Re: To Garamond: Genesis Commentary

On Dec 17, 1:42 pm, Garamond Lethe <cartographi...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, 16 Dec 2007 22:06:08 -0500, Zoe wrote:
On 16 Dec 2007 04:00:25 GMT, Garamond Lethe <cartographi...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Fri, 14 Dec 2007 20:40:34 -0500, Zoe wrote:

<snip>

that was a badly worded question. Let me try again.

Q. What are the processes that are claimed to produce new beneficial
inheritable traits?

A. Those processes that are claimed to produce new beneficial
inheritable traits are random beneficial mutations and genetic drift.

Mostly right. There are a couple of other mechanisms as well, and all of
them can also produce neutral, detrimental, and lethal changes.



Q. If the processes are random, then new traits are random.

This is incorrect.

I'm getting the impression you've confused "random" with
"unconstrained". The two are very different concepts.

At the level of individual mutations, there isn't any such thing as a
"new trait". Existing traits will be modified slightly -- sometimes
this is slightly beneficial or negative, sometimes it's lethal, and most
of the time it's just neutral. Over time, successive mutations can
cause what we'd classify as a new trait, but this never happens within a
single generation.

well, I did use the word "processes," which would eliminate the
individual mutation as my meaning.

Ah, that wasn't clear.

Can scientists predict what these
new traits will be?

Much like scientists can predict the weather -- if you looking at large
populations over the short term, then yes. The more specific and longer
term you go, the worse the predictions get.

On that
basis, can you predict what random advantages will be retained through
natural selection?
A. No. You can only predict that natural selection may retain a new
advantage, but you cannot predict what that retained advantage will
be.

This is incorrect.

Show me an organism's predators and parasites and I'll tell you what the
retained advantages will be.

what are the retained advantages of antibiotic-resistant bacteria such
that the claim can be made that new morphologic features are developing?

Not my field, but as an example: an enzyme might be modified so that it
interferes with the functioning of the drug.

What is the evidence that developing changes are taking the bacterium
away from its species into an entirely new genus?

As bacteria reproduce asexually, one has to use something other than
reproductive isolation for classification.

Would you like some help looking up the answer?

When is a population
no longer recognized as bacteria but as organisms with, say, nucleated
cells?

There's a continuum across all of life. To the extent that
classifications help us understand life, they're useful. I have no idea
how this particular classification is made. Again, would you like some
help finding out?

So far, what is being described is adaptation. Adaptation is
not thought to be the same as speciation, I hope.

The two are orthogonal. A species can change (adapt) radically over
time, yet no members of any given generation are reproductively
isolated.



This is easiest to see in drug resistance. Say we apply a new drug to a
population of malaria. If the population is large enough, some members
will be sufficiently different that they'll survive -- they have some
natural resistance to the drug. They might not do well, their
reproductive efficiency may drop, and there might not be enough of them
to make you sick, but they're still around.

The populations will continue to mutate as usual. Individuals whose
mutation causes them to lose the resistance will be promptly weeded out
of the population. However, there will be an occasional mutation that
further increases resistance. That will be selected for and, after a
sufficient number of generations have passed, most of the population
will be highly resistant.

In this case, only those traits that deal with the drug will be relevant
-- indeed, such traits might have been actively harmful in a different
environment.

actually, the way I view this is not that some bacteria have developed a
new mutation that allows them to deal with drugs, but that there are
varying degrees of healthiness that allow for effective resistance to
negative influences in the environment.

The "mutation ... to deal with drugs" is usually not an all-or-nothing
proposition.

The healthier the organism, the
more able it is to adapt and deal with its environment.

In this case, the drug is part of the environment for the malaria.

"Healthy" here
refers to an organism whose immune system's integrity is not compromised
by preceding external conditions.

Again, I think health is better defined on a continuum.

As a result, the offspring of
healthier parents will also be healthier than offspring of parents who
have weaker immune systems, and the healthier organisms are better able
to defend against negative influences, i.e., antibiotics, and pass on
this increasing ability to defend to their offspring.

I think you're conflating "health" and "fitness" -- not difficult to do.
In an environment with lots of food and few predators, even the least fit
organisms can be healthy and reproductively successful. And where
competition is the most fierce and the environment is harshest, the most
fit may be healthy only in comparison to those who are less fit (who are
dead).



That is what I mean when I say that evolution is unpredictable,
therefore untestable, therefore unscientific.

The fact that some aspects of evolution are treated as though they are
random is no bar to it being useful -- statistics handles this problem
extraordinarily well. What is unpredictably random at the level of a
single gene for a single individual is entirely tractable when dealing
with a population over generations.

so can you predict what our present life forms will morph into?

Yes.

Can you
predict what natural selection will produce next?

Yup.

Can you predict what
an organism will evolve into next?

Sure.

Takes millions of years, you say?

The Dodd paper you read took 8 generations over 1 year.

Then evolution is not observable,

I think I remember posting a link to a t.o. faq that detailed dozens of
observed instances of speciation. Evolution itself is so commonplace
that you can observe it happening just by signing up for a good
university biology class that has a lab section.

not testable,

Well, evolution is defined as the change of allele frequencies over
time. Assuming you can measure those frequencies, and you do so over
time, then it can be tested. Unsurprisingly, it works.

not predictable,

Because we're able to predict evolution, we can design sane drug delivery
policies for malaria. Because we're able to predict evolution, we can
develop much more effective chemotherapy treatments.

and
therefore, not scientific....imo.

Zoe, you're smarter than this.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.htmlhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-intro-to-biology.html

And if you don't want to be caught dead visiting talkorigins.org, then
check out a biology textbook from your library and keep renewing it until
you've pounded your way through it. Harvey Lodish's _Molecular Cell
Biology_ might be a good place to start, although since you've got plenty
of experts right close, you might want to ask for the group opinion.

If you want examples of observed morophological changes, then head on
over to scholar.google.com and start looking. If you need help, then
ask. Here's one to get you started:

Alexander V. Badyaev, Kerry R. Foresman.
"Extreme environmental change and evolution: stress-induced morphological
variation is strongly concordant with patterns of evolutionary divergence
in shrew mandibles"

Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences, Volume 267, Number
1441/February 22, 2000.

<q>
Morphological structures often consist of simpler traits which can be
viewed as either integrated (e.g. correlated due to functional
interdependency) or non-integrated (e.g. functionally independent)
traits. The combination of a long-term stabilizing selection on the
entire structure with a short-term directional selection on an adaptively
important subset of traits should result in long historical persistence
of integrated functional complexes, with environmentally induced
variation and macroevolutionary change confined mostly to non-integrated
traits. We experimentally subjected populations of three closely related
species of Sorex shrews to environmental stress. As predicted, we found
that most of the variation in shrew mandibular shape was localized
between rather than within the functional complexes; the patterns of
integration did not change between the species. The stress-induced
variation was confined to non-integrated traits and was highly concordant
with the patterns of evolutionary change - species differed in the same
set of non-integrated traits which were most sensitive to stress within
each species. We suggest that low environmental and genetic canalization
of non-integrated traits may have caused these traits to be most
sensitive not only to the environmental but also to genetic perturbations
associated with stress. The congruence of stress-induced and between-
species patterns of variation in non-integrated traits suggests that
stress-induced variation in these traits may play an important role in
species divergence.
</q>

http://journals.royalsociety.org/content/n3u8qrj30y7ffrcq/fulltext.pdf

From the abstract alone I think you'll find a prediction, observation,
and measurement of evolution sufficient to cause morphological change.
It was on the first page of my search for <"morphological change"
evolution>. There are 10k more hits where that came from.

Now I await your corrections.

I hope this has convinced you that your idea of evolution might not be
correct. As always, there's no need to take my word for it. The t.o.
faq is easy to find:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-intro-to-biology.html

and has references at the end.

I think you misunderstood my questions.

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<snip>

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pity the poor man on the street who does not have access to all this
higher criticism. Must he come to the scholar in order to
experience salvation? Definitely not.

Must he become a scholar before making public claims about the correct
interpretation of scripture? Probably a good idea.

so, again, only the scholar can make public claims about salvation
(which is what the scriptures are about)? If this is your position, I
think you would be competing with the pope for that position of
authority.

The pope used to -- and still might, I don't know -- claim
infallibility. I make no such claim.

If there's one virtue that where scientists consistently excel, it's
humility.

well, you are the first humble scientist that I have met anywhere.
Certainly the only one I've come across here in TO.

Nah. They've all had experiments go bad, hypothesis blow up, etc. All
you need to do to get them to sit down and shut up is present them with
data.



I'm writing a dissertation. This process takes years. Not
too many months ago, I thought things were pretty well mapped out and I
was making good progress. One experiment later and a third of that
dissertation evaporated. The world was more complicated than I had
anticipated, and I had a lot more work in front of me.

what is your present dissertation about? And what was your last
dissertation about? You don't have to answer, of course. I'm just
curious.

It's the same one -- power-aware supercomputing. The really big iron
(>100,000 processors in one machine) can take over a million dollars a
month in electricity to keep running. I've come up with a couple of
techniques to shave a few percentage points off of that. I get to play
with some of the fastest machines on the planet, and that's pretty fun.



This happens to everyone, sometimes over and over again. All knowledge
really is tentative.

So, am I certain that my interpretation of Genesis is correct? Not at
all. But that also means that I find certainty in others much less
persuasive.

so far these higher critics seem very certain of their position. And if
you want to find the highest degree of certainty anywhere, read this
forum. All evolutionists here appear to be very certain that they are
correct and that any positions that challenge evolution, are dead
wrong.

I disagree -- it's just those positions that don't bring any new data to
the table, or don't provide a new theory that has more explanatory or
predictive power. If you came up with a theory that explained everything
evolution explains and makes better predictions, everybody here would be
lining up to polish your Nobel.



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snip>

I have read the passages and resolved them for myself, but I can
understand why you would want to make them nonliteral. It's an easy
way out of the dilemma.

Hmmmm.... there's a dilemma imposed by the literal interpretation in
it's seeming contradiction to evolution, if that's the dilemma you're
speaking of. I'm not sure if you mean that or if you're calling the
problem of determining the best interpretation itself a dilemma.
Anyway....

I am referring to the dilemma of a God who is painted as harsh in some
parts of the Old Testament and as a loving God elsewhere in the Old and
New Testament writings.

But I submit that the Bible interprets itself.

Now that's what *I* would call taking the easy way out.

Both historically and in my own experience I've seen this attitude
towards interpretation lead to mutually exclusive conclusions. This
isn't unexpected, but each side feels they're obviously,
incontrovertibly right. This makes me suspicious that both sides have
it wrong.

to which "sides" are you referring? The side of those who interpret
scripture using one set of commentaries or the side of those using
another set of commentaries? I hope I don't have a side because I like
to let the scriptures interpret themselves. As I do for any other
writing.

Pro/anti slavery before and during the Civil War (and elsewhere).
Pro/anti homosexuality.
Pro/anti women's rights.
Pro/anti divine rights of kings.
Pro/anti antisemitism.
Pro/anti whatever war we happen to be involved in at the moment.

All used the same Bible and the same commentaries and reached exactly the
conclusions they started with. (Yes, there were probably a few
exception, but they're very, very rare.)



If a writer uses the word "blossom" and the context is that of "thrive"
or "flourish," i.e., "Little Johnny began to blossom under the warmth of
their approval," I don't go outside of the writer's contextual meaning
and insist that since "blossom" is used elsewhere to mean a literal
flower or bloom that therefore the writer meant to say that "Little
Johnny was a flower." That is what I mean by letting scripture
interpret itself. The conclusions will be more accurate if we allow the
writer to explain himself.

Of course.



So if the writer says, "darkness was on the FACE of the deep," and in
the very next breath says, "and the Spirit moved upon the FACE of the
waters," his meaning seems clear to me because he has tied the two
together. I don't need to go to Babylonian literature to see what they
mean when they use the concept of "deep." Not when the original writer
has made it clear.

But the original writer didn't say "deep". He used the proper name of a
Babylonian creation god. If what he meant was "deep", then that's a
metaphorical interpretation.



The kind of interpretation I'm favoring is one where "I don't know" and
"It isn't clear" replaces certainty. So, for example, it's seems
plausible to me that Tiamat had been reduced to a metaphorical
cosmological term in Gen. 1:2, but now I'm left with the problem of
figuring out what the metaphor means. This is good -- I've learned
something and that's replaced a bit of certainty with uncertainty. It's
harder to live with the uncertainty, of course, but I think it's more
honest and eventually more fulfilling. I certainly wouldn't
characterize it as the easier way out.

okay, I accept your view on that. And if I've given the impression that
I am certain about this, let me clarify that I am only giving what makes
sense to me, and I am open to anything else that makes sense to me. So
far, however, it doesn't make sense to me to try to read one community's
perspective through the perspective of an entirely different community.
I'd prefer to let a writer explain himself through his own writings or
through his own community of writers.

Cool.

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snip>

Cool as it is, I believe Zoe's interest in Gensis and scripture had
been his early day influence through brainwashing education in the
church or parents.
I know its very hard for an adult to discard what had been irrational
teaching, falsehood or invented stories.
This is due also largely to the inability of the scientific community
to categorily demonstrate that a god is a non-existent identity.
However, science cannot be fault for this inability due to the fact
that god is just a perception, a descriptive being, a belief and has
no physical identity for detection.
Being an all powerful god as it is, no one dare to stand out to
confirm that god did appear before him.......
The promise by any party that there is a god is just an empty
"contract", with no ink writing in it.
For those who believe, the ink seemed real but not to physical
challenge in this modern world.
So, the ancient stories without independent witness and which could
not live up to modern day analysis becomes a very inked
"proof".........embraced by bigotry person or institution.

Sad, in that sense, the non- manifestation of god himself throughout
the centuries becomes a liability to the religion.
Worse, the teachings contained encouragement to bloodshed and killing.
Those with critical minds must realize how evil this religion is......!

.

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