There was a time when people believed the moon craters were the product of intelligent design because they were so perfectly round “they must have been made by intelligent creatures living on the moon”. That idea was falsified. If hypothetically someone had said back then, “The Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) made the moon craters”, the claim would have been falsifiable, but it really doesn’t make a positive case for the FSM, doesn’t make the FSM directly testable, doesn’t make the FSM science. Substitute the word “ID” instead for “FSM”, and one will see why I think even though ID is falsifiable, I don’t think ID has a positive case, and I don’t think ID is directly testable, and I don’t think ID is science at least for things like biology.
I accept stonehenge was intelligently designed because I’ve seen humans make similar artifacts. The case of design in life is a different matter because we have not seen a designer of such qualifications directly. If we saw God or some UFO sending flames down from the sky with a great voice and turning a rock into a living human, then I would consider ID a positive case at that point. For now there is no positive case, but a case based on some level of belief. One might redefine science to allow ID to be defined as science, but I prefer not to promote ID as science. I’m OK with calling ID science for man-made things, but not for God-made things, unless God shows up and gives us a visual demonstration.
NOTES:
Johannes Kepler
The invention of the telescope led scientists to ponder alien civilization. In the early 1600s, astronomer Johannes Kepler believed that because the moon’s craters were perfectly round, they must have been made by intelligent creatures.
Is Anybody Out There?
Or the pink unicorn was tired and let the blue one have a go that day.
Time Cube stuff, Sal.
Take a look at Lenski again. When actual experimental evidence contradicts a model, something is wrong with the model.
What is wrong with ID creationists? Are your brains fried?
You guys will poo poo genetic algorithms as not really modelling biology, but will take some century’s old abstract model of genetic drift and worship conclusions that are contradicted by experimental evidence.
Ten mutations per human — in functional coding areas of the genome. Every generation.
Said the YEC.
The claim of genetic entropy has been resolved by a simple (but long) experiment.
In a fixed environment, fitness goes up indefinitely..
If the environment changes rapidly, you can expect extinction.
If the environment changes to favor a “less fit” allele, as with malaria and drug treatment, you should not be surprised if the population adapts.
Perhaps Sal can name a species that certainly went extinct due to genetic entopy.
And provide convincing evidence.
This cannot be correct.
If average fitness is below 1, the population will decline and eventually disappear (go extinct). If the average fitness is above one, the population will grow exponentially, then destroy its niche with the overpopulation so it will crash.
In a relatively stable world, average fitness will hover around 1 — sometimes a bit higher, sometimes a bit lower.
This somehow doesn’t sound right. You seem to be confusing the size of the pie with the proportion of pie represented by an average slice. I have no difficulty imagining an ecosystem where fitness of organisms is uniformly lousy, and improves across the board, so long as the equilibrium is maintained.
Depends on how you measure fitness. Lenski measures it as the inverse of reproductive time for replication. That’s an absolute measure rather than a comparative measure.
Since Lenski and Thornton are the bad boys doing the kind of thing Doug Axe has the talent to do — but refuses to do — I assume everyone knows what they are up to. Bad assumption.
Then there’s always to possibility that I say they are up to something, but get it wrong, or partly wrong.
And how did you or anyone determine the genetic changes in Lenski’s bacteria were all accidents, errors or mistakes?
The only gene that could transport citrate was duplicated and put under the control of a promoter that was turned on in the presence of O2. Only wishful thinking says it was Darwinian evolution
There is zero evidence of any external direction for the observed mutations.
If this was “intelligently directed” why did it occur in only 1 of 12 lineages? You’ll run from the question like you always do.
Morphological similarities also count
Every kid in any given classroom learns the same thing from the same teacher and the same books. Yet they all don’t get the same score on the tests. They don’t all give the same answers. And yet some poster thinks all bacteria should respond the same way to the same environment even though VARIETY is the key to survival.
Unbelievable
Frankie,
What about homeschooled bacteria?
In your metaphor ,every kid was a clone of each other
Why?
If the bacteria were front loaded with a pre-planned goal in mind they’d all respond the same.
If there was an external Intelligence directing them to a pre-planned goal they’d all respond the same.
The fact they all respond differently is strong evidence for unguided evolution and strong evidence against Intelligent Design.
Thanks Virgil FrankenJoe for your support of evolution! 🙂
Some posters just never get it so they are forced to respond with a strawman and an equivocation.
Strawman- what pre-planned goal? The ability to adapt is what was designed. AND the bacteria used were not the originally designed bacteria.
equivocation- ID is not anti-evolution. Evolution by design is still evolution
Thanks for confirming that humans weren’t any sort of special goal for the Designer. Humans and all extant species are the end result of 3.5+ billion years of unpredictable stochastic processes where each species came up with its own unique ad hoc adaptations to its changing environment.
Thanks again Virgil FrankenJoe, you’re really becoming a great spokesman for evolutionary theory! 🙂
Blah, blah, blah, Adapa, you are back on ignore. You had a chance to say something of substance but you just repeated your oft-refuted diatribe.
It isn’t as if you have never been told what I am saying. No use in going in circles. But you can continue…
That’s OK FrankenJoe. I’m just so thrilled you finally admitted humans weren’t created special but were the end result of stochastic evolutionary processes.
Some people are too stupid to understand when they admit ID has no pre-planned goals it also means they admit humans weren’t specially created. 😀
Some people are too stupid to understand that context matters. Just because no specific evolutionary pathway was pre-planned they think nothing was.
The desperation is getting pretty ridiculous.
Some people are too stupid to realize in their idiotic haste to attack evolution they cut the legs right out from under ID’s main tenet of specially created “privileged planet” living humans. 😀
Well he doesn’t understand ID.
The desperation continues- I never attacked evolution. ID is not anti-evolution. Evolution by design is still evolution.
Because your metaphor is irrelevant to lenski’s experiment unless they are
First off, based on the discussion here with Joe Felsenstein regarding absolute fitness:
V_A = 100% at most = viability of each offspring
F_A = 2 = number offsrpring
W_A = V_A F_A = absolute fitness = 2 max for bacterial or unicellular creatures
If strain_1 overtakes the other in a culture, we assume the W_A_strain1 is the maximally fit strain, the highest RELATIVE fitness. We can assign it the relative fitness value of w_A_strain1 = 1, and every other strain less than 1.
we could assume absolute fitness
W_A = approximately 2 for the most favored phenotype
and the relative fitness
w_A = 1 for the most favored
Hypothetically then as strain_1 overtakes the population, the absolute fitness of the population then approaches the maximum, hence “fitness is always increasing” asymptotically toward the theoretical maximum of 2 per individual. The genetic variance decreases and hence fitness increases. By the way, that was the point of this discussion with Joe Felsenstein over Fisher’s not-so-fundamental Fundamental Theorem of Natural selection:
In an antibiotic environment, for example, some bacteria with broken pumps will have the highest relative fitness because they fail to ingest the anti biotic, but in anti-biotic-free environments, they are out competed and have low relative fitness.
Here are a list antibiotics and the kind of bacteria that are broken but become the king of relative fitness in such an antibiotic environment:
So relative fitness of a phenotype is improved even though there is genetic deterioration, loss of function. Hence fitness can always be increasing in a bacterial culture even though bacterial function is compromised!
Fitness change is kind of not the best way to look at things since hypothetically someone with a heritable disease might be more “fit” reproductively — i.e. Sickle cell heterozygous trait, Tay-sachs disease, possibly obesity, high cholesterol, etc. listed in Sharon Molem’s Survival of the Sickest :
The question of genetic deterioration is a question floating around in the NIH. I know it because I meet some of the researchers there and it is in some papers in peer review.
The Male Y-Chromosome is subject to Muller’s ratchet if there aren’t repair mechanisms. One geneticist, Sykes predicts extinction of the human race in 100,000 years.
People favorable to a Eugenics movement think there is genetic deterioration. Even before John Sanford became a creationist, he was sympathetic to eugenics. The YECs and eugenecists have thus become strange bedfellows on the question of genetic deterioration.
Genetic deterioration is one example of where I wish creationist theory were wrong.
The NIH provides training to learn how to navigate the huge flood of medical data anticipated to arrive now that DNA sequencing is becoming dirt cheap (relative to the Sanger methods in the Francis Collins era of the Human Genome Project).
I’ll be monitoring the developments and visiting the NIH a lot and plan to enroll in their FAES grad school in the evenings.
I know of no one in the NIH or associated research centers that insists humans on average are becoming more genetically improved each year!
100,000 years is an eye blink. All mammals have Y-chromosomes. Can you explain why mammals have not gone extinct? Do you consider the possibility that models have limits?
Loss of function seems be a creationist masturbation centerfold.
Humans have lost most of their body hair. Humans are helpless for their first half dozen years. Humans have such big heads that it is not rare for mothers to die in childbirth. The list could go on.
If peacocks adapted by having smaller tail feathers, would be loss of function?
Is it appropriate to define function without regard to survival of the population?
All these things that humans have lost, and yet there are some folks arguing that evolution has been designed or directed to produce humans.
My guess — because mammalian life on Earth is recent and the fossil record isn’t millions of years old, and that’s why the fossils have C14 traces not due to contamination, they have biological materials that shouldn’t be there given the half-lives of DNA and proteins. 🙂
Assuming that the consilient evidence of physics, geology, biology and astrophysics is correct, and Sal Cordova is mistaken, why haven’t mammals gone extinct?
Auto renormalization. That is to say, just because something is genetically damaged, doesn’t mean the absolute fitness of the population keeps declining.
In fact, because of modern technology, we can see for example, that even though there are more cases than in all history of kids living with juvenile diabetes, the number of kids with juvenile diabetes keeps increasing. The trait has increased its absolute fitness because of a change in environment even though we may not have a handle on it’s progress as far as relative fitness.
So it is hypothetically possible the genome of mammals gets compromised, but in a non-competitive environment, absolute fitness can increase.
Btw, that goes to show the problem of defining absolute fitness, it’s just a reproductive capacity measure without much environmental context.
Bottom line, I think there are some falsifiable hypotheses now that sequencing is cheap. One other fix, one I would be agreeable to is non-random mutation or limited or highly constrained mutation.
I would suggest you go back and look at my question (why have mammals not gone extinct) and rethink this.
Petrushka,
I suppose we can poll the skeptics here.
How many think the human genome is on average acquiring more functionality or is it acquiring more damage in the present era?
1. yes more damage
2. no
3. don’t know
I point to this study in 2015:
But the question then, in light of this, how did the Y-chromosome start acquiring so much function in the first place that it is now supposedly losing?
My answer is that the Y-chromosome never evolved, it was specially created. Muller’s ratchet will not be mocked!
Of course, the special creation of Y-chromosomes can’t be directly tested, but the claim of deterioration is falsifiable.
When talking about the human genome in terms of the entire species, what exactly would constitute “damage”?
ETA:
As a followup, what does “damage” even mean in such a context?
Heritable disease or heritable tendency toward disease. Obviously, many researchers at the NIH look at “damage” in terms of the way a medical doctor would.
For example, a doctor would consider the sickle cell gene a defect even though evolutionary biologists consider the heterozygous form in a Malarial environment as “beneficial”.
The book survival of the sickest actually highlights the issue of what should we view as “damage” vs. “function”. I argued the evolutionary approach is actual at strong variance to ordinary intuition.
In any case, since most of the NIH and medical community are concerned with treating human suffering, they adopt the more common notions of what “damage” means.
We are now starting to track on very large scale genetic indications for tendencies to develop all sorts of cancers. Btw, much of the indicators are often found in the non-coding regions, hence the hundreds of millions being spent on the NIH ENCODE, Roadmap, and E4 (enabling exploration of the eukaryotic epitranscriptome) initiatives.
It is somewhat amusing to point out, many evolutionary biologists are extremely hostile to the NIH work because they find the NIH viewpoints to be hostile to evolutionary ideas. See:
and Graur and other evolutionists have an extremely low opinion of the NIH director and respected Evangelical Christian, Francis Collins:
What we can do is test to see if the y-chromosome evolved more quickly than other chromosomes, as we’d expect of one lacking (except at the tips) the recombination that conserves other chromosomes.
Chimp y-chromosomes are quite divergent from human y-chromosomes, as expected. Even gene content differs significantly. But you can always invoke miracles.
What you can’t do, though, is say that there is any reason to think that y-chromosome creation ought to result in such a divergence, while y-chromosome evolution ought indeed to result in a good deal more of a divergence than in other chromosomes. Creationism has no real entailments–no deterioration would be more “proof” of divinity–while evolution does, and we see those entailments in life.
Not that such evidence persuades creationists, since it’s not about the evidence for them.
Glen Davidson
Robin,
My mother and other family members have kidney ailments.
Here is an example of an NIH talk that looks at the genetic basis of disease through the Roadmap/ENCODE work:
LoL! The bacteria that evolved the ability to transport citrate in an aerobic environment was some 30,000+ generations removed from the clones.
Whoops
Why would they have?
You’re missing my point: on a species level what constitutes damage?
I’m well aware of what damage to DNA looks like on an individual level. My question deals with the entire human genome however. As far as I know, there is no such thing as “damage” across an entire species genome (how could there be)? So I’m curious as to what the discussion is really about and thus how to answer your survey.
But that’s not damage to the entire species genome. In fact, sickle cell anemia affects less than 1% of the human species. This strikes at the heart of my question.
And yet there are billions of humans living without the benefit of 21st century medicine.
And each and every one of them has about ten mutations in areas of the genome known to be functional. Enough mutations to test a mutation at every site. Why do you suppose the species (and every mammal species) does not go extinct in a couple of generations?
Any clues?
Petrushka,
I gave my answer:
1. young life
2. auto renormalization (reductive evolution, loss of function does not necessarily reduce absolute fitness). i.e. mostly blind moles and cave fish.
3. mutations are not as random as we think they may be constrained, i.e. as far as I know telomeres are deeply conserved, but why, they’re supposed to be mostly junk!!!!
The stuff about juvenile diabetes was just an illustration of fitness not necessarily being correlated with function.
The design prevents it
Yes, I understand that quite well, but again, this does not address my question. My particular disease isn’t even genetic; my disease has zero impact on the human species at large. But then, neither do ANY genetic diseases as far as I can tell since there are no genetic diseases that affect even 1% of the population as a whole. But, maybe I’m wrong…maybe there are some of which I’m unaware. That’s the point I’m actually raising.
To take an example, roughly 2-3 million people in the US are estimated to have some form of heart disease (of that, roughly 600,000 die annually from it). Let’s assume 3 million for easy math. If 3 million people have heart disease in the US (population 318 million), then that would be just less than 1% of the population. So, how much “evolutionary” impact would you estimate Homo sapiens “experiencing” from something that effects 1% of the population? How much does this “genetic damage” affect the entire human genome?