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Why is ID so successful?
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CplFerro
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Transforming a flipper into a proper leg, for instance, would be impressive, but it's still not adding any truly unique structure that I can see. Giving a walrus hoofs would be getting somewhere.
On DNA, well, all clouds are made of water, too, and yet they come from different places. Why we have DNA as the basis for life is, I'd say, because it's the only thing that works or is naturally growable. It's like how I imagine the discovery of an alien biosphere will be a huge letdown for humanity. We'll go there and expect all these bizarre lifeforms, and find nothing but grass and trees, bugs and birds, and every other major taxonomical group present. Why? Because birds are the ideal flying things, bugs are the ideal creeping things, and so on. I'm guessing it's the same with DNA - it's just the best way to do it.
On DNA, well, all clouds are made of water, too, and yet they come from different places. Why we have DNA as the basis for life is, I'd say, because it's the only thing that works or is naturally growable. It's like how I imagine the discovery of an alien biosphere will be a huge letdown for humanity. We'll go there and expect all these bizarre lifeforms, and find nothing but grass and trees, bugs and birds, and every other major taxonomical group present. Why? Because birds are the ideal flying things, bugs are the ideal creeping things, and so on. I'm guessing it's the same with DNA - it's just the best way to do it.
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CplFerro
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Iacchus said:
If Jupiter produced life, /then/ we'd have something potentially very strange. I was referring to a small, rocky planet like Earth.
If you don't believe in randomness then welcome to the world of block-universe determinism!
No, I meant from the ground -- or, lack thereof -- up. Not as a result of it being populated by aliens, including ourselves.Upchurch said:
No, I do in fact believe in the variegation of things ... all of which stems from the same original source.
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Yes, that is what the book describes.Iacchus said:
[fquote]No, I do in fact believe in the variegation of things ... all of which stems from the same original source. [/fQUOTE]a Prime Mover? Yes, that is about as fanciful as what goes on in the book I linked to above. You just happen to believe it is real.
As a careful perusal of those linked pages suggests, hammegk has a valid point; species remains loosely defined. Taxonomic boundary disputes are commonplace in biology, by long standing tradition -- but when biologists engage in such disputes, they are prepared to provide logical arguments supporting their positions. For this reason, anyone attempting to make definitive statements like: "Observations of the artificial mutation of thousands of fruit fly generations has never shown transformation into a different species." really seems to incur an obligation to be specific with regard to how he defines (or at least attempts to define) the term.
I don't entirely disagree -- but then, I am prepared to accept the flipper as a modified leg, consistent with the hypothesis that the walrus evolved from a land-dwelling ancestor. In other words, the same basic ingredients used to make a leg could, with some modification to the recipe, be used to make a flipper instead. I'm not sure I understand why you feel that "giving a walrus hoofs would be getting somewhere"; isn't a hoof basically just a modified toe and nail?
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos
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So you want to see functional changes. Here you go:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section5.html#functional_change
~~ Paul
That's an interesting question. I must admit to never having been close enough to a walrus to have made that observation, and doubt if I would have noticed anyway. The walrus is believed to have evolved from a bear-like ancestor, which surely had claws. My guess is that these are vestigal in the modern walrus, but since you've brought it up, I intend to investigate the matter (one never knows when the ability to regurgitate such a factoid may come in handy).
It's interesting. The argument over species is, in one way, a neat example of how science changes. "Species" itself is a holdover from the Linnaean view of organisms, a view that represented a species with a prototype, and viewed variation from that prototype as "error". More modern views are different; rather than a prototype and error, the same data are seen as a varying population. Variability (formerly "error") is part of the population, and an integral part of its adaptation to a particular niche.
In this view, what a "species" is is more or less an irrelevant question. It is the functional equivalent of asking "where, in a rainbow, does it switch from orange to yellow?" Of course, it switches from yellowish-orange to orangeish-yellow, and there is no one meaningful line of demarkation. Does this mean there is no yellow, and no orange? Of course not. We have functional definitions of species, and they work. There is no "unresolved problem" of speciation, because the very concept is a vestige of a view of organisms that has been replaced.
So, in a way, hammegk, it is a moving goalpost. But only to those who insist on applying terms from a previous era. I agree with you; "species" is not a perfect term at all. But that is more a problem of language and model (and outdated model at that) than of science.
In this view, what a "species" is is more or less an irrelevant question. It is the functional equivalent of asking "where, in a rainbow, does it switch from orange to yellow?" Of course, it switches from yellowish-orange to orangeish-yellow, and there is no one meaningful line of demarkation. Does this mean there is no yellow, and no orange? Of course not. We have functional definitions of species, and they work. There is no "unresolved problem" of speciation, because the very concept is a vestige of a view of organisms that has been replaced.
So, in a way, hammegk, it is a moving goalpost. But only to those who insist on applying terms from a previous era. I agree with you; "species" is not a perfect term at all. But that is more a problem of language and model (and outdated model at that) than of science.
CplFerro
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Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
Some of those data are promising, but are they really on the level of transforming yellow into blue, to so speak? Most of the observations are of immune systems doing what immune systems are designed to do. Or, the ability of bacteria to eat nylon, for instance, has its digestive system rearranging itself. It's like muscles getting bigger with exercise, or developing calluses, or a man getting used to tropical heat. But the bacteria remains a bacteria, and not an algae or an amoeba.
The example of E. coli bacteria being artifically selected to develop new genes sounds the most promising of the lot. I don't know what they have there, it seems on the cusp.
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos
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The ability to digest pentachlorophenol required the evolution of a new metabolic pathway. What more can you ask?
Are you sure you aren't requiring the observation of new external features to be convinced? And again I ask what you hypothesize to be the mechanism that prevents arbitrary changes over long periods of time.
~~ Paul
CplFerro
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Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
They're close, but they don't satisfy me that there's anything more than microevolution going on, of creatures that already had a certain in-built adaptability to their various vital systems. I see this as no different from Europeans developing the ability to digest dairy, or growing red hair.
External, radically different, comprehensive, functional features would probably clinch it. Worms growing usable and used legs, for instance. Jellyfish growing eyes. Internally, again, lungs to gills or vice versa. Cellularly, bacteria to amoeba, etc. Even a totally anaerobic microbe becoming aerobic would be compelling.
I doubt microevolution is the sole cause of species, because I don't see it able to overcome entropy. It's like a nation experiencing a revolution from oligarchy to republic - there's a gradual buildup of revolutionary ideas and prerequisite conditions, which can vary highly in mustering time taken, but then at some critical point the ideas are taken up by a revolutionary leadership that then wages a campaign. If successful, the actual transformation from one "species" of national entity (oligarchy) to another (republic) is very quick.
Similarly, I see microevolution as letting a species adapt only so far to new conditions, beyond which making the jump to something radically different requires a higher principle, some kind of self-organisation principle as either a function of, or subsumed into, the basic principle of life itself as something essentially different than non-life.
The examples PCA has given you are rather remarkable in terms of how much change has occurred in such a short span of time.
I keep getting this image of a critic trying to review, say "Citizen Kane", based on 2 or 3 frames of film near the end, and saying "no, I am convinced that this cannot be the movie you say it is." For us to replicate natural selection in the laboratory, "from fins to proper legs", is quite literally asking us to condense millions of years into some convenient time-frame for human observation.
Fortunately, we have the ability to look at our particular "Citizen Kane" through the fossil record--still only a frame or two at a time, of course, so if you demand to see motion in a human time-frame you will not see it here. And we can look through the DNA record, but that is a bit more like reading the script--it is also not absolute proof that this thing was ever a motion picture.
The evidence is there, for those who do not choose to wear blinders.
I keep getting this image of a critic trying to review, say "Citizen Kane", based on 2 or 3 frames of film near the end, and saying "no, I am convinced that this cannot be the movie you say it is." For us to replicate natural selection in the laboratory, "from fins to proper legs", is quite literally asking us to condense millions of years into some convenient time-frame for human observation.
Fortunately, we have the ability to look at our particular "Citizen Kane" through the fossil record--still only a frame or two at a time, of course, so if you demand to see motion in a human time-frame you will not see it here. And we can look through the DNA record, but that is a bit more like reading the script--it is also not absolute proof that this thing was ever a motion picture.
The evidence is there, for those who do not choose to wear blinders.
Dogdoctor
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In order to have finger nails, they need to have fingers, in order to have fingers they need to have hands. They have flippers and nails but the nails are on the digits of the flipper and so not fingernails but the anatomic pinaped equivalent of them.CplFerro said:
As long as conversion efforts are not undertaken by force, but via other means (evangelization, argument, personal example, and so forth) which are proper to free societies, then no, I don't see this as a real threat. In this particular respect, Christianity does not strike me as formally different than other ideologies competing in the marketplace of ideas.cyborg said:
Again, as long as he is not talking about fighting in the streets, bomb-throwing or what have you, then let him fight. I do not feel threatened by this. Also, there is a non-frivolous case to be made that Europe's particular brand of secularism has not been an unqualified boon to its citizens. Yet, as with any ideology, contemporary European secularism has little incentive for self-examination or improvement if it is spared from competing with other ideas.cyborg said:
I am opposed to ID being taught as science in our classrooms, and I do agree that there is a (sometimes-not-so-) latent threat posed by fundamentalism. On the other hand, I don't begrudge fundamentalists the right to put forth their ideas publicly, defend and seek support for them. Also, at least on a worldwide and historical scale, I do not view fundamentalism as a prevalent characteristic of Christianity, and I do not view non-fundamentalist Christians as a real problem.cyborg said:
Not, apparently, to the same extent you do when you characterize Christianity as "a threat to me and every other freethinker because it despises us." It would be petty of me to overlook the fact that our modern tradition of free rational inquiry in the West is of Christian provenance, and that, all things considered, Christianity has proved itself benign to those areas of independent thought (such as science) that I consider important.cyborg said:
It's often suggested that the threat posed by Islamic fundamentalism will be overcome not by external forces but by the better tendencies of the rest of the Islamic world asserting themselves. I express no opinion on that, but in a similar way, I suspect that the comparatively minor threat posed by Christian fundamentalism will probably not be overcome by the forces of secularism, scientific naturalism or anything other than the better tendencies of Christianity itself.