Common Descent by ID?

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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…

406 thoughts on “Common Descent by ID?”

  2. phoodoo: Haha, so of course you think this is an example of evolution.That figures.

    For a while there were white and brown moths, then for a while there were more brown ones (maybe, that’s not even certain) then later there were both brown and white ones again.

    Oh, the power of natural selection in action!

    Oh how the peppered moths have evolved. Once there were two colors. Now there are two colors, imagine what it will be like in 1 million years!

    So you accept that natural selection ensures the survival advantage of one variant over another. So your previous post was an irrelevancy.

    I rest my case. “I feel like I’ve already won”.

  3. phoodoo: Probably the biggest factor is the street you were born on, or the area code you grow up. That will determine how many kids you have.

    Or one’s religious beliefs.

  4. Rumraket: So you accept that natural selection ensures the survival advantage of one variant over another.

    Bad news. They all survived.

    Tough loss.

  5. Allan Miller: It’s an example of changing frequency through differential reproductive success.

    Every birth is a change in frequency. No two sets of DNA are alike. Who doubts this?

    That doesn’t turn a duck beak into a poison gun turret.

  7. phoodoo: Why?

    For one thing, we have tokenised the garnering of resources. When falcons start wandering down the shops for their tins of rabbit, we might see a diminution of selective favouring of such capacities as eyesight, flight efficiency, talon grip &c

  8. phoodoo: Every birth is a change in frequency.No two sets of DNA are alike.Who doubts this?

    That doesn’t turn a duck beak into a poison gun turret.

    Er … no. No, it doesn’t. But you are arguing (today, at least) that there is no environmental consistency favouring any trait.

  9. Allan Miller: Er … no. No, it doesn’t. But you are arguing (today, at least) that there is no environmental consistency favouring any trait.

    No, favoring any trait long enough for it continue to get another fortunate mutation, and another and another..slowly sculpting a cow into a whale, then into a flying aardvark velociraptor that mimic’s a ceiling fan.

    THAT kind of consistency there is zero evidence for. But instead you suggest we ignore what our eyes tell us.

  10. phoodoo: Bad news. They all survived.

    Tough loss.

    LOL. So now we have gone through this:

    You: There is no differential in reproductive success
    Me: Here are examples ABCDEFG
    You: Okay but you haven’t explained how the variants arose
    Me: No, but you claimed there was no differential reproductive success
    You: The variant that dropped in frequency didn’t go out of existence nya nya

    Well done phoodoo. Well done.

  11. phoodoo: No, favoring any trait long enough for it continue to get another fortunate mutation, and another and another..slowly sculpting a cow into a whale, then into a flying aardvark velociraptor that mimic’s a ceiling fan.

    Never mind all that; you have just been arguing that the environment isn’t even consistent enough to get one. Backing off from that claim now are we?

    THAT kind of consistency there is zero evidence for.But instead you suggest we ignore what our eyes tell us.

    What, so you wander down the street, glance at a toad and decide that selection isn’t happening? I think you need a little more rigour in your experimental design.

  12. Rumraket: You: There is no differential in reproductive success

    Yea, never said that.

    In fact, what I said was you can have different reproductive success in each generation, and still get nowhere.

    But yes, well done indeed.

  13. phoodoo: No, favoring any trait long enough for it continue to get another fortunate mutation, and another and another..slowly sculpting a cow into a whale, then into a flying aardvark velociraptor that mimic’s a ceiling fan.

    So some mammal lives in water, it gets a single mutations that makes it slight more capable of this life in water. This trait rises in frequency in the population.
    The organisms descendants continues to live in water, but any moment now the water will… stop working like water does, so another mutation won’t help it? I like how you just declare that this couldn’t possibly happen.

    THAT kind of consistency there is zero evidence for.

    Sure there is, it’s called comparative genetics. That’s how you determine the longer-term effects of selection than are visible in a human lifetime. How long have you lived?

    Of course, one can just observe evolution of organisms with very short generation times, like bacteria, fruit flies, and so on.

    But instead you suggest we ignore what our eyes tell us.

    That some environmental challenges on Earth have persisted for almost the entire history of the planet, like the ocean and the basic physics of aquadynamic drag?

  14. Allan Miller: Never mind all that; you have just been arguing that the environment isn’t even consistent enough to get one.

    So where’s the one?

    Is one too much to ask?

  15. phoodoo: In fact, what I said was you can have different reproductive success in each generation, and still get nowhere.

    You can imagine whatever you want, what matters is what the evidence shows. Your intuitions about the frequency with which certain changes happen are neither here nor there.

  16. phoodoo: So where’s the one?

    Is one too much to ask?

    Do you want to be present at the moment the last bearer of an allele dies? Is this the sticking point?

  17. phoodoo: So where’s the one?

    Is one too much to ask?

    van’t Hof AE, Edmonds N, Dalíková M, Marec F, Saccheri IJ. Industrial melanism in British peppered moths has a singular and recent mutational origin. Science.2011 May 20;332(6032):958-60. DOI: 10.1126/science.1203043

    Van’t Hof AE, Campagne P, Rigden DJ, Yung CJ, Lingley J, Quail MA, Hall N,
    Darby AC, Saccheri IJ. The industrial melanism mutation in British peppered moths is a transposable element. Nature. 2016 Jun 2;534(7605):102-5. doi: 10.1038/nature17951.

  21. T_aquaticus: Much of science is based on modeling probabilities.

    I was talking about the infant in the pram. Somehow, some way, Maynard Smith managed to determine, scientifically no doubt, that this was just a case of bad luck and that it had nothing to do with fitness. It’s laughable. You may as well admit that you can attribute anything you like to “bad luck: or “good luck” and just drop the whole fitness nonsense. Or is it only when good luck is involved that fitness can be taken into account?

    Maynard Smith’s claim is scientific nonsense.

  23. Allan Miller: It’s presentation slides rather than a paper, but this is using GA as one possible approach to rapidly finding stable configurations in de novo protein design

    Scanning quickly through it, bells went off at “search algorithm.”

    🙂

  24. Mung: I was talking about the infant in the pram. Somehow, some way, Maynard Smith managed to determine, scientifically no doubt, that this was just a case of bad luck and that it had nothing to do with fitness. It’s laughable. You may as well admit that you can attribute anything you like to “bad luck: or “good luck” and just drop the whole fitness nonsense. Or is it only when good luck is involved that fitness can be taken into account?

    Exactly!

  25. Rumraket: The mysterious invisible designer is a bit of an artist, creating animals that look like things in their surroundings just for the heck of it?

    And providing a way for them to adapt if the surroundings change from dark to light or light to dark, obviously. I don’t know why you can’t see the hand of God here. 😉

  26. Allan Miller: What, so you wander down the street, glance at a toad and decide that selection isn’t happening?

    If it gets run over by a car, it’s just bad luck, that’s all. THEN we can tell that selection is not happening.

  27. phoodoo: In fact, what I said was you can have different reproductive success in each generation, and still get nowhere.

    DNA_Jock will be by in a moment to berate Rumraket.

  29. Mung: If it gets run over by a car, it’s just bad luck, that’s all. THEN we can tell that selection is not happening.

    And if walks past a snake, also bad luck.

  30. Mung: And providing a way for them to adapt if the surroundings change from dark to light or light to dark, obviously. I don’t know why you can’t see the hand of God here.

    How does the hand of God change the color from light to dark, specifically?

  35. Allan Miller: It’s random chance, you say?

    Mutations are consistent with a model where they are random with respect to fitness. This has been the case for 60 years now.

  36. T_aquaticus: Mutations are consistent with a model where they are random with respect to fitness.This has been the case for 60 years now.

    I know, just mocking a common Creationist stance.

  37. So…has anyone been able to dig out the Darwinian prediction of 40% junk DNA in human genome? No? How about 10%?

    I’m sure someone can get 97% or even as high as 98%?
    Or will creationists be blamed, again?

  38. Allan Miller: I know, just mocking a common Creationist stance.

    That’s allowed.

    Shouldn’t there be a term though for selected by bad luck and another term for selected by good luck?

  39. Mung: I was talking about the infant in the pram. Somehow, some way, Maynard Smith managed to determine, scientifically no doubt, that this was just a case of bad luck and that it had nothing to do with fitness. It’s laughable. You may as well admit that you can attribute anything you like to “bad luck: or “good luck” and just drop the whole fitness nonsense. Or is it only when good luck is involved that fitness can be taken into account?

    Maynard Smith’s claim is scientific nonsense.

    I think you may be taking a bit of whimsy a tad too seriously. You buy the bit about levitation, but describing a lightning strike as misfortune is beyond the pale? 😀

  40. J-Mac:
    So…has anyone been able to dig out the Darwinian prediction of 40% junk DNA in human genome? No? How about 10%?

    You read the paper by Ohno?

    How’s 100% coming along?

  41. Allan Miller: I think you may be taking a bit of whimsy a tad too seriously.

    i do think he was trying to make a serious point without having really thought about it in any meaningful way. Presumably his point had something to do with fitness. Fitness is only applicable to those who are not unlucky?

  42. Mung: i do think he was trying to make a serious point without having really thought about it in any meaningful way. Presumably his point had something to do with fitness. Fitness is only applicable to those who are not unlucky?

    I’m willing to bet he gave the subject more thought than you.

    As he clearly states in the first sentence, the fitness he is discussing is a property of a class of individuals, not simply of each individual. Now, when there is only one individual, you can’t get a meaningful statistic for mean offspring number, because chance plays a much stronger role in small samples. Of course there is a mean, but it’s not indicative of the performance of that genotype in multiple copy, based as it is upon a single event. But what if it became more common? A clearer picture emerges from repeat trials.

    When rare – and particularly when recessive – genes can only spread by drift. They may not impact every life. But when numbers increase, you start to expose any selective effects the allele may have, just as multiple throws might show a bias in a dice not visible on any one throw.

    Now, you could try and derive grand principles from what happens when you only have one copy of something, but …

  43. A similar issue arises with public health, or associative trials. You take some factor and count mortality rates. Any one death may well be nothing to do with the factor in question. And you could say the same about every death, examined individually, so far as you can tell. But if A suffers 10% more mortality than B, you might start to think something was going on, which you can only see by summary statistics, not looking separately at singletons.

  44. J-Mac:
    So…has anyone been able to dig out the Darwinian prediction of 40% junk DNA in human genome? No? How about 10%?

    Junk DNA is not a Darwinian prediction, it’s a population genetics prediction, and it involves more than 40% of the genome. Population genetics was not around when Darwin wrote his books on evolution.

    J-Mac:
    I’m sure someone can get 97% or even as high as 98%?

    Maybe. I don’t know. We could start with the fact that around 50% of the human genome consists of transposons with disabling mutations. After that, other than getting better estimates based on population genetics, I don’t know where else to go. There’s retro-pseudogenes, but I don’t know how much they cover, there’s other kinds of pseudogenes, but, again, I don’t know how much they cover, there’s inserted retroviruses, but I don’t know how much they cover either. Then there’s selfish DNA, which I would not call "junk," so it would not count in my list, but maybe it counts in the views of other scientists. That's a conceptual problem. In the end, I'd leave that to others to calculate, since I don't care enough to start producing my own numbers.

    J-Mac:
    Or will creationists be blamed, again?

    Be blamed for what? For their ignorance? Well, they’re too blame for that. Ignorance can easily be fixed. It’s a matter of reading for comprehension. For the amount of junk DNA in the human genome? Don’t be silly, that is beyond anybody’s control.

  45. Entropy,

    Why do you get angry when I try to show you that Darwinian predictions “adjust” as the evidence shows they are …you know… wrong?
    If you don’t have access to the Darwinian prediction that claimed that human genome must be 98% junk, 97%, 90 % 75%… 40% and so on, I’d be glad to show you where to find it in your own ‘bible’…

    I hope you are well…🤣

  46. Junk DNA is such an embarrassing prediction by Darwinian Secret Service that I’m willing to pay for anyone’s book to be published claiming human genome is over 60% junk…Larry Moran?

  47. Neil Rickert: It was fit enough that it was able to take advantage of its good luck.

    You mean it didn’t get run over by a car when the frog walked past?

  48. Neil Rickert: It was fit enough that it was able to take advantage of its good luck.

    Or did you mean it didn’t get picked up by an eagle right as the frog was walking by?

  49. Entropy: Junk DNA is not a Darwinian prediction, it’s a population genetics prediction, and it involves more than 40% of the genome. Population genetics was not around when Darwin wrote his books on evolution.

    Maybe. I don’t know. We could start with the fact that around 50% of the human genome consists of transposons with disabling mutations. After that, other than getting better estimates based on population genetics, I don’t know where else to go. There’s retro-pseudogenes, but I don’t know how much they cover, there’s other kinds of pseudogenes, but, again, I don’t know how much they cover, there’s inserted retroviruses, but I don’t know how much they cover either. Then there’s selfish DNA, which I would not call “junk,” so it would not count in my list, but maybe it counts in the views of other scientists. That’s a conceptual problem. In the end, I’d leave that to others to calculate, since I don’t care enough to start producing my own numbers.

    Be blamed for what? For their ignorance? Well, they’re too blame for that. Ignorance can easily be fixed. It’s a matter of reading for comprehension. For the amount of junk DNA in the human genome? Don’t be silly, that is beyond anybody’s control.

    I’m not a “creationist” you think I am…Why would you even put me in the category of “creationists” like Byers? If you don’t want to converse with me, just say so…

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