Recently, I have been awestruck by the statement of one of the “reputable” regulars at TSZ that evolutionary theory doesn’t need to be subjected to any experimental testing or experimental verification…
How do you like that?
He erroneously used the famous experiment that verified Einstein’s prediction of gravity’s ability to bend light. Here are the details:
See? Experiments don’t need to be run in the lab, and they can still be valid experiments.
While this kind of statement is nothing new to me that Darwinists deny or ignore the need for the experimental verification of their evolutionary claims, on the other hand, they demand ID to be subjected to the scientific method processes for their claims to be verified…Hypocrisy at its best…
So, why can’t evolution be tested?
For those who are not well familiarized with the scientific method, it is probably a good idea to review some of the requirements of the scientific theory, or hypothesis, just to realize what an impossible task Darwinists would face even if they would like to verify their evolutionary speculations by experiments… While the definitions of the scientific method vary slightly depending on where you look, most scientific methods of a theory or a hypothesis need to meet the 3 main criteria:
- It needs to be observable (one kind of animal evolving into another: organs in transition, the third hand evolving to hold the cellphone while I’m driving)
- It needs to make accurate predictions (If we tweak this gene this is going to begin to evolve, such as a change the body plans from 5 pound land walking animal to 50 ton whale)
- It needs to be replicated by experiments (bacteria without a flagellum put under selective pressure to evolve something resembling a flagellum or a propeller…
Anyone who has been following TSZ and my OPs knows that my calling on the supporters of evolution to help their belief system to meet the criteria of a scientific theory or scientific hypothesis is not new… The public admission by some that evolution doesn’t need to be subjected to experimental testing reached the new, unacceptable levels of ignorance by Darwinists, especially in the view of their arrogant insistence that ID would be subjected to experimental testing to be proven as a scientific theory or hypothesis…
Darwinists either don’t know, or choose not to know, but if they subjected evolution to experimental testing they could prove their theory or hypothesis right and, at the same time, ID wrong…
So, why not do it?
I guess the only explanation for the phenomenon is that Darwinists have not much faith in their own beliefs… It is just used as a facade to make their s”intelligence” look less ludicrous…
BruceS,
Really.
That surely is a cool experiment. There are multiple examples of such large experiments, e.g. David Reznicks Trinidad guppy project, which demonstrated rapid evolution of life history traits in guppies living in river ponds, in response to predation pressure.
I swear that J-Mac must be browsing the internet with his eyes closed.
This is why the concept of Darwinian evolution is so problematic.
You can’t have rapid evolution, just because there is pressure to do so, if we are to believe the Darwinian nonsense. That’s the opposite of Darwinian evolution. Why do evolutionists just gloss this over?
You were waiting for the right random mutations, and you got them fast, because they were needed?
Come on.
Of course. I beg your pardon. What I meant to say was that there was rapid evolution when nasty big fish were present that ate the guppies, because guppies with certain heritable traits had higher reproductive success than other guppies that did not have those traits.
No, the variation was already there: Most populations not inhabiting petri dishes in the lab have standing genetic variation.
Corneel,
So why call that evolution?
Its like if a fire swept through a village, and all the fast people got away, but the slow ones who couldn’t outrun the fire died.
Would we call that evolution?
Because that’s part of how it happens. How come you’ve rejected evolution for eons and you didn’t know this?
Perhaps if escaping fires was a constant-enough feature in the success of the population and then, eventually, genes involved in being better able to escape those fires started prevailing in the population. Then we’d have an example of evolution by natural selection.
Then we get into those details about population bottlenecks, their effect in random genetic drift, whether the population intermingles with other, less-fire-stimulated populations, etc. Then we’d talk about evolution actually happening constantly and that natural selection is mostly about explaining hereditary adaptations, etc. But let’s not make it too complicated for now.
If their ability to run fast is a heritable trait they can pass on to their offspring, then yes. Evolution is something that happens to populations, not to individuals. The genetic and phenotypic makeup of the population changes if all the slow people die. Then the genetic makeup of the population has become exclusively the faster version.
Sure, mutations have to arise at some point, and they do. The standing variation in a population is the variation generated by many previous generations of mutations. Not when they are needed, rather they constantly accumulate and affect pretty much all attributes of the organism, such that all these attributes currently exist on some spectrum. At any given moment, any population that hasn’t passed through some extreme bottleneck recently will have every organismal attribute represented by individuals across a spectrum, normally following a Gaussian distribution. The funny thing is only evolution actually makes sense of and explains this phenomenon.
Why is it that there is so much variation in all our attributes? Why does it follow a Gaussian distribution? We aren’t clones. Why aren’t we clones? The answer is mutations. It’s a byproduct of ages of transgenerational accumulation of mutations in ancestral populations.
Thanks for the link. I looked at the blurb you linked only, so I don’t know the details of the guppy experiment.
What struck me about the mice experiment as Atlantic described it was the research on the genome changes that dove the phenotype changes.
What I find interesting is that populations that survive a bottleneck can re-acquire diversity, through drift. This isn’t widely discussed.
So can we say that there is two types of evolution, one that just changes the frequency of traits already present and the other producing novel traits? The guppies example demonstrates the first type of evolution but not the second type? Is this not an important distinction?
If there is a related well-characterised model organism available, as in the case of the mice, genetic dissection of the selection response is often attempted. Some success stories are known for traits that have genes with large effects present (pigmentation often does) but these researches often yield frustatingly few results for more complex traits. I can tell from personal experience that variation in longevity is a bit harder to crack.
The answer to that question hinges on the definition of “novel traits”. One thing that is not often appreciated in these discussions is that selection can change the phenotype of a population outside of the range of the original population without adding new mutations. Does exceedingly high length or speed or resistance, not encountered in the ancestral population, count as a novel trait? I say it does. Yet the novel phenotype is the product of a novel combination of pre-existing variants.
I think this is one of the cases mentioned by Jonathan Losos in his book. A book i enjoyed and recommend.
Only if they left more offspring.
Why do you say this? If individuals did not change there would be no diversity in the population, and we look at individuals to see that evolution took place.
I don’t think that would be helpful – or at least, they already have suitable labels, which calling them ‘evolution 1’ and ‘evolution 2’ would not improve.
Evolution has components, among which are mutation and selection. Mutation (and recombination) are the presumed origin of the standing variation upon which selection (and drift) acts.
Uh, no.
There is no reason to say this.
There is also no reason to call the existence of a farm full of various dog breeds, some of which die, evolution. But this is what they are trying to do.
That would be the first type of evolution as per my previous post.
I wonder why the author of this article uses some of the phrases I a read in the text? From the article
How do they distinguish between the ‘delta-Ser mutation’ and the presumed original version? Instead of calling it a mutation I think a better term would be an alternative version of the gene.
And why does Yong say that “It forces Agouti to work alone” when it would be just as correct to say it allows it to work alone?
IMO this is a good example of the plasticity of species which allows them to survive in a changing environment.
Or one can observe the finches with a larger beak adapting to the rapidly changing environment… two base pair changes out of 1.5 billion in genome within one generation which often disappear in the next when condition go back to normal…
Hybridization or Devolution by Mike Behe? Both?
Populations are always diverging. So, this “already present” is a bit of a misconception. Populations have internal diversity, and the diversity is in constant “renovation,” with new alleles and new genes coming and going all the time. Some alleles and some genes will be advantageous under some circumstances, thus making the genes/alleles more prevalent in the population, at the expense of other genes and alleles. Diversity is dynamic.
In that case it would not be the genes themselves, but the way the genes are manipulated, that cause the changes. I would agree with that.
I’m more interested in what the facts are than what may be helpful to some point of view. Would you say that the two types of evolution I gave are factual? Do you think that micro and macro evolution are equivalent terms? Do you think that it is helpful the multiple ways the term ‘mutation’ is used?
I’ve directed these questions at you but I wouldn’t mind hearing the opinion of others too.
Mutations are any heritiable change in DNA sequence. This includes, but not limited to, substitutions, insertions, deletions, recombination, trasposon insertions, endogenous retroviruses, and gene duplications. The smallest unit of evolution is a single mutation, and large scale evolutionary changes over time are just an accumulation of these singular mutational events. If walking to the curb by putting one foot in front of the other is microevolution, then walking to the store 1 mile away using the same process is macroevolution.
So in these cases of the mice and the guppies have they mentioned any new alleles or genes appearing?
I agree that diversity is dynamic. Heraclitus was right in that everything is in a state of flux. How we make sense of the dynamism is where differences of opinions arise.
So what would taking a flight to another continent be?
T_aquaticus,
Like dogs? Are they one step towards something new?
If we keeping breeding them, will we create a new animal soon?
Dogs ARE new. They’re clearly different from wolves, not at all identical, so since they’re different, they’re new.
This response was brought to you by a person who has bothered defining “new”.
Yes there is, as that meets the definition of evolution: Change in the frequency of allele genes in populations, over generations.
When creationists refuse to define their terms, I have decided to do it for them. They always refuse to define new, so here I will do it for them: If it’s different from what it was before, then it’s new. If it’s slightly bigger, slightly smaller, slightly darker, slightly longer, slightly thinner, slightly more curved, if it has changed in ANY measurable way, then I say it’s new. That goes for physiological, mental, and molecular changes of any and all kinds. Changing a T nucleotide into a G nucleotide is change, and therefore new. An ever so slightly taller person is different, so also new.
There we go, “new” has now been defined and any measurable change qualifies as new.
With respect to new information: New information is any change in a sequence such as a polymer like DNA, or a string of abstract symbols used in writing (including it’s length, or the order of arrangement of monomers or symbols within it) that wasn’t there before. If it wasn’t there before, it’s new. So any mutation is new information. All duplications are new information. All substitutions are new information. All deletions are new information, because they all constitute change that wasn’t there before.
Using this simple, intuitive definition of what would be “new”, all mutations cause new information. If creationists don’t like this definition, they’re going to have to come up with one they think is better.
It’s not helpful to comprehension, not to a point of view. If terms exist, use them.
Mutation and selection are factual.
As generally used, they refer to evolution within a single gene pool vs processes accounting for patterns between separated gene pools – anagenesis vs cladogenesis, to get technical. It can confuse, because microevolution can be a macroevolutionary mechanism.
You’d have to give some examples before I could adjudicate. I understand mutation to be a general term covering single base changes, insertions, deletions, inversions, maybe transpositions and other gross rearrangements. When one means a specific element from that list, one would simply use one of those words instead.
Rumraket,
Excellent work!
Wolves aren’t identical to wolves. And dogs aren’t identical to dogs. But some dogs are identical to some wolves.
Dogs are wolves more than dogs are dogs.
So no evolution.
Yea, every thing born is an example of evolution.
Excellent theory. I wonder why it took until Darwin for anyone to think of it?
Congratulations Allan, you jumped the shark with Rumraket on your back.
Scholars.
It would be an abuse of the analogy.
Every dog is a new animal, in case you forgot. Due to mutations, every dog is born with a genome that has never existed before, and they are a new animal by every definition. All lineages accumulate mutations, so all are changing at the molecular level. Those molecular changes at the DNA level might not always express themselves as large changes in morphology, but they are changes nonetheless.
Every generation is different from the last due to the accumulation of mutations and de novo mutations that happen in that generation. So, evolution.
Who wants to jump the shark alone?
You’ve just demonstrated that there is nothing new under the sun. 🙂
You could always offer your own definition. That was kind of his objective. The ball is at your feet, and you’re just gawping at it.
Great stuff. Care to venture into ‘Darwinism’ territory?
Sadly, E as in Entanglement is more than enough E-related work for me in trying to make a dent in relevant technical literature. I rely on the Evolution experts here for the biological E.
It’s also very helpful when they are challenged with well-articulated, responsive, and relevant posts.
Probably yes. I don’t know if they have analyzed the genomes (a titanic task).
The scientific method is there to try and help us out of being left with differences of opinion.
It seems an inevitable – and unexceptionable – corollary of a mutation-fixation process of evolution that a singular event is part of that process. A mutation occurring in one cell in one individual becomes shared by all. I don’t see the problem with calling that ‘new’.
If one’s not enough, how many are?
Excuse me?! You must be joking… Please tell me it ain’t so…
Why don’t simply say that no evidence against your belief system will work? You will save yourself some time… You will eliminate the unnecessary loss of space at TSZ…
You mean the territory you would like it to go to…in the Canadian way?
Your comment was not in any way responsive to mine. If one is not enough, how many are? What evidence would you regard as convincing, Mr Follow-the-evidence-where-it-leads? It would help if you quantified this, rather than just repeating the same vague aspersions ad nauseam.
So in order to help me with my comprehension what terms would you use for observed changes such as in the case of mice colouration in the experiment? And what term would you use for the appearance of fur in mammals from an ancestor that presumably did not have such a thing?
I agree, but would you say that the observed differences I referred to are also factual? Two types of evolution can be distinguished, one that just changes the frequency of traits already present and the other producing novel traits. In the first observation fur variation was already present but in the second instance, say the first appearance of fur in animals whose ancestors presumably had no fur and changing frequencies is not going to bring it about.
So for the sake of clarity wouldn’t it be a good idea that anyone arguing for evolution made it clear which type of evolution they were using in any examples they gave?
The headline in the link BruceS gave reads:
“The Wild Experiment That Showed Evolution in Real Time”
And they say this shows, “the full process of evolution by natural selection”. Is this not misleading? Does it show the full process? The mutations were already there in the population.
IMO it is a poor analogy in the first place.