Further to the OP Munging ID it seems that there is still a significant amount of confusion as to whether ID could be, or even is, compatible with common descent… Moreover, Mike Behe has been quoted by Paul Nelson here at TSZ as one of the very few from among the Discovery Institute (DI) who “supports” common descent, common ancestry or descent with modification…
While I doubt we would be able to get Mike Behe to post at TSZ, for the reasons I have already mentioned in the moderation issues in the past, unless his book critics decide to post here and he would be provoked to respond, let’s just watch some of the videos where elaborates on those very issues:
Intelligent Design and Common Ancestry – Michael J. Behe, PhD
Another issue related to common ancestry is the that some members of DI, including Mike Behe and Ann Gauger apparently accept the possibility of “guided evolution”… which in my view would be an oxymoron…I must stress however that I have not seen any real details about that coming from either of them, so I don’t really know what they mean by “guided evolution”…Perhaps Behe’s upcoming book will provide us with some insight on the theme…Have they come to a similar conclusion Jonathan Wells has with the embryo development (cell differentiation) where the information beyond DNA would have to be added in the process? I don’t know at this point…
I have also mentioned it in the past that ID supporters, as well as logically thinking creationists, must accept some sort of “micro-evolution” or descent with modification within “kinds”…
The example of that type of evolution, or rather devolution, is the “evolution” of dogs from wolves by the breaking genes or the decreasing gene functions…
Other possible “evolutionary changes” leading to dog evolution from wolves could be compared to the antibiotic resistance evolution that had already existed in the some genomes before the antibiotics were even developed…
Cry me a river…😂
Bet what?
Yeah…unfortunately… aspirations continue…🤣
ID predicted and still predicts the great majority of human genome will be functional.. I asked Joe Felsenstein to put his career on evolutionary prediction of junk DNA just like Grour..”.if encode is right, evolution is wrong ”
You have faith, don’t you?🤔
When you have time – what are you proposing as a bet?
Well, that’s failed. What do I win?
Based on what? How can you possibly make such a prediction unless you know the capabilities and intentions of the Designer(s)?
If there’s one thing ID is good at it’s making postdictions based on the research of others and claiming them to be ID predictions.
Sadly for betting my career, I have already retired. Not because of the ENCODE leadership’s statements, which remains wrong about the great majority of the genome not being “junk”.
Have creationists even noticed that ENCODE dropped its “80%” figure down to “40%”? (And even then that’s way too high).
Joe Felsenstein,
On what basis do you think we understand all the working of the genome under all conditions including embryo development?
Oh, we’re playing that game! I wonder what proportion of people who majored (or minored) in evolutionary biology accept the evidence for common descent? I’d place it if the high 90’s, myself. Whaddyareckon?
Yes, of course it does. If you prove someone didn’t come by bus, you haven’t proven they teleported.
Your theory would also*** have to account for the junk in organisms that do not form embryos, and the prevalence of copy-paste transposons which, on the face of it, increase genome size for reasons unconnected to organismal function.
*** I say ‘also’, though I think I’ve given you too much credit for actually having one.
You construct a hypothesis – e.g., if two distinct branches fused we would expect a bimodal distribution of genes nesting in the two original clades. That’s been done, for mitochondria and for plastids. Guess what they found?
Typical attempt to divert the discussion, or else you actually think that the reason for saying it is junk is that we have eliminated all possible functions. As reading any one of many posts on Larry Moran’s “Sandwalk” blog should have made clear, the reasons are (a) lack of conservation, (b) large-scale genomic changes (“the onion test”), and (c) annotation of large parts of the human genome as transposons and other selfish elements. None of these involves understanding all possible functions in detail, they involve what purifying selection would eliminate if it had function.
Oops, forgot one major category of evidence for the prevalence of junk DNA: (d) the crushing mutational load on the population if all that DNA were subject to deleterious mutations.
Also, I need to aplologize, I was too harsh. Colewd was not trying to divert discussion — he just did not know what were the arguments for Junk DNA.
Good to hear that you see no conflict between ID and common descent, but your “dog descent from wolf” being evidence of it seems a bit thin.
Since you accept that dogs and modern wolves share a common ancestor in some ancestral wolf population, and that humans are responsible for the changes in morphology in dogs, then why are you hesitant to accept guided evolution combined with universal common ancestry? Your breeder has many more tricks up her sleeve then mere humans, so should in principle be able to create the discontinuities, no matter how large you judge them to be, right? Do you agree that the Designer could, in principle, have created the current biodiversity by guiding modifications in offspring lineages of some distant primordial cell? If not, then what are the impediments to this scenario?
Joe,
We have been over this many times… You have even refused to put your after retirement career on Junk DNA…You don’t have faith?
Larry Moran is writing a book on junk DNA where he is going to claim that human genome is 90% junk… You are willing accept close to 40%…
On what evidence do you base this discrepancy in the estimates?
Please tell me something I don’t already know…
You are joking, right?
It’s impossible and I don’t base this on my own knowledge alone…
I base this on the Darwinists acknowledgment that endosymbiosis (symbiogenesis) is not possible… due to hundreds, if not thousands of genes, that are unaccounted for for this process to be even considered plausible…
Constantly, but I am not sure what you are referring to. You think “dog descends from wolf” is a killer argument for common descent? Could you explain what you find so hard to digest? In your own words?
Joe Felsenstein,
I did have some familiarity with the arguments but when I asked Larry about genetic activity during embryo development he did not have an answer. This is a big issue as we know gene expression levels change dramatically depending on the age of the organism. What looks like noise when measuring expression in a mature animal may have high levels of expression in a younger animal. What looks like noise during embryo development may have high levels of expression in a mature adult.
I am agnostic on the junk DNA discussion as I think the creationist prediction claims have no real basis as there is no model that shows that junk would not accumulate.
I also think the current evidence is inadequate to have a strong level of certainty for large amounts of junk as some of the arguments you mentioned are based on assumptions that are up for debate. I think there are segments where sequence is less critical like introns but if the nucleotides are used as spacers for gene expression timing then they would have to be called functional. Larry agrees with this point.
Regarding Mike Behe’s acceptance of common descent, all I can say is that he doesn’t believe that Darwinian processes could be responsible for common descent…
Maybe Paul Nelson could reveal some more details, as I’m not at liberty to do so…
Behe’s book reviews and his book release will also shed some light on that issue…
Darwinism? Weren’t we discussing whether Intelligent Design was compatible with common descent?
Endosymbiosis is a walk in the park for an omnipotent Designer. Someone capable of creating organisms out of thin air has no trouble putting two organisms together.
Dog descent from wolf is a killer of Darwinism…Wait for Behe’s book…
It also proves that “restricted” variations within “kinds” are possible… I wouldn’t expect cats to descend from wolves because that are not of the same “kind”…
Bill,
Nobody knows including J. Wells who thinks embryo development requires information beyond DNA… I think quantum information could be the answer…
I’m working on it… 😉
Some junk could and probably should accumulate but not what Darwinists predicted… DI with Meyer stand by their prediction that the great majority of human genome will turn out to be functional…
I’d pay for Larry’s book to be published just to see his and junk DNA supporters faces when they are proven wrong… lol
Thousands huh? 🤔
You are the one constantly bringing up Darwinism. I am just trying to establish whether ID and common descent are compatible.
Cats and wolves both belong to Carnivora, I believe. The Designer could have easily guided the evolution of both cats and wolves from the common ancestor of all Carnivora. Don’t see any impediments from ID theory (ha!).
This is FUN!
Just roll with it 😀
You’re mixing up your directions. If Larry says 90% junk, that’s 10% functional. ENCODE are now saying 40% functional, not 40% junk. 40% functional is still 60% junk, which is no use to ID.
Is there proof of how many genes are actually missing? How many are missing is not really a problem is it? It is more so where they came from… 😉
“… Lateral gene transfer would explain how eukaryotes that supposedly
evolved from an archaeal cell obtained so many bacterial genes important
to metabolism: the eukaryotes picked up the genes from bacteria and
kept those that proved useful. It would likewise explain how various archaea came to possess genes usually found in bacteria.
Some molecular phylogenetic theorists—among them, Mitchell L.
Sogin of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and Russell F. Doolittle (my very distant relative) of the University of California at
San Diego—have also invoked lateral gene transfer to explain a longstanding mystery. Many eukaryotic genes turn out to be unlike those of
any known archaea or bacteria; they seem to have come from nowhere.
Must’a been another evolutionary miracle or genespermia! lol
Uprooting the Tree of Life
W. Ford Doolittle
http://labs.icb.ufmg.br/lbem/aulas/grad/evol/treeoflife-complexcells.pdf
Still waiting for you to explain WHY that is a prediction of ID. From what first principles of ID does the prediction arise?
Larry and Joe have been saying forever that 90% of human genome is junk…
ENCODE came out with 80% functional with the possibility of 100% functionality…
Under pressure from “the lovers of scientific evidence rather than evolutionary assumptions” ENCODE adjusted their interpretation of the results mainly over the disputes of what function means or is…
Many individuals involved with ENCODE still think 80% or up of human genome is functional…Darwinists try to minimize what function means because they are married to junk DNA and Darwinism…
ID says the great majority of human genome should be functional…
In short, Darwinsts have claimed for a long time that human genome was full of junk and therefore evolution is true and ID is false…
ID had no choice but to claim that human genome would be expected to be mainly functional if they were to claim that it was designed…
Darwinists insisted any designed genome full of junk, especially human, would defeat ID and support evolution…
Bad design = No designer therefore blind dumb luck…
They didn’t bow to pressure. They realized there was a problem with their definition of ‘function’ They said a nucleotide has a function if its involved in any biochemical activity in the cell. By that definition everyone would agree that its not 80% of the genome thats functional but 100%
You prove my point…
The problem is our knowledge is limited about what most of genome does even in bacteria… Why 75% or even more of bacterial genome can’t be knocked out even though we don’t know what the majority of it does?
J-Mac,
80%? You’ve just been corrected on that. Why do you continue to repeat falsehoods?
Still waiting for evidence that Venter spent $100 million on an endosymbiosis experiment too.
You know God’s watching, right?
The funny thing about all this is that the evidence for how many genes are or aren’t ‘novel’ comes from phylogenetic analysis. You don’t believe in phylogenetic analysis, so why do you feel entitled to any conclusion drawn from it?
Rather than pretending that all there is is anomaly, you might wonder what enables something to be perceived as anomalous in the first place. How does ID explain the bimodal rooting of genes that are held in common?
So there is virtually no junk in most prokaryotes. I don’t see how that helps ID either.
Allan Miller,
I’m not sure how to tell you this but I responded to you by accident…I hope you don’t mind…
I can continue to cry me a river though…
Don’t just love Darwinism? It only predicts accurately after the fact… 😉
Puffer fish has almost no junk DNA which Darwinists predicted after that fact
What’s the ID explanation? How can puffer fish survive without junk, if it is functional?
What we would expect to see if mutations were guided is no neutral or deleterious mutations. All of the mechanisms Shapiro describes produce neutral, deleterious, and beneficial mutations, and there is no mechanistic connection between the processes that produce mutations and what would be beneficial in a given environment. Again, mutations are random WITH RESPECT TO FITNESS. This is what biologists mean by random.
They are compatible until they are not compatible.
You may be able to devolve a bicycle from an airplane but you cannot evolve an airplane from a bicycle.
I bet you know this because you’ve read it.
Animals disembarking after the flood and diversifying would have to evolve rapidly given current species. Don’t you agree? So rapid evolution, or rapid speciation, would confirm that model, wouldn’t it?
You’re confused about who is capable of critical thinking and who is not.
Yes. So why do we find the profound discontinuities at the beginning of the process rather than at the end of the process?
No idea why you bring this up. Under ID theory (snigger) how many genes are “missing” is irrelevant, because there is no limit to how many Intelligence could have created. As many as were required, would have been created de novo.
Hence the Designer could, in principle, have created all extant lineages by guiding modifications during branching evolution. I conclude that ID theory is fully compatible with common descent. Agree?