Is Natural Selection Stymied by this tactic?

[SteveGrenard]

That's not an agnostic argument. Agnostics don't posit that god created us.

Agnostics are undecided if god is present in our everyday lives today. Some agnostics concede god created heaven and earth in 7 days, etc. They concede creation but nothing that follows.

The amino acids that are used in
life, like most other aspects of living things, are very likely not the product of chance.

I went to your link. Here's what I found right away from this site that has you snookered. These people are very good at what they do.....they are claiming in follow-up the levo rotation of the amino acids used to create life ocurred by natural selection....

Claim CB040:

The twenty amino acids used by life are all the left-handed variety. This is very unlikely to have occurred by chance.

Source:
Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. 1985. Life--How Did It Get Here? Brooklyn, NY, pg. 43

So the best opening reference they could get for their statement re the amino acids is from a tract published by the New York area group of the iehovah's Witnesses? Would that be correct?

I am entitled to counter the above argument with this discussion:

http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2004/06/the-left-hand-o.html

Are you saying that all traits are due to pure chance?

And what exactly would be your alternative explanation? god created them? a designer made them in his lab? they are the product of genetic engineering a 100 million years ago?

Yes, you are saying natural selection. You are correct but chance caused them and propelled them first. If they're traits favorable for an organisms in a particular environment they will prevail, if not, they will wither.

 

[SteveGrenard]

As I already conceded I am not a fan of creationist arguments or anti-evolution literature but I ran across this from a pro-creation, anti-evolution site which seems to jive with CL’s position that the 20(levo-) amino acids that were created to produce living cells and organisms could not be the product of chance:

http://thetrumpet.com/index.php?page=article&id=590

The Improbability of Evolution

From the March/April 2002 Trumpet Print Edition »

By Mark Nash

Numbers this large don’t really have much meaning, as it is not possible to comprehend their size. So, let’s get some perspective. It is estimated that the known universe consists of a total of 10 to the power of 80 atoms. So the chance against one modest-sized protein having all levo molecules is 10 to the power of 40 times greater than the total number of atoms in the universe!
The figures we have been looking at are for one amino acid. A human genome is made up of about 3.2 billion pairs of these molecules, and there is not even one that is of the dextro type.
Such figures put evolution beyond the realm of improbability. Evolution is an impossibility. •

So it would seem Claus by your argument and source the chirality of these amino acids could not be result of chance or random activity: would that be correct?

The above, which is covered in the Panda’s Thumb discussion cited above, seems to be a favorite position of the anti-evolution procreationists….would that be correct? And you are espousing this? Yes or No?

 

[Lucky]

If the snakes can smell when the toxin decays, then presumably the lifetime of the toxin is irrelevant to those particular snakes. So even if the frogs develop a longer lived toxin, the snakes will just wait longer.

We don't know that, though – only careful experimentation can tell. Perhaps the snakes aren't directly sensing the toxin - they may be using some marker that under current conditions correlates with the toxin's decomposition. In either case it would be possible for the arms race to continue. A small change in the toxin might make it more poisonous at the time when the snakes sense it to be sufficiently decomposed. If it's an indirect marker then simply making the toxin longer lasting could work, or altering the marker in a way that fools the snakes.

If what the authors meant was that this particular arms race has been ended by the snakes' senses outmanouevering the frog defences, then they would seem to be correct.

They should not have made such a confident statement (if they did). It's not a good idea to say that anything is an evolutionary impossibility. In this case I've suggested a couple of ways the frogs could improve their defences, and (this is the important point) there is no logical way to ensure we've thought of all possible ways the defence might be varied, or all consequences of a particular variation.

They need a different kind of toxin. If indeed frogs get their toxins from their food, then an isolated population eating a somewhat different diet may well develop a different kind of toxin.

Yes, and there's a case for calling that a continuation of the same arms race, especially if the same genetic locus is involved in both toxins.

 

[Dancing David]

Give an example.

Expession of the double recessive white fur of many animals. It is a trait that many mammals have. It becomes expressed in artic enviroments.
A particular individual is likely to have the trait in a recessive allele. Generally a mammal that has the double recessive will not be likely selected for reproduction because they will be eaten by a predator that can spot them easily. However if the idividual ends up in an eviroment that is predominately white (artic) then the double recessive is likely to meet another double recessive and they are likely to have white offspring.

So in that sense it is a matter of 'luck' in one enviroment an indivdual with white fut is selected against, another it is selected for. (Or the white squirells of Olney , IL. Humans selected them by killing the ones that weren't white.)

So the expression of a trait interacts with the enviroment, in one it is 'unlucky' in anaother it is 'lucky'. That is a semi random process with causal elements..

 

[Dancing David]

No, dinosaurs aren't extinct because Newton planned it. Newton didn't plan his laws, he described them, based on observations and experiments of celestial bodies.

My point is that you cannot call meteorites random. When you call them random, you are ultimately describing the trajectories needed for the moon landings as random.

They are anything but. We send probes to other planets based on the predictability of Newton's laws - with a pinch of Einstein for flavor.

Causal and random can exist side by side. Celestial mechanics can be tricky. It may be causal but it can be very hard to define at a future point.

There are random and pseudo random processes. Where a particular individual will end up (say a balooning spider) can be very random or pseudo random.