Certain commentators seem surprisingly agitated about pursuing the idea that there is no ‘theory of evolution’. Some mean there is no single theory, although on examination the things they see as separate are frequently simply different components of the same broad process. Or, alternatively, they are referring to evolution in other senses, or in non-biological contexts. Others say there is no theory at all, as if that against which they argue does not even exist.
A theme has emerged that TSZ is somehow suppressing their concerns. So, in the spirit of suppressive dictatorships everywhere, here is a thread for people to say whatever they want about this vital topic. Hopefully without pasting in vast swathes of something already posted elsewhere – a link will suffice.
Here, for my part, is my very broad summary of ‘the’ theory of evolution: Genetic changes (mutation, recombination) are subject to a sampling process, correlated to a greater or lesser extent with their effects on survival and reproduction. This process leads to a simultaneous increase and decrease in frequency for the variants in the population, through to, in the limit, extinction or fixation of a variant. This process proceeds indefinitely, subject to the fuel of new variation. All commonly accepted*** ‘theories of [biological***] evolution’ of which I am aware place emphasis on different components, influences and consequences of this basic process. None, so far as I am aware, are at odds with it, which might be expected if there really were ‘different theories’.
*** The caveats are inserted to try to head off anticipated ‘gotchas’, in a possibly forlorn attempt to reduce opportunities to make semantic capital out of a phrase whose intent should be easy enough to understand without them. This is not ‘biologism’: the ToE which upsets people is (are?) the generally accepted biological one.
Wow. Dawkins says that the monkey “breeds from” the parent phrase. The monkey is not blind. Nor is Dawkins, when he breeds biomorphs (of course, the Wizards of ID don’t care to speak to that part of his book).
The ID movement has done you a disservice, continually misrepresenting attacks on a pedagogical stepping stone in a work of popular science as challenges to the theory of evolution.
GlenDavidson,
Very true.
Evolutionism is a load of untestable claims and a hope that a fairy tale of how life evolved can keep the materialist worldview alive. Good luck with that 🙂
Tom English,
Dawkins did a great job of demonstrating the power of evolution by means of intelligent design (active searches have nothing to do with any currently alleged ToE)
Ah, a little sermon.
Fits right in with the rest of your bunkum.
Glen Davidson
Adapa,
Yes. Isn’t amazing that would could make communication systems and computer systems work with a billion year old design concept.
And as explained HERE you don’t seem to know what this alleged modern theory of evolution entails.
And seeing that my comments are delayed you will most likely never read that refutation of your claim and you will just keep making it.
Mung,
I’d say that selection, drift and common ancestry all fall out of the same process – population sampling – which is why I tend towards a unified view, regardless that others may see them as separate ‘theories of evolution’.
Some degree of common ancestry is an inevitable consequence of the sampling process I allude to in my OP. Universality is not essential to the theory – evolutionary theory is untroubled by more than one separate origin. It is accepted on observation, which fits Universal better than Multiple.
Regardless of the degree of selective differential in operation, a finite-population sampling process (that’s Life, folks!), must lead (with minor caveats) to the situation where every member of a future population inherited the allele in question from one ancestor. Keep going back further, more and more of the modern collection coalesces on the same few individuals.
I’m ignoring recombination there. Adding it back in – sex, HGT, transposition – means that the path connecting ancestor to descendants is rather more convoluted – a base may not have followed the exact same path through a lineage of organisms as its neighbour since their origin in a single ancestral template.
GlenDavidson,
You bet it is. A response to your little sermon.
Transcription, translation, error-correction, editing and splicing all require knowledge to be carried out. Knowledge of what needs to be transcribed and what gets transcribed. Knowledge of what get translated and how to translate it. Knowledge that an error exists and knowledge of how to fix it. Knowledge of what to edit and knowledge of how to edit it. Knowledge of what to splice and how to splice.
There aren’t any known laws of physics and chemistry that can account for any of it.
Geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti observes:
(snip a few paragraphs on peppered moths)
Not quite what Common Ancestry needs.
Allan Miller,
So the debate is about how many separate origins? If it turns out there are millions would you consider the theory still valid?
Someday you’ll know the difference between a sermon and measured judgment.
Nah, I’m just kidding.
Glen Davidson
colewd,
No, of course it isn’t. I never even mentioned origins in my OP.
Yes. A single ancestor can give rise to diversity, or diversity can be there from the beginning. The evidence is more with the former than the latter. Either way, evolution will still happen.
Put another way, if we were to intelligently design a new predator and set it loose on an island, I would expect evolution to occur in both predator and prey (assuming extinction did not happen first). Or even if we designed both. The origins of replicators is a separate thing from their evolution, as you are surely aware by now.
Frankie,
If you want to get Sermonti to post here, by all means do. Otherwise, I’m not interested in C&P.
As previously noted, your lack of knowledge about something is evidence of, well, your lack of knowledge, nothing more.
Before I help you out, I want to make the context clear. Your “argument” is that repair mechanism(s) are essential to propagation; without them, any replicator is headed for inevitable genetic meltdown. I have tried to explain this to you before, with examples and numbers and all, but it hasn’t changed your behavior and professed ignorance one iota.
Now, in your defense, I will note that I used Qbeta as an example of a crappy replicator, wherein the majority of copies are mutant. That was a little bit of a cheat on my part, which you might have discovered if you had dared to engage on the subject matter, or to educate yourself.
So, in order to be Caesar’s wife virtuous, I offer you HIV, and the somewhat less crappy AMV and MLV retroviruses.
To anticipate your complaint “but they’re not alive”, that doesn’t affect the argument. They replicate successfully without any repair mechanism.
Not to butt in but design does not require a non materialist designer.
How do you know that?
Experience and observation- no one has ever observed or experienced otherwise. Knowledge of cause and effect relationships
So?
He is only interested in science and not personal opinions on isolated blogs.
Frankie:
The way to get rid of ID is to do nothing. All I’m doing is pointing and laughing at the passengers on the sinking ID boat, up to their necks in water, proclaiming everything is just fine.
The thing about ID is that there are actually many theories of ID. Some say the designer was an alien, not god. Some say god, not alien. Some say frontloaded. Some say injected when needed. Some say virtual reality and god is the programmer. And so on.
So which is the correct non-straw-man version of ID Joe?
Allan Miller,
How life originated dictates how it evolved- if the OoL = intelligent design then it is a given organisms were designed to evolve and evolved by design. Intelligent Design Evolution is in contrast with Darwin and all subsequent additions and variants
Is everything he says correct and everything everyone else incorrect? Why do you accept the opinion of one person as gospel, but the opinions of others as worthless? What is the common denominator?
Oh, wait, I think I already know!
Would a million separate origins be evidence for or against the need for an OOL designer?
Why would you need to ask those questions? Do you think it’s a matter of opinion?
If we observed a few different trees of life, with independent origins, would that mean that evolution never happened? Or simply that it happened in a different fashion?
I’m sure you can figure that one out yourself
I’m shocked! An OP that fails to mention everything!
Mung,
By ‘very broad’, I did not mean ‘comprehensive’! I went over a paragraph last time and got my wrist slapped …
What percentage of ID is about novel, positive case research and what percentage is a bunch of ‘laymen’ on the internet trying to find points of disagreement between evolutionary experts.
The opportunity to articulate which theories in evolutionary biology are incompatible remains open, folks!
Maybe I should start … RNA World and Proteins First. Is that the kind of thing we mean?
He called a book The Blind Watchmaker (and the first of his computer models acquired that name). As you may have heard, there is also a non-random element that is important to the theory.
No indeed! There is no long-term plan according to the modern theory of evolution. Are you beginning to get this?
You are!
6. “Blind watchmaker” thesis: the idea that all organisms have descended from common ancestors solely through an unguided, unintelligent, purposeless, material processes such as natural selection acting on random variations or mutations; that the mechanisms of natural selection, random variation and mutation, and perhaps other similarly naturalistic mechanisms, are completely sufficient to account for the appearance of design in living organisms.
The phrasing omits the very important fact that natural selection is a non-random bias on reproductive success. The niche environment acts as the designing agent.
Yes, the ToE does consider that sources of variation arise randomly and it is the selection element that is non-random and which biases reproductive success leading to a trend of adaptation to the niche.
Joe, I’m impressed. You seem to be starting to grasp the elements of the theory. You just need to get your head around the non-random part.
Is he still alive?
Did he? I missed that. Do you have anything that supports that rather, well, ambitious claim?
Alan Fox,
LoL! I have known all about your alleged theory of evolution for decades. Natural selection is an eliminative process and is only non-random in a very trivia way- not every variation has the same chance of being eliminated. It is not even about survival of the fittest. NS is the survival of the good enough.
It’s about as non-random as the spray pattern of a sawed-off shotgun loaded with bird shot. You might as well call it contingent serendipity because that is all it is.
It is still a bl;ind and mindless process, Alan.
The niche environment could favor the short, the tall, the fats, the slow, the fat, the slim, the spotted, the striped- all in the same niche
The weasel program. His program actively searched for the solution and was guided towards it. And the string was just granted the right of reproduction. That is a great deal of unexplained CSI right there.
Are you?
Alan Fox,
6. “Blind watchmaker” thesis: the idea that all organisms have descended from common ancestors solely through an unguided, unintelligent, purposeless, material processes such as natural selection acting on random variations or mutations; that the mechanisms of natural selection, random variation and mutation, and perhaps other similarly naturalistic mechanisms, are completely sufficient to account for the appearance of design in living organisms.
Nope, that is what the natural selection acting on random variations or mutations;, means.
You keep saying that but never supporting it. Repeating the cl.aim is not support of the claim.
And how do we test those hypothesis?
Ok. Can you give an example of that?
That appears to be sufficient however. Were there any other questions?
Trying to cross the Frankie and FFM streams. Bold move. There’s definitely a very slim chance we’ll survive.
http://people.clas.ufl.edu/rdholt/files/129.pdf
Niche differentiation in Mexican birds: using point
occurrences to detect ecological innovation
Only now you are prepared to let your light shine!
You are getting it!
Exactly! This is getting scary! That trivial effect that ends up doing just enough!
Wow, you’re on a roll.
Contingent serendipity? No, I don’t think it will catch on.
How quickly you forget. Natural selection is a non-random bias on reproductive success
The Rift Valley Lake cichlids are a wonderful example of how one lake, seemingly one environment, is in fact a hugely diverse set of niches, allowing the ancestral species to diversify into hundreds.
Frankie,
So do me the favour of not C&P-ing opinion pieces I cannot discuss with the author. As I’m sure you know, you can tie people up for weeks like that, couple of mouse clicks and you’re away. Hardly in the spirit of a discussion forum, is it?.
And of course some old timer wrote some kind of book about some kind of island based environment where something like that happened. It’s probably some obscure reference I heard about years ago. C something wrote it, I’m fairly sure.
Alan Fox,
Contingent serendipity is all NS is. Just because NS is non-random doesn’t change the fact it is blind and mindless. Dawkins is more of an authority than you are wrt evolution- he says it is blind and non-random. UC Berkeley says it is mindless and also non-random.
Natural selection is blind and mindless. It is alleged to be the blind watchmaker that is a designer mimic. Having a trivial non-random component doesn’t escape the fact it is blind and mindless.
Natural selection is impotent when it comes to universal common descent and producing protein machines. It can’t even get beyond populations of prokaryotes given the starting populations of prokaryotes. Endosymbiosis is nothing more than “it looks like those organelles coulda been bacteria”- organelles only, which is still far from a eukaryote.
NS is not a ratchet. When the environments change the selection pressure changes. And that is why the norm survives and the mutated get reeled back to the norm. That is what NS does.
“Built-in responses to environmental cues”- Spetner 1997, 2015
Outside opinions, especially those of experts, should be welcome, if for nothing else for food for thought. An opinion based on years of research and reading what others have published should be as welcome as someone else’s baseless opinion.
So it is hardly in the spirit of a discussion forum to allow bald assertions to go unchecked and to be treated as fact.
I can agree with mindless and non-random.
OK, I can agree with that.
Who alleges what? Strive for clarity.
Ok, so what?
I’m not sure what you are claiming here. Are you saying there is evidence of universal common descent over aproximately 4 billion year period and you just can’t accept that natural selection is an element in producing that nested hierarchy? If so, it’s progress that you accept the scenario at least. 🙂
Yes, if I were an evolutionary skeptic, early evolution, especially the evolution of cellular machinery is where I’d direct my attack. It’s hard to find direct evidence for events of over two billion years ago. We have to rely on circumstantial evidence. Thank goodness for molecular phylogenetics
chuckles Well, endosymbiosis has more going for it than you suggest. Has anyone ever suggested you have a look at lichen?
Frankie,
It is ultimately fruitless. Your expert says X, so I trot mine out who says Y. What’s the point? I can formulate and articulate my own views, which can be challenged directly by interlocutors, without sticking a glove puppet on and enacting a punch & judy show.
There is more than one Creationist who proceeds almost entirely by C&P, and probably doesn’t even read the answers. Then, it becomes tantamount to trolling.
All Sermonti is doing is making assertions. Evolution cannot happen because domesticated animals will probably die off if we didn’t look after them. Since no-one proposes that evolution proceeds from such lineages – the products of intelligent design, one might add – it’s a strawmanning assertion at that.
Now look what you made me do – I’m arguing with your glove puppet.
Darwin started it. Dawkins agreed as di Mayr, et al. Tat was teh whole point of NS- design without a designer.
No and you don’t know what a nested hierarchy is. Transitional forms would ruin any attempt at forming one. Are you saying this alleged ToE says there won’t be any transitional forms?
Not with respect to prokaryotes evolving into eukaryotes
Frankie Joe is saying what Marks, Dembski, and Ewert are saying. He’s simply not as good as they are at fancy obfuscation of stupid stuff.
Nope, his opinion is based on years of observation, experimentation- his own as well as others.
1- That isn’t what he is saying
2- Domestication was all Darwin had to make his case and dawkins comes behind him as does the same thing. NS doesn’t even have the power to do what AS can. All it can do is undo what we have done. And that is the point- NS brings everything back to the norm/ feral state