What is it with ID proponents and gambling? Or rather, what is it that makes people who play p0ker and roulette think that that gives them a relevant background for statistical hypothesis testing and an understanding of stochastic processes such as evolution? Today, “niwrad”, has a post at UD, with one of the most extraordinary garblings of evolutionary theory I think I have yet seen. He has decided that p0ker is an appropriate model this time (makes a change from coin tossing, I guess).
S/he begins:
I dedicate this short post to our great UD President Barry Arrington, who is a poker player.
Evolutionists usually claim that prerequisite for Darwinian evolution is a single self-replicating thing capable of heritable variations. From such thing evolution produced all life forms, from ameba to whales, by means of small random variations and natural selection.
Just for fun, we could metaphorically see evolution as a particular “poker game”, with the following correlations:
(1) The dealer deals shuffled cards to the players. This shuffling is analogous to the genotypic random variations.
OK, so each player is an organism. So far so good. And each has a different “genome” aka the hand of cards.
(2) The active players show their cards, and the owner of the best five-card hand wins. These players are analogous to the phenotypes, the organisms that fight for survival.
And the player herself is the phenotype. One organism survives.
(3) Players who fold and discard their cards are analogous to natural selection, by which traits that do not confer an advantage are discarded, while advantageous traits are selected for and are passed on
And all the others die. We don’t seem to have any reproduction so far, so what happens next:
(4) Higher organisms have a number of cells ranging from 10^12 to 10^16. Roughly a five-card hand has a number of molecules of that order. Any card has a pattern which identifies the card value. In our poker/evolution metaphor the patterns in a five-card hand are symbolically analogous to the specifications of the main large apparatuses of an higher organism.
Still no reproduction. But an additional piece of information: each card represents a specification for specific functional feature.
(5) Now, to make more precise our metaphor we must recall two things evolutionists state: at the beginning of evolution there is only a self-replicating thing; evolution works by small random variations in such primitive thing and its offspring. The small random variations are at the level of molecules. So it would be fully inappropriate to consider the dealer as a provider of cards in their entirety. Because in the metaphor complete cards are symbols of entire apparatuses with billion cells. Consequently, in our metaphor necessarily the dealer must provide/shuffle molecules of cards, not complete cards, to the players.
Still no reproduction. But apparently niwrad has seen the problem. Start again. This time the dealer deals five piles of molecules to each player.
Conclusion
Like incomplete and unspecified card patterns confer no advantage to a poker player, analogously, biological irreducibly complex systems missing some parts confer no advantage to an organism. Example: a fragment of white card with only a black pixel in the corner is not a valid and recognizable card; analogously an organism with a genotypic variation cannot account for, say, an entire functioning cardiovascular or nervous system, arising ex abrupto. Such useless things would be discarded by the poker player / natural selection.
So now we have every organism with a useless genome, so they all die sans issue.
As a consequence, the players will never have winning card hands. In all sessions, they will always be forced to discard what they have in their hands. No complete poker game will ever begin. Darwinian poker is eliminative, not constructive. In short Darwinian poker is a non game.
Therefore Darwinian evolution doesn’t work. Hooboy.
This poker metaphor somehow shows why not only Darwinian evolution cannot produce biologic complex IC systems, let alone organisms, but why it is a process that cannot even begin the job.
Because, apparently, it can’t explain OoL.
Even though Darwin stipulated that his theory did not account for the first self-replicating life forms; even though no “evolutionists” claims that Darwinian evolution can’t account for OoL; even though niwrad himself starts out by saying “Evolutionists usually claim that prerequisite for Darwinian evolution is a single self-replicating thing capable of heritable variations…” – s/he then presents a demonstration that Darwinian evolution cannot occur without a “single self-replicating thing capable of heritable variations”.
Yeah.
But here is the extraordinary thing: in the comments, Barry, the p0ker champ himself, leads the cheer:
Great post niwrad. So the Darwinian hand is “nothing.” Yet Darwinians, like our friend Lincoln, cling to it tenaciously. I guess they agree with Luke (from one of the best movies of all time, Cool Hand Luke): “Sometimes ‘nothing’ is a real cool hand.” 🙂
Great post? For pointing out what Darwin himself was at pains to point out in the very work in which he expounded his theory? Note that niwrad’s example assumes a “dealer” who deals out a set of genomes so useless that none of their bearers can reproduce. In fact, nowhere does he even mention reproduction. The post is entitled “Darwin’s Bluff” and niwrad ends with this thought:
A final poker concept remains to be placed in the metaphor: the bluff. Imagine a player who makes us believe he has a straight flush while having in his hands only some molecules of card. That is Darwin’s bluff – the biggest bluff in history – the claim to be able to create all life forms by unguided evolution, while it cannot produce the least organized system of the smallest living being.
I’d like to call niwrad’s (“Darwin” backwards, get it?) own bluff: Imagine a player who makes us believe that he has a straight flush, while having in his hands only some molecules of card. That is the ID bluff – fortunately not a very successful one – to persuade some people to think that ID has the killer hand that will bring the Darwinian House of Cards to the carpet, while it cannot even fill its own ID-supporting journal with anything more than review articles, a couple of theoretical models, and the odd piece of empirical research that falsifies a claim that nobody even makes.
I suggest that a first step for ID supporters is to learn what Darwinian evolution actually is – build some proper models, vary some parameters – and feel the power.
And the beauty of it is: how much more awesome would be a Designer who could dream up such a superb system, than one who has to keep tinkering with bug-butts, because the system is too buggy to evolve them on its own.
They love to use gambling as a metaphor for evolution because gambling relies upon thoroughly randomizing outcomes, and it completely avoids natural selection (some artificial selection may occur at times).
It actually fits ID fairly well, though, since ID fully lacks the regularities expected from evolution (until they smuggle these in, illegitimately), which also happen to be found in organisms. The Designer is a blank slate, that is, until they suddenly decide that something is so awesome that it “must have been designed.” But that won’t do in any honest appraisal, since we have no access to Designer as Cause, hence it could produce randomness, on up to entities that are undetectable, so far as we know.
Evolutionary limits, and the patterns arising from these, are far from random. And ID can’t explain them, preferring to attack a strawman that, for all we know, could be what the Designer would produce.
Glen Davidson
Teehee. Is Barry’s title really President? What a pompous git. Funny, you’d almost think he was selected for fitness in the environment of delusional self-reverence of the whole ID corporate enterprise. Me, me, look at me – I know better than any expert who has put in decades studying, doing the work, and refining models based on experimental results. No, don’t look at them – they’re just biased – look at me, me, me; I’m the real expert on genetics! After all, I’m a card player and who is better at intuitively understanding probability than us card players. Why, sometimes I even win real money at cards, and that proves I know what I’m talking about. Me, me, me!
Yeah, yeah, I know that wasn’t B. Arrington, Esq who implied in this case that his personal card-skill is better than an education in genetics — it was his stooge niwrad — but the attitude is so pervasive in what I’ve seen of UD that I have no doubt it’s what BA is thinking.
Sorry, Lizzie, for going so far off topic, but now that I’ve written it, I want to post it ….
I think it’s also because “random” comes into Darwinian evolution (though not in the sense most ID proponents use the word, which is more like “woah! that was random!” – i.e. without rhyme or reason or intention) and also into gambling so somehow gambling must be a model of Darwinian evolution, and if you understand gambling probabilities you must also understand biological probability distributions.
In fact, in nature most probabilities don’t result from independent events, and as gambling does (or you get booted out of the casino, or the casino loses its license), the second is usually a really really poor model for the first.
Looking at Allan Miller’s Randomness and Evolution thread, you can see that even without natural selection, fixation occurs – in other words, in an entirely “random” system, the outcome is “all heads”! Every time!
It’s just not the same system as coin tossing – there’s feedback, and the probability of the next state is a function of the previous one.
I think we’ll probably resurrect this:
http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?s=52cc69e05ce4f68b;act=ST;f=14;t=7297;st=0
Having posted several posts at PT and at TSZ pointing out earlier mistakes “niwrad” made at UD (they will be found here, here, here, and here), I am unsurprised that niwrad gets it wrong again.
If you took a large number of poker players, dealt them hands, rated the hands, and eliminated the hands of some fraction of the ones with weaker hands, you would have a rough simulation of natural selection. For replication, you would not dissolve the cards into individual molecules. Instead you would give each player a copy of one of the surviving hands, chosen at random. For mutation one would occasionally replace a card in each hand by a new, randomly drawn card. One could also recombine hands.
The fitness surface is a bit complex, but this simulation would probably make progress toward better hands, if the mutation rate was not too high.
If niwrad wants a p0ker model, here is one:
There are, say 50 players.
The dealer gives everyone one card.
The 5 with the lowest value card drop out.
The remainder go choose a partner from the audience, and gives them another copy of their own card, or another one close to it in value, or two cards whose total comes to about the same.
We now have 80 players, some with two cards. The 8 with the lowest value drop out.
The remaining 72 find partners, as before, making sure that their partner has cards with similar value to their own.
Keep going.
How many players will you end up with, and what will the average value of their hands be?
In other words, how many organisms will you end up with, and how cool will their functions be?
Barry’s back slapping is comical given the bucket-loads of fail in that post. At least understand it before not liking it, guys…
Richardthughes,
I would, however, give Barry a free pass for calling himself “President” of the site. On a blog you can call yourself anything, even Emperor. I run a weekly seminar on population genetics at our university. When I send out the weekly email notification, I usually sign myself with my name and style myself “CEO” of the seminar. Everybody’s a CEO these days, so I might as well be too.
heh
I like “Queen Elizabeth” myself.
There was a comment about great fictional detectives, who were able to leap from unwarranted assumptions to foregone conclusions without actually traversing the space between. And the fictional detectives did it the same way the UD people do – they knew whodunnit before they started.
So I think this is just another rather boring attempt to rationalize preconvictions with yet another inappropriate analogy (ID people love analogies, the less applicable the better). Barry isn’t applauding the analogy, he’s applauding the conclusion. Which is all that matters, of course.
partially edited transcript of S2E2 The Hounds of Baskerville:
Well, it is a brilliant display of deduction. Even if he did know the answer, at least part of it, in advance 🙂
The failure of ID’s premise is made plain if we push their gambling metaphor to logical/theological conclusions:
By definition, the outcome of a blind, undirected process is not subjected to divine intervention. As a result, any given outcome may fall outside of God’s intention, and eventually some number of outcomes will certainly be so. Roulette is a good example of a blind, undirected process, ergo some consequences that extend outward from the Roulette table will fall outside of God’s intention. Thus God’s plan can be altered, even circumvented by Roulette wheels and other instances of chance.
Substitute ‘Darwinian’ Evolution for Roulette, and you can understand why ID proponents are predominantly conservative (religious not political) Protestants.
Of course chance is real. And of course chance (or free will) does not fall outside of God’s plan and/or God’s intention. I doubt you will find many ID proponents to argue otherwise — except for evolution. And that’s the contradiction that ID proponents fail to see.
Why is God’s plan not challenged by stochastic processes like the Roulette wheel, or the fickle, selfish whims of human beings, but becomes a helpless captive to the all powerful random events that constitute evolutionary history?
Whatever you wish, Your Majesty 🙂
TL/DR: The scientifically accurate labeling of a process as blind and undirected applies only to this universe and that which it contains, not to God or God’s plan. Thus the blind and undirected processes of evolution are simultaneously known to God and accounted for.
“He” meaning Holmes, or Doyle?
Meaning Holmes. I think it’s interesting that this sequence is written against convention, that the great detective is not starting with a blank slate and examining all the evidence with an unbiased eye to come to a conclusion, but rather he gives in the punchline that he had prior information. He already knew the answer, or at least part of it, and the bravura display is him showing us what pieces of evidence he picks which would support that answer he already had. I saw it as meta; Sherlock giving us a peek at the process by which his author constructs Sherlock’s dialog to carry us along to accept the author’s conclusion without doubt.
It’s not an important point, but I thought it nicely illustrated something related to your comment that UDers reach conclusions the same way fictional detectives do. That is, the answers are pre-written for them, and any interest for the audience is only in seeing what – if anything – they pick to support their supposedly independent conclusions.
Of course, Sherlock does it with more intelligence, humor, and charm than any IDist ever born. 🙂
Even Evolution theory [I think it is a conjecture more than a theory] is ‘pre-written’, as is every model.You are fitting fossil evidence to the model to test the model.
I think niward’s model is conceptual – not a mathematical model to be tested against probabilities.
Wasn’t Sherlock Holmes an ID-ist? 🙂
What about the original geologists who went looking for evidence of a young earth and came away believers in an old?
Or don’t you know your history?
Doubtful. Holmes didn’t give a tinker’s damn about anything that did not directly impinge upon his narrow interests, as was conclusively demonstrated in A Study in Scarlet:
I think it likely that Holmes would ignore ID, on the grounds that the existence, or lack thereof, of the Intelligent Designer “would not make a pennyworth of difference to [him] or to [his] work”.
I am not an YEC ! I have said that before !
Did you read the link : Theology of Holmes ? I admit I was surprised to find such a link !
… and so would Darwin’s theory
… by that logic he would ignore Darwin’s theory too
You are absolutely right that theories (conjectures, hypotheses) are written before they are tested. However, the fundamental methodology of science is to fit the model to the data, not the data to the model. The model is evaluated by how well it fits the data. If the fit is poor, then the model is poor.
The model is fitted to fossil, and other, evidence. If the fit is good, the model is good. If the fit is poor, the model is poor. This is how HGT was discovered – a tree model of genetic descent had small but systematic errors that required a revision of the model to include non-longitudinal vectors of genetic transfer. Then that model – the HGT model – had to be fitted to new data. With great success.
Sure, it’s conceptual. But what it reveals is that niwrad’s concept of what evolutionary theory actually proposes is wildly wrong. His conceptual model doesn’t actually include the fundamentals of the theory – reproduction with variation.
If niwrad’s point was simply that Darwinian evolution can’t happen because it can’t account for its own prerequisites, all he’d be saying is “ah! But Darwin’s theory can’t account for OoL!” Which is a bit like saying “ah! But Newton’s theory can’t account for Big Bang!” Nobody claims that Darwin’s theory accounts for OoL.
You don’t need a p0ker analogy to make that point. There is no “Darwin’s Bluff”.
As I said, niwrad has Darwin backwards – he starts with the last sentence of Origin, and dismisses it on that basis.
Also from A Study in Scarlet, chapter 5:
Okay, so you’re not YEC but you’re still ignorant of the actual history. You claim that we scientists “are fitting fossil evidence to the model to test the model.” but in reality it was the exact opposite. Christian geologists in the 18th centurty — before Darwin and before any model of “evolution” — went looking for evidence of the Flud, but since they were honest scientists they did not force-fit their new discoveries to the then-popular (Flud) model. Their data on geological strata, fossils, and million-year spans of time for visible processes of erosion and sedimentation demanded a new model. They fit the new model to the data, not the other way around.
In fact they did more or less force-fit their discoveries onto their model, hence catastrophism. I’m not faulting them, since modifying the reigning model usually seems to work (of course the fact that creation had never been based upon disciplined empiricism makes modifying that model questionable). In this case, though, it didn’t, since organisms in the “new creations” weren’t really new at all, merely modifications of what had gone before, and, in some cases, morphologically quite similar organisms persisted.
To really start explaining things required a new idea, evolution, which people played around with prior to Darwin, without being especially convincing. Darwin’s model was fairly convincing, although being high status didn’t hurt his chances of getting a good hearing any either. Of course it still left out a lot (inheritance mechanism(s) in particular), and the model has had to change a lot in a number of ways, although natural selection remains crucial.
Evolution (Darwinian) is the model that was created to fit the data. ID hasn’t been since around Paley’s time, and it was always rather difficult for biologists to see how to explain the extremely derivative nature of life on any sort of designing intelligence.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
Catastrophism was one theory developed to account for the newly discovered evidence. There were others and there was a lot of back and forth. “The rocks don’t liie” is a good read.
The more you look at nature, the more you will be convinced Darwin doesn’t make sense. Let me take a simple example- Have you seen butterfly wings with images (not pattern) on wings? Have you seen the camouflages of butterfly ?
Have a look here :
Butterfly Camoflouges
Can you imagine ANY THEROY(don’t answer without looking at the images) which would account for, say, Gonepteryx rhamni designed as leaf ? This is definitely not fractal mathematics.
Yep.
butterfly alphabet
Easily. Ancestral butterflies which even slightly resembled leaves had less chance of being spotted and eaten than those who didn’t. They mated and passed on those genes. The more their genes made them look like a leaf the better chance of survival they had. After millions of generations with selection and feedback you get some pretty amazing natural camouflage. It’s not unique to butterflies or even insects. Lots of animal species have evolved natural camouflage in the same way.
I’ve never been able to understand why the notion of differential survival rates, and the continuous refinement to improve those rates, is such a conceptual mystery to some people. To the point where they’re willing to sincerely believe in sheer magic, no mechanism known, necessary, or required. And yet these same people regularly raise forks to their mouths using a feedback process of continuous refinement to hit the target.
My speculation is that the conceptual barrier lies in the notion of process. If process makes sense, then increasingly effective camouflage (those with less effective camouflage not surviving) seems stone obvious. If process is not considered, then I suppose magic is all that’s left.
Doesn’t seem mysterious at all, to me. The people you speak of? Their minds have been colonized by a memeplex which is contradicted, in several parts, by evolution, and as a result, the memeplex absolutely, flatly requires that these people must reject evolution, no ifs, ands, or buts. These people are typically able to comprehend specific, individual components of the theory of evolution, but they are psychologically incapable of putting the pieces together, because their memplex-colonized thought patterns flatly will not allow them to make that final, fatal leap of insight. To these people, absolutely anything is more palatable than acknowledging the validity of any component part of evolutionary theory, let alone the validity of evolutionary theory in toto.
Thorton the Storyteller!
Storytelling is great and all.
But you missed the part where you explain that not only one bug mistook the organism with an ever so slight resemblance to a natural object, but a slew of bugs all made the same mistake. But how could that be unless the likeness was more than just a slight resemblance? Rather it had to be a pretty damn good likeness from the get-go to fool the large number of bugs required to allow the organism with the likeness to get past the predator in order to proliferate in the population.
Ah, but i guess that’s where Thorton The Storyteller’s rhetorical skills come in; to cross the ‘I gotta fool a thousand reapers with my baseball cap in order to make it to Tuesday’ bridge.
By the way Thorton the Storyteller, why haven’t you posted on Cornelius Hunter’s blog these past few weeks??? Comments are open, if you didn’t know. Look forward to your stylish evolution inspired graffiti art over there.
Here ya go Steve – since you accept evolution now, here’s a nice little PBS science piece on the evolution of insect camouflage.
Evolution of insect camouflage
I can link you to lots of scientific papers with specific examples of animal camouflage if you’re interested in learning. Just let me know, K?
what possible survival advantage will alphabets give to a butterfly unless you believe predators will avoid alphabets?
1) The butterfly wings are not a single structure. They are composed of MILLIONS OF NANO SCALES( see Electron Microscope images of butterfly wings) arranged precisely in channels. The random undirected mutations will have to account for not only nano structure arrangement to form a leave shape, but also the venation patterns and the circular brown spot on the ‘leaf’ pattern plus the colorations of ‘leaf’, spot and venation pattern.
2) Given that REGULAR predators of butterfly (not the occasional monkey) have simple nervous system with simple visual acuity, why would butterfly wings mimic not just the colors, but even venation and brown spot too ?
I am particularly astonished that all this develops in pupa before the beautiful butterfly emerges.
Yes, you are quite right. The correct answer is of course that the designer designed each individual butterfly wing individually.
Out of interest, do you know when/how/where that happens?
Bugs can attempt to mate with a model many times bigger then any possible mate could be, but the colors and shape are right so….
So fooling a bug might be a problem Steve for you, but it’s really not so troublesome.
Hmm. Thank you for admitting you can’t explain the nano scale patterns of the wings, the venation, the coloration by random mutation.
Out of interest, does CC or Steve who think that “wings that look like other things must have been designed” care to express an opinion as to how many generations of butterfly they think we’re talking about here?
10?
50?
What?
Natural mutation provides the raw material that is then available to selection and will be selected on the basis of how well it camouflages the organism in some circumstances.
Now, what’s your version of the same?
Is that you admitting that you can’t explain it yourself? What is the design “explanation”? Is it “it was designed” or “the designer wanted it that way”?
Come up with a better alternative to what I just said and I’ll promote that view instead. But that’s never going to happen, is it?
Patterns on animals has been the subject of much research. Where the tiger got it’s stripes etc. There are good models that can reproduce such.
Where are the ID equivalents?
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/newsevents/news/newsrecords/2012/02Feb/Scientists-prove-Turings-tiger-stripe-theory-.aspx
How does this validate either tiger scales or nano structure with venation pattern of butterfly ? The reseacrher studied the development of the regularly spaced ridges found in the roof of the mouth in mice. They identified morphogens for mice mouth – FGF and Shh.
…but wait…Thorton the Storyteller points us in the direction of PBS, another storyteller explaining how evolution evolved biomimicry.
…but where is the science???….its got to be under that leaf..er, .leaf bug….er, well you know what i mean?
Hint: Those aren’t really alphabet letters. They’re bright patterns which happen to resemble letters. They have the same survival advantage as all bright coloration in butterflies does.
Genetic variation and selection explains the arrangements quite nicely. Aren’t you past the “gee it’s soooo complex it must be DESIGNED!” stage yet?
Reference please to the REGULAR predators of butterflies having poor visual acuity. Once again, the closer the insect mimics a real leaf the better chance it has of surviving. It’s not rocket science.
Here’s another nice overview of insect defenses including mimicry from the biology department at N.C. State
Insect Defenses
Read the part about protective coloration and particularly the part about predator-prey “arms races”.
Yes Steve, we know all too well what you mean. You’re excited about finally accepting evolution and want to learn more! If you like I’ll explain the difference between Batesian and Mullerian mimicry for you. Are you interested? In the meantime there have been thousands of scientific papers and articles written on the topic.
Animal camouflage: current issues and new perspectives
I do wish however that you’d please tell us about the evidence that convinced you macro-evolution is real and has happened in the past. That evidence may just help other ID-Creationists accept the scientific fact of evolution too.
No, because it makes little sense that mutation- a stochastic process- happening inside the butterfly can replicate a leaf’s features existing outside the body – so accurately, even down to the brown spot! Imagine the number of variations of not just colors, but venation patterns and the form of the brown spots that needs to be formed and tested against predators [even assuming co-evolution] to perfect the leaf.
If there was a mechanism which showed that the mutation recognizes the environment and then mutates, there would be no problem in accepting the theory, although then mutation wouldn’t be a random process.
It makes perfects sense if you understand biochemistry. Even though mutations are stochastic, the chemistry and physics that takes place in the interplay between the genome and the environment isn’t, outcomes are constrained by the properties of the interacting molecules. Carbon atoms all have the same structure in the distribution of the electron cloud around the nucleus, so does oxygen, hydrogen, phosphorous etc. etc. all have unique atomic structures that make their interactions predictable.
Some molecules simply fit together in specific ways because of their shape and polarity. That means there’s only one way for them to stick together(if at all) and until they bounce into each other where the two spatially fitting interfaces are close together, they will simply rub off each other and keep bumping around. Sort of like small pieces of plastic with magnets in specific locations. Only when they meet at certain 3dimensional angles do they “stick” because the magnets are close enough together to attract each other.
Such specific interactions can cascade outwards through very simple physical processes from a single starting point, in a way “guiding” the formation of a much larger structure from the 3D properties of the individual molecules. The simplest example is crystal formation, like in snowflakes. Here the simple tetrahedal arrangement of the electron cloud in the oxygen atom in water molecules determines the shape of snowflakes, wich always form these branching tetrahedal patterns which ultimately reduce to the oxygen atom in the water molecule.
In the same way, macroscopic structures in biology are determined though cascades of interactions from the simple properties of the molecules that make up the whole structure.
So no, there’s nothing mysterious or magical about this. It’s how physics and chemistry works. Here mutation can alter expression patterns, such as changing the timing at which certain new proteins are introduced in the formation of larger structures, which subsequently alter their shape and pattern. The mutation doesn’t have to “know” or “guide” or in any way be “aware” of all the individual interactions that take place. These are determined locally by the physical and chemical properties of the interacting molecules.
Or a mutation in one of the proteins istelf can alter the structure of the protein in some small way, which can also lead to a cascade of changes in the way all the interactions take place during pattern formation in development.
You can read about this in any good book on biochemistry. Possibly supplanted with some developmental biology too.
I guess you don’t have to think the evolutionary model, that postulates that variation among individuals in a population of, say, insects that, for example, are predated on by birds result in the more visible being picked off, leaving the less visible to breed and the resulting reiteration producing change in the genotype and expressed in the phenotype, is a complete or even convincing model.
Do you consider other explanations of how organisms we come across seem so well adapted for the lifestyle they follow and location they are found in? I’ve looked at something called “front-loading” that postulates the genentic material is already present and just gets expressed at the appropriate moment. Seems to me this has much less explanatory power as it doesn’t explain how the genetic material arises nor how the right gene expression gets in step with the right niche.