Stephen T-B

loved it. DT
best wishes
S.T-B

Principia

DT,

Excellent post. But you wrote, Whoa, man. Let's not get carried away, here. I do somewhat disagree with Rad's comment that biology is not physics though. In the coming age of proteomics and organic nanomachinery, biology will have a lot to do with physics. The way I would put it is that biology and chemistry are about emergent properties of physical laws (of which self-organizing behavior that your brought up is one). If you read any physics journal, I think you'll agree that physics is most definitely not about "the simple things."

Back to your regular programming.

MrDarwin

I was able to sum up Darwin's main ideas in one short, easy-to-understand paragraph, and you still haven't managed to answer my question. Which of those ideas have been proven false, and how? Your answer implies that they have not been falsified to your satisfaction, aside from the fact that you don't like them or the implications that may or may not logically follow (like the existence of God).

That one is trivially easy. Most people have already had children and raised them to at least young adulthood by the time they are 50. Thus there is little or no selective pressure for people to live past the age of 50.

Now, you do understand that chance and accident, whether a genetic mutation or a rock falling off a cliff, have some bearing on how long an individual lives?

Oolon Colluphid

Huh?

Well of course biology has everything to do with physics, since chemistry is based on physics, and biology on chemistry. But I'm not sure how I was getting carried away...

Sure. But I (also) meant organised complexity, the sort of things IDiots bring up. What Dawkins calls 'designoid' things, things with many many parts, which, if the parts were rearranged in nearly any of the other possible ways they could be, would not do what they can when arranged as they are. Hence disagreeing with you somewhat...

Of course physics is not 'simple'; nor is it about merely simple things. However, I'd suggest that there is rather a difference (quantitative rather than qualitative, perhaps ) between the complexity of an atom, subatomic bits 'n' bobs and all, and the complexity of a mammalian eye, a mitochondrion or a neuron (let alone a brain! ) I'd suggest that the difference is several orders of magnitude. Hence, by comparison to biological complexity, the physics is indeed about the simple stuff. (Indeed, how could it not be, since science is reductionist and physics is about the fundamental bits, not about what happens when you mix lots and lots of them up: that's where we get the emergent phenomena we call chemistry and biology!)

Admittedly, I've never picked up a physics journal (even what I see in Nature may as well be written in Serbo-Croat), so I could be wrong...

Cheers, DT

Principia

Well, I don't think I agree. There are fairly complicated physical systems that physicists deal with: modeling stellar movement in galaxies, predicting turbulent (chaotic) behavior in liquids, understanding the nature of superconducting lattices. If I had to guess, I'd say that the biological applications of supercomputers in the world, at present, are a rather insignificant fraction compared to all of the physical models being run. But the fact that we may disagree suggests that demarcating between various disciplines isn't as clear cut as one would like (surely there are already people working at the interface between biology and physics, right?). Biology (with the advent of mol. bio.) has started to deal with the "little stuff" that once only physicists and chemists cared about. I think the frontier of mol. biol. is where the IDiots are making their last stand -- they make truth claims about the "simple things" becoming (or rather not becoming) "complex things." But the problem is that we all know that the governing behavior is more likely than not, still described by the same physical laws. So there is really one big continuum here, from physics to chemistry to biology. I think it is not helpful to help make the IDiots arguments for them by suggesting that there is some kind of ontological/epistemological divide between physics and biology. [/rant]

But, I'm not a philosopher of science... So take it with a grain of Na Cl crystals.

PS: My physicists friends complain frequently about the biology articles in Nature. They especially hate the thousands of acronyms for all the proteins and cellular components we know about.

Oolon Colluphid

I think actually we may...

Sure. But that’s not the sort, or rather the level, of complexity I’m talking about. As I’ve said, I mean organised complexity. To paraphrase Dawkins again, Mount Everest for instance is a very complex arrangement of bits. But a large proportion of the ways you could rearrange those bits would still be Mount Everest. A turbulent liquid is still a turbulent liquid: it doesn’t matter if you swap some molecules round in it. By contrast, nearly all the ways you could rearrange a frog, say, would most definitely not be a functioning frog. This is the point of Paley’s watchmaker analogy... and of natural selection as a blind watchmaker. What it means in effect is that such complexity is too improbable to come about by chance alone. In other words, the complexity of where stars move does not require algorithmic selection from random variation to explain it, whereas a frog does.

Sorry, you’ve lost me

Probably As I said, it may be a matter of quantity of complexity rather than quality -- get enough of it and the result can’t have happened by the tornado blowing through the junkyard .

Sorry if it sounded like I was!

Sorry if I sounded acidic; it’s good to have an alk-ally around for physics things... between us we have the (saline) solution!

You should try the genetics stuff: a recent paper talked about MITEs, a miniature Ping (mPing), and “An mPing-associated Ping element, which has a putative PIF family transposase...”

DT

MrDarwin

That's not quite what Darwin said, but let's review the evidence.

Here's a somewhat oversimplified but standard and widely accepted evolutionary sequence: invertebrate => fish => amphibian => reptile => mammal; and within mammals, from monkeys => humans.

For the sake of argument, let's say that humans are a "kind". So, if the evolutionary progression is correct, then humans evolved from the monkey "kind", that evolved from a primitive shrew-like mammal "kind", that evolved from the reptile "kind", that evolved from an amphibian-like tetrapod "kind", that evolved from the fish "kind", that evolved from the invertebrate "kind". Counting up we need, hmmmm, a total of 6 "missing links" from invertebrates to humans. Can we account for them?

1. The living amphioxus (a fish-like invertebrate) has always been considered a pretty good example of an organism transitional between an invertebrate and a fish. Of course no modern group is derived from any other modern group, so we have to look back in the fossil record, and see what we find right before the earliest fishes appear. And sure enough, recent discoveries in China have found Cambrian fish-like invertebrates that are very similar to amphioxus. (There are so many cool fossils coming out of China lately, documenting the early histories of so many different groups, that these are going to pose a major problem for creationists.)

2 & 3. Living lobe-finned fish (like lungfish) are good intermediates between typical bony fish and land-living tetrapods. So if we look to the fossil record just before tetrapods appear, what do we find? Lots of lobe-finned fishes that are either more like fish or more like tetrapods. Thanks to very exciting recent discoveries of early tetrapods (I say "tetrapods" because the line between early "amphibians" and early "reptiles" is pretty blurry, in part because the fossils are so transitional) this has become one of the best-documented transitions.

4. There are some unusual living mammals, like the platypus and echidna, that have retained many reptilian characteristics (like laying eggs, among other features of their urogenital systems). But what do we find before typical mammals appear in the fossil record? Extinct mammal-like reptiles document an excellent transition from early reptiles to early mammals (right down to the evolution of earbones from jawbones). These early mammals are generally small shrewlike insectivorous creatures. This is another very well-documented transition.

5. There are also many living primates that are more or less intermediate between a shrew-like mammal (e.g., tree shrew) and "higher" primates like monkeys (e.g., bushbabies, lemurs, etc.). Although the fossil record of early primates is poor, it's not nonexistent, and living primates show a pretty continuous transition from "primitive" primates to more advanced ones like monkeys and apes.

6. The transition from monkeys to humans: while there's a poor fossil record of the earlier parts of this transition, there's no getting around the fact that the great apes, especially chimpanzees, are excellent transitional forms between monkeys and humans (in fact, chimpanzees are far more similar to humans than they are to monkeys). But the transition from apes to humans is exceedingly well documented in the fossil record; recent discoveries of early hominid fossils in Africa have pretty much filled the major gaps from apes to humans.

Reviewing the above, it would be nice to know some more about the early radiation of the mammal orders, or the common ancestors of apes and humans, but otherwise, it's hard to figure out just which links are still "missing". Recent discoveries have also filled in some of the other "missing links" between, e.g., whales and land-living mammals, and between birds and dinosaurs.

Jan Haugland

Oh, his musings about the hopefull monster in "The Panda's Thumb", for example. I can't recall his wording exactly, but he did say something suggesting he thought Goldschmidt would have his reputation restored.


- Jan

...who rants and raves every day at Secular Blasphemy

pz

That's an awfully vague complaint.

It's also wrong on a few levels. Why should saying that Goldschmidt's reputation would be restored be "utterly stupid"? Have you read any of Goldschmidt's work? Are you familiar with The Material Basis of Evolution? Despite its flaws, he brought up a lot of good ideas that people would do well to think about, and his research on Lymantria was classic stuff. He deserves to have his reputation restored, and with the ongoing growth of evo-devo, it will happen.

Daggah

I find it absolutely hilarious that Radorth, after just being forced to admit that Luther's anti-semitic writings played a large role in inspiring Hitler and the Nazis, is attempting to pull the typical "survival of the fittest inspired the Holocaust and Stalinic purges."

Typical Radorth.