I say no but why do evolutionists?
This is a sly way to demonstrate how unlikely evolutionism is on a probability curve.when on thinks of the millions (billions?) of segregated populations in biology(species) then it should be a high, or respectable percentage, are evolving as we speak to create new populations with new bodyplans to survive in some niche. By high I mean millions, with a allowance for mere hundreds of thousands. YET I am confident there is none evolving today. further i suspect evolutionists would say there is none evolving today. WHY? If not today what about yesterday or 300 years ago? Why couldn’t creationists say its not happening today because it never happened? Its accurate sampling of todays non evolution for predicting none in the past!
i think the only hope (hope?) is if evolutionism said , under pE influence, that all biology today is in the stasis stage and just waiting for a sudden need to change, qickly done, then stasis again. Yet why would it be that stasis has been reached so perfectly today relative to the enormous claim of the need in the past for evolutionism?
Anyways i think creationists have a good point here but willing to be corrected.
I don’t have an ‘anti-reductionist’ stance. Reducing processes to their component parts is necessary for understanding. The problem lies in going no further than this. Unless we then use this knowledge we have gained to understand how the parts relate to the whole in their actual context, then we have put self imposed limits on our understanding.
What is more reductionist than reducing the world to a grain of sand?
I think the distribution of life over the planet from some warm little pond, or whatever you take the beginning to be, is a good example which covers that one.
Not necessarily, but physical linkage generates a shared and direct interest which is very important, from the genetic level outwards.
And yet the further apart we are, the more competitive. I’ve just been reading about race riots; we aren’t that harmonious.
Nah. Analogy again. Not persuasive.
Sure. And through all that churn, the shared genotype smirks like the Cheshire Cat’s smile (barring a Pedant’s Latitude arising from somatic mutation)
No elan vital appears required to maintain individual organisms. But to give your analogy legs, such a force is required at the biosphere level, immediately disconnecting the two things you want linked. I see no need for such vague forces.
Bodies unroll a program, encoded in the shared cellular genome, progressing cyclically from zygote to zygote. Ecological units don’t. Newcomers simply exploit a niche, either reaching a balance, or going extinct through their own overexploitation. The result is a set of interacting niches whose denizens have not (yet) gone extinct, and along people come and declare it must be the work of a Celestial Gardener, and couldn’t possibly happen unaided. I don’t see why not.
Yes, similar. As I explained earlier, life and death exist at many levels. The various forms of the dinosaurs gave way to the forms of modern birds. Individual forms come and go but life marches on.
No it doesn’t. There’s no cycle there, just lineage.
By ignoring or subordinating the role of nucleic acids in processes, I think you have put self imposed limits on your understanding.
Um, atoms?
No, dinosaurs evolved into modern birds (a process well under way before they croaked). The arbitrary ‘end point’ you have decided to draw (coinciding with an asteroid collision) has no analogue in multicellular life cycles. Closer to vegetative growth, but still no banana.
😉
Yes this is a good start. We agree that all life is built up from cellular replication. But should we just leave our investigations at this level? I look out of my window and I can see that the birds are getting frisky. They will soon be mating and building nests in preparation for the eggs to come. Throughout the year I will be seeing the production of like from like. Robin chicks will mature to be like their parents in form and behaviour and the same is true for all the birds I will see over the period. Salmon make the hazardous journey upstream to the place where they were conceived in order for the fertilisation process to be repeated. Sperm swim via a similarly hazardous route to the egg with the aim of fertilisation leading to a repetition of the process. Two seemingly unconnected events that differ greatly in the details but very similar in what they achieve.
To see that which persists above all the differences, in the way the whole is reflected in the parts, requires a determination of what is essential and what are the incidental, variable aspects. The body persists while its cells come and go, the species or kind persists while its individual organisms come and go, Life persists while species come and go.
From the words of Goethe in his poem, “Nature”: “Eternally she creates new forms. What now is, never was in time past; what has been, cometh not again – all is new, and yet always it is the old.”
All the body cells are related because they are descended from the same zygote. The isolated genome is an abstraction. The whole cell, complete with genomes, cell walls, cytoplasm, mitochondria and other organelles, was the source of all subsequent cells.
It was through a certain type of reductionist thinking that lead to the false belief that humans would have at least one hundred thousand genes, and that when the entire genome was mapped the causes of many of our ills. It’s not the genes that make the organism, it ‘s the way they are manipulated that provides the suitable material to build the form and to allow the form to function.
Of course. If you were not, you’d have to accept the philosophy of the circular reasoning, like Joe does with his fitness…
Why? That people choose their worldview over the theory that contradicts it?
It’s actually sad, you know…
Who can blame them…
” …a house divided against itself cannot stand…”
Why do a revision then, if it’s going to be similar?
I won’t have to take it apart. Harshman will do for me while taking a break from his bible study…lol
What I would suggest is working with nature and not against it. Trying to think of the wider consequences our actions have. Education rather than coercion. This is not to say that I’m the one qualified to do the educating.
You say that knowing it’s not true. So can you link? Or explain the circular reasoning and show where Joe says the equivalent?
You and others say this because it’s what you must believe. After all, you have chosen your worldview despite the evidence, not because of it. So logically everyone else has also done the same.
It’s called projection.
It is sad. You are not the first person to come here recommending cures other then conventional medicine for cancer. Once chap is convinced his wife was cured by a faith healer, no less. But yet the best outcomes remain not faith healer related. But it appears the fact that you have demonstrably chosen your worldview despite the available facts does not dissuade you from accusing others of exactly that. It’s called projection. You accuse others of what you unconsciously know you are doing yourself.
The divisions are there, but there are not what you think. In evolutionary biology there is not nor will there ever be a ‘designer’ and ‘anti-designer’ side. It simply is not the case. There are people on the fringe who write books, of course. People much like yourself who delude themselves into thinking what they are doing is interacting with and making a difference in the scientific endeavour. You no doubt think your blog posts here are actually achieving something other them amusement,
Gpuccio knows deep down that his ‘ideas’ will fall apart at the first serious interaction with actual peer review. If you could prove that Joe has been using circular reasoning in his work then why not publish a scientific paper about Joe’s scientific work saying as much?
Otherwise the people who were originally mislead will never get to hear of their error in taking Joe seriously!
Yes and all life processes from development to evolution is about maintaining dynamic balance between constructive and destructive forces. Either of these forces can be detrimental to the next higher level. So the crux of matter is not whether genomic changes are damaging or beneficial, it is whether or not the living entity can cope with the change and live on regardless.
Will this is where our thinking about this really diverges. Our prior beliefs pull our thoughts in opposite directions and we end up poles apart.
My thinking on this involves the etheric. IMO the etheric can be thought of as energy, very complex dynamically structured energy. Material substance is a condensation of this energy. Goethe’s idea of the archetype is just the etheric given another name. Individual plants come into existence through the interplay of the etheric with the physical which we see as a series of contractions and expansions of form.
It is the same with every case of gamete formation. Chromatin condenses to form chromosomes. These come together and line up as polypeptides converge to form the spindle and the spindle fibres. This process is repeated later in the meiotic process. Through multiple expansions and contractions gametes are produced. These have a condensed physical form and a very active expanded etheric form. A dead cell will lose its membrane and its contents will be scattered wide. It will lose its form because it has lost its active etheric field of energy.
The complexities of cell formation do not just pop up from nowhere. They are already present, but unseen, in the etheric. An analogy would be the lines of force in a magnet. They remain unseen until iron filings are scattered round it. Then we become aware of something that was already present. It was only the limitation of our senses that prevented us from seeing it. The physical and the etheric are just two aspects of life. Living substance is physical and living form is etheric.
And when we think back to the early earth and the original eukaryote cell, in what I am proposing it does not have to come from simpler physical precursors. This makes it possible that it already had physical complexity when it first appeared because it condensed from the pre-existing complexity of the etheric.
Energetic fields may be unseen but they are not unknown to us.
Yes, which begs the question: Why all this complication for something it didn’t need?
Both, it’s not either/or. Take the coronavirus of which there are fears that it could become a pandemic. The virus by itself can do nothing without the regulatory system of the host cell.
Fancy that. I was going to ask you the same thing. My explanation is that parthenogenic lineages all derive from sexual ancestors.
It’s been said before: you are extremely focused on humans. All those “intricate networks of coordinated activity” in spermatogenesis and fertilisation turn out to be completely dispensable in many other species. Since they managed to get rid of those useless male bastards, one might even argue they are more highly evolved.
You believe SARS, HIV and influenza to be part of human gene regulation? That should bring you lots of joy next time you come down with the flu.
CharlieM,
Yes, things are gearing up for the annual return of haploid genomes, the true ‘organism’ of which we are mere nurturers and amplifiers!
You keep beating this drum, and I keep saying ‘no’. How long can we keep this up? The fundamental process is semiconservative nucleic acid replication. That creates two copies where once there was one. Without it, there would be no ‘purpose’ to cellular fission. If it did something other than create two for one, most hypothetical fission products would be empty.
Not really, but anyway you can’t chuck out a viewpoint just because it was wrong once. What was that about chucking the baby out with the bathwater?
The true number of genes wasn’t discovered by ‘holists’.
Sorry, it is the genes. Transplant a foreign genome into a cell and it starts making that genome’s proteins. Change a gene, you change the way the program runs – look at antennopedia, for one of a squillion examples.
More importantly, over evolutionary time, genotype is all that persists. Yes, in cells, but cells made by genes.
Our genomes are littered with the scars of old infection, of course, some of which end up ‘getting with the program’. The rest lies there waiting for a ‘holist’ to come up with a DNA-as-system-tool explanation.
Because I feel like.
Well, I think John was wrong. He actually played a significant part in the genesis of my ideas, way back in Talk.Origins days. He didn’t buy it then and doesn’t buy it now, but his critique served to strengthen my conviction. If I fail to persuade, that’s down to me, but I know why I think as I do, and can defend it.
But it is interesting that you automatically side with John – someone with whom you profoundly disagree on everything – for the mere fact that he disagrees with me. Sometimes it must be a struggle to decide whose coat-tails you are going to hang on today.
Heh heh. You haven’t read my paper then! All is revealed … my stance, however, is ‘reductionist’. 😉
That said, reductionism hasn’t been hugely successful in understanding sex either. A poorly-thought-out version of ‘selfish gene’ theory leads to an imaginary ‘twofold cost’ of meiosis. There is, however, a reductionist stance which does make sense, both of sex and of the multicellular bodies it builds. It’s not simple to expound, hence 55 pages.
Yes, we do inherit a genotype, but with it comes along with other things. We actually inherit two genotypes, cytoplasm, cell membranes and organelles.
What I wrote above can be seen in another way. I did not inherit a functioning cell, In fact I was a functional single cellular organism. I became multicellular, I became sentient, I became a rational thinking being. All these things are a part of who I am.
I agree that all the substances within me are either imported or made from genes. Does this mean that genes are the ultimate cause of form? No. To say that genes cause form is like saying that building materials cause the form of the house that has been built. The creativity comes from epigenetic marking, cascade instigation and suppression, alternative splicing and all the other ways in which genes are manipulated.
We inherited the processes that produce organisms.
I take it you agree that we inherit genotypes. Do you think this means that we have the same genotype as LUCA? What is actually passed down through the generations? Processes are more consistent than genotypes.
The nuclear genotype that gets passed on is a unique construction extremely unlikely to have appeared on earth before.
Yes, I know all this. I went to university and everything! 😉
Before that, you were two haploid genomes.
I think the problem is that you are seduced by your analogy. Gene-centrism is not even intended as a stance for understanding physiology, but evolution. Genes integrate into the genomes of the future population, by recombination, and gene centrism views this ‘as if’ they have volition. In a life, it’s just one genome, differentially expressed. But because you want to get from physiology to the biosphere by analogy, you reject gene centrism in toto – chucking the baby out with the bathwater. And yet, it gives a good evolutionary explanation for a huge proportion of our genomes.
No, it’s like saying the architect’s drawings [hears excited clattering from Design enthusiasts’ keyboards!] cause form. Shove things around in CAD, you change the form.
All of which traces back to genes, from one diploid genome, with the ultimate result of returning haploid genomes in profusion.
Because of my unwavering devotion to “seeing things from the other side” I can actually see the logic behind that. But if Charlie fails to recognize dangerous infectious agents like SARS coronavirus as selfish pathogens, I am all out of arguments.
Sorta. But in a biochem. lecture in 1976 or so I vividly recall the lecturer saying someone had just written a book saying DNA wasn’t ‘the organism’s’ way of reproducing, it was the other way round. It shone a bright light on something quite fundamental. A lot of sense flows from that stance, IMO.
That’s why we’re different…
To be perfectly honest, I thought you were searching for the truth…
There you go… I knew It! 😉
It’s more obvious than you think…☺
If the supporters of evolution can’t agree on so many aspects of the theory, how could it be worth while?
Interestingly, the many disagreements among the supporters of evolution got me more interested in evolution…😊
John and I agree on few things. He got more interested in the Bible. He’s read it you know?
I fail to see the application of it…
Now we know why “the seeker of truth” has decided to take John’s side on this one. LMFAO
This has nothing to do with evolution, it’s just Brownian motion 😀
Found it. But I enjoy writing.
What is? Complete your thoughts, man!
It’s not a church. Ideas get kicked around, and the very endeavour of science is one of attrition of ideas, by discussion as well as experiment.
I might mention that ID supporters are hardly of one mind on the subject. Yet they never openly disagree.
Oh.
You fail to see many things. What’s the application of ID?
I’m not disagreeing with everything you wrote. It was the following statement of yours that set me thinking and prompted my reply:
“As long as this is stable there won’t be a lot of ‘novel complexity’ that gives significant advantages over what the organisms already have.”
Eyes are complex structures. Did they evolve to make use of a changing environment? Or was their evolution a case of organisms having an increasing awareness of what was always there? What is your opinion on this?
And here we see how life pulsates in its ongoing evolution. We have periods of diversification and mass extinctions. A progression through a series of expansions and contractions on a large scale which is mirrored by the series of expansions and contractions in the progressive growth of a individual plant which Goethe observed. Just as the flesh of an apple falls away to allow the seed to sprout new life, so the mass extinction of old forms allow new forms to spring forth. The whole reflected in the parts.
Whatever…
The example simply shows how easy it is to assume “evolution”, do research, and arrive at the desired conclusion, which has to be evolution…
The “evolution of poo” is no different…
If you don’t arrive at the desired results – evolution – you can kiss your funding money good bye… and the “Darwinian gestapo” is going to get ya too…
It’s really sad that we live in the society where scientism is worshiped and not the scientific method… I know something about that, as I lived under the communist regime a part of my life..
Truth, as you see would like it to be?
You don’t have to answer that…
Somehow, I missed you doing the research part. To me it looked like you posted two pictures of excrements and then complained a lot.
Nothing is lost. Just try to substitute – whatever the researchers are trying to prove, with how environment causes the evolutionary adaptation ( you can apply any of the typical evolutionary narrative) – with the evolution of poo using the examples how red deer poo evolves due to the same factors…
You are not going to be much off, if any, if you assume evolution took place… 😉
I have done the same with the evolution of the polar bear; the “white fur” and the high cholesterol…
If you assume evolution and continue with the bs, miracles fade in comparison…
The fast evolution of the walking sharks is another I was planning to take apart… 😉
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/01/walking-sharks-new-species-evolving-fast/
I have no strong desire to place haploids at the centre of the sexual transaction, it just makes sense of the whole endeavour to do so. I’m a big fan of things making sense. Call it a ‘worldview prejudice’.
True enough. And today we can see all the stages of eye development in the various organisms. Organisms that have no need of advanced eyes remain at the stage which suits them. Human vision in combination with our other senses suits our advanced consciousness. But advanced species could only acquire such sophisticated vision because of the foundations laid in early evolution. In the same way we have fully functioning sophisticated vision because it was gradually formed during early embryonic development. The whole reflected …
CharlieM,
Can you imagine a process of evolution which was any different? I can’t. Later states are bound to be built upon that which went before, and new instances of multicellular organism are bound to develop, rather than pop up fully-formed, eyeballs and all. That being so, you can’t infer some kind of mystical quality to the process, an extra force, from those things which we would still expect to see in its absence.
Why?
Will John Harshman support you?
I don’t think so…
Here is why:
Do you get my point?
No, eh?
See no point of further discussions…
I hope you don’t mind…
BTW: If you are interested in the challenges Venter faced when trying to “imitate evolution”, watch carefully this video:
You are a riot, J-Mac. But if we just visit the webpage from which you blindly copied the picture, we can read that the difference is completely explained by feeding rate, NOT evolution:
No worries. I already reported the owner of the site to the Darwinian Gestapo. He will soon have his funding cut.
Now, to prove that you are not full of poo of the bovine kind, could you tell the class how we can tell the difference between an evolutionary and a non-evolutionary change?
Huh?
Possibly not. Dunno.
Not really. You never really make points, just half-thoughts that trail into ellipsis, lol and emoji after making some vague allusion to someone you imagine supports you.
I’m here all week, try the fish.
That’s not imitating evolution. I though you were going to dig up a paper on him not evolving the genetic code or some such? Proving me wrong, at least.
Exactly!
Venter had spent many years trying to intelligently manipulate life that supposedly evolved by mindless process…
Even if evolution progressed to prokaryotic cells, past that it is impossible:
Be patient! I’m working on it…
It will change nothing, as you know it very well yourself…
Gotta run…
He’s not even trying to imitate evolution. He’s reverse engineering a stage, at best.
This doesn’t alter the fact that the copying is achieved by coordinated cellular processes. Molecules required for copying need to be imported into the cell. Balance needs to be maintained between the inner and outer environments of the cell. Cellular respiration must be continuous.
Think about cell division, whether it is during mitosis or meiosis, DNA is condensed into chromosomes and separated. While this is going on all the protein complexes required to carry out all the processes involved in division and in respiration must be present and doing their job. I would think that the usual switching on and off of genes to produce proteins becomes a problem when the genome is so condensed. To have all the available proteins ready and available when required within the cell must involve some extraordinary organisation and planning.
Can you give us what you think is a good specific example of this transplantation?
From the article, Nuclear transplantation, the conservation of the genome, and prospects for cell replacement, it finishes with the following:
I’m not doubting that foreign genomes can supply raw materials specific to it. But I would be interested to learn what actually results from the further development of such a cell.
CharlieM,
As I’ve said, I don’t need a biology education. I already have a pretty good grasp of how cells work. Nonetheless, everything that happens traces back to nucleic acids, albeit sometimes one or two cellular generations prior.
Inheritance of that cell’s’ genome, and the consequent manufacture of all cellular components from it. As j-mac is pointing out elsewhere, Venter did this with a completely synthetic (albeit reverse-engineered) genome.