Evolution a hoax?

[Dancing David]

I would like to point out that scientists will, sometimes, make a distinction between microevolution and macroevolution, as a point of reference. Sometimes those words are useful.

But, there is ultimately no empirical difference between the two. The process of natural selection is exactly the same for both.

Sure, and that is not what randman means.

Evolution and higher taxa, and the use of the word 'evo', this seems familiar

 

[Wowbagger]

From the Kakapo example:
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/060401_kakapo

One branch of evolutionary theory known as sex allocation theory suggests that in some situations, an organism might maximize its fitness by producing all-girl offspring — and in other situations it might make more sense to produce boys.

I previously explained how sex allocation has been mapped across species, making it relevant as a consequence of macro-evolutionary thinking. (Though, I had mistakenly said "sexual selection". I meant "sex allocation amongst birds".)

From the Bird Flu example:
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/051115_birdflu

Viruses evolve quickly, in part because they acquire genetic variation in multiple ways. Sometimes viruses acquire genetic variants through random mutation, much as human populations do. However, viruses have a much higher mutation rate than humans and produce a high number of genetic variants as they reproduce. The more genetic variants, the higher the odds that one of them carries a useful mutation that selection can act upon. This increases the rate at which viruses evolve. Through random mutation and subsequent selection, an H5N1 virus could slowly evolve into a form better adapted to human-to-human transmission.

From the fire-ant example:
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/fireants_01 (multiple page presentation)

The hypothesis that natural selection is responsible for the increasing frequency of multiple-queen colonies is a good one — provided that scientists can establish one crucial fact: that queen number (one or many) is genetically controlled. After all, selection can only work on traits that have a genetic basis — if ants learn to be loyal to a single queen or if some environmental cue causes them to accept new queens, natural selection cannot be responsible for the switch.

[snip]

The evolutionary upshot of all the evidence seems to be that Gp-9 influences queen number and that selection has acted on the gene, favoring the B form of the gene when starting a colony alone was advantageous, and favoring the b form when banding together with other queens was advantageous.

From the Pine Cone example:
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/montereypines_01

DNA studies have shown that the material from which these foreign plantings were developed was not very diverse genetically. On the contrary, the native forests are genetically diverse. According to Millar, the diverse germplasm in these native populations have "inestimable value." It could, for example, help with the development of strains that are more resistant to certain insect pests and diseases.

There, I have shown how Natural Selection is directly relevant to some of the examples I cited.

Here is an EASY CHALLENGE for RandMan:

Read through the work of Doug Axe, again (either the article about him or in his papers), and show me how Intelligent Design is relevant to that work. Where is he actually invoking I.D.?

Are any of Dr. Axe's findings pointing to a mechanism by which the Design took place?

Perhaps they can show us at what points the Designer intervened, at least?

If you think irreducible complexity is relevant, please indicate what fresh insights are coming from that? (Your answer must be better than 'they did not develop by chance', because evolutionary theory would say the same thing. You need a more specific innovation or finding.)

If you, for some reason, think barnology is relevant, please show us where.

If Intelligent Design is as powerful as you claim it is, this should be an easy challenge for you.

 

[Dinwar]

Who, what, where and in which context.

Citatiopns and evidence? Show me.

This is a typical Creationist trick: take a legitimate question, and twist it into denying evolution.

There is a true mystery here--new phyla haven't arisen in a long time. The paleontological evidence puts most phyla of animals (not all--I believe Arthropoda, at least, should be multiple phyla, and I'm certainly not alone) arose at least 540 million years ago. The squishy evidence--DNA, protiens, and such--puts it a bit further back as I understand it. This is weird. You'd think that the invasion of land, for example, would spark an evolutionary explosion, but the fact is we just don't see that. All terrestrial vertebrates are basically fish, and all terrestrial arthropods (the other most successful group) show remarkably little variation. It's an open question as to why.

The two explanations given by real scientists are 1) what we call phyla arose because of variations in the Hox genes, which can't mutate much today without killing the critter, so it doesn't happen, and 2) competition keeps us neatly in our niches (natural selection, remember, is a stabilizing force most of the time). Note that both of these are evolutionary arguments--certain changes can't happen, and selection pressure makes others impractical. So Creationism/ID really don't have a role to play.

There's another, larger issue here, though: an entire KINGDOM (plants) arose after the Cambrian Explosion. This isn't a question of why higher taxa never arise, but why animals seem so limited--the rise of angeosperms in the Cretaceous clearly shows that evolution of higher taxa is still going strong. Creationists only talk of animals, and expect us to take this as all of evolution!

There's a kernal of truth here: paleontologists are confused about the lack of novel phyla within Animalia. But it's lost in a sea of garbage.

 

[randman]

There, I have shown how Natural Selection is directly relevant to some of the examples I cited.

So what wowbagger. Do you have some misguided view that only NeoDarwinism accepts and incorporates natural selection?

 

[randman]

Also, you are just moving the goalposts, wowbagger. The paper demonstrates Darwinian mechanisms are insufficient and so supports ID in that sense. It's scope is justifiably narrow in that sense. Axe may propose a new mechanism or evos may as well, but that's not the point in this specific, narrowly structured work.

His response to folks like you if you care to read it and learn.

http://biologicinstitute.org/2011/05/04/correcting-four-misconceptions-about-my-2004-article-in-jmb/

 

[bikerdruid]

So what wowbagger. Do you have some misguided view that only NeoDarwinism accepts and incorporates natural selection?

you keep using the term 'neodarwinism'
care to define the term?

 

[Wowbagger]

So what wowbagger. Do you have some misguided view that only NeoDarwinism accepts and incorporates natural selection?

If Intelligent Design also accepts natural selection, what exactly are we debating?

What can I.D. add to our knowledge of life's history, that theories of natural selection would be missing out on?

 

[JJM 777]

> Evolution a hoax?

We were cheated into becoming what we are. Darn.

 

[randman]

As an old proverb has it, first they'll reject the truth and then they'll appropriate it and say they knew it all along. Enter Paul Kammerer, the Austrian biologist who almost a century ago was assailed as a fraud for his anti Darwinian findings. His crime: he found evidence for Lamarckism--the idea that organisms can pass on traits they have acquired to their offspring. Kammerer ended up committing suicide and now, almost a century later, evolutionists are figuring out that he was right. Guess what they're calling him now? That's right, Kammerer has now been crowned an "evolutionist."

http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2009/09/paul-kammerer-evolutions-legacy-of.html

 

[randman]

If Intelligent Design also accepts natural selection, what exactly are we debating?

What can I.D. add to our knowledge of life's history, that theories of natural selection would be missing out on?

We can learn what natural selection does and does not do instead of being beholden to a lockbox on science at the hands of evos that naively presume natural selection and random mutation, etc,....are sufficient mechanisms for macroevolution.

Microevolution, particularly via loss of genes, works fine with natural selection but not the other way around so much.

 

[Dinwar]

He's going to argue that natural selection occurse in microevolution, but macroevolution (however randman decides to define it this post) can't operate on those principles. Because randman never considers any evolution but animal evolution.

 

[randman]

you keep using the term 'neodarwinism'
care to define the term?

Mainstream evo theory, the dominant hypothesis and what people are referring to generally when they talk about the theory of evolution.

Here is an example of alternative theory mentioned in the comment section of a link I provided earlier. Note his point about microevolution being distinct and having different mechanisms than macroevolution, just as critics of NeoDarwinism have stated for decades. Some like Grasse going as far as to refer to the idea of microevolution adding up to macroevolution as "the myth of evolution."

As reported (1), one portion of a protein of S1A family protease, termed the blue sector (arbitrary color to be different from two other sectors of red and green), is much more conserved in vertebrates than in invertebrates (Figure 6B of the Cell paper) and is not related to enzyme activity. The existence of sectors in a protein, the blue sector in this case, that can differentiate complex vertebrates from simple invertebrates cannot be explained by the modern evolution theory. Thus the paper made no attempt to discuss the blue sector in connection with any evolution theory. Here is why. To explain the blue sector by natural selection, one must invoke that vertebrates as a whole encounter an entirely different natural environment from that of invertebrates, which is simply not the case. To explain the blue sector by random drift would require neutrality for most of the amino acid positions in this sector, which is also simply not the case.

So what does the blue sector say about actual evolutionary mechanisms? First, it adds one more outstanding fact to the long list of facts that contradict the modern evolution theory. Second, every fact that contradicts the modern evolution theory has been automatically found to be evidence for the MGD and the new result of the Cell paper is no exception. The MGD treats the modern evolution theory as true only for microevolution and suggests that macroevolution is distinctly different and involves a change in epigenetic complexity.

An increase in epigenetic complexity will lead to a decrease in genetic diversity as measured by point mutations due to a self-evident inverse relationship between genetic diversity and epigenetic complexity (2, 3). A gene in complex organisms encounters more epigenetic constraint than in simple organisms and is thus less tolerant of point mutations. Macroevolution towards higher epigenetic complexity involves a suppression of point mutations, and in this sense is the exact opposite of microevolution (2, 3). Thus the MGD predicts that protein or DNA sequence sectors that are non-constrained in simple organisms would become constrained in complex organisms even though such sectors may play no role in enzyme function. The blue sector of S1A protease is the first example of such Complexity-Associated-Protein-Sector (CAPS). Epigenetic complexity puts maximum CAPS on sequence divergence.

1. Halabi, N., Rivoire, O., Leibler, S., and Ranganathan, R. (2009). Protein sectors: evolutionary units of three-dimensional structure. Cell 138, 774-786.

2. Huang, S. (2008) Histone methylation and the initiation of cancer. Cancer Epigenetics, Ed. Tollefsbol, T., CRC Books.

3. Huang, S. (2009) Inverse relationship between genetic diversity and epigenetic complexity, Submitted. Preprint available, http://precedings.nature.com/documents/1751/version/2

for more, visit my blog: http://thegoldengnomon.blogspot.com/

http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2009/09/paul-kammerer-evolutions-legacy-of.html

 

[Dinwar]

Amazing--he committed the error before I was done typing what error he was going to commit!

 

[cwalner]

Also, you are just moving the goalposts, wowbagger. The paper demonstrates Darwinian mechanisms are insufficient and so supports ID in that sense. It's scope is justifiably narrow in that sense. Axe may propose a new mechanism or evos may as well, but that's not the point in this specific, narrowly structured work.

1st Hi-lite indicates a false dichotomy. Disproving one theory or model does not support any other theory model, it simply disproves that one theory or model. (That is assuming that the paper does that, I have not read, but am not addressing the validity of the paper, but your logical conclusions based it)

2nd Hil-lite goes to the exact point that Wowbagger has been repeating over and over again. What Axe may or may not do is not at issue, what he and other ID proponents have or have not done is. Specifically, Wowbagger is claiming that they have not added any useful science, and the hi-lited quote shows that you agree that in this paper, Axe has not.

If Intelligent Design also accepts natural selection, what exactly are we debating?

What can I.D. add to our knowledge of life's history, that theories of natural selection would be missing out on?

I was thinking the same thing. Well put.

 

[bikerdruid]

Mainstream evo theory, the dominant hypothesis and what people are referring to generally when they talk about the theory of evolution.

how is that 'neo'darwinism?
does that make you a neocreationist?

 

[randman]

cwalner, in other fields such as physics, showing a mechanism is insufficiently explanatory is considered an advance in science. Not so for evos which just shows you guys aren't about real science but about debating competing ideologies when it comes to the framework of origins. The first step towards discovering new things sometimes is discovering what we previously believed was incorrect. Axe advances science but evos don't want to admit it because he is an IDer.

 

[randman]

how is that 'neo'darwinism?
does that make you a neocreationist?

NeoDarwinism is an accepted term even in peer-reviewed literature. If you want to coin a new one, neocreationist, I suppose you could try labelling IDers that but evos themselves came up with NeoDarwinism. It was not meant to be pejorative but rather descriptive.

 

[Dinwar]

how is that 'neo'darwinism?

Again, Creationists take truth and twist it. Neodarwinism IS a scientific paradigm--I forget the specific technical definition but the Modern Synthesis is part of it. randman is using the term as a perjorative, to indicate that we're a religion.

cwalner, in other fields such as physics, showing a mechanism is insufficiently explanatory is considered an advance in science.

And when this is demonstrated for evolution, we'll consider THAT an advancement. It has yet to be so demonstrated. In 150 years.

 

[Wowbagger]

The paper demonstrates Darwinian mechanisms are insufficient and so supports ID in that sense.

First of all, the paper does NOT demonstrate Darwinian mechanisms are insufficient. The paper does not take into consideration a great many things: cumulative probability, co-option, transpositions, gene-pool variation strategies, etc.; These are well understood to be relevant to lots of other evolutionary processes. None of his work seems to take any of them into account.

Furthermore, the paper does not even properly address the process of natural selection, which he misconstrues as a process left to "chance".

Secondly, even if he did find that Darwinian mechanisms are not sufficient for something: That does NOT automatically mean Intelligent Design is right. There are other possabilities to consider:
1. Other natural processes could be involved, that do not require intelligence. Perhaps such as the auto-catalytic processes studied under abiogenesis. Or, perhaps a new form of networking-theory could be discovered to account for how things tend to clump together.

2. The enzymes might not have been designed, but rather mutated out of bad experiments on the part of the Designer. Axe's findings do not address alternatives to the presumed intentional design of life forms.

3. Those enzymes, and in fact everything in the Universe, were created last Thursday, as the Universe routinely cycles through infinite possabilities of everything. Any memories before that time were also created on that day, but of course it won't feel like it. This idea may sound stupid, but I do not think I.D. has any way to demonstrate that its position is any more realistic.
(If you disagree, demonstrate otherwise.)

In short, as you admit, Axe is not actually finding an alternative explanation. He is merely trying to claim one particular one is not accurate. In fact, he really does not make any new empirical findings, at all.


Thirdly, some scientists have worked out some of the selection forces at work in enzyme and protein folding:
http://www.febsletters.org/article/S0014-5793(01)03232-X/abstract
http://bohr.winthrop.edu/faculty/hu...les/Protein Folds Functions and Evolution.pdf
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cbic.201000771/full

I will see if I can find better references, later. But, my point is that it is NOT impossible for evolutionary pathways to emerge for the types of things Axe was studying.

It's scope is justifiably narrow in that sense. Axe may propose a new mechanism or evos may as well, but that's not the point in this specific, narrowly structured work.

Do you have a better example, then? Because this one does not reflect much of Intelligent Design's power.

His response to folks like you if you care to read it and learn.

http://biologicinstitute.org/2011/05/04/correcting-four-misconceptions-about-my-2004-article-in-jmb/

For answering his objections, Axe redefines Darwinism as a search algorithm, and does so in a way that does not take cumulative probability into consideration; only straight adding-up of some numbers. He is actually ignoring a great portion of the whole natural selection paradigm.

His findings might, indeed, have implications for the type of 'evolution' he is defining. But, it does NOT address evolution the way evo scientists understand it.

My Objections:

#1: He is NOT invoking an Intelligent Designer. He is merely wasting everyone's time with work that will not go anywhere nor do anything.

#2: It is important to study the evolution of protein folding, because improper folding lead to disease (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_folding#Incorrect_protein_folding_and_neurodegenerative_disease ), and we would like to know what genetic factors are relevant to that, and how they tend to spread through the history of life. Axe's work is actually counter productive to such efforts.

 

[randman]

If you are so sure Axe's papers are bunk, why don't you submit a letter debunking him?

fact is you are just throwing stuff up against a wall hoping it will stick and basically misunderstanding or misrepresenting his work. It was published for a reason. Doesn't make it unassailable, but sure does suggest your backhanded dismissal of his work is incorrect. If it was as laughable and non-science as you suggest, I hardly think considering the bias against IDers, that non-evos would have published it.