Wholly Natrualistic Alternative To Neo-Darwinism?

[Patrick1000]

Since I was a grade school boy during the 1960s, I have enjoyed biology, and was actually exposed to "evolution" very early on, wandering over to San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park all by myself and spending hours in there. This, from the time I was about 8 years old.

From the time I first got a handle on neo-Darwinism, age 11 or 12, 1970ish, I always felt convinced that there was good evidence for common ancestry, especially the fact that all living things shared the very same genetic code. BOY! that really seemed convincing.

Yet, I could never buy into the mechanism for change, as at least I understood it to be presented. Many many many mutations, unintended, undirected, with their affects on the phenotype accreting over time. It seemed, and still seems absolutely implausible to me.

Living things seem far too complicated for biological systems, their information, to have effectively changed in this manner to bring about new living systems and so forth and so on through time.

Anyone else share my skepticism?

I am an atheist by the way. So God was and is not a "way out" for me. Intelligent design? Seems like God all over, is it not?

 

[MG1962]

Since I was a grade school boy during the 1960s, I have enjoyed biology, and was actually exposed to "evolution" very early on, wandering over to San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park all by myself and spending hours in there. This, from the time I was about 8 years old.

From the time I first got a handle on neo-Darwinism, age 11 or 12, 1970ish, I always felt convinced that there was good evidence for common ancestry, especially the fact that all living things shared the very same genetic code. BOY! that really seemed convincing.

Yet, I could never buy into the mechanism for change, as at least I understood it to be presented. Many many many mutations, unintended, undirected, with their affects on the phenotype accreting over time. It seemed, and still seems absolutely implausible to me.

Living things seem far too complicated for biological systems, their information, to have effectively changed in this manner to bring about new living systems and so forth and so on through time.

Anyone else share my skepticism?

I am an atheist by the way. So God was and is not a "way out" for me. Intelligent design? Seems like God all over, is it not?

Thats where you went wrong

 

[Patrick1000]

Present your evidence then MG1962

Thats where you went wrong

Present your evidence then MG1962. I find there to be none. There is no evidence, no empiric confirmation for the neo-Darwinian mechanism as proposed.

 

[MG1962]

Present your evidence then MG1962. I find there to be none. There is no evidence, no empiric confirmation for the neo-Darwinian mechanism as proposed.

You are the evidence.

Deciding something 'seems' impossible is not evidence it is an opinion

 

[nvidiot]

You are making an argument from ignorance here...

What is your proposed test to show the simple, demonstrable and obvious mechanisms are restricted from allowing evolutionary change over deep timescales?

 

[jj]

Your word "seems" is in fact the problem, most likely due to not realizing both the speed (or lack thereof) of change, and how change occurs.

Basically, your argument is the "irreducible complexity" argument put forth by the "creation scientists" although you may not realize that. You may, of course, also been exposed to that tommyrot via some of the knowingly dishonest (Not you, them) "teach the controversy" attempts to deny science and ruin America.

Simply put, evolution is usually, not always, very slow, and leads to small incremental changes from a common ancestor.

So, if you're thinking "turn ape into man", no, there was a previous organism that split into two paths, one that became each.

Now, the "too complicated" part, say the citric acid cycle, or the krebs cycle, or whatever, does in fact have variations, but the key is that it took a long, long time to come about, in terms of evolutionary history, and this is where the "slow" doesn't quite apply, because the advantage os so enormous that the organisms that developed it simply overran the rest, except in the niches where the rest functioned better, that being the way of selection, after all.

Things like the eye, ear, and so on can be traced from very, very primitive organs and organisms, the eye all the way to single celled animals, and the ear to breathing apparatus of primitive fishes. So there is a path of evolution for the more complex organs.

So I'm not sure what the problem is, because there is lots of evidence of evolutionary pathways for just about anything I can think of.

 

[jj]

There is no evidence, no empiric confirmation for the neo-Darwinian mechanism as proposed.

Given that the literature is chock full of evidence, and yet you assert otherwise, please provide extraordinary proof for your extraordinary claim.

When you do that, we can move onward.

 

[not_so_new]

Yet, I could never buy into the mechanism for change, as at least I understood it to be presented. Many many many mutations, unintended, undirected, with their affects on the phenotype accreting over time. It seemed, and still seems absolutely implausible to me.

I think it is hard for the human mind to comprehend the amount of time we are talking about here.

For instance, to make things easy to follow let's say that human history is 10,000 years old (not really the case but...). Humans as "humans" came about 2,000,000 million years ago, dinosaurs went extinct 65,000,000 years ago, dinosaurs came into existence 200,000,000 years ago, life started on Earth 3,000,000,000,0000 years ago etc.

10,000
2,000,000
65,000,000
200,000,000
3,000,000,000,0000

That 10,000 looks a little small doesn't it? Yet we can fit everything about "us" in there. Roman Empire, Mark Twain, Alexander The Great, Attila The Hun, Jimi Hendrix, The Great Wall of China, The Magna Carta...

Amazing things can happen given enough time and there has been a LOT of time on this planet before we got here.

Living things seem far too complicated for biological systems, their information, to have effectively changed in this manner to bring about new living systems and so forth and so on through time.

Anyone else share my skepticism?

Nope

I am an atheist by the way. So God was and is not a "way out" for me.

Oh really? So if it's not evolution what is it then?

Intelligent design? Seems like God all over, is it not?

Errrr... yeah....... what else would it be?

 

[nvidiot]

Errrr... yeah....... what else would it be?

Multidimensional hyperintelligent mice?

 

[Lowpro]

Go buy Evolutionary Analysis the Freeman/Herron book. You lack the understanding of what selection pressures are.

 

[Dinwar]

Yet, I could never buy into the mechanism for change, as at least I understood it to be presented. Many many many mutations, unintended, undirected, with their affects on the phenotype accreting over time. It seemed, and still seems absolutely implausible to me.

I assume, based on this quote, that you intended to type GRADE school, not GRAD school. There's a bit of a difference there. I can accept that someone who's understanding of evolution stopped in grade or high school may labor under this misconception, but I cannot accept that someone who went to grad school and got anything out of it is this ignorant of one of the foundational theories of a field they say they enjoy.

Here's the thing: while mutations are undirected, their survival is not. Genes that pass from one generation to the next frequently do NOT do so at random--some are selected against, and do not pass on to the next generation. That process is called "natural selection".

In other words, evolution is the non-random survival of randomly varying traits. You've forgotten the "non-random survival" part of that whole paraphrase.

Living things seem far too complicated for biological systems, their information, to have effectively changed in this manner to bring about new living systems and so forth and so on through time.

Why? We're not dealing with human timescales here--we're dealing with lengths of time in which rocks can flow like water, in which mountains can rise and crumble and rise again (thinking of a few areas for that one), where entire continents can form and be ripped apart and be formed again. I've seen rocks twisted like taffy, yet unbroken (well, other than the typical microfractures)--something that cannot happen unless the Earth is either far, far older than our minds can fully grasp, or at one point it was so hot that the air itself would light on fire.

The human mind has no ability to grasp what a billion years is. Even to geologists and astronomers the idea remains somewhat vague, a number and a sense of incredible, almost unbelievable age--yet life has had four billion years to evolve.

And remember, most organisms reproduce faster than we do. Some rodents have a generation that's a year long. Plankton have generations that are much, much shorter. Many species mate each year. Plants are colloquially divided into perennials, which survive multiple years, and annuals, which only survive one season. A billion years is a billion generations for these creatures--more than enough time for incredible diversity to arise.

There is no evidence, no empiric confirmation for the neo-Darwinian mechanism as proposed.

This is a lie. There is ample evidence. I suggest Essentials of Genetics, by Klug and Cummings, and Evolution, by Carl Zimmer (forward by S. J. Gould). Those will present vastly more evidence than Darwin had--and remember, Darwin convinced dyed-in-the-wool Creationists that he was right.

The only way to make the statement I quoted is to be either completely ignorant of the literature, or to knowingly be stating a falsehood. Either way, there's a lie in there.

If you're still skeptical after reading up on the topic (and please note, uninformed "skepticism" such as you've presented thus far IS NOT skepticism), if you have a better alternative, great. Let's hear it. But you should really get a handle on what's actually being stated before you start attacking the theory. If nothing else, you'll know what to actually attack, which in and of itself would be a novelty.

 

[ehcks]

I think it is hard for the human mind to comprehend the amount of time we are talking about here.

For instance, to make things easy to follow let's say that human history is 10,000 years old (not really the case but...). Humans as "humans" came about 2,000,000 million years ago, dinosaurs went extinct 65,000,000 years ago, dinosaurs came into existence 200,000,000 years ago, life started on Earth 3,000,000,000,0000 years ago etc.

That's the wrong last number, there. You wrote 3 trillion. It's "only" been 3.8 billion years since the first cells.

Not that I can fathom either of those times.

 

[Patrick1000]

Sorry MG1962 I am having trouble getting your point.

You are the evidence.

Deciding something 'seems' impossible is not evidence it is an opinion

Sorry MG1962 I am having trouble getting your point. Could you say it in another way perhaps? Thanks.

 

[Dinwar]

We can trace humans back, more or less (more "more" than most people realize), to lobe-finned fishes, and can trace the evolution of specific genes within that morphological framework. Once you understand genetics, and you have a grasp of the genes in other organisms, your own DNA becomes glaringly obvious evidence for the theory of evolution. If you can't comment intelligently on the fossil lineage or on the DNA arguments, you probably don't know enough about evolution to be able to determine whether it makes sense or not.

 

[jasonpatterson]

Yet, I could never buy into the mechanism for change, as at least I understood it to be presented. Many many many mutations, unintended, undirected, with their affects on the phenotype accreting over time. It seemed, and still seems absolutely implausible to me.

Another problem with this is the idea that mutations are what causes the change in the first place. Mutations (of all types) are a source of variation in a population's genetics, but the changes that occur aren't because an individual organism has a mutation in a single gene and is suddenly able to do something amazing (at least, that's very rarely the case.) Instead it's because there are many many individuals, each trying a host of genetic options out simultaneously. Each one of their genomes is exposed to changes due to mutation, to be sure, but the larger impact is simply that their genomes are different to begin with because they aren't clones of one another.

Basically, faster cheetahs aren't faster because a mutation occurred and made them faster, they are faster because the individuals with a genes that led to speed were more reproductively fit and tended to have babies with at least some of those genes included.

Another common misconception is that a mutation occurs and suddenly a gene is doing something completely novel. This sort of thing can happen (and has been observed in the lab) but it is more often the case that something like the following occurs in the creation of genes with novel functions. First an existing gene is duplicated in the genome (a fairly common event.) The copy of the gene doesn't need to function, so it is free to accumulate errors without hurting the organism. It does so, and over time comes to have some novel function. Typically speaking, it does this novel function extremely poorly, however, an extremely poorly functioning gene is more effective than no gene, so it survives and benefits the organism. After that, mutations in the gene improve its function until we have something highly effective. This set of steps is apparently what happened in the evolution of the bacterial flagellum, a creationist favorite, with the vast majority of the proteins that comprise it identified as having precursors elsewhere in the cell doing other functions.

 

[temporalillusion]

Learn yourself some books!

http://www.amazon.com/Your-Inner-Fish-Journey-3-5-Billion-Year/dp/0375424474
http://jerrycoyne.uchicago.edu/index.html

A couple of good ones.

 

[PixyMisa]

From the time I first got a handle on neo-Darwinism

You mean evolution. Or evolutionary theory.

age 11 or 12, 1970ish, I always felt convinced that there was good evidence for common ancestry, especially the fact that all living things shared the very same genetic code. BOY! that really seemed convincing.

Yes.

Yet, I could never buy into the mechanism for change, as at least I understood it to be presented. Many many many mutations, unintended, undirected, with their affects on the phenotype accreting over time.

Then either you misunderstood it or it was presented inexcusably badly.

Mutations and natural selection.

It seemed, and still seems absolutely implausible to me.

If it were mutations alone, without selection, that would be implausible.

No-one in the field has ever claimed this to be the case.

Living things seem far too complicated for biological systems, their information, to have effectively changed in this manner to bring about new living systems and so forth and so on through time.

And yet, we have observed this happening.

Anyone else share my skepticism?

No.

I am an atheist by the way. So God was and is not a "way out" for me. Intelligent design? Seems like God all over, is it not?

Yes, so-called "intelligent design" is merely creationism in a funny hat.

 

[Halfcentaur]

Since I was a grade school boy during the 1960s, I have enjoyed biology, and was actually exposed to "evolution" very early on, wandering over to San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park all by myself and spending hours in there. This, from the time I was about 8 years old.

From the time I first got a handle on neo-Darwinism, age 11 or 12, 1970ish, I always felt convinced that there was good evidence for common ancestry, especially the fact that all living things shared the very same genetic code. BOY! that really seemed convincing.

Yet, I could never buy into the mechanism for change, as at least I understood it to be presented. Many many many mutations, unintended, undirected, with their affects on the phenotype accreting over time. It seemed, and still seems absolutely implausible to me.

Living things seem far too complicated for biological systems, their information, to have effectively changed in this manner to bring about new living systems and so forth and so on through time.

Anyone else share my skepticism?

I am an atheist by the way. So God was and is not a "way out" for me. Intelligent design? Seems like God all over, is it not?

You don't seem to understand self ordering and self arranging algorithms at all, which are a major key to understand something like this. Check out a documentary called the Secret Life of Chaos on youtube.

 

[Sideroxylon]

Evolution by natural selection can be modelled with computers.

Take a look at these artificial life models and the astounding behaviours they "learnt" through the selection of random changes to algorithms based on pre-set "environmental" criteria:


Evolutionary computing has real world applications in engineering:
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/EVCO_a_00005

That complex behaviour and structure can arise without the need for a top-down designer is counter intuitive but demonstratively true.

 

[marplots]

If the problem is just finding a way to fit it into your head, try language as an analogy. It's not hard to look back just a hundred years and see how the language I speak has mutated with some changes "sticking" and some staying on for awhile and dying off. And yet, each generation has no trouble speaking with the previous few.
A short passage from the 1911 yearbook of the Philadelphia Society: "Directly in the centre of the table of honour sat the President of the United States, who had made the long journey from Washington that afternoon, expressly to accept the hospitality of the Society. With him sat men of national prominence and honoured guests from Pennsylvania, but his charming personality and the glamour of his great office held all eyes."

I see mutations that are yet to occur in that passage, mostly surrounding the changes to come in British and American spellings, but also in meaning. Go back further and it's even more dramatic. Much more than a few hundreds of years and it's largely unrecognizable (for a speaker of American English).

What is more mysterious to me is how biological information is preserved at all. That's the real trick; the keeping things mostly the same.