Evolution Pros and Cons

[questor]

I think I have it. If something occurs by natural causes, there is no reason. The universe was born with no reason and all biological reactions occur with no reason.

Moon, this explains why we don't see eye to eye. When you find a natural occurence that happened with no cause, get in touch.

[Essay]

...am I just missing a bit of sarcasm here, or....

Yes, questor, there is no "reason" for oxygen and hydrogen reacting. It's natural process that takes place naturally, no reason required.

It may just be a few stray photons of the right energy, but there's always a natural explanation or reason, isn't there?

===

 

I promised not to, but when I explained about this horrible semantic misunderstanding, my wife said okay.

===

 

Of course everything happens for a reason. Nothing happens with no cause or "spontaneously" (except where we don't understand the cause).

 

The physical constants of nature lead to certain interactions which we characterize as the laws of physics.

These same laws govern how interactions occur at a more complex level--above that of an individual atom, leading to our understanding--characterized as the laws of chemistry.

Similarly, our characterization of the laws of biology arises out of the complexity of chemical interactions, governed by those laws and parameters of physics.

 

Thermodynamics is the study of how physics is expressed in a chemical system.

Evolution is the study of how chemistry is expressed in a biological system.

 

As catalysts lower the activation energy for a potentially unfavorable physical reaction in chemical systems, so enzymes act to similarly enable chemical reactions in biological systems.

 

DNA mostly produces enzymes (and a few structural proteins), I think...

 

...and it's pretty much the same structural elements across the variety of life forms;

...and it's basically the same chemical reactions and pathways that drive life, from yeast to plant and animals.

 

Whoops! I'm starting to wax persuasive about the common sense of evolution.

Semantics is what needs to be addressed.

MTM, you were not seeing the cause at the fundamental level of reality which pervades everything, but were talking about the kind of cause that one attributes to human agency or devine intervention, IMHO.

 

Of course, if one can transcend the preconceptions of space and time, then these two descriptions of causation dissolve into the same thing--pointing out the semantic stumbling block of perspective.

 

I have to agree that you'll be hard pressed to "find a natural occurence that happened with no cause."

 

~ SAmantics

:smilingsun:

[Pyrotex]

Let me say that this thread not is about creationism. It is about questioning the science or lack of it in the theory of evolution. If someone here can explain how genetic code can be changed to make a lemur become a man,...

I believe this can help you. Lemur to Man

[questor]

Essay, you are correct. Now if dna is directed and repeated information, it is quite easy to asume that mutations can cause variation in species. And so we can observe, it does happen. On the other hand, it would seem that it would take quite a number of mutations which are provident to change a fish to a man. And what would be the engine for this change? I would assume the fish is comfortable in the ocean, what environmental factors would drive him to become a land animal? If evolution has two components-- species variation and species derivation, are they propagated by the same biochemical reactions, or is there a difference? I know there are many web sites that carry on the argument between evolutionists and anti-evolutionists and I think the truth will only be known when we understand how genetic code functions biochemically.

[questor]

Pyro, your link...laughable,weird, somewhat disturbing.

[Essay]

... and I think the truth will only be known when we understand how genetic code functions biochemically.

Which is why I suggested those two programs from the ResearchChannel in post #73.

Very illuminating.

 

~SA

[Galapagos]

Still Just Asking Questions, are we?

 

On the other hand, it would seem that it would take quite a number of mutations which are provident to change a fish to a man. And what would be the engine for this change? I would assume the fish is comfortable in the ocean, what environmental factors would drive him to become a land animal?

This has already been answered. You have ignored the answer more than once.

http://hypography.com/forums/biology/17750-evolution-pros-and-cons-7.html#post249354

 

 

If evolution has two components-- species variation and species derivation, are they propagated by the same biochemical reactions, or is there a difference?

Speciation generally occurs gradually by way of accumulation of small change. There is not other mode of evolution, and speciation events rarely happen in large leaps.

Speciation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Reproductive isolation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

I know there are many web sites that carry on the argument between evolutionists and anti-evolutionists and I think the truth will only be known when we understand how genetic code functions biochemically.

Who says we don't understand the genetic code biochemically?

 

 

ANd this website was down before, but now the archives are up. This is all the evidence any reasonable person needs for common descent:

29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: the Scientific Case for Common Descent

 

Take your pick, as many lines of evidence as anyone could want.

[Moontanman]

Moon, it's not simple at all. Here is something simple: H2O - The Mystery, Art, and Science of Water: The Chemistry of Water: Electrolysis

are you telling me there is no reason for this reaction? You understand that in order to have chemical reactions, elements or compounds have to be present in proper amounts, conditions must be correct and a catalyst must be present.

Again, I ask you--tell me of things that happen with no reason.

 

With all due respect to Essay I see no reason behind things that happen naturally. There is no reason the sun shines, no reason the Earth rotates, no reason for the asteroid that struck the Earth and started or completed the process that killed the dinosaurs, No reason for the stray atomic nuclei that strikes a chromosome and causes leukemia. No reason, it's just the way the universe works, reason suggests an intelligent control mechanism, reason is why i pay my rent, why my son loves me, reason is why I'm stupid enough to discuss this with you even though you show no signs of having any! Reason suggests something other than random effects. No reason! **** happens! Are you sure you're not Nutronjon?

[Essay]

No reason, it's just the way the universe works, reason suggests an intelligent control mechanism....

 

The semantics between reason and cause....

...or on the difference between something happening "for a reason" versus "with a reason."

 

I don't think anyone is arguing that things happen "for a reason" directed, as you say, by "an intelligent control mechanism," to achieve some purpose or goal.

 

Things happen with a reason or cause; but not for a reason, or for some cause celeb....

 

Yes, I was just talking about cause and effect based on those constants that determine "the way the universe works."

I'm not talking about a "reason" as if there is some purpose or goal for which the reason is important; I'm just using "the reason" for something happening, as synonymous with "the cause" of something happening.

 

Looking back at my post #87 I see I started out using the word "reason" but quickly changed to "cause."

Just my equating of "natural explanation or reason" in the first line from that post 87 should show I was using the word reason to mean cause or explanation.

===

 

My Webster's talks about both uses:

1.

a) ...an explanation... of an act or procedure.

:) ...a motive, or judgement inducing or confirming a belief, influencing the will, or leading to an action.

 

2. A ground or cause; that... which makes any fact intelligible.

Syn. See Cause:

 

MTM, I think you are using the #1b. definition, while I was using the #2./syn. definition, eh?

 

...as I say... :D

~Saymantics

[HydrogenBond]

The proposed experiment was to randomly mutate the genes in generations of mice to see if they will evolve.

 

Without some sort of environmental or other pressure your experiment would be moot, even with a fast reproducing animal like a mouse it might take many decades to see any significant mutations other than bad ones, the ratio of bad to good is quite high.

 

That is the point, most random mutations would not be progressive but would be more or less destructive. Even if we provided an environmental goal for adaptation if we added random mutations, common sense says we would also pick the wrong genes more often than not. It would be like the amateur trying to make his computer evolve by randomly replacing parts. This seems to indicate random will not work.

 

Say we extended this blind random mutation experiment to an ecosystem where we mutate everything in a random way. The odds are the entire system would break down and go extinct as links in the chain break. I can't see how random mutations could lead to evolution or how this can explain how healthy eco-systems have evolved everywhere.

 

What makes more sense is a logical explanation where the mutations slant in a favorable way for adaptation. The follow up experiment would be to forget about the three blind mice random approach and cherry pick our mutations with logical goals in mind that are tailored to the environmental goal.

[Moontanman]

The semantics between reason and cause....

...or on the difference between something happening "for a reason" versus "with a reason."

 

I don't think anyone is arguing that things happen "for a reason" directed, as you say, by "an intelligent control mechanism," to achieve some purpose or goal.

 

Things happen with a reason or cause; but not for a reason, or for some cause celeb....

 

Yes, I was just talking about cause and effect based on those constants that determine "the way the universe works."

I'm not talking about a "reason" as if there is some purpose or goal for which the reason is important; I'm just using "the reason" for something happening, as synonymous with "the cause" of something happening.

 

Looking back at my post #87 I see I started out using the word "reason" but quickly changed to "cause."

Just my equating of "natural explanation or reason" in the first line from that post 87 should show I was using the word reason to mean cause or explanation.

===

 

My Webster's talks about both uses:

1.

a) ...an explanation... of an act or procedure.

:) ...a motive, or judgement inducing or confirming a belief, influencing the will, or leading to an action.

 

2. A ground or cause; that... which makes any fact intelligible.

Syn. See Cause:

 

MTM, I think you are using the #1b. definition, while I was using the #2./syn. definition, eh?

 

...as I say... :D

~Saymantics

 

No, I was saying Questor used the 1.b definition, my definition is that there is no man behind the curtains pulling levers and making things happen for a reason!

[Moontanman]

The proposed experiment was to randomly mutate the genes in generations of mice to see if they will evolve.

 

 

 

That is the point, most random mutations would not be progressive but would be more or less destructive. Even if we provided an environmental goal for adaptation if we added random mutations, common sense says we would also pick the wrong genes more often than not. It would be like the amateur trying to make his computer evolve by randomly replacing parts. This seems to indicate random will not work.

 

Say we extended this blind random mutation experiment to an ecosystem where we mutate everything in a random way. The odds are the entire system would break down and go extinct as links in the chain break. I can't see how random mutations could lead to evolution or how this can explain how healthy eco-systems have evolved everywhere.

 

What makes more sense is a logical explanation where the mutations slant in a favorable way for adaptation. The follow up experiment would be to forget about the three blind mice random approach and cherry pick our mutations with logical goals in mind that are tailored to the environmental goal.

 

No HB, the idea was to use radiation to step up the mutation rate and see if the mutations produced a new species. This is totally disingenuous, in the natural environment natural selection decided which animals die and which animals live, this is what drives evolution. radiation would speed up the process of mutation but since the size of the animal pool would have to small the rate of bad mutations would drown out any good mutations unless we picked them out. If we wanted to arbitrarily pick and choose from the mice we could in just a few generations produce some really odd looking mice with really unusual behaviors and odd body shapes and colors but this would not be evolution, no more than breeding dogs or cattle for desired traits would be evolution, it's really the same thing and the only real intelligent design. In the natural world death and lack of reproductive success is that drives the changes to the genomes, in animal husbandry it's us. If we used a huge sample group of organisms (mice) and gave them some unnatural environmental pressures (us) they would indeed change rapidly, I doubt anyone would say this is analogous to evolution although it would be.

[Galapagos]

The proposed experiment was to randomly mutate the genes in generations of mice to see if they will evolve.

 

That is the point, most random mutations would not be progressive but would be more or less destructive. Even if we provided an environmental goal for adaptation if we added random mutations, common sense says we would also pick the wrong genes more often than not. It would be like the amateur trying to make his computer evolve by randomly replacing parts. This seems to indicate random will not work.

Random mutation is the raw material on which natural selection works to produce adaptations. Natural selection itself is however, not random at all, but selection. In iterative occurrences of reproduction and selection, small changes accumulate. Natural selection takes any deviation from the norm, and if it is neutral or advantageous, it is maintained, and if it is at all deleterious, it is annihilated. The mutations are random--- selection is the precise opposite of random, it is deliberate selection.

 

I'm also confused by your objections Hbond, it makes me feel as though you are unaware of all of the mathematics that go into evolutionary models(and how they actually work). Ever since the modern synthesis and the birth of population genetics, evolutionary talk about mutation rates and selection pressures has taken place in the language of math, and a lot of the objections you make just wouldn't make any sense had you played with even the most basic of these models before.

Also, about evolutionary algorithms not working... Tell that to NASA... you can send a signal to the antennas they recently designed using evolutionary algorithms:

Antenna Evolution

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2004/04_55AR.html

Say we extended this blind random mutation experiment to an ecosystem where we mutate everything in a random way. The odds are the entire system would break down and go extinct as links in the chain break. I can't see how random mutations could lead to evolution or how this can explain how healthy eco-systems have evolved everywhere.

No. Selection doesn't allow deviations too far from what is known as the "adaptive peak" on a fitness landscape. If selection is maintaining some of the adaptations in the population I do not see how you conclude that the entire ecosystem would "break down".

What makes more sense is a logical explanation where the mutations slant in a favorable way for adaptation. The follow up experiment would be to forget about the three blind mice random approach and cherry pick our mutations with logical goals in mind that are tailored to the environmental goal.

How would the macromolecules in your phenotype effect your genotype? That "logical explanation" makes absolutely no sense.

 

Here is a page I dug up on basic population genetics. Play with the Hardy-Weinberg equation for a minute if you'd like, its quite simple and enlightening:

The Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium

[HydrogenBond]

I can see the statistics if the genes are already present. What I was talking about is adding new genes to the blend so we can get changes that weren't there. If this was random we have the problem of de-evolution.

[Moontanman]

I can see the statistics if the genes are already present. What I was talking about is adding new genes to the blend so we can get changes that weren't there. If this was random we have the problem of de-evolution.

 

The idea of de-evolution is nonsense, added genes would either help or hinder the organism, natural selection would determine this. If they helped, or were neutral, the organism would survive, if not the organism would die or fall to reproduce. No de-evolution is involved, Evolution has no direction :)

 

Yes! Boogie boy the results are in! De-evolution is real! Gee Dad we are all Devo! :) I say Whip it! Whip it good! :)

[questor]

Galapagos has presented a link to a site that everyone intereted in this subject should read. 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: the Scientific Case for Common Descent This poses and argues the subjects we should be discussing. A quote from this site:

I am writing this essay in response to a request from Edward E. Max to comment on his posting The Evolution of Improved Fitness (updated July 12 1999). His essay is an attempt to defend evolutionary theory against attacks by creationists. Although Max scored some points against some alleged creationist arguments, he failed to defend Darwinian evolution against my attack on it in my book Not By Chance. He did not mention my book in his posting, but he referred to my book in his request for my comments. I shall also take this opportunity to clarify some issues in my book about which some readers have written me.

The principle message of evolution is that all life descended with modification from a putative single primitive source. I call this the grand sweep of evolution. The mechanism offered for the process of modification is basically the Darwinian one of a long series of steps of random variation, each followed by natural selection. The variation is generally understood today to be random mutations in the DNA.

 

That primitive source of life is assumed to be sufficiently simple that it could have arisen from nonliving material by chance. There is no theory today that can account for such an event, but I shall not address that issue here. That is for another place and another time. What is relevant to this discussion is that the requirement that life arose spontaneously sets, at the very least, a stringent upper limit on the complexity and information content of the putative first organism that could reproduce itself, and thus serve as a vehicle from which to launch Darwinian evolution. The issue I address here is the alleged development of all life by the neo-Darwinian process of random mutation and natural selection, starting from a sufficiently simple beginning.

 

Despite the insistence of evolutionists that evolution is a fact, it is really no more than an improbable story. No one has ever shown that macroevolution can work. Most evolutionists assume that macroevolution is just a long sequence of microevolutionary events, but no one has ever shown it to be so. (Those few evolutionists who hold that macroevolution is really different from microevolution have changed their story several times since they first came out with it, and their mechanism is so fuzzy that I cannot tell what it is. John Maynard Smith seems to be of a similar opinion.)

 

For the grand process of evolution to work, long sequences of "beneficial" mutations must be possible, each building on the previous one and conferring a selective advantage on the organism. The process must be able to lead not only from one species to another, but to the entire advance of life from a simple beginning to the full complexity of life today. There must be a long series of possible mutations, each of which conferring a selective advantage on the organism so that natural selection can make it take over the population. Moreover, there must be not just one, but a great many such series.

 

The chain must be continuous in that at each stage a change of a single base pair somewhere in the genome can lead to a more adaptive organism in some environmental context. That is, it should be possible to continue to climb an "adaptive" hill, one base change after another, without getting hung up on a local adaptive maximum. No one has ever shown this to be possible.

 

Now one might say that if evolution were hung up on a local maximum, a large genetic change like a recombination or a transposition could bring it to another higher peak. Large adaptive changes are, however, highly improbable. They are orders of magnitude less probable than getting an adaptive change with a single nucleotide substitution, which is itself improbable. No one has shown this to be possible either.

 

Moreover, as I have noted in my book, the large mutations such as recombinations and transpositions are mediated by special enzymes and are executed with precision - not the sort of doings one would expect of events that were supposed to be the products of chance. Evolutionists chose the mechanism of randomness, by the way, because we can't think of any other way beneficial mutations might occur in the absence of a law that might govern them. Genetic rearrangements may not be really random at all. They do not seem to qualify as the random mutations neo-Darwinists can invoke whenever needed to escape from a local adaptive maximum.

 

Evolutionists can argue, and rightly so, that we have no way of observing long series of mutations, since our observation time is limited to a relatively short interval. Our genetic observations over the past 100 years are more like a snapshot of evolution rather than a representative interval in which we can search for the required long series of changes. But our inability to observe such series cannot be used as a justification for the assumption that the series Darwinian theory requires indeed exist.''

 

''I agree that there are no definitive examples where a macroevolutionary change (such as the development of cetaceans from terrestrial mammals) has been shown to result from a specific chain of mutations. And I agree with your further comment that "we have no way of observing a long series of mutations." But you go on to say that "our inability to observe such series cannot be used as a justification for the assumption that the series Darwinian theory requires indeed exist." An equally reasonable conclusion, in my view, would be that our inability to observe such series cannot be used as a justification for the assumption that such a series of mutations did NOT occur.''[>quote]

 

Here are two sides of the continuing argument over evolution. One side believes it happens a certain way, cannot prove it, but believes certain evidence, the other side believes it happens a different and proposes contrary evidence. Sounds pretty much like the argument over creationism. Irreducible complexity must be considered in this argument and if any of you reading this material determine the force or reason or mechanism causing mutations or genetic changes leading to differentiation of species by the biochemistry involved, please let me know.

[Moontanman]

First of all I don't see any contary evidence for a mechanism other than evolution via random mutation, I see statemnts that say random mutations cannot be proved to be the basis of evolution but no counter evidence. Is it too much to ask for more than someone just saying they cannot prove it so it must be wrong? Here is another quote from that site.

 

Are There Other Scientifically Valid Explanations?

The worldwide scientific research community from over the past 140 years has discovered that no known hypothesis other than universal common descent can account scientifically for the unity, diversity, and patterns of terrestrial life. This hypothesis has been verified and corroborated so extensively that it is currently accepted as fact by the overwhelming majority of professional researchers in the biological and geological sciences (AAAS 1990; NAS 2003; NCSE 2003; Working Group 2001). No alternate explanations compete scientifically with common descent, primarily for four main reasons: (1) so many of the predictions of common descent have been confirmed from independent areas of science, (2) no significant contradictory evidence has yet been found, (3) competing possibilities have been contradicted by enormous amounts of scientific data, and (4) many other explanations are untestable, though they may be trivially consistent with biological data.

 

When evaluating the scientific evidence provided in the following pages, please consider alternate explanations. Most importantly, for each piece of evidence, critically consider what potential observations, if found, would be incompatible with a given alternate explanation. If none exist, that alternate explanation is not scientific. As explained above, a hypothesis that is simply compatible with certain empirical observations cannot use those observations as supporting scientific evidence.

 

No other theory or hypothesis is being proposed other than God did it. No way to show God did it but lots of evidence that random mutations driven by environmental pressures accounts for it.