Biological Evolution- What is being debated

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In an earlier post I showed that ID is not anti-evolution. http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/intelligent-design-is-not-anti-evolution-2/

So is ID is not anti-evolution then what is being debated?

Evolution has several meanings. The meanings of evolution, from Darwinism, Design and Public Education:

  1. Change over time; history of nature; any sequence of events in nature
  2. Changes in the frequencies of alleles in the gene pool of a population
  3. Limited common descent: the idea that particular groups of organisms have descended from a common ancestor.
  4. The mechanisms responsible for the change required to produce limited descent with modification, chiefly natural selection acting on random variations or mutations.
  5. Universal common descent: the idea that all organisms have descended from a single common ancestor.
  6. “Blind watchmaker” thesis: the idea that all organisms have descended from common ancestors solely through an unguided, unintelligent, purposeless, material processes such as natural selection acting on random variations or mutations; that the mechanisms of natural selection, random variation and mutation, and perhaps other similarly naturalistic mechanisms, are completely sufficient to account for the appearance of design in living organisms. see Coyne- https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/natural-selection-and-evolution-material-blind-mindless-and-purposeless/

The debate isn’t as black & white as saying it is evo #6 against IDists, Creationists and theistic evolutionists. However it is obvious that evo #6 is what is being debated.

(Theistic evolutionists are a different breed. They don’t seem to acknowledge that evo #6 is what is being taught in our public school system. And therefore don’t appear to understand the issue. The TE’s I have debated with tell me that humans were an intended outcome of the evolutionary process, which is OK for evo #5 but defies evo #6. IOW TE’s are closet IDists.)

Creationists go with 1-4 (above), with the change in 4 being built-in responses to environmental cues or organism direction as the primary mechanism, for allele frequency change, culled by various selection processes (as well as random effects/ events/ choice of not to mate/ unable to find a mate). The secondary mechanism would be random variations or mutations culled by similar processes. IOW life’s diversity evolved from the originally Created Kind, humans included. Science should therefore be the tool/ process with which we determine what those kinds were.

With Creation vs. “Evolution #6” the 4 main debating points are clear:

1) The starting point of the evolutionary process. (What was (were) the founding population(s)?)

2) The phenotypic & morphological plasticity allowed/ extent the evolutionary process can take a population (do limits exist?).

3) The apparent direction the evolutionary process took to form the history of life. (ie from “simpler” bacteria-like organisms to complex metazoans)

4) The mechanism for the evolutionary process.

With ID vs. Evo #6 it is mainly about the mechanism- IDists go with evolution 1-5, with the Creation change to 4 plus the following caveat in 5: Life’s diversity was brought about via the intent of a design. The initial conditions, parameters, resources and goal was pre-programmed as part of an evolutionary algorithm designed to bring forth complex metazoans, as well as leave behind the more “simple” viruses, prokaryotes and single-celled eukaryotes.

IDists understand that if life didn’t arise from non-living matter via some blind watchmaker-type process, there is no reason to infer its subsequent diversity arose solely due to those type of processes (point 1 up top).

What does the data say? Well there isn’t any data that demonstrates bacteria can “evolve” into anything but bacteria. Therefore anyone who accepts evolution 5 or 6 has some splaining to do. Preferably splainations with scientific merit.

Throwing time at an issue does not splain anything:

 

If one desires to extrapolate small changes into large changes by simply adding time, one requires independent evidence to justify this move. The problem is that we really don’t know how evolution occurs. And when talking about the evolution of the mammalian middle ear bones, we should not forget that we are still basically in the dark in trying to explain how both a mammalian and reptilian zygote actually develops the middle ear and jaw bones, respectively. Without this knowledge, attempts to explain such a transition as a function of a series of small, incremental changes stretched across time are rooted in ignorance. That is, we don’t truly understand neither the process of development nor the process of evolution and without such knowledge, there is no reason to think we are on safe ground when employing (1).

Attempts to justify this move by appealing to the use of (1) in astronomy and geology fail because biotic complexity differs in both structure and formation.

One may assume (1) to explain evolutionary change as a working hypothesis, but we should keep in mind that large changes in evolution are basically a “black box” and a series of small incremental changes may play only a trivial, fine-tuning role in any transition (there is no evidence to think otherwise). What’s more, bacteria, as the predominant life forms on this planet, which have experience the most evolution of all life forms, tell us clearly that (1) need not apply to biological evolution.

In the end, appeals to small change + deep time are embraced merely as a matter of convenience, as it happens to be the primary way we can think about evolution at a time when we are just starting to come to grips with it. As we begin to better understand the process of evolution, I predict (1) will one day be viewed as a quaint understanding that served mostly to highlight just how much we didn’t understand evolution.- Mike Gene

However Father Time, Mother Nature and some still unknown natural process does make for an interesting trinity…

1,113 thoughts on “Biological Evolution- What is being debated”

  1. Frankie:
    Did adapoa really dis a book on the evidence for evolution by zoologist Mark Ridley? Really? Talk about desperation

    No FrankenJoe, I dissed your moronic misunderstanding and misrepresentation of what Ridley was discussing. Talk about IDiot idiocy.

  2. Acartia: All human made codes involve human rationale.

    So? You think if a code is reasoned or rational it cannot be arbitrary?

    …dependent on one’s will or pleasure, discretionary.

  3. Scientists have been trying to show that the genetic code is not arbitrary for decades. And yet they have never been able to demonstrate any law or necessity that can produce it. Hypotheses have been presented to try to overturn the observed arbitrary nature of the genetic code but not one has panned out. So it isn’t as if they ain’t tryin’. Decades of trying but still unable to shake the reality of the arbitrary nature of the genetic code. I know foot stomping and attacking me isn’t going to help yet that is the tactic my opponents have chosen.

    And the problem goes well beyond the code- you need the means for carrying it out. That entails many components functioning in harmony to produce a specific effect. Components that wouldn’t be required in a pre-code world and shouldn’t exist. There isn’t any need for ribosomes in a pre-code world- would there be any use for DNA?

  4. Frankie:
    And the fact that you can’t find anything tat determines what codon represents which amino acid is evidence the genetic code is arbitrary.

    Duh! Chemistry 101.

  5. Frankie

    derp derp derp

    We know FrankenJoe. Science can’t explain all the details to your personal satisfaction therefore the entire universe was POOFED into existence only 6000 years ago.

    Still the IDiots wonder why they get laughed at, then ignored.

  7. Adapa: “tat”– Sure sign of a Joe G meltdown.

    Or that he is taking up lace making. Not that I would be surprised.

  8. All human made codes involve human rationale.

    All rainy days involve liquid water. All discussions with evoTARDs involve evoTARDgasms. And all evoTARDgasms involve lies, distractions and bullshit.

  9. Mung: So? You think if a code is reasoned or rational it cannot be arbitrary?

    …dependent on one’s will or pleasure, discretionary.

    Obviously the code itself can be based on arbitrary factors. But the decision to use arbitrary factors is not arbitrary.

  10. Frankie: All rainy days involve liquid water.

    All IDiot claims by a scientifically illiterate toaster repairman involve regurgitating the same handful of stupid PRATT one liners he’s been spamming C/E boards with for more than a decade.

  11. Frankie: All rainy days involve liquid water. All discussions with evoTARDs involve evoTARDgasms. And all evoTARDgasms involve lies, distractions and bullshit.

    So, you are finally admitting that you are a lying turd? Admitting your failings is the first step to improvement. I am proud of you.

  13. Mung:
    Frankie, I promise that Ignore Commenter works for Adapa.

    Does it work for me?

    By the way, any response would imply that it doesn’t. 🙂

  14. Mung:
    Frankie, I promise that Ignore Commenter works for Adapa.

    It’ll never happen Mung the child abuse enabler. FrankenJoe’s far too ronery and far too needy of the attention.

  15. Acartia: Obviously the code itself can be based on arbitrary factors. But the decision to use arbitrary factors is not arbitrary.

    I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.

    Your claim seems to be that the Morse Code is not arbitrary because some amount of thought went into it. So, far example, the English letter most likely to appear in a communication might be the letter ‘E’ and therefore the most efficient way to communicate over a wire using electrical impulses might be to assign the shortest impulse to the letter ‘E’, and we’ll call this ‘dot’.

    So a single dot shall be used to represent the letter ‘E’.

    Yes, that appears logical, even perhaps rational, reasoned. But a single dash could have been used to represent that same letter, or any number of dots, or any number of dashes, or any combination of dots and dashes. There is therefore no necessary relationship between dot and E.

    Can we at least agree on that?

  17. Mung:
    Frankie, I promise that Ignore Commenter works for Adapa.

    Yes, it does. I got bored and started reading the posts from my ignored list. The laughs are priceless

  18. If indeed there is no direct stereochemical relationship between an amino acid and a triplet, the problem of constructing an adaptor to recognize the codon may be a difficult one to solve.- Crick 1968

    Scientists have been looking for a direct stereochemical relationship between an amino acid and a triplet since the 1950s and haven’t found anything but a pattern. And unless it is a secret code I would expect it to have a pattern

  20. Mung,

    “Your claim seems to be that the Morse Code is not arbitrary because some amount of thought went into it. “

    Pretty much the opposite of arbitrary.

    “ So, for example, the English letter most likely to appear in a communication might be the letter ‘E’ [is the letter E] and therefore the most efficient way to communicate over a wire using electrical impulses might be to assign the shortest impulse to the letter ‘E’, and we’ll call this ‘dot’.”

    Yes.

    “Yes, that appears logical, even perhaps rational, reasoned. But a single dash could have been used to represent that same letter, or any number of dots, or any number of dashes, or any combination of dots and dashes. There is therefore no necessary relationship between dot and E.”

    Except that a single dot is the most efficient way of presenting the most frequently used letter.

  21. Acartia: Except that a single dot is the most efficient way of presenting the most frequently used letter.

    So you have nothing. That’s what I thought.

  22. Mung: So you have nothing. That’s what I thought.

    What I have is that the selection of the dots and dashes for Morse code was not arbitrary.

    Was the arrangement of the letters on a QWERTY keyboard arbitrary?

  25. Frankie:
    Acartia’ sock is in italics:

    Is H2O a code?

    I was talking about the molecule itself, not the symbol.

    “The molecule is not a code. It doesn’t fit the definition.”

    Really? So the fact that it crystallized at zero C is just magic? Or is their a built in molecular code?

    There it is! You either think it was magic or a molecular code that turns water into ice. And your responses show that you think it was a molecular code

    You obviously have honesty issues

    You obviously have reading comprehension issues. Joe logic:

    When someone asks you two questions, he must believe that one of those questions is true. Let’s test out that hypothesis.

    Joe, are you a complete moron? Or do you have a room temperature IQ?

    Damn. On second thought, you might have a point there.

  27. And still no evidence that the genetic code is determined by physics or chemistry. Just a bunch of ignorant spewage proving they don’t understand what a code is nor why the genetic code is a real code in the same sense as Morse code.

    Science be damned, right evos?

  28. And they don’t seem to realize the fact no one can demonstrate the genetic code is determined by physics and chemistry that supports the claim that it is arbitrary in nature. But then again they don’t seem to understand what “arbitrary” means.

  29. Frankie: And still no evidence that the genetic code is determined by physics or chemistry.

    What sort of evidence would you be looking for?

  30. And still no evidence that OMagain understands anything. It doesn’t understand that the scientists looking for a determining cause know exactly what to look for.

  31. The following is from a test:

    a. There is no chemical correspondence between codons and amino acids—the code is arbitrary in its origin.
    b. The presence of gene±c code alterna±ves directly challenges the concept of a common ancestor for humans and E.coli.
    c. Life arose twice as independent events.
    d. The genetic code has a small number of alterna±ve states but these differences cannot be used like nucleo±de differences in the genome to infer phylogenies (rela±onships)

    .Answer: A
    Sec±on: 17.4
    Level: Easy
    Blooms: Evalua±on44.

    Level = easy and the answer is A- There is no chemical correspondence between codons and amino acids—the code is arbitrary in its origin.

    FRom here

  32. Frankie: It doesn’t understand that the scientists looking for a determining cause know exactly what to look for.

    What are they looking for? Can you say?

  33. Frankie: There is no chemical correspondence between codons and amino acids—the code is arbitrary in its origin.

    Then it could be the product of a mindless process, right?

  34. There are no known mindless processes that can produce codes. What would that even look like?

    The genetic code is a communication code. The message from the DNA via mRNA to the ribosome is “make this polypeptide”. Even wikipedia as a communication code.

    The genetic code is arbitrary in that it was not determined by chemical and physical processes (law/ regularity/ necessity). There isn’t any reason, chemically speaking, why UUU represents the amino acid tryptophan. That holds true for all communication codes- they are arbitrary in that they are not determined by laws or necessity.

  35. Frankie:
    There are no known mindless processes that can produce codes.

    Tree rings. Starlight spectral lines. Every chemical reaction that’s ever been mapped.

    The same answers that refuted your equivocating bullshit the last 200 times you posted it.

  38. Mung,

    Point to the refutations of:

    “An essential property of language is that any word can refer to any object. That is not true in genetics. The genetic code which maps codons to proteins could be changed, but doing so would change the meaning of all sequences that code for proteins, and it could not create arbitrary new meanings for all DNA sequences. Genetics is not true language.

    The word frequencies of all natural languages follow a power law (Zipf’s Law). DNA does not follow this pattern (Tsonis et al. 1997).”

    please.

  39. Strange, I never made any claim about the genetic code being the same as language. Also the genetic code is a real code as it fits the definition of a code.

    There isn’t anything that talk origins said that refutes my claims. WTF?

  40. No one but the clueless would say:

    Tree rings. Starlight spectral lines. Every chemical reaction that’s ever been mapped.

    and think that refers to a code. Read the wikipedia entry and tell us how tree rings fit that- the same goes for spectral line and chemical reactions.

  42. Frankie: Your posts say that you need to as your posts prove you don’t know anything about codes.

    How did the Intelligent Designer create the genetic code?
    When did the Intelligent Designer create the genetic code?
    Why did the Intelligent Designer create the genetic code?
    What will the Intelligent Designer change in the genetic code in the future?
    Does the Intelligent Designer control every change in the genetic code?

    I’m interested to hear what ID has to say about codes.

  43. Hi OMagain- your posts prove that you don’t know anything about ID or science. But keep hacking away

  44. Frankie:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code

    Read the article adapa.

    I did Chubs. It gives the definition

    “A code is a rule for converting a piece of information into another object or action, not necessarily of the same sort.”

    There’s no mention of intelligence being required. That’s why tree rings, starlight, and DNA all encode information just using the “rules” of chemistry and physics. Your claim “all codes require intelligence” is simply false.

    Looks like you shot yourself in the fat foot once again.

  45. LoL! adapa allegedly read the wikipedia entry but didn’t see tree rings or starlight there

    That’s why tree rings, starlight, and DNA all encode information using the “rules” of chemistry and physics.

    Totally wrong- it isn’t DNA- it is the GENETIC code of which DNA is only a part. The GENETIC code is the code that has mRNA codons REPRESENTING, not chemically transforming into, amino acids. It is a code for communication, just as wikipedia says.

    No one thinks tree rings or starlight qualify as communication codes- well maybe adapa and acartia.

  46. Frankie:
    LoL! adapa allegedly read the wikipedia entry

    I did read it Chubs, even posted the definition it gave. The definition doesn’t say anything about intelligence or decoding being required for encoding with a code. The entry also doesn’t say anywhere DNA is a communication code. You made up that lie whole cloth.

    BANG! Another hole in those fat feet for Chubs!

  47. LoL!

    The entry also doesn’t say anywhere DNA is a communication code

    The entire article is about communication and information processing codes:

    In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form or representation, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a channel or storage in a medium. An early example is the invention of language which enabled a person, through speech, to communicate what he or she saw, heard, felt, or thought to others. But speech limits the range of communication to the distance a voice can carry, and limits the audience to those present when the speech is uttered. The invention of writing, which converted spoken language into visual symbols, extended the range of communication across space and time

    The process of encoding converts information from a source into symbols for communication or storage. Decoding is the reverse process, converting code symbols back into a form that the recipient of that understands time.

    One reason for coding is to enable communication in places where ordinary plain language, spoken or written, is difficult or impossible. For example, semaphore, where the configuration of flags held by a signaller or the arms of a semaphore tower encodes parts of the message, typically individual letters and numbers. Another person standing a great distance away can interpret the flags and reproduce the words sent.

    And the genetic code is a code in that sense.

  48. Frankie:

    And the genetic code is a code in that sense.

    The article doesn’t say that anywhere. You shouldn’t lie about things so easy to check Chubs.

  49. BWWWWWAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

    They just list it as an example of a code in that sense for no reason, then? Really? Is that your insane argument- that in an article about communication and information processing codes the genetic code is listed as an example of such because it has nothing to do with it.

    Is that how encyclopedia articles go where you’re from? The information they contain has nothing to do with the topic?

  50. Frankie:

    They just list it as an example of a code in that sense for no reason, then?

    It’s not listed or identified as a communications code anywhere Chubs. The title of the Wiki entry is “code”, not “communication code.” I know you’re a compulsive liar but that’s pretty blatant even by your low standards.

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