Evolution: the Facts.

[Aridas]

The issue is that ID--remember, it's been proven in court to merely be Creationism with a new name--has no evidence supporting it. Thus, it's not even a valid theory to consider.

As you may have noted, I did put it on about the same level as solipsism. I advocate thought experiments and understanding, which includes putting the levels of certainty and reasonableness into perspective. I do not and will never support efforts to teach solipsism as science, in other words, except in, perhaps, the realm of psychosis.

That's a mistake. ID has, again, been proven in a court of law to be nothing more than a dishonest attempt to hide Creationism in order to get it into classrooms. Everything since then has been ID advocates running around trying to find a way around that simple fact.

I am well aware of that, much as I disagree with your implication that it only started after it was utterly demolished in court. The problem, of course, with all of it, is that it's a topic far better suited to philosophy than to science, given parsimony.

Christians largely believe in Deistic Evolution, not Intelligent Design. While they may appear superficially similar, they're actually two very distinct theories.

Admittedly, I've been treating Deistic Evolution as a subset of the overall concept presented by the ID proponents, and treating the specifics of what they tried to push as ID as a different subset, one that has been demolished, but still invokes the larger question in its name. Likely, this is due to a few people, including my brother, getting angry at me for not doing so. To put it a different way, the label "Intelligent Design" has been adopted by many people to mean things that are not, in fact, the form that was attempted to be forced into public schools.

Thank you for taking the time to present good criticism, for the record.

ID advocates are relying on people like you to make their case for them--they deliberately chose a vague name, in the hopes that people would erroneously expand the definition of the term.

And yes, it worked like a charm. Hence why I tend to make distinctions between intended use and other potential forms.

Intelligent Design, as the name of a theory, is that the Christian God created the universe. That's historical fact. The concept that life originated via some other intelligence is a completely different theory.

It was. I tend to view them as having become too conflated, though, in the minds of too many, to separate nicely. I could likely try to distinguish them more firmly here, though?

 

[Dinwar]

I am well aware of that, much as I disagree with your implication that it only started after it was utterly demolished in court.

The first use of the term that I'm aware of is the "Of Pandas and People" issue, which came just before the court trial (and in response to another trial).

Likely, this is due to a few people, including my brother, getting angry at me for not doing so.

Sorry to hear that.

I could likely try to distinguish them more firmly here, though?

It'd help. The issue is that when you say "ID", many of us are going to hear something different from what you mean. There's some justification for toying with the idea that life was seeded on Earth, at least from a "bull session" standpoint.

 

[jimbob]

Well, assuming a designer with sufficient knowledge to actually direct life towards the current situation, they would seem to have been pretty incompetent. They could have either selected for the mammalian retina and blood supply to have been got right, or genetically engineered it and culled the rest.

This assumes that they had the power and were involved with the process at the time. Sufficient knowledge means nothing if one doesn't have the ability or tools to apply it.

I'd argue that any hypothetical being that did have the technological knowledge to achieve something - given that they had to have somehow got to Earth from "Elsewhere" would have had the technical means to do something.

If they hadn't the technical means, then what could they have done?

I suppose a very old but rather dim species of alien is not ruled out as the designer. Though there is no evidence for any of the usual signatures of design - why do many traits look like convergent evolution as opposed to reusing a proven design from another type of life? This would be evidence against a dim but knowledgeable alien designer, as reusing design elements uses less design effort than starting from scratch again.

This is a rather different tangent than the previous, and... my first reaction delves somewhat into the realm of "if you don't know anything about the people in question, why do you think that you can describe them even that well?" That's largely because it feels like a straw man, though. Assuming an ancient alien race was involved, that still leaves question such as motive unanswered. Earth could well just have been one of many testing grounds for various experiments, including different genetic ways to fulfill the same function. One could apply that dim label because they didn't have either the desire or capability to just use computer models to examine the effects.

Well any hypothetical designer would have to have been either supernatural, or technologically advanced.

Motive is important in this context. I'd argue that if Earth was simply an experiment, then the hypothetical designer was not benign. Not necessarily malign, but neither benign.

I'd argue that is abiogenesis, which is not unrelated, but outwith the discussion of evolution.

I would disagree, but it's close. Either way, it was just one example of something that could potentially count as an intelligent, benign designer, given ID and your statement.

I wasn't talking from a human point of view. The mammalian retina affects all mammals. Hiccups affect many vertebrates.

I would agree that this is not proof, but is strong circumstantial evidence against such an idea.

For the record, I'm not attempting to support ID and tend to think that the currently available evidence is against it, or, at very best, is negated if one uses parsimony. I've largely been pointing out why ID is unfalsifiable, though.

I'm pretty sure that I understand where you are coming from - and I would agree that the idea of a designer isn't in principle falsifiable. I am arguing that we have evidence which puts constraints on any hypothetical designer, and in fact can show that the unspoken claim is pretty close to being demonstrably false.

 

[Lukraak_Sisser]

The fact remains though that not a single of the by now thousands of fully sequenced genomes contains anything even remotely suggesting genetic engineering.
We can trace by now inactive genetic elements that exist solely to propagate themselves (transposons) inserted into a genome millions of years ago, so this is not due to a limit in detection.
That leaves a hypothetical creator that has Star Trek like abilities to directly insert genes into a genome without the need for genetic markers, who then did its absolute best to make sure everything looked like natural selecion.
I'm not saying its totally impossible, but the probability based on genetic evidence has quite a lot of zero's after the decimal point.

 

[Acleron]

The fact remains though that not a single of the by now thousands of fully sequenced genomes contains anything even remotely suggesting genetic engineering.
We can trace by now inactive genetic elements that exist solely to propagate themselves (transposons) inserted into a genome millions of years ago, so this is not due to a limit in detection.
That leaves a hypothetical creator that has Star Trek like abilities to directly insert genes into a genome without the need for genetic markers, who then did its absolute best to make sure everything looked like natural selecion.
I'm not saying its totally impossible, but the probability based on genetic evidence has quite a lot of zero's after the decimal point.

In those genomic histories we have examined in detail from fossil sources the posited designer would need to be devilish clever. So clever in fact one wonders why it made such an awful job of the final result. Sense of humour perhaps.

 

[jimbob]

The fact remains though that not a single of the by now thousands of fully sequenced genomes contains anything even remotely suggesting genetic engineering.
We can trace by now inactive genetic elements that exist solely to propagate themselves (transposons) inserted into a genome millions of years ago, so this is not due to a limit in detection.
That leaves a hypothetical creator that has Star Trek like abilities to directly insert genes into a genome without the need for genetic markers, who then did its absolute best to make sure everything looked like natural selecion.
I'm not saying its totally impossible, but the probability based on genetic evidence has quite a lot of zero's after the decimal point.

I don't know whether this is worthy of a derail - but can you explain to a physicist cum engineer how the markers force the gene to go where you want it to go?

Targeted insertion of a gene needs a marker to force your inserted gene to go where you want it to go. In bacteria this is usually antibiotic resistance, in eukaryotes we tend to use aminoacid deficiencies (which need to be introduced) with a marker that alleviates this deficiency. Such a marker will show up in any sequencing like a red flag as it will be in a completely illogical spot and often genetically clearly unrelated to the organism in question to prevent unwanted genomic crossing. These markers need to be designed to be genetically VERY stable, as genomic manipulation is a very unreliable process at the best of times and higher eukaryotes are *very* hard to engineer.
Nothing even closely resembling this has been found in the human genome.
The data of the human genome project are a matter of public record.
I'd say you download all of it, re-do the open reading frame analysis and then look for insertion markers yourself.

In those genomic histories we have examined in detail from fossil sources the posited designer would need to be devilish clever. So clever in fact one wonders why it made such an awful job of the final result. Sense of humour perhaps.

Indeed, I don't know about genetic engineering - but I do know about design and engineering; we can be pretty sure that any posited designer couldn't be both benign and competent, whilst simultaneously needing to have pretty amazing abilities to leave no trace of the meddling that can be detected by twenty-first century science. Competent malignancy could be an explanation I suppose.


Some of the jokes might be amusing, letting some humans think they are the pinnacle of creation whilst giving them the mammalian retina, but others are a bit lame, like the vagus nerve.

 

[Acleron]

Some of the jokes might be amusing, letting some humans think they are the pinnacle of creation whilst giving them the mammalian retina, but others are a bit lame, like the vagus nerve.

The pleasure centres next to the poop chute is always a good one, how it must have peed itself laughing.

 

[Lukraak_Sisser]

I don't know whether this is worthy of a derail - but can you explain to a physicist cum engineer how the markers force the gene to go where you want it to go?






Indeed, I don't know about genetic engineering - but I do know about design and engineering; we can be pretty sure that any posited designer couldn't be both benign and competent, whilst simultaneously needing to have pretty amazing abilities to leave no trace of the meddling that can be detected by twenty-first century science. Competent malignancy could be an explanation I suppose.


Some of the jokes might be amusing, letting some humans think they are the pinnacle of creation whilst giving them the mammalian retina, but others are a bit lame, like the vagus nerve.

I'll try my best, but forgive me if its not totally clear

To integrate anything into a genome you first need it to go where you want it to go. Usually this is done by adding two bits of DNA that are homologous to the area you want it to go into to your new bit of DNA.
However, genomic integration is a rare event. To give an indication, in bacteria which are quite good at integrating offered DNA you have about a 1 in a billion chance of the DNA integrating. In the rest of the cases its just stripped down to nucleotides and eaten.
Finding that one in a billion chance among the rest that did NOT do what you want is undoable. So you need to resort to a trick.
This is usually done by coupling the gene(s) you want integrated to a marker that you can easily detect.
And the best detection mechanism is life/death. If you make sure that only those mutants that do what you want live and all the rest dies, all of a sudden this becomes trivial.

Bacteria can use antibiotics, but no such simple mechanism exists for eukaryotes. There are tricks to get around this, but these are complex and would leave extremely clear trails to follow, such as essential genes removed from their environment where they normally occur and suddenly being smack in the middle next to something utterly unrelated in every other homologous organism.

Since there would be no compelling evolutionary reason to return to the original state as long as things work, this arrangement would then remain as fixed as any other gene cluster.
And to the algorithms programmed to scan genomes this would not be something to easily overlook, but rather to report as anomalous with major priotity.

 

[jimbob]

I'll try my best, but forgive me if its not totally clear

To integrate anything into a genome you first need it to go where you want it to go. Usually this is done by adding two bits of DNA that are homologous to the area you want it to go into to your new bit of DNA.
However, genomic integration is a rare event. To give an indication, in bacteria which are quite good at integrating offered DNA you have about a 1 in a billion chance of the DNA integrating. In the rest of the cases its just stripped down to nucleotides and eaten.
Finding that one in a billion chance among the rest that did NOT do what you want is undoable. So you need to resort to a trick.
This is usually done by coupling the gene(s) you want integrated to a marker that you can easily detect.
And the best detection mechanism is life/death. If you make sure that only those mutants that do what you want live and all the rest dies, all of a sudden this becomes trivial.

Bacteria can use antibiotics, but no such simple mechanism exists for eukaryotes. There are tricks to get around this, but these are complex and would leave extremely clear trails to follow, such as essential genes removed from their environment where they normally occur and suddenly being smack in the middle next to something utterly unrelated in every other homologous organism.

Since there would be no compelling evolutionary reason to return to the original state as long as things work, this arrangement would then remain as fixed as any other gene cluster.
And to the algorithms programmed to scan genomes this would not be something to easily overlook, but rather to report as anomalous with major priotity.

Thanks - I can understand that. I now have about Sesame Street level of knowledge of genetic engineering...

 

[Aridas]

I'd argue that any hypothetical being that did have the technological knowledge to achieve something - given that they had to have somehow got to Earth from "Elsewhere" would have had the technical means to do something.

If they hadn't the technical means, then what could they have done?

You'll note that the main points of my short response were time dependent. It's quite hard to have the ability to select for the mammalian retina and blood supply if they aren't there during the period in time in question, in the first place. Admittedly, I seem to have missed the genetically altered and culled the rest part, much as, as a standard matter, I simply don't consider the current situation or humans in general to be a requisite condition for, well, much of anything. Given that and possibly a long night of work, I'm just not feeling much impact from that argument.

Well any hypothetical designer would have to have been either supernatural, or technologically advanced.

Motive is important in this context. I'd argue that if Earth was simply an experiment, then the hypothetical designer was not benign. Not necessarily malign, but neither benign.

If one could say malign, one could certainly say benign. Benign is not necessarily omnibenevolent, after all, without even starting on the subjectivity inherent. I would agree that neither is necessarily indicated, though. Regardless, that was just one possible example of an alternate explanation that was immediately obvious to me.

I'm pretty sure that I understand where you are coming from - and I would agree that the idea of a designer isn't in principle falsifiable.

Indeed.

I am arguing that we have evidence which puts constraints on any hypothetical designer, and in fact can show that the unspoken claim is pretty close to being demonstrably false.

A way I would put it would be, whether any specific hypothetical designer could be the case can be evaluated by looking at the available evidence. Either the evidence will support that hypothetical designer equally as much as all other hypothetical designers that could be the case, or the evidence will not support that hypothetical designer, in which case it can't be ruled out. There's a third possibility, of course, which is a subset of the possibles. Namely, the hypothetical designers that the evidence can never evaluate, for one reason or another.

Probably, that was needlessly wordy. Either way, the most useful of those results is when the evidence says that a particular concept conflicts with the evidence and is not unfalsifiable by nature.

 

[Aridas]

In those genomic histories we have examined in detail from fossil sources the posited designer would need to be devilish clever. So clever in fact one wonders why it made such an awful job of the final result. Sense of humour perhaps.

Wait. Final result? Surely you're not implying koalas are the final result?

 

[Acleron]

Wait. Final result? Surely you're not implying koalas are the final result?

No koalas are the final solution.

 

[Pierson5]

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if any of you are familiar with the science behind paternity testing?

After watching C0nc0rdance's video, I posed this question to an Intelligent Design advocate and asked for his take on it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vjm64g3VRuE

The only information I could find on the subject at talkorigins was:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section4.html#transposons

My question is, are the two methods exactly the same for determining relatedness? What genetic markers are used exactly? I'm having trouble pinpointing the exact method used in paternity testing, and comparing it to a study done to determine evolutionary relatedness. I know there are many converging independent lines of genetic evidence supporting the ToE, but many are easily dismissed by creationists.

I tried using the 16S rDNA method linked in C0nc0rdance's video, but to no avail. I feel like if it is possible to show the methods used for paternity testing are exactly the same for determining relatedness in evolutionary history, this would be a smoking gun (one of many) for evolution. How could one possibly ague out of it without dismissing paternity testing as well?

 

[Acleron]

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if any of you are familiar with the science behind paternity testing?

After watching C0nc0rdance's video, I posed this question to an Intelligent Design advocate and asked for his take on it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vjm64g3VRuE

The only information I could find on the subject at talkorigins was:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section4.html#transposons

My question is, are the two methods exactly the same for determining relatedness? What genetic markers are used exactly? I'm having trouble pinpointing the exact method used in paternity testing, and comparing it to a study done to determine evolutionary relatedness. I know there are many converging independent lines of genetic evidence supporting the ToE, but many are easily dismissed by creationists.

When creationists start publishing these dismissals in high quality journals they can be discussed. But at the moment they are of the level of 'I don't believe it can be this way'

I tried using the 16S rDNA method linked in C0nc0rdance's video, but to no avail. I feel like if it is possible to show the methods used for paternity testing are exactly the same for determining relatedness in evolutionary history, this would be a smoking gun (one of many) for evolution. How could one possibly ague out of it without dismissing paternity testing as well?

I'm not clear what you are asking or what you mean by a smoking gun. Creationists and IDers have tried for years to find holes in both the fact of evolution and evolutionary theory and failed.

Perhaps you could explain a bit more why you think the techniques for paternity and complete genome sequencing could matter.

 

[Dinwar]

I know there are many converging independent lines of genetic evidence supporting the ToE, but many are easily dismissed by creationists.

Not really. The Creationists have short soundbites that appear to dismiss the genetic evidence, but they don't have any actual arguments. Genetics is a very complex topic, and anyone who thinks they can summarize it into an easily-digested soundbite is wrong, and probably selling something.

I feel like if it is possible to show the methods used for paternity testing are exactly the same for determining relatedness in evolutionary history, this would be a smoking gun (one of many) for evolution.

If Creationists were honest, sure. And that's the rub: the ones educated enough to understand what you're presenting aren't honest, and the ones who are honest aren't educated enough to make sense of what you're saying.

 

[Pierson5]

I'm not clear what you are asking or what you mean by a smoking gun. Creationists and IDers have tried for years to find holes in both the fact of evolution and evolutionary theory and failed.

Perhaps you could explain a bit more why you think the techniques for paternity and complete genome sequencing could matter.

Well, I believe if you can compare a technique (paternity testing) obviously accepted by the vast majority of the public and demonstrate that it is, in fact, the same process used for determining relatedness across the animal kingdom, how could one possibly argue against that without dismissing the technique they obviously accept as legitimate?

"Smoking gun" is a metaphor to describe an incriminating piece of evidence. "cdesign proponencists" was a smoking gun in the Dover trial, for example. I'm not very familiar with the details involved in paternity testing and had some trouble finding much information online.

 

[Pierson5]

If Creationists were honest, sure. And that's the rub: the ones educated enough to understand what you're presenting aren't honest, and the ones who are honest aren't educated enough to make sense of what you're saying.

Hmm, I see where you are coming from. But surely there are those who are educated enough to understand, as well as honest with themselves. Maybe not the person directly involved in the conversation, but perhaps the spectators?

 

[Aepervius]

Good post dinwar, sadly it seems that Ufology decided to ignore this thread for the moment.

 

[jimbob]

Parasitic wasp larvae secrete antibiotics whilst feeding off their cockroach host

Herzner watched the larvae by installing transparent panels into the sides of parasitized roaches, literally providing a window on the parasite's behaviour (see video). She saw that the larvae regularly slathered large amounts of a clear liquid onto their hosts' tissues. “They virtually soak their cockroaches with chemical compounds,” Herzner says.

 

[jimbob]

Edited by jhunter1163: 

Edited by request; duplicate post.