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Author | Topic: IC challenge: Evolve a bicycle into a motorcycle! | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Soplar Inactive Member |
Hi Parsimonium
I believe we have communicated previously. My comment re 95% of species being extinct is a bit loose. While I believe trial is an apt term, error needs some expansion. As I mention in my post, the principal argument for ID is the need for a “designer” to operate the evolutionary “design process” I believe that there is no question that there is a design process active in evolution, but this process is driven by genetic mutations which automatically produce a large number of new trial organisms. These new trails are subjected to whatever conditions are extant and thus those sufficiently fit survive and those who are not do not. Re the 95% of species that have existed are currently extinct, it is important to note that their time on earth has varied widely. If one examines the fossil record, one sees a continual improvement in organisms. One also sees that many early organisms remain even though those with greater survivability appear. A good example is fish. Fish first appeared about 500 mya (http://www.dol-ex.org/HTML/p7.html) but some of species are still swimming in the ocean. On the other hand, dinosaurs appeared about 250 mya and all disappeared abruptly at the end of the cretaceous period, 65 mya (http://www4.tpgi.com.au/users/amcgann/dinosaurs/page2.htm) Thus, while 95% of all species have ultimately become extinct, the “errors” that caused their demise did not immediately manifest themselves. Thus the Trials portion of evolutionary T&E process is quite effective in producing ever improving organisms, but the Errors portion (elimination of less fit organisms) is not in general time synchronous with the Trials portion. In the end, the less fit do not survive, even though it takes awhile for conditions to arise which cause the less fit to become extinct. One interesting aspect of the evolutionary T&E process is the appearance of the organism with the greatest survival ability - Homo sapiens. This has led to the increased rate of extinction of those organisms less able to compete which includes just about all species. Regarding the ID debate, the most important idea to note that the production of trials and subsequent winnowing occurs without the need of any supernatural ID. Regards Soplar
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pop  Inactive Member |
hey andya are you a muslim or what I think you must refuse evolution
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nator Member (Idle past 2196 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
Andya ia, indeed, a muslim but he accepts the ToE along with the rest of modern science.
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Nighttrain Member (Idle past 4020 days) Posts: 1512 From: brisbane,australia Joined: |
One interesting aspect of the evolutionary T&E process is the appearance of the organism with the greatest survival ability - Homo sapiens. This has led to the increased rate of extinction of those organisms less able to compete which includes just about all species.
Save bacteria and viri.
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obvious Child Member (Idle past 4142 days) Posts: 661 Joined: |
and roaches. Those things will outlive mankind. 100 to 1 odds on that.
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RAZD Member (Idle past 1431 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined: |
and how many other species of beetle?
ps - welcome to the fray we are limited in our ability to understand by our ability to understand RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ... to share.
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obvious Child Member (Idle past 4142 days) Posts: 661 Joined: |
Depends on how they break food down. A super simple enzyme process would be more advantegous in the long run then a complicated digestive system.
Roachs...i hate those abominations. Those things can eat a variety of foods (many things we don't consider edible), breathe a variety of gas ratios, survive a large amount of radiation, reproduce quickly, there's a reason they haven't changed much in 100+ million years.
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RAZD Member (Idle past 1431 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined: |
I used to live in Mississippi, down on the coast, and one night I went into the dark kitchen hearing a noise, turned on the light and a 3" roach leap off the counter landed on my stomach and ran down my leg to get away.
The next day I got roach traps. Lots of roach traps. And spread some borax around the edges.Cockroach Organic Control Information Of course if one were looking for a good survival design ... I don't think humans would make the cut: too much politics and bickering to really get anything done on a useful time-scale that would anticipate problems (global warming as a case in point). {nods towards topic} Enjoy.
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dogrelata Member (Idle past 5338 days) Posts: 201 From: Scotland Joined: |
Guys, I am currently re-reading Behe's 'Darwin's Black Box' and one of his examples stuck on my mind. In page 44 he asked whether we can evolve bicycles into motorcycles by using only random variations and natural selection. He allows for a factory and a blueprint to simulate bicycle reproduction and blueprint (which can be mutated). However, Behe said the motorcycle is an irreducibly complex system and the bicycle cannot be a functional precursor to a motorcycle. I know it’s not considered ”good form’ around here to dig up old topics, but since this one has been revived already . I’d like to go back to the original post. It may just be my lack of understanding, but there does appear to be a degree of inference that because A led to B, A must have ”set out on the journey’ with something approximating B in mind. This makes me a little uncomfortable. I realise it wasn’t the purpose of the proposal to take it in this direction, but a better analogy for evolution might have been to ask, given the bicycle factory and mutating blueprint, would anything emerge that found a niche that could not directly be filled by the original bicycle? If the answer to the above question is no, then why is it no? If the answer is no, are we to assume that there must be some process in place preventing (random?) mutations leading to different forms that may either be better fits to their environment than their predecessors, or sufficiently different to find their own niche in a different environment? That is to say, a mechanism that allows only mutations that may not lead to a better fit. It seems to me that for someone to propose that evolution does not work, they need also to propose such a mechanism. To date I am aware of no such proposal (other than the big numbers argument that has already been covered in this topic). One last thought. If we could rewind time by 10 million years, then restart the clock, would evolution lead us to the same diversity of life that we see today, or would the random effects of mutation and environmental change produce something different. A variation on that theme might be, how closely will the diversity of life on planet earth in 10 million years approximate what we see today? And will homo sapiens be around to observe it?
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Soplar Inactive Member |
Hi Nighttrain
I had about givien up on this site. Most of the responses are dogmatic or rather confusing. It's nice to "hear" from someone rational. I believe you are quite correct in excepting bacteria and viri (of course, I allowed for exceptions by the phrase "which includes just about all species"). At present, bacteria and viri appear to be able to adapt in manners which have so far thwarted our efforts to vanquish them. Of course, we only wish to vanquish that "bad" ones - multicelled life would be impossible without the "good" ones. I believe that advances in microbiology, genetic maipulation, etc will eventually supply humans with the tools to eradicate even the most adaptable microrganism. A good example is the progress being made in the struggle with HIV. HIV is the most insidious microrganism to date. It propagates via sexual activity - something we all want/need but are unwilling/unable to talk about, and HIV attacks the bodies basic defense mechanisms. Regarding the possible ultimate ascendency of bacteria and viri, I find it intriguing that, should bacteria and viris be the ultimate survivors, life will have come full circle since all life began with single celled life. One last comment - you didn't address the main theme of my posting: there is a "life design" process at work - T&E. The process is "driven" by genetic mutations which give rise to improved life forms which are ultimately selected over lesser organsims. This design process proceeds without any intervention of a supernatural being. Do you agree? Soplar
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Brad McFall Member (Idle past 5059 days) Posts: 3428 From: Ithaca,NY, USA Joined: |
Well an answer could be "yes."
To do so one would need to have a community of scholars where what Gould holds out as the internally directed directionality of 19th century ideas of evolution were NOT be argued against simply to establish "constraint" and in example 'developmental constraint' as a new notion able to "channel" (evoltutionary) changes but that artifical rather than natural selection be developed as the cause of any directionality (thus to the niche or B as a species(sic!))where the directionality is an external purposiveness of the artifically selected bike manifold in the internal dependence of man on the tissue of other life. What would happen to evolutionary theory in case of this, is that where discontinuity is presently being written, continuity would arise (where "emergent" characters were asserted), and the discontinuity would be returned socially and then culturally to the unconditioned approach to supernaturalism rather than having personal identity of religious experiences as in current writings. Directionaltiy IN NATURE is due to natural selection not variation (as is standard)but in the bike factory or the creationist striving for an independent view than the secular hereditary king evolutionary change is sustainable within anthropological changes from A to B.
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AnswersInGenitals Member (Idle past 177 days) Posts: 673 Joined: |
AP challenges:
Guys, I am currently re-reading Behe's 'Darwin's Black Box' and one of his examples stuck on my mind. In page 44 he asked whether we can evolve bicycles into motorcycles by using only random variations and natural selection. He allows for a factory and a blueprint to simulate bicycle reproduction and blueprint (which can be mutated). However, Behe said the motorcycle is an irreducibly complex system and the bicycle cannot be a functional precursor to a motorcycle. So I challenge my friends evo and cre: If I start with a factory that produces bicycles from a mutable blueprint, what evolutionary steps would be needed to achieve the final product of a motorcycle? AP, you and Behe have things a little confused here. The bike doesn't move by itself. It requires a human rider to mobilize it. Therefore, the correct analogy is for the human rider to evolve into the motorcycle engine. You may question whether the evolutionary process can result in a human evolving into a mindless piece of machinery, but you need only pay a visit to Bob Jones University to observe this process in operation. Actually, the motorcycle did evolve from the bike, but not through a gradual series of allelic gene mutations. It was an instance of endosymbiosis. If you are not familiar with this term, you should read Lynn Margulis' "Symbiotic Planet". It is a very short book and lays out the concept and evidence for endosymbiosis in a straightforward manner. Just be careful not to take her seriously when she proposes this mechanism for all speciation events. She has the mind of a great biologist, but the soul of a crackpot creationist, seeing her solution as the only possible one and all criticism as part os a great conspiracy. Endosymbiosis was the process whereby modern plants first aquired green chloroplasts for photosysnthesis when one of their ancient ancestors ate a small blue-green algae, and instead of digesting it, started a beautiful relationship.. It is also the process whereby we 'better than thou' eukaryotes acquired our mitochondria when one of our ancestors ate without digesting an efficient aerobic bacterium. But getting back to bikes and motorcycles: when this red herring analogy was put forth by the blue nosed Behe in his yellow journalism tract he (being a professor of biology) knew full well that it was a total non-sequitor designed to distract the uninformed, which it did in your case. While mankind's (peoplekind's, he/shekind's?) technological evolution certainly has a large Darwinian aspect to it with a lot of small, random modifications filtered through an environmental selection process, it tends to be dominated by Lamarkian processes that make analogies drawn between technological and biological evolution more confusing than enlightening. Regards, AnInGe
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Brad McFall Member (Idle past 5059 days) Posts: 3428 From: Ithaca,NY, USA Joined: |
I have expressed my own doubts about IC on evC but I also have doubts evolutionarily about Williams non-material hierarchy. If however one had no interest in ID or Creationism and one tried to insist with Williams's group the parts of the "bike" may non-material in the same obscure sense that IC is claimed no matter said motorcycle.
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Nighttrain Member (Idle past 4020 days) Posts: 1512 From: brisbane,australia Joined: |
Thanks, Soplar. One tries to be rational. Except when I`m teasing. Or stirring (an irritating Aussie habit, I`m afraid). The sheer variety of bacteria and rapidity of lateral transfer gives them abilities that Homo sap would die for. Our very existence in present form has depended on bacterial insertions. To give an idea of numbers, here`s something I posted elsewhere in EVC
News | CIRES "We step on soil every day, but few people realize that 'dirt' supports a complex community of microorganisms that plays a critical role on Earth, he said. "The number of bacterial species in a spoonful of soil is likely to exceed the total number of plant species in all of the United States." http://www.sdearthtimes.com/et0998/et0998s8.html The group, led by microbiologist William B. Whitman, estimates the number to be five million trillion trillion that's a five with 30 zeroes after it. Look at it this way. If each bacterium were a penny, the stack would reach a trillion light years. These almost incomprehensible numbers give only a sketch of the vast pervasiveness of bacteria in the natural world. http://www.cropchoice.com/leadstry9f94.html?recid=633 To put this in its context Jack Heinemann of Canterbury University pointed out that it is extremely difficult to simply detect HGT as at present scientists are only aware of 10 million species of bacteria which is only 1% of the total number of bacteria species i.e. we don’t have clue about the other 99%. On top of this of the species of bacteria that are known not all of them are able to be studied in the lab as they cannot be cultured for analysis. Put in a global context bacteria hold as much carbon in them as all the plants on the planet and ten times the amount of nitrogen than plants. While virus species out number bacteria by 10-100 times. If simplicity ensures long-term survival, maybe we are heading the wrong way
Researchers at Oregon State University and Diversa Corporation have discovered that the smallest free-living cell known also has the smallest genome, or genetic structure, of any independent cell - and yet it dominates life in the oceans, thrives where most other cells would die, and plays a huge role in the cycling of carbon on Earth. In nature, apparently, bigger is not always better. Publishing in the journal Science, scientists outlined the growing knowledge about SAR11, a group of bacteria so dominant that their combined weight exceeds that of all the fish in the world's oceans. In a marine environment that's low in nutrients and other resources, they are able to survive and replicate in extraordinary numbers - a milliliter of sea water off the Oregon coast might contain 500,000 of these cells. "The ocean is a very competitive environment, and these bacteria apparently won the race," said Stephen Giovannoni, an OSU professor of microbiology. "Our analysis of the SAR11 genome indicates that they became the dominant life form in the oceans largely by being the simplest." The new study outlines how SAR11 has one of the most compact, streamlined genomes ever discovered, with only 1.3 million base pairs - the smallest ever found in a free living organism, and a number that's literally tiny compared to something like the human genome. "SAR11 has almost no wasted DNA," Giovannoni said. "This organism is extremely small and efficient. Every genetic part serves a purpose, more so than any other genome we've studied." The organism is able to survive as an unattached cell in a hostile environment, has a complete set of biosynthetic pathways, and can reproduce efficiently by consuming dissolved organic matter. "By comparison, humans are mostly junk DNA, with large parts of the human genome having no important function," Giovannoni said. This type of genome streamlining, researchers say, appears to be a major factor in the evolutionary success of SAR11, which they believe may have been thriving for a billion years or more. One scientific hypothesis holds that natural selection acts to reduce genome size because of the metabolic burden of replicating "junk" DNA with no adaptive value. SAR11 supports that theory. Researchers are particularly interested in SAR11, Giovannoni said, because of the critical role it plays in geochemistry. Photosynthesis is a process used by plants to convert sunlight energy into organic molecules, creating the foundation of the food chain and producing oxygen. About half of photosynthesis and the resulting oxygen on Earth are produced by algae in the ocean, and microbes like SAR11 recycle organic carbon - producing the nutrients needed for algal growth. "Ultimately, SAR11 through its sheer abundance plays a major role in the Earth's carbon cycle," Giovannoni said. "Quite simply, this is something we need to know more about. SAR11 is a major consumer of the organic carbon in the oceans, which nearly equals the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The carbon cycle affects all forms of plant and animal life, not to mention the atmosphere and fossil fuel formation." SAR11 was first discovered at OSU in 1990. Since then researchers have learned that populations of SAR11 increase during the summer and decrease during the winter, in a cycle that correlates to the ebb and flow of organic carbon in the ocean surface. Molecular probes, gene cloning, sequencing techniques and other tools have been used in this exploration. Guess this knocks the idea of more complex organisms supplanting simpler. On numbers alone, we fight a losing battle. Add the dimishing resources as we proliferate and it seems a good time to swap species. To sum up, I see no evidence of any supernatural influence. Chemistry created life. Chemistry governs life. Chemistry ends life.
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RAZD Member (Idle past 1431 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined: |
... but a better analogy for evolution might have been to ask, given the bicycle factory and mutating blueprint, would anything emerge that found a niche that could not directly be filled by the original bicycle? Well there was this bicycle shop run by a couple of brothers with some family land in North Carolina ... and while they may not have gotten it "Wright" the first time, what emerged was certainly NOT a bicycle ... ps -- welcome to the fray. we are limited in our ability to understand by our ability to understand RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ... to share.
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