TOE and the Reasons for Doubt

Here's the full quote from Sagan, Peg:

quote:

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The fossil evidence could be consistent with the idea of a great designer; perhaps some species are destroyed when the designer becomes dissatisfied with them, and new experiments are attempted on an improved design. But this notion is a little disconcerting. Each plant and animal is exquisitely made. Should not a supremely competent designer have been able to make the intended variety from the start? The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient designer (although not with a designer of more remote and indirect temperament).

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Now, do you think that:a) The section you quoted accurately reflects what Sagan was saying?
b) That what he actually said supports your position at all?

What new things did you learn that changed your mind, Mike?

I see this claim, or similar ones, from Creationists all the time; the idea that you could just line up modern species and form "transitionals" so it doesn't mean anything. It's just not true.There is no living creature that resembles a transitional like Archaeopteryx, no living creature that forms a transitional like Tiktaalik, no Eohippus, no Australopithecus, the list goes on and on. You can't just say things are transitionals by looking at living creatures, the necessary creatures just aren't there. And even if you could, you'd still be missing any concept of order. The transitionals identified in the fossil record are not found arbitrarily, they're found in order according to multiple, independent dating techniques. In some cases (e.g. Tiktaalik) they were found were they were predicted to be by people looking there specifically because that's where they might find that particular transitional form.

I'm not talking about transitionals to hypothetical future species; I'm talking about transitionals between existing species.

I know that. But Mike made a claim very similar to one I've seen lots of other Creationists make that you could just line up existing species and call them "transitionals" and that's all the transitionals we have found are - scientists lining things up and saying they're transitional.This is not so.

Er... did you not understand the post?Kaichos Man has posted on your side.

(emphasis mine)It doesn't work this way. There aren't "correct mutations", evolution is not searching toward a single "correct" sequence of nucleotides. Because the assumptions behind your calculations are wrong, your results are meaningless.Edited by Mr Jack, : tag fix

It needs to be for what? Are you talking about a mutation we've already discovered? Then your argument is even more broken. You can't treat the probabilities of an event that has already occured like that way; if you could no-one would ever win the lottery.

Hi Kaichos,If you enclose the bit of a message you're quoting in quote tags, like this:[qs]Quoting you[/qs]then it'll come out like this: And be much clearer for all ...On to your actual post Yes, that's what I said. Your argument doesn't work for it, it would only work for a gene we hadn't found and were looking for. It's like this, see: I've just rolled 12 dice, and come out with the result 543456656141 !! Amazing, huh? That's a 1 in 2,176,782,336 chance! Isn't it astonishing that it happened?Well, no, of course it isn't. Because while events may be astonishingly unlikely before they happen, after they've happened the probability of them having happened is 1. I hope you now realise I was talking about basic probability and not evolution.Edited by Mr Jack, : While a probably may be probable, it isn't probability.

I assure you that 4¹⁰⁰⁰ is a very long way from one.

Could you elaborate on what exactly you are talking about here? We share organs (and all the other common features) with other species because we have a common ancestor with them. These organs don't uniquely spring forth anew, they are conserved from that ancestor. Or was that not what you meant?

Well, I've read that paper which discusses how mutation breeding experiments behave. It discusses the unsurprising result that the number of novel mutations found is asymptotic with the number of experiments. This is a paper based on discussing a particular aspect of agricultural breeding; it is fantasy to think it has any impact on evolutionary issues.Could you explain why you think it proves that genetic research is unable to prove ToE? Edited by Mr Jack, : Improved clarity.

Do you know what a mutation breeding experiment is, Peg? They take individuals from a genetically homogeneous captively bred population and expose them to radiation to induce mutation and have a gander at what results. There are three things about this you should immediately recognise as being different from natural populations:1. There is no accumulation of mutations
2. Mutation is induced by large radiation dosages
3. The initial population is homogeneousThat these experiments produce an asymptotic number of mutations should be entirely unsurprising to you - there are only so many nucleotides to mutate or places to break a DNA strand (a common cause of mutation in radiation experiments but almost completely irrelevant to evolution). And most breaks to a gene will have the same effect: no functional protein produced so large groups of these point mutations and breaks will produce the same mutation.You'll notice as well that a large number of mutations produce no effect at all, either because they have struck some part of the genome that produces no meaningful change (i.e because it hit an inactive or duplicate gene) or because the mutation does not meaningful change the protein produced (either because it produced a synonym for the same amino acid, or because it altered a part of the protein not critical to function to a similar amino acid).Which brings me on to accumulation of mutation, whereas in a mutation breeding experiment these neutral changes are useless, in evolution they can be quite important. An empirical example of this comes from Richard Lenski's experiments with E. coli where an early neutral mutation was key in allowing a later mutation that enabled citrate metabolism.As a final point regarding mutation breeding, I refer your attention to a point you made: Again, I draw your attention to the point raised in the last couple of pages of this thread that there is not target in evolution. The goals of agribusiness are much more narrow and more defined than the range of potentially beneficial mutations for a natural population.(Oh, and as a matter of fact the main reason that mutation breeding is being dropped from agriculture is not that it doesn't work: it does, as any wheat field you've ever walked through attests but because considerably more powerful methods are now available)On to your second point: One in 20/100? That's 1 in 0.2, or 5 times certainty! Wow! I never knew they were so probable! Snark aside, how is the "chance" of forming a histone remotely relavant to anything? Histones were not formed by chance, they evolved. Even the simplest histone forms found in Eukarya probably took a billion years to evolve, and the complex forms found in our nuclear DNA took longer still. The much simpler (but homologous) histones of Archaea doubtless took less time to emerge.And bacteria, of course, manage just fine with not a single histone to their name as does the mitochondrial DNA found in every cell of your body. Histones are not needed for DNA function, and thus certainly not needed for life.

No, it's not, it's dishonest, misleading rubbish. You can find a critique here if you wish; it's pretty damning.But that's rather an aside. To me, posts like yours are the real sadness of Creationism, it's not just that you're wrong it's the time and effort you and people like you are putting into reading the wrong sources. Rather than studying real science, and real biology, you're lapping up lies and misinformation. That's really sad.There's a world of books on biology out there, catering to all levels of knowledge. If you put half the effort into studying them you do into absorbing this bullshit you'd have learnt so much about the world. Instead you're rattling around inside an echo chamber of misinformation.I think that's tragic.

It's not just Yorkshire, I was baffled as to why Coyote was objecting.Heh: two peoples very much alike in everything, of course, but their language