Oolon Colluphid

Ah, most certainly. Now, where's that paper from a while back, something to do with Hox genes and insect body plans, from Science IIRC...? Simple change turned the thing inside out or whatever. Anyone?

Cheers, Oolon

luvluv

I'm still here, guys!

I got lost in the bookstore the other day. I went to get a copy of Dawkins Climbing Mount Improbable or The Blind Watchmaker and Micheal Behe's Darwin's Black Box.

Well, unfortunately my local Barnes and Noble did not have copies of either of Dawkins books (which surprised me) but they unfortunately did have a fascinating book by William Lane Craig on the nature of Divine time. I have since been lost in said book for days and have neglected to post on this thread.

I did get Behe's book, though. At any rate, I shall return better informed, but it may be a day or two.

Doubting Didymus

I've had the same problems finding actual science books. The blind watchmaker is common enough, but that, the demon haunted world, and erich von danikens bloody pyramidology trash normally makes up the entire "science" segment of my local bookstores.

I haven't read behe, but I am a little bit familiar with the irreducible complexity arguments. When you read the book, I suggest you keep This page in mind. It shows how irreducibly complex systems can be built up in incremental steps, with each step improving the function. This requires evolution to proceed indirectly, but no-one suggests it can't do that, through things like the elimination of functional redundancy after new mutations.

luvluv

Peez:

Wha??!!

I thought that such notables as Dawkins, Gould, Mayr, and Huxley were all VERY adamant as to the fact that evolution does not require the cooperation of a deity. Indeed, it could not be a science if this was not spelled out at the outset.

My "whatever" refered to this statement by you:

By that "whatever", I did not mean to communicate that I could not respond to this statement of yours and demonstrate to you that I am unbiased. I simply meant to convey to you the absolute apathy I posses towards your opinion about my bias.

It's irrelevant to the conversation, other than that it wastes bandwith for you to continue to tell me that you think I am biased, and for me to continue to tell you that I don't care what you think about my bias.

I'm not saying what couldn't happen. I'm expressing my that I don't believe it could have happened. As concerns evolution, I am a weak athiest. I'm not saying it DIDN'T happen just as evolution says it did. I'm simply saying that I don't believe it happened in that way.

I'm not making a positive statement that evolution is definitely false. I am simply saying that, at present, I don't believe in it.

What if there is no radio? What if the cars don't know what Eden is? What if the cars that are slightly closer to Eden don't have any "survival advantage" to those cars which never get anywhere near to Eden? What if only one car ever got started in that direction, and didn't make it?

My point exactly.

Let's be clear, if we were merely talking about morphological structures (bones, limbs, etc.) evolution would be much more believable to me. If it really were all about bones changing shape, that would be plausible. But that I am expected to believe that things like love, reason, morality, and aesthetic appreciation are all matters of chemicals being misarranged, is asking too much of me.

But, for me, your above explanations just aren't enough.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that common descent is NOT proved. What is proved is that there were different organisms on earth at different times. It has not been proven, it is not a "fact", that all of these organisms share a common ancestor.

No kidding.

This isn't my definition this is the evolutionist's defintion. As far as I know, there is no hard and fast definition of what constitutes fitness. Evolution is descirbed as the survival of the fittest, and the fittest is typically defined by nothing more than what survives. Thus evolution is defined tautologically as the survival of what survives.

This isn't a problem with my understanding of the theory this is the theory itself. There is no way to define fitness or beneficiality in the abstract, and you know it.

Where was I when this happened!!!???

I just complained in my very last post that you like to provide examples as if your words were infallible and just handwave away all questions. I asked you several questions about your last post, which you haven't yet addressed (maybe you will later in your response, I'm doing this in order).

You have a very bad habit of assuming you've sufficiently explained things before you have.

You have absolutely NOT proven that this is possible!

Specifically, you have not presented any explanation of how this could occur:

All you've offered in support of this was that the molecule, if it were to occur, could (if our luck holds out) be incorporated in a nerve cell. That really doesn't explain WHY the molecule which confers absolultely no advantage would stick around TO BE incorporated in a nerve cell, and it doesn't really explain how this would be advantageous to an organism which has no ability to use the information brought to it whatsoever.

The basic problem, as I see it, is that you have to go an AWFULLY LONG WAY before any advantage at all is gained by having a light sensitive molecule in your nervous system. It depends not simply on having a light sensitive molecule, but having the light sensitive molecule hooked up to your nervous systeml, and having the ability to use this information to your benefit.

But what is keeping all this in the genome in the first place when it is not advantageous to the organism who posses it for possibly HUNDREDS of generations?

It's like Steven Jay Gould's old question "What good is five percent of the eye?"

Because 5 percent of an eye does not equal five percent vision. It equals a functionally useless appendage. So why does it stick around for millions of years? Is it waiting to become an eye?

That works great when the gene you are describing is one which causes more offspring to be reproduced. No surprise that if the gene you are using in your example is a gene that causes more births, that the organism which has it has a clear advantage over an organism that doesn't, and thus it outreproduces it's neighbors.

I was asking how genes which, in the incremental stages, confer NO BENEFIT, like the one light-sensitive molecule totally unconnected to the nervous system, could find itself becoming more common in a genome despite the fact that it provided no advantage whatsoever.

If it became commonly spread through the genome it would have become so on the basis of sheer luck (or providence). There's no realy scientific reason why it should have become prevelant.

Well, thanks. My point is that it doesn't have an advantage. So why does the 1 inch tail stick around to become the 6 inch tail? Why doesn't it go the way of the 6th finger?

I've got a lot of objections to the theory. The problem is, you are sounding more like someone who is trying to forcefully convert someone to their own way of thinking rather than someone willing to share the nuances of a theory. You worry too much about whether I will accept evolution. Maybe you'll explain it to me, I'll understand your explanation completely, and yet I won't believe in evolution any more than I do now. You seem to be offended at the notion that this is possible.

This is not quite the case however, as you are generally AVOIDING my questions, even the ones that are relevant. They're all relevant. If evolution can't account for something that exists, then it's not completely true.

My question was is this true of rhodospin, or of any known molecule that could have been a precursor of vision, or are you just making up this up? I'm trying to distinguish just how much of this is pure conjecture and how much of it would really be plausible in the real world.

I don't remember asking you to explain all of biology. To be honest, your answers so far aren't inspiring confidence.

No, you haven't.

I said:

You said:

So am I to understand you are now going to stop complaining when I don't accept your explanations as gospel? Or will I continue to be charged with heresy for so doing?

No, the organism does not RESPOND to the light merely because ONE of it's molecules is heat sensitive. As I have been trying to argue, it is a long way from having one light sensitive molecule to an organism RESPONDING TO LIGHT.

My question was what is the advantage of a light sensitive molecule which the organism can't respond to or incorporate into it's actions in any way. You haven't answered that question yet.

I wasn't. Again, stick to my questions to you or to general questions, and stay out of my personal comments toward other posters, and confusion like this can be avoided.

It doesn't NOW, because there are an awful lot of amoebas, and they are pretty resillient.

But back then, when there were a few, or much fewr, I would think that they could be eradicated, or nearly eradicated, fairly easily by something like a hurricane or a volcanic erruption.

luvluv

Didymus I actually have seen Behe respond to that mousetrap analogy over at Leadership University. I'll try to find it later, right now I'm beat and I'm off to dreamsville.

Doubting Didymus

If they didn't diverge from a common ancestor, then endogenous retroviral fragments confirming phylogenetic relationships would be more than a little bit baffling.

Albion

Oh, great, a bookstore that has Behe's book in the science section and not Dawkins's. Well, I suppose it beats the one I came across where "Icons of Evolution" was the only biology book in the science section.

Oolon Colluphid

Peez, I’ll take this bit, if I may...

It is precisely one percent better than 4% of an eye.
Oh deary-dear. It is not a case of subtracting 95% of a modern eye. It’s a case of building incrementally and co-opting other bits along the way.

What exactly is a something-percent of an eye? Is it like the nautilus’s eye, which is a pinhole camera design, but which doesn’t have a lens? Is it a deep cup of photocells, such as many molluscs have? Would a “1% eye” be the lightspot found in Euglena?

Please explain how these something-percent eyes are “functionally useless appendages”.

Say, if they are, can I add them to my list of stupid design features? These things aren’t as complete as a human eye, therefore they’re useless... and therefore, please tell us why god bothered to give them to their owners.

Ref ‘subtracting 95% of a modern eye’... evolution has done that. Well, some percentages at any rate. There’s a load of creatures that really do have “functionally useless appendage” eyes. They live in total darkness in caves -- fish (eg Astyanax mexicanus), insects (eg the Hawaiian cave planthopper Oliarus polyphemus), spiders (eg Neoleptoneta myopica), salamanders (eg Typhlomolge rathbuni) and crayfish (eg Cambarus setosus), or in burrows, eg marsupial moles (no lens or pupil, reduced optic nerve), amphisbaenians and naked mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber)).

So there ya go: functionally useless something-percent eyes. Wanna tell us why god created them?

TTFN, Oolon

MrDarwin

Um... no.

"Survival of the fittest" was a phrase coined by (I believe) Huxley and Darwin, unfortunately, picked it up in one of the later editions of "Origin of Species"--unfortunately because it has led to precisely this kind of confusion. But despite this common misunderstanding, evolution is not "survival of the fittest". At best, natural selection is "survival of the fittest" but it is not a tautology, it is a phenomenon. "Fitness" and "beneficiality" are things that we can observe in the real world, and test in the laboratory: genetic variations among related organisms result in differential survival because certain genes can confer advantages or disadvantages (but note that which is which can vary with the environment). It explains why babies born with severe genetic abnormalities rarely grow up and have children of their own; it also explains why insects with certain mutations are more resistant to pesticides (and why the incidence of such genes tend to increase in insect populations that are exposed to insecticides).

Creationists may have their doubts as to whether the phenomenon of natural selection is sufficient to explain the diversity of life we observe in the world today (and it isn't), but it irritates me to no end when they suggest that there is no such thing in the first place.

MrDarwin

You're wrong.

It would be more correct to say that common descent is an observation. We know from observing the world around us that all organisms come from pre-existing organisms, i.e., we know of no instances of spontaneous generation and have never observed a new species or group of species *poof*-ing into existence.

We can also make several related observations. Organisms vary, even within a species, sometimes quite a bit; i.e., they do not beget carbon copies of themselves (if they did, evolution would be quite impossible because things could never change). New things don't appear suddenly and from nowhere in the fossil record: there are similar things preceding them in the fossil record. Among groups of similar organisms, the more recent ones in the fossil record are the most similar to living ones, and representatives of these groups become more and more different in older and older fossils. And as we trace groups back in time through the fossil record, they converge in morphology and become more and more similar to each other.

From this series of observations we can make the hypothesis that life originated once on this planet, and once only, but has changed during that time. You may be surprised upon reading "Darwin's Black Box" to find that Behe by and large agrees with this, although he disagrees with the mechanism of change (albeit without ever identifying the mechanism, except to refer vaguely to a "designer"). Of course, observations can be mistaken or even erroneous. So can you give me any good reasons why these observations (which even Behe accepts), or the evolutionary interpretation of them (which Behe accepts with some reservations as to the mechanism of change), are incorrect?