What evidence is there for evolution being non-random?

[Foster Zygote]

The fundamental point is that information cannot be added by natural selection, but only by mutations, which are random.

Precisely. And evolution is generational. With each generation natural selection determins which bits of randomly added information will increase in frequency in the following generation and which bits will decrease in frequency.

 

[Foster Zygote]

For the rest of the mutations, they are just a little bit bad or a little bit good, which means that it will take a long time for the better ones to dominate the gene pool, because the process by which they gain an advantage is ....drum roll please....random. Their chance of surviving and reproducing is only a little bit better than nonmutants, so it will be many generations before you see dominance, and a very long time before the slightly bad mutations are completely eliminated.

You raise a very important point. Too often I meet people with the impression that evolution is an all or nothing thing, the "nature red in tooth and claw" idea often pushed by pseudo-scientific social Darwinists. The whole thing is much more elegant and much simpler when one realizes that to be successful a gene only has to leave slightly more copies of itself and not necessarily the only copies. Not that there aren't instances of extreme environmental stress when the latter does occur.

 

[jimbob]

How about: it can be considered as nonrandom in stable environments, with large enough populations, and clear selection pressures?

 

[Meadmaker]

You raise a very important point. Too often I meet people with the impression that evolution is an all or nothing thing, the "nature red in tooth and claw" idea often pushed by pseudo-scientific social Darwinists. ...

Thank you. I might add that I've met believers and nonbelievers alike who say such things.

 

[articulett]

The fundamental point is that information cannot be added by natural selection, but only by mutations, which are random.

However the information is either culled or multiplied exponentially by natural selection which Scientists consider the "non-random" part of evolution.

 

[articulett]

Thank you. I might add that I've met believers and nonbelievers alike who say such things.

Yes... they equate fitness with their own view of "beneficial" when it only refers to the ability of the info. to get itself into vectors that copy it.

And DNA is passed on in genomes--whole packages of stuff--so neutral and deleterious stuff can go along for the ride in successful genome packages. The environment is the filter which allows some genes to become highly conserved throughout life forms, and to slowly filter out the deleterious genes. The neutral stuff can stick around forever...the same with recessive alleles...unless or until they produce something that the environment can select for or against.

 

[articulett]

How about: it can be considered as nonrandom in stable environments, with large enough populations, and clear selection pressures?

Natural selection is non-random. Actually, mutations aren't completely random either...but they occur regardless of whether they benefit the organism containing them or not.

 

[rittjc]

The term is dynamic to everybody.

Maybe, but only evolutionists use the word both ways to try to explain their philosophy.

 

[rittjc]

I have never heard this before. Can you provide a source for this?

Yes, I can. Me.

 

[Wings]

Maybe, but only evolutionists use the word both ways to try to explain their philosophy.

I disagree. The 747 analogy is a useful example of why I disagree.

Even if evoluntionists did misuse the term, so do creationists / intelligent design proponents. The IDers point to the 747 in the junkyard example and then talk about evolution being random, they associate the "randomness" in evolution with the improbability of the example, giving the wrong impression of what "randomness" in evolution really is.

However, Schneibster is right, this is political rather than scientific. Therefore I respectfully will refrain from further commenting on the "randomness or non-randomness" of evolution. I think I've about learned all I can from this thread anyway, thanks to everyone for allowing me to participate in this debate.

 

[Hokulele]

Yes, I can. Me.

OK then, let's take the phrase "The laws of physics claim the physical realm cannot create itself". Which "laws of physics" are you referring to and where do they show this?

 

[articulett]

Precisely. And evolution is generational. With each generation natural selection determins which bits of randomly added information will increase in frequency in the following generation and which bits will decrease in frequency.

Yes, I've heard evolution defined as change in allele frequency over time...
but that's a bit technical for most.

I kind of like it because it illustrates how organisms competing in environments act as the sifters of DNA (gene-plexes) that define the genomes of future "sifters"--that pass on the best of the "sifted" (DNA). It seems counterintuitive to see the gene as the thing "trying "to get itself copied and sifted...but understanding this is the key to understanding why things appear designed.

 

[articulett]

duplicate

 

[articulett]

So I agree with your statement that chaos and randomness are fundamentally different, but I thought you left out these things in your reasons why.

So Von--given your explanation, how would you define the question in the OP?

 

[rittjc]

There are trillions of organisms, and trillions of generations, (in the case of small critters anyway) but we don't need trillions of changes. That makes the numbers look better for us.



My concepts of evolution wouldn't have you believe that, except with very, very, bad mutations, like ones that killed the mutants or made them sterile.

For the rest of the mutations, they are just a little bit bad or a little bit good, which means that it will take a long time for the better ones to dominate the gene pool, because the process by which they gain an advantage is ....drum roll please....random. Their chance of surviving and reproducing is only a little bit better than nonmutants, so it will be many generations before you see dominance, and a very long time before the slightly bad mutations are completely eliminated.

At least you admit it is merely a concept. Hard to get an honest response from evolutionists these days. They use the "establish fact" terminology to describe the complete lack of evidence.

You can conjecture that defects are happing in a manifold manner, but you can't prove it. But, this still goes back to my insistence that evolutionist must, by such concepts, no understand the complexity of nature.

Random change cannot happen on the level of the "gene". It must happen at the codon level. The suns rays (which are conjectured to be the source of change) would destroy codons as DNA is highly sensitive to heat being made of sugars. By destroying a single codon, the amino acid it was supposed to form is not formed. The precision of the amino acid complex causes the protein to roll back upon itself and form a solid structure. If you mess with the amino acids then the protein cannot form properly.

So if the external changing mechanism exists, it would have to throw something constructive like an entire DNA strand to alter amino acid.

An amino acid is very complex in and of itself. Scientists have tried to create a protein in a lab. Perhaps you have seen the experiment with the boiler the trap, etc. They did produce a protein of sorts. Just one problem. The amino acids turn out to be 50% right handed, and 50% left handed. Of course the liberal media got a hold of this and insisted that science had created a cell in the laboratory. The scientists lamented this but didn't come out publicly and say different.

But, despite efforts artificial production amino acids have always resulted in the 50% mix. But in living organisms (all of them) 100% are all left handed amino acids. This has confounded scientists.

Scientists know what they are after and have many intelligence based resources to try to accomplish it. But if these "intelligent" scientists using biased controlled artificial systems to create optimal conditions can't do it, then why is "unintelligent" nature so unquestionably expert at it to do it trillions times trillions of times without fail or without knowledge of the process?

Those are the kinds of things the religious evolutionists demand we accept as fact. So, they should either prove this happens or quit using propaganda words like "established fact", etc to give their faith a false credence. To do otherwise can only be said to be intellectually dishonest.

But, if these evolutionists have no moral accountability (a convenience of being an atheist) then why should being intellectually dishonest be anything other than a means to an end?

 

[Rodney]

However the information is either culled or multiplied exponentially by natural selection which Scientists consider the "non-random" part of evolution.

If information can be added only through random mutations, the evolutionary process as a whole is random.

 

[rittjc]

I disagree. The 747 analogy is a useful example of why I disagree.

Even if evoluntionists did misuse the term, so do creationists / intelligent design proponents. The IDers point to the 747 in the junkyard example and then talk about evolution being random, they associate the "randomness" in evolution with the improbability of the example, giving the wrong impression of what "randomness" in evolution really is.

However, Schneibster is right, this is political rather than scientific. Therefore I respectfully will refrain from further commenting on the "randomness or non-randomness" of evolution. I think I've about learned all I can from this thread anyway, thanks to everyone for allowing me to participate in this debate.

Politics is a spectrum with two extremes so Schneibster's point is, well, pointless.

Random is simple. If it is not repeatable it is random. If you seed a 128 bit random number generator with the same seed it will produce the same result so in that context it is not random and the code is useless. But it you seed it with say the number of milliseconds since the they year 1 AD then your number would be random.

Why this is complicated means you have stepped in a dog pile of philosophy and it nets you nothing but establishment of confusion. Only people looking to muddy the water of rational thought try to redefine or dynamically define random as something else.

Sounds similar to the infamous president that tried to redefine what the word "is" is.

 

[rittjc]

If information can be added only through random mutations, the evolutionary process as a whole is random.

If Natural Selection is a highly destructive process that eliminates possibilities, then how does this translate to information addition? It ONLY gets rid of information based on that species' information being deleted by the its elimination. Killing and eating the one with alternate but yet subjectively inferior knowledge does not get imparted into the predator.

This is why Natural Selection is one of the poorest mechanisms to try to explain the religion of evolution. It indicts evolution, it does not "explain" it.

 

[rittjc]

I'll point a couple of things out.

First, a very respected and senior evolutionary biologist, and a teacher of evolutionary biology at the University of California,You described the course of evolution, in a source articulett quoted, as "haphazard." I posted the quote and a link to the article. The purpose of the article was specifically to refute cretinist claims that "evilution is random." Yet, there's that word, "haphazard," right in the middle of it. Even in an article specifically intended to deal with precisely this issue, a true and proper scientist cannot avoid, in good conscience, describing the overall course of evolution as "haphazard." Here is the quote:

"The fossil record shows that life has evolved in a haphazard fashion."

Here is the link. You will find the quote at the beginning of the summation, the end of the article. Note that it is one of a series of colloquium papers on evolution, presented in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. This is an authoritative source.

Second, I'd like to point out a couple of things I have said over the course of this conversation:
1. While saying that "evolution is not random" is probably a good idea from a political point of view, when speaking to the general public, it's not such a good idea when dealing with people who have specific training in the physical sciences. It is, in fact, technically incorrect, in a number of ways. And you can expect that people with technical training in the physical sciences will spot all of those ways very quickly, and be very skeptical when they encounter it.
2. I would not describe evolution as either random or non-random. It is complex, it is chaotic, it is emergent. These are characteristics that we are finding increasingly in many large physical systems. Evolution deserves recognition as one of these types of systems; and being recognized as one, it will receive the support of being "one of those types of things," immediately recognized by anyone with knowledge of these types of systems as a member of this class. It also deserves the support of the physical sciences, and to the extent that it conforms to these sorts of paradigms, it becomes much more easily comprehensible to those who pursue them, and therefore more likely to be so supported.

I think that the objections made in this thread are not scientific, but political. As has been repeatedly said,

The political forum is that way ->

The fossil record shows full forms similar to what we see today if not exactly and shows no intermediates.

The fossil record shows that flooding occurred. Any ideas on why the earth was flooded?

Simpleminded evolutionist has bitten into the hook of fossils are a record of animal deaths. But they are snapshots in time. As a matter of fact some fossils (called polystrate fossils...google them) are found between two and three layers that are supposedly millions of years apart. (Whoops!).

When Mt Saint Helens blew, with it went many of the evolutionists religious traditions. Fossil forests that evolutionists demanded were supposed to have formed over long 50,000 year periods were witnessed to happen in two week periods. The formation of peat said to take millions of years too place in only a few weeks from the tree bark of trees blown into spirit lake.

So now we are left with desperate evolutionists thinking the paleontologists have the answers in the fossils, but yet at the same time, the paleontologists hope the evolutionists have the answers in Natural Selection.

Both have a problem of faith in the other but no faith in their own. The creationist just sits back an laughs at the buffoonery. It never grows old.

 

[joobz]

come now... you know...those sciency laws that creationists use to try and sound like they know what they are talking about...

Remember...creationists don't know that the earth is plugged into a power source outside of itself...so they think it's a "closed system" -- don't tell me you haven't heard this idiotic canard before--?

Oh I have. I just like hearing it again. it never stops being funny.

BTW, even if the sun wasn't our heat source and it was purely from geothermal energy and no heat was lost into the universe(a closed system), life would still be possible. As long as the sum of all entropy in the earth increased, it would be possible.(For at least a little while until thermal equilibrium was reached).