Re: Does anybody have any evidence that all evolutionary events are

dkomo <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

John Harshman wrote:
....
It's my understanding, based on occasional and strictly exposure to
physics, that it's been shown that quantum events can't be determinate,
i.e. that there are no hidden variables. But if they are truly random,
and if mutations are the result of individual quantum events, which they
frequently are,

Where do you get that mutations are the result of individual quantum
events? As far as I can tell, mutations are poduced by chemical
interactions, and these occur at the molecular level rather than the
atomic, nuclear or subatomic level. A point mutation like a base
substitution might be caused by thermal noise, for example, but I
wouldn't consider that a "quantum event".

Even the occasional gamma particle is hardly the major source of
mutation. I too understood most mutation to be thermal noise and
mispairings.

and if individual mutations are at all important in
evolution, then evolution is indeterminate. Depending on how important
the mutations are, different independent trials of the history of earth
might produce quite different results. We of course have no opportunity
to test this hypothesis by making such independent trials. If we test it
on a local scale with repeated selection experiments, we sometimes get
identical results, sometimes very different ones. It's hard to say
whether the differences in outcome were due to quantum effects or to
some unknown, small, and uncontrolled difference in initial conditions.


--dkomo@xxxxxxxx


--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Philosophy
University of Queensland - Blog: scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts
"He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor,
bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: ID and the Difference Between Spheres and Cubes
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