unconvincing as when Darwin himself anticipated it. It commits the logical error of arguing by default. Two rival theories, A and B, are set up. Theory A explains loads of facts and is supported by mountains of evidence. Theory B has no supporting evidence, nor is any attempt made to find any. Now a single little fact is discovered, which A allegedly can’t explain. Without even asking whether B can explain it, the default conclusion is fallaciously drawn: B must be correct. Incidentally, further research usually reveals that A can explain the phenomenon after all: thus the biologist Kenneth R. Miller (a believing Christian who testified for the other side in the Dover trial) beautifully showed how the bacterial flagellar motor could evolve via known functional intermediates.

Dawkins concludes:

f correct, Behe’s calculations would at a stroke confound generations of mathematical geneticists, who have repeatedly shown that evolutionary rates are not limited by mutation. Single-handedly, Behe is taking on Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, J. B. S. Haldane, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Richard Lewontin, John Maynard Smith and hundreds of their talented co-workers and intellectual descendants. Notwithstanding the inconvenient existence of dogs, cabbages and pouter pigeons, the entire corpus of mathematical genetics, from 1930 to today, is flat wrong. Michael Behe, the disowned biochemist of Lehigh University, is the only one who has done his sums right. You think?

The best way to find out is for Behe to submit a mathematical paper to The Journal of Theoretical Biology, say, or The American Naturalist, whose editors would send it to qualified referees. They might liken Behe’s error to the belief that you can’t win a game of cards unless you have a perfect hand. But, not to second-guess the referees, my point is that Behe, as is normal at the grotesquely ill-named Discovery Institute (a tax-free charity, would you believe?), where he is a senior fellow, has bypassed the peer-review procedure altogether, gone over the heads of the scientists he once aspired to number among his peers, and appealed directly to a public that — as he and his publisher know — is not qualified to rumble him.

Does Behe honestly think that he's suddenly (for the second time now apparently) discovered the magic flaw in evolution being that mutations cannot account for the majority of diversity among species? If so why hasn't he attempted to publish his work (or work on the previous "problem" of irreducible complexity")?

Even as I was reading the biased review of a rebuttal on the DI site (not that bias is horrible but that I read supporting reviews first) I was unimpressed with the arguments that mutations cannot produce current variation. Scientists have measured mutation rates and genetic divergence and found that mutation rates are many thousands of times higher than that necessary to account for common descent. Of course, fixation rates are much more difficult to measure but since that's apparently not Behe's argument, we probably don't need to go there.

 

[Deamiter]

Read the book, bro - its worth it.

It's already on my reading list but I'm afraid I don't generally drop everything to read the latest musings of a guy who can't bring himself to have his work scrutinized by experts in his own field.

 

[Lludmila]

YECs say that micro evolution happens everyday but that we never observe macro evolution. My question is, in your opinion, would the accumulation of many many micro evolutionary changes count as macro evolution?

Yes, I'd say it does; however it (to my thinking) would take more time than I believe has existed.

Which is to say: it WOULD take millions of years for these small changes to add up so much, and I believe in only about 6000.

 

[Deamiter]

Although, I admit I'm not actually sure what Behe thinks. IIRC, in "Darwin's Black Box" the conclusion is that God made the first cell with all the information for all the life we see today. He thinks that evolution could not have created the life we see on it's own, but rather, that God had to put all the information there in the first place. Now he fight's against natural processes creating new functions so that he can keep God in the picture. Correct me if I'm wrong (because I may be wrong) but that sounds like a God of the gaps argument. Like every other God of the gaps argument, one a scientist gives a natural explanation for what Behe attributes to God, ppl like Richard Dawkins will go "Ha, told you there was no god!"

Close but not quite. Behe argues not that all information was in the first cell but that God caused repeated large-scale speciation by causing multiple simultaneous (and indeed very improbable) mutations. His claim now seems to be that evolution does happen, but that the variation we see today could not have been the result of numerous beneficial mutations.

As far as I can tell without having read the book, he doesn't talk much about neutral mutations though and I very much question his conclusions which seem to rely on his assumption (not evidence mind you) that there IS NO pathway by which successive beneficial or neutral mutations could have built up to produce currently observed variation among species.

You're quite right that it's pretty much the ultimate God-of the gaps argument, but that seems to be Behe's forté to begin with.

 

[archaeologist]

i do not believe in micro or macro evolution so here is a question for you all to answer as i am only interested in what people think on this topic.

is it consistant or hypicritical to one's faith to believe that one exists but not the other?

don't worry, all i am after are people's opinions, i have no plans to rebut ayone.

 

[Deamiter]

Yes, I'd say it does; however it (to my thinking) would take more time than I believe has existed.

Which is to say: it WOULD take millions of years for these small changes to add up so much, and I believe in only about 6000.

Brilliant! That's exactly what the last few decades of research into mutation rates and genetic divergence has shown! Stick around for a while and we'll get into a thread on the age of the Earth or the cultural inconsistencies in assuming that the Hebrews valued factual accounts as much as us post-enlightenment scientists do.

 

[laptoppop]

No, he absolutely has not dropped the irreducible complexity argument. The new book details even more cool specifics about the ol' flagellum that add to that argument. He also had a link to this cool video -- specifically check out the one about the flagellum replicating. http://www.npn.jst.go.jp/movie5.html

I think we can all agree -- its totally amazing. All the pieces working together so wonderfully. wow.