TOE and the Reasons for Doubt

"Since when did the Pope of the Catholic church look to scripture as the final authority in the first place? Not since before Constantine. I don't care what the Pope says. I care what Moses said, "For in six days the Lord God made the heavens and the earth..." Exodus 20:11 in the 10 commandments, no less. Jesus said, "But from the beginning of the creation God made the male and female", Mark 10:6. Jesus confirmed that everything Moses taught in the Pentateuch was true (Luke 24). I believe them, not the Pope. "Quoting scripture in a scientific debate is a no-no.Edited by ts, : add quote

There are roughly 750,000 words in the bible, in the original hebrew there were no vowels. If we assume an average of two vowels per word, that's 1,500,000 vowels. The chance of any given vowel being assigned in the right way are 1 in 5, so that means there is only a 0.21500000 probability of all the vowels in the Bible being correct!

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Would you accept the above argument? Does it matter in your rejection whether the maths is right? No, of course not, because the assumption made (vowels have been randomly assigned) is nonsense. Similar it doesn't make any difference whether you've correctly calculated your probability because the assumptions you've used are nonsensical and bare no relationship to the subject you're actually talking about.

G,day, Mr Jack.If the vowels were wrong the meaning would be garbled and the entire Bible would be incomprehensible. Precisely my point. If the neucleotides are jumbled the gene won't function. They have to be placed in the correct order if the gene is to function, and the probability of that is the aforementioned laughingly-tiny number.According to your logic the Bible would be composed of an entirely random collection of characters, from which readers would try to extract meaning, with each successive edition containing more and more of their guesswork until you finally wind up with a completely random and totally mindless collection of unrelated guesses.Compare that to the real bible, in which the prophet Daniel pinpoints the exact years of Jesus Christ's ministry and execution 400 years before He was born.

Kicked in after a 0.5% improvement on the duplicated gene. Didn't you understand this? No I didn't. It wouldn't matter if the mutations were happening to an individual or a population until natural selection kicks in. The only difference in a population is that the incident of mutations would be greatly accelerated, which means that until natural selection kicks in THE GENE WOULD DETERIORATE FASTER. It's pretty simple:Works towards the enabling of Natural Selection = "good".Works away from the enabling of Natural Selection = "bad".

Thank you so much. That was the probability of the gene NOT evolving.

And they're not, which is precisely my point. Why are they not? Because the calculation I presented is nonsense because the assumptions behind it are nonsense.Exactly as the assumptions behind your calculation are nonsense.

As far as I know about evolution, nothing "enables" natural selection. It's a process, not a lightbulb. The genes mutate or not, and the environment determines whether those mutations benefit the organism, are survival neutral, or deleterious to the survival of the organism. Natural selection is the process by which heritable traits that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully reproduce become more common in a population over successive generations. Get it? Once again, it is a process. There are no goals or targets - Natural Selection will not dream of starring on Broadway no matter how much you anthropomorphize it.If members of a population have a gene that is deleterious to its survival in its current environment, then under the process of natural selection, those members would reproduce less and generations later the gene would be expressed in less individuals of the total population. If member of a population have a gene that is beneficial to its survival in its current environment, then under the process of natural selection, those member would reproduce more and generations later the gene would be expressed in more individuals of the total population.There is no deterioration of the gene. The gene just changes, that is all. And seemingly deleterious mutations can actually improve survivability in certain environments. And a changing environment can make previously beneficial mutations, deleterious ones. The process is nowhere near what you have described it as. So all your probability calculations cannot apply here. You have attached characteristics that are not accepted by biologists as part of the definition of natural selection.In short, you are wrong.Edited by Izanagi, : No reason given.Edited by Izanagi, : No reason given.

Please bring this to an appropriate thread so that we can see your "evidence" for this assertion.It should be a fun discussion for both of us.

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Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

In addition, evolution is not a one shot deal. An organism doesn't evolve wings overnight. That would probably be a case for creationism.Evolution is gradual, happening over time. It is the accumulation of mutation after mutation within a population much like a stalactite accumulates mineral deposits from dripping water. The aggregate sum of all those mutations are what eventually differentiates the daughter species from the mother species. But this happens during a relatively long time, and you wouldn't notice it while it was happening. What you could see are the endpoints, that is, you could see differences between the mother species and daughter species, but not the transitionals between would be less clear.

Hi, Kaichos Man. This needs to be addressed first, because you’ve got it completely backwards. Natural selection is not good for an organism. Natural selection is the killer of the bad stuff. Let me explain:How do you define the word, survivor? I would define it as, something that hasn’t died (yet). It’s a negative definition: it is defined in terms of what it is not.When you start saying that survival is the result of the mechanism of natural selection (as you have been), you are trying to define survival positively. This means that survival can’t happen until your mechanism is enabled. So, if natural selection, of your usage, is not enabled, the organism is not surviving, so the mutations in your example are never happening.So, we don’t define natural selection that way: we define it as the pressures that can kill things, and survivors as things that natural selection hasn’t gotten yet.Natural selection is bad for individual organisms, because it kills them or prevents them from breeding. And, if it is not enabled, that means the organism is surviving.Do you understand this part?----- Okay, now I’m going to beat the horse for a little more, just to make sure you understand the implications of the above definition for natural selection.Yes, I did understand this. It is your "a priori" talking, like I mentioned in my earlier posts.Selection isn't something you just "enable" at some point: it's the result of pressures that are always present for all organisms (e.g. predators, pathogens, resources, competitors, mates, physiological constraints, etc.). Again, these pressures are always working on all organisms. Selection is always hovering over everybody's head, waiting for the chance to strike. As soon as you start changing your phenotype (the outward expression of your genes), you potentially make it easier or harder for natural selection to "get" you. If it doesn't "get" you, you survive and reproduce.What your threshold-value approach is saying is that under a certain specific circumstance, and under no other circumstances, the organism's fitness will be changed such that natural selection occurs. This is you, dictating, a priori, what counts as "good" or "bad."But, in reality, any time you start changing base-pair sequences, you risk tipping your phenotype into the "inviable" or "unfit" region. And, since mutations are random, you really have no way of knowing when a mutation will happen, nor how it will affect you when it does happen, nor, for that matter, how many other possibilities might have happened or how they would effect you. This is why your a priori selection of the time at which natural selection "kicks in" is a completely fallacious approach.Any given mutation might happen in any given embryo (that’s when evolution-relevant mutations typically occur). And, a whole array of effects of this mutation on the organisms's ability to withstand a potentially endless quantity of selection pressures would have to be evaluated before you could say whether or not said mutation was deleterious, neutral or beneficial under the organism’s circumstances. And, even then, its effects on the organism would only be a statistical probability.The line to remember from my last post: This should be obvious, given that there are millions of organisms with millions of different survival mechanisms (e.g. herding, armor, speed, armaments, camouflage, resource management physiology, food acquisition and processing syndromes, sensory accoutrements, etc., each with many different sorts and flavors).An example: let's say "the gene we want to mutate" from your example produces wings. What your example says is that, if we don't evolve wings, we have failed. But, in the process of failing to evolve wings, we could easily evolve increased muscle fitness or more efficient oxygen-exchange in our lungs instead, which, although not what we "wanted," could contribute to our fitness.So, yes, you failed to incorporate natural selection by assuming that it wouldn't occur unless a specific set of circumstances that you dictated beforehand came to fruition.I wrote a bit more about selection pressures in a new thread, Stasis and Evolution, which also now features links to a couple older, but still good, threads directed by RAZD on related issues.----- If we take out the errors involved in dictating natural selection thresholds beforehand, this amounts to you tacitly (like my word?) agreeing with me that you failed to incorporate the population.The gene wouldn't deteriorate faster because it would mutate in multiple different directions simultaneously in different individuals in a population. This will result in multiple phenotypes in a single population, and the different phenotypes will be involved in an evolutionary game in which they have different chances to succeed. And, you can't deteriorate a gene without some sort of consequences on your survival. So, you'll have natural selection, all along the way, weeding out any with deteriorated genes. Thus, natural selection results in the preservation of the genes without deterioration and the genes with actual improvements.Does this make it clear to you? Populations and selection are always going to be present, and you must explicitly incorporate them in any model of evolution if you want your model to be meaningful.-----It seems the reasons for doubt about evolution are usually just misunderstandings of what evolution is actually about. It was the same way for me when I first began hearing about it. I sincerely hope this will help everyone understand the concepts behind evolution better (though I’m sure the length of the post has already prevented many from even bothering to read it).Edited by Bluejay, : "indidivual"Edited by Bluejay, : "improvments"

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Nice quote mine. I'll get back to you when I figure out how you so slyly tricked me.

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It's not the man that knows the most that has the most to say.

Ok guys I think we have been going about this the wrong way (trying to educate our Creationist friends over the ToE).Quote from Kaichos Man message 274: It's patently obvious from the above that Creationist understanding of the Toe is a laughable strawman of the accepted scientific stance of the theory.So in order to discuss/argue further first we need to find out from their own words what they think the ToE actually is. Once we get to that base we can continue.So this is a general question put out to all those who consider the ToE as 'wrong'...(please don't answer if you support the ToE/are an evolutionist as I want to see what comes in from the Creationist side first:Question: Skin colour in humans range from the very dark skin of continental Africans to the blondest of blonde skins in Scandinavians. What do you think the ToE says is the 'good' skin tone, which is 'bad' and why. What predications do you think the ToE even makes in the situation I have painted above - and why?There is only one correct answer and if you can answer correctly we can move on...let's see what happens...

G'day Bluejay.Thank you for a reasoned and detailed post. This is "negative" selection. It is the process Kimura was almost exclusively concentrating on. As a Creationist I have absolutely no problem with it- it is logical that those organisms most damaged by mutations will be selected out. What is the difference between selection being "enabled" and selection "striking"? If you don't like the verb "to be enabled", then fine. Call it natural selection "coming into play". Once again, if the changes to your phenotype make it easier for natural selection to get you, that's negative selection. If harder, that's positive selection.Creationists have no problem with negative selection. It is positive selection we refute, with the attendant idea that mutation can create a superior phenotype (not just a "less damaged" phenotype) from the formation of new genetic material resulting in a feature or function additional to all those enjoyed by the original organism. That's why this exercise focussed on the statistical impossibility of the creation of a new gene. Let's see. You have a population of fruitflies with no antennae (it was an antenna originally, it sort of evolved into a wing at some point, but I think that was my fault!)So, fruitflies without antennae. The gene mutates "in multiple different directions simultaneously in different individuals in a population. This will result in multiple phenotypes in a single population."Which gives us fruitflies with a host of interesting new phenotypical features, one of which may or may not be an antenna?That is NOT observed!Edited by Kaichos Man, : typos

I don't why you are using Kimura to support your contention that Evolution should be doubted. Kimura said of his theory that

quote:

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"The theory does not deny the role of natural selection in determining the course of adaptive evolution" (Kimura, 1986)

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Interestingly enough, apparently Kimura believes in evolution. He just proposed a new mechanism for it. He also said that his theory doesn't deny natural selection, it's just that there is a larger role for genetic drift.So why are you using a mechanism for evolution to bring doubt to evolution?Edited by Izanagi, : No reason given.

I wasn't aware that you can quote-mine yourself!

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"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy." Charles Darwin