Re: Darwinian Mechanism of Mutation and Natural Selection Found Lacking

From: "Kermit" <unrestrained_hand@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 7 Apr 2007 22:49:51 -0700

On Apr 7, 9:22 pm, "paratope.epit...@xxxxxxxxx"
<paratope.epit...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

It is constantly a source of wonder and amazement to me that highly
competent scientists, whom I otherwise hold in high regard, have not
come to these same conclusions. The conclusions are that life could
not have arisen de novo on a barren earth, and that all of the life
forms that we see today could not have appeared as a result of the
darwinian mechanism of mutation and natural selection.

The evidence for evolution is broken down into three broad
catagories.

The first is direct evidence of small-scale changes in controlled
laboratory experiments.

The second is direct evidence based upon sequences in the fossil
record.

The third is the vestigial argument, the idea that the signs of
history are preserved within every organism which record pathways of
historical descent.

The evidence includes, but is not limited to:

Fossil evidence sorted by time, corresponding to progression of early,
simple forms to diversity of modern forms, with numerous clear
transitional series.
Fossil evidence showing progression of whole ecosystems, with various
types of fossils associated with only certain other fossils.
Fossil evidence corresponding to plate tectonics, magnetic striping,
and other geological evidence.
Nested hierarchy of morphology.
Nested hierarchy of all the genomes studied so far.
The fact that these two nested hierarchies *match* is evidence in
itself.
Vestigial organs, structures, molecules, and behaviors.
Life is unified by a sharing of fundamental polymers, nucleic acids,
protein catalysts, etc.

You might want to check out:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

Not only is each class of evidence persuasive in itself (especially
the genetic, whic you fail to mention), but the fact that these
classes of data all converge on the same picture and timeline is
utterly convincing to anyone who pays more than lip service to the
evidence.

There is only one testable model that fits these data.

I have never denied for a moment that mutations occur, or that natural
selection occurs. What I'm saying is that it is a trivial effect, with
no creative power to produce new forms. Evolution correctly is defined
as a change in the frequency of genes in a population. The leap of
faith, which I refuse to take,

What you mean is, you refuse to look at the evidence. Your strawmen
above indicate that you have never read a book on evolution by
*scientists, or are dishonest. Do you really think that lying about
the data will give you eternal life?

is that these changes can accumulate to
the point where new species, genera and classes are formed. Artificial
selection experiments in laboratories have demonstrated that there is
a point beyond which you cannot go.

Bull***. Cite one.

Why should it be any different in nature?

There is no such data. Either you are lying or you are naively
accepting lies others have told you.

Let's start at the beginning. Could life have arisen de novo on the
primitive earth? I won't rule it out, but I consider it very unlikely
given what we know.

And yet biochemists and biologist think it very likely indeed.
Moreover, there once was no life (unless you think bacteria thrive in
magma), but now there is. The most likely explanation is pretty clear.
Also, there are several proposed pathways for the process to take
place.

It is becoming more clear as time goes on, that
the primitive atmosphere contained little, if any, ammonia, methane
and hydrogen. This puts all of the experiments of Fox and Miller in
question. A much more likely scenario, is that the primitive
atmosphere was rich in carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water vapor. No
one to my knowledge, has proposed any believable mechanism that would
cause these perfectly stable molecules to combine together into RNA,
DNA, proteins, cells, tissues and organisms. You can't even get past
the first step. In addition, the oldest cells date back to around 3.45
billion years old. The earth probably only became habitable for life
at around 3.8 billion years ago. This leaves you with only 350 million
years for the processes of photosynthesis, replication, cell
respiration and all of the enzymes needed by these processes to
evolve. I just don't think that's enough time.

Can you show the math?

What do you think happened? It seems much more likely to me that life
came to earth from elsewhere, with all of these processes already in
place. I think the key to it all is the water. The earth appears t o
be the only planet in the solar system with large quantities of water,
which is necessary for life to flourish

Possibly.

.
That's all well and good, but it only postpones the question.
Where did the space life come from?

Mars!

Well, now you've come to the question of primary cause. Stated another
way, we may well ask "why is there anything, instead of nothing?" At
some point in time, you've got to get to something that has always
existed.

No, you don't. See how easy that was? Please provide reasoning or
evidence to support your assertion. It looks suspiciously like the
argument from ignorance.

Conventional thinking calls this something God.

Conventional thinking also thinks that if you throw ten heads in a
row, you are more likely than normal to throw tails next. Much
conventional thinking also approves of astrological horoscopes.

But it may
just as well be the universe as God, in my mind. We must consider the
possibility that the universe, and the life in it have always existed.

It doesn't look like the universe has always existed, at least not in
its present form. It's unlikely life existed thru the big Bang, even
if there was some sort of extra-temporal cause for it, like branes
touching, or a multiuniverse foam, or what have you.

It may just be that the question "why is there life?" is no different
from the question "why is there matter?"

Perhaps we don't know enough yet to answer these questions. I suspect
the real questions are How...? When we know the how, we'll know the
why.

Getting back to evolution, scientists claim that there is a "mountain
of evidence" for evolution.
Do you deny this?

Nope. There is a mountain of evidence. If you had read a good
introductory book on it, you'd have known that.

Well, I just don't see it. There is a "mountain of evidence" that all
living forms are related. Of that there can be no doubt. In fact, this
relatedness is profound. I think this is the evidence that they are
talking about. The similarities in genes found across the spectrum of
living things is astounding. The same genes are present in all kinds
of animals, and even in plants. There is a gene in the bean plant that
codes for hemoglobin, which is never used by a bean plant. Why is it
there? But this profound relatedness, does not mean that one organism
is ancestral or descendant to another. And furthermore, this
relatedness says nothing about the mechanism by which these forms
appeared, certainly it does not support the mechanism of mutation and
natural selection.

It's a testable model that explains this, and 160 years of testing
have only supported it with more evidence, and more kinds of evidence.

The nested hierarchies of morphology, genetics, vestigial organs, etc.
are explained by common descent via modification.

Doesn't the fossil record show that organisms have evolved from simple
forms to complex forms over time? How can you deny this?

Well, naturally they started simple. There's only one way to go from
there. Some stayed pretty simple, some got more complex and bigger,
then some got simpler again. Why would we deny this? But complexity is
not the goal or hallmark of evolution - adaptation is.

Even if the fossil record did show this, which it doesn't,

Shows what? That some species got more complex? Sure it does. If you
mean "shows that all life inevitably gets more complex, no of course
not.

this would
say nothing in support of the darwinian mechanism of mutation and
natural selection.

The fossil record by itself does not, or course. But mutation and
natural selection (and sexual selection, genetic drift, and other
players) *explain it. And now genetics offers strong support for it.

The fact is, the fossil record falsifies the
darwinian mechanism.

No it doesn't.

From the time of the first eukaryotic cells,
around 1.4 billion years ago, up to the Cambrian period which began
around 600 million years ago, life did not progress beyond the single-
cell stage. This is 800 million years available, and no move towards
multicellularity.

Evolution is not a march toward complexity. It is adaptation. The
Cambrian fossil record show much multi-celled life, so it must have
happened before that, yes? It did still seem to take a long time,
true. That only suggests that it was not an easy trick to "learn".

Then in a period of time which may have been as
short as 5 million years, all of the known animal phyla appear at
once.

Much longer than that, but so what?

After that, no new animal phyla apppear for the next 500 million
years. This is not consistent with a darwinian view that evolution
occurs by the slow accumulation of beneficial mutations.

Even Darwin indicated that he did not expect evolution to be slow and
steady all the time. And why would we such much in the way of new
phyla when the available niches are filled nicely already?

Another
profound observation is that there appears to have been little or no
evolution in the 40 million years between the Burgess fossils and the
Chengjiang fossils. Why?

Nonsense.

Aren't there lots of transitional fossils to prove evolution?

All fossils are transitional, except the fossils of species that went
extinct shortly after the specimen was fossilized.

There are transitional fossils and there are transitional fossils.
First of all, there is an almost complete absence of transitional
fossils between classes. This is a very important distinction. This
had been known by paleontologists for a long time and Gould and
Eldridge tried to neutralize the problem with their theory of
punctuated equilibrium. There are no intermediate forms between
invertebrates and vertebrates. There are no intermediate forms between
birds and reptiles. There are no intermediate forms between amphibians
and reptiles, or between fish and amphibians. These forms are not
still hidden in the fossil record. They never existed.

The hierarchy
of living organisms is profoundly discontinuous. Hardly what we would
expect if life evolved gradually by the slow accumulation of
beneficial mutations.

Since what you said is a lie - yours or somebody else's - why should
anyone trust your judgement on anything important? At *best you are
lazy and gullible.

I've heard it said that humans did not evolve from gorillas, but
rather that gorillas and humans had a "common ancestor". What about
this?

It's true.
None of our ancestors are still alive. Chimps and bonobos are our
closet cousins. Gorillas and orangutans are more distant, monkeys more
distant than they, and bananas more distant still.

All of these so-called "common ancestors" are hypothetical. Look at
the time lines in any textbook. The lines converge at the base, but
these lines of convergence are usually dotted lines. Why? Because the
convergences to a common ancestor are hypothetical. In my opinion,
they never existed.

No, they're simply not know. Who were you great-great-great-great-
grandparents? Can't name them? Does that make it hypothetical that you
had some?

What about this idea of historical evidence. Why does our body display
the vestiges of an arrangement better suited to quadrupedal life, if
we are not descended from four-footed creatures?

lets assume for a moment that we are descended from quadrupeds. What
does that say about mutation and natural selection? Nothing at all. We
may have changed from quadrupeds to bipeds by the addition of a small
chunk of DNA that was incorporated into our genome from a virus that
came from space.

It seems unlikely that random space DNA would have been compatible
with us. This is seriously loony stuff.

This argument only addresses the question of
relatedness, which is clear and profound. It says nothing whatsoever
about the mechanism by which these changes occurred.

No, the pattern of mutations is beginning to paint a pretty clear
picture. If you had only bothered to look this stuff up, you'd know
that.

Nor does the
fossil record. The key to the whole question is, "where did the genes
come from?" Where did the instructions that produce these structures
and behaviors originate? I do not believe that they arose by chance as
a result of mutations.

Argument from ignorance. You can't imagine how it happened, so it
couldn't have. You will instead propose an exceedingly unlikely and
probably untestable alternative.

I recently saw an advertisement in a magazine for a car. The caption
said "Mr. Darwin, your car is ready." The implication is that this was
an example of how the car evolved over time into its present state.
Aren't technological advances, such as have occurred in the aircraft
industry examples of evolution?

No. Vehicles are not self-replicating, with errors in blueprints.
Human designers can work on a structure deliberately, with an end goal
in sight. They can take a device from one machine, and apply it to
another. Cars cannot be placed in a nested hierarchy.

Life can only fit in one nested hierarchy - there are no other ways to
arrange them. Living species have structures and molecules which are
modification of predecessors.

The analogy between biological evolution by natural selection and
technological advances is a false analogy. I know that some people
have drawn an analogy between biological evolution and the evolution
of, say, an airplane or car.

Not biologistsm however. Why did you bring this up? You are arguing
against admen, not scientific models.

The analogy is false because at no point
in the development of the automobile or airplane was any element of
design achieved by chance. Only by the most strict application of the
rules of engineering and aerodynamics was the final result obtained.
There is no way that a random search could ever have discovered the
design of the internal combustion engine. In all cases, the search for
function is intelligently guided. Evolution by the method you propose
is analagous to problem solving without any intelligent guidance. In
the case of every kind of complex, functional system, the total
magnitude of all combinational possibilities is nearly infinite.
Meaningful islands of function are so rare, that to find even one
would be a miracle.

There has been much talk about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

Only by Creationists.

You say evolution violates this law. Evolutionists say that this law
only applies to a closed system, and that the earth is not a closed
system, it receives large amounts of energy from the Sun. How do you
answer this?

http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/rncse_content/vol25/3524_creationism_and_the_laws_of_th_12_30_1899.asp

First of all, there is no such thing as a closed system anywhere in
the universe. The only closed system is the universe itself, as far as
we know. Secondly, the earth radiates back into space an amount of
energy equal to that which it receives from the sun, minus that which
is stored in the process of photosynthesis. The question is, can this
energy from the sun cause molecules of carbon dioxide, nitrogen and
water to aggregate into amino acids and proteins? I don't think so.

The chemicals react according to natural law. Are you arguing against
chemistry now?

The only effect it would have, as far as I can see, is to make the
earth warm.

If you took some chemistry yo might see more. Until you do, you might
want to be cautious about making pronouncements about what chemicals
can and can't do.

If anything, it would create more disorder by increasing
the average kinetic energy of the molecules. No one to my knowledge,
has proposed a plausible mechanism by which order comes from disorder
under these conditions.

Please propose a method by which order can be derived from a system at
zero degrees kelvin.

It seems logical to me that small improvements might accumulate
gradually over time to produce new adaptations. Why don't you see
this?

Ummm... that's called biological evolution. Are you two different
people?

The biological world is filled with numerous examples of processes and
structures that do not work unless they are complete. Examples would
include the flagellum of a bacterium, the biochemistry of vision, the
blood clotting system, the cilium, the immune system and the cellular
transport system. Many biochemical pathways in the body are "cascade"
reactions in which a series of intermediate steps leads to the final
result. How can these processes and structures be found by natural
selection? They would have no selective value at their intermediate
stages of development. In fact, they might even prove fatal to the
organism. How many random mutations would have to occur before all of
the correct steps are in place? 50% of an eye might not be 50% of
vision, if the missing part was the optic nerve. It would be 0% of
vision.

Here's just one example:
http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/DI/clot/Clotting.html

Dr. Miller is a well-known Christian and a real scientist. From the
link:
"In short, the key to understanding the evolution of blood clotting is
to appreciate that the current system did not evolve all at once. Like
all biochemical systems, it evolved from genes and proteins that
originally served different purposes. The powerful opportunistic
pressures of natural selection progressively recruited one gene
duplication after another, gradually fashioning a system in which high
efficiences of controlled blood clotting made the modern vertebrate
circulatory system possible."

I suggest reading it. It's not too long, and you might want to look up
the other examples you list and reconsider them.

How do evolutionists view the appearance of new adaptations?

According to evolutionary theory, every adaptive advance discovered
during the course of evolution, along every phylogenetic line has been
found by a gigantic lottery by using a purely random search strategy.
This has been shown by mathematicians to be a hopelessly inefficient
process.

Which mathematicians? Name one or two, and show the math.

This is patent nonsense. The *pool is random; the selection is not.
There may be thousands, possibly many millions of a species born in
any generation. they all have multiple mutation (you probably have
around 200) and if any of these mutations are advantageous they will
quickly spread throughout the genepool.

But hasn't Richard Dawkins proposed something called "cumulative
selection" to get around this problem?

There is a fatal flaw in Dawkins example. For cumulative selection to
work, there must be selective advantage at every step in the process
or,

Mostly.

the outcome must be known in advance. Otherwise, how can the
"worth" of each small change be judged so that the beneficial
mutations can be kept?

Some are neutral. Some interact with other genes to produce new
effects.

We saw previously that many processes and
structures are irreducibly complex so they have no worth at
intermediate steps of evolution.

As I showed, "we" simply have demonstrated that you don't know what
you're talking about.

My name has 13 letters and one space.
How long would it take to find it by selecting random combinations of
13 letters and one space? The only way to be successful is if the
target string is known in advance. If the outcome is known in advance,
then we have intelligent design.

There is no target in evolution. what are the odds of the wining hand
in a bridge game? Astronomically slim. but what are the odds that
*some hand will win? Certain.

Do you think that living organisms show evidence of intelligent
design?

Nope.

Considering the ingenuity with which living organisms are assembled,
and the deepening layers of complexity that are found therein, I
cannot ascribe it to any random process that is driven by chance. I do
see evidence for intelligent design.

I see bunny rabbits in the sky on cloudy days, but that doesn't mean
there are any. The evidence, which you refused to look for, is
plentiful. You are either incompetent or dishonest. The answers to all
of you false complaints are online and in your local library.

And even if you had evidence which was such a major problem for
evolutionary science, it would not be support for whatever alternative
you have.

If the observational and experimental evidence doesn't support
darwinian evolution, why does it persist as a theory?

Because that's a lie. It does fit the evidence, it is supported by all
scientists except a handful for religious reasons, it is testable and
continues to pass the tests, and there are no testable alternative
models which fit s the data.

The main
reason, I think, is that science can offer no alternative. People
expect scientists to have answers. Scientists don't like to say "I
don't know".

Unlike creationist, however, they will if they actually don't know.
Creationists simply make up lies. Did you know you were repeating
lies, or did you simply not care enough about the truth to find out
what science actually says on these issues?

This would create an information vacuum that would
quickly be filled by religious creationists who believe that God
created the universe and all of the life in it. Another reason, is
that there are a whole generation of evolutionary biologists who have
grown up with this theory,

At this point, six or so generations. Do you think this is new
science?

believed in it, promoted it and defended
it. How would it be for them, at the twilight of their careers to have
to admit that their life's work was incorrect?

Traumatic for some, exciting for others. What does this have to do
with the data?

It is also clear that
Darwinism is on the road to becoming an established religious belief
with Darwin as the diety.

Bull***. It's science, jsut as geology and astronomy and chemistry
are.

There are new groups of "ultra-darwinists"
who seek to explain everything in the world including psychology, in
terms of darwinism.

If we evolved (and we did), then everything we do is best understood
in the light of the environment in which we evolved.

This isn't rocketscience.

No, it's evolutionary science. And you are poorly equipped, either
intellectually or morally, to critique it.

http://www.charliewagner

Kermit

.

References:
- Darwinian Mechanism of Mutation and Natural Selection Found Lacking
  - From: paratope.epitope@xxxxxxxxx

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