That's not quite what he asked in Message 1. He actually asked:
Show us a single genetic difference between the human and chimp genome that could not have been produced by known microevolutionary processes in either the chimp or human lineages. eg - compare the genomes and show which differences could not occur through mutations of the type observed in organisms today.
Do you see the difference?
Noted, but the poster cannot prove that the genetic differences were the produced by ME processes, any more than I can prove they were not.
That's a lot of genetic changes and a fair proportion of them are documented by historical observation in recent (geoplogical) years.
If we compared the skeletons of those dogs to one another, would we see more or less variation than see here:
Ok, but those dogs were selectively bred, those homonids were not.
"I have learned from my own embarrassing experience how easy it is to concoct remarkably persuasive Darwinian explanations that evaporate on closer inspection." - Daniel Dennet
That asked, the chances of the mutations required between human and primate, occurring in the right gene and often enough in the population to change the genome of the entire species, are next to naught.
Ordinary old lottery fallacy. The chances of you winning the lottery are next to naught. The chances of somebody winning the lottery are pretty high. Similarly, the chances of evolution producing one pre-specified result are next to naught, but the chances of evolution producing something viable are nearly 1.
By themselves, random base substitutions, and deletions, resulting in beneficial changes to the organism, do not occur frequently enough.
Noted, but the poster cannot prove that the genetic differences were the produced by ME processes, any more than I can prove they were not.
Again the question was not whether they were but whether they could be. In other words look at the types of mutations that we observe and show that there is something different that could not occur via one of the known types of mutations.
Ok, but those dogs were selectively bred, those homonids were not.
Similarly, the chances of evolution producing one pre-specified result are next to naught, but the chances of evolution producing something viable are nearly 1.
The problem is that the 'result' that you claim evolution produces, is always 'pre-specified', because it is incredibly complex and cannot function without all it's parts. Michael Behe in his book 'Darwin's Black Box' states, for example,
"You can’t start with a signal sequence and have a protein go a little way towards the lysosome, add a signal receptor protein, go a little further, and so forth. It’s all or nothing."
He concludes that "it is extremely implausible that components used for other purposes fortuitously adapted to new roles in a complex system."
Show your calculations or references.
"Elementary statistical theory shows that the probability of 200 successive mutations being successful is then () , or one chance out of 10 . The number 10 , if written out, would be "one" followed by sixty "zeros." In other words, the chance that a 200- component organism could be formed by mutation and natural selection is less than one chance out of a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion!" - Henry M. Morris, Ph.D.
"I have learned from my own embarrassing experience how easy it is to concoct remarkably persuasive Darwinian explanations that evaporate on closer inspection." - Daniel Dennet
The problem is that the 'result' that you claim evolution produces, is always 'pre-specified', because it is incredibly complex and cannot function without all it's part
Nope. You are confusing "specified complexity" (which in itself is meaningless) with "specified result". By "pre-specified" we mean the nature of the organism produced. Evolution has no goal. Evolution didn't "try" to evolve humans. It could have produced an essentially uncountable number of other organisms, some more complex than humans and some less complex. When calculating probability you must take all possibilities into account, not just the one possibility that happened.
If you flip a trillion fair coins, you will get some number of heads and some number of tails. The probability of getting those two numbers is essentially zero. And yet you got them. Because the probability of some pair of numbers is one.
(And next you have to account for the effect of selection).
Complexity is not a problem. "Irreducible complexity" is not a problem. Evolution can produce and has produced such things.
"Elementary statistical theory shows that the probability of 200 successive mutations being successful is then () , or one chance out of 10 . The number 10 , if written out, would be "one" followed by sixty "zeros." In other words, the chance that a 200- component organism could be formed by mutation and natural selection is less than one chance out of a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion!" - Henry M. Morris, Ph.D.
Yep, standard creationist straw man. And the lottery fallacy again. Evolution does not require any number of successive successful mutations. Evolution has trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of attempts, almost all of which are deleterious or have no effect. Winning the lottery is almost impossible, but we won the evolutionary lottery once and that's enough.
For example, Behe calculated that it would take 20,000 years for a bacterial population to evolve a novel protein, starting with a population of one billion. He actually published that. Many people pointed out that his calculation was reasonable (but overly simplistic) except for the starting population. There are about 100,000,000,000,000,000 bacteria per tone of soil on the Earth. Re-run the calculation again and a novel protein is almost guaranteed to emerge in 20,000 years. See Behe Disproves Irreducible Complexity
"Elementary statistical theory shows that the probability of 200 successive mutations being successful is then () , or one chance out of 10 . The number 10 , if written out, would be "one" followed by sixty "zeros." In other words, the chance that a 200- component organism could be formed by mutation and natural selection is less than one chance out of a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion!" - Henry M. Morris, Ph.D.
Curiously math is incapable of affecting reality, it can only model it, and when the model and reality disagree it is the model that is faulty.
quote:the old improbable probability problem: We see them over and over .... this or that could not possibly have happened because the improbability is just too great.
Usually these are based on very restrictive "all-at-once-out-of-nothing" linear calculations where the errors involved are multifold and pervasive:
The calculation is a mathematical model of reality and not the reality itself. When a model fails to replicate reality it is not reality that is at fault but the mathematical model. When a hurricane prediction program crashes because it can't model the first hurricane in the South Atlantic on record, the meteorologists don't go out to the hurricane and say "you can't be here, our model does not allow you to be here" ... they fix the model by looking for and taking out the failed assumptions (ie - that all hurricanes are north of the equator). When a model fails to model reality it is a good indication that some aspect of reality has been missed in the model.
"Elementary statistical theory shows that the probability of 200 successive mutations being successful is then () , or one chance out of 10 . The number 10 , if written out, would be "one" followed by sixty "zeros." In other words, the chance that a 200- component organism could be formed by mutation and natural selection is less than one chance out of a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion!" - Henry M. Morris, Ph.D.
But you and Henry Morris are wrong. Check this out:
Making Genetic Networks Operate Robustly: Unintelligent Non-design Suffices, by Professor Garrett Odell (online lecture):
Abstract: Mathematical computer models of two ancient and famous genetic networks act early in embryos of many different species to determine the body plan. Models revealed these networks to be astonishingly robust, despite their 'unintelligent design.' This examines the use of mathematical models to shed light on how biological, pattern-forming gene networks operate and how thoughtless, haphazard, non-design produces networks whose robustness seems inspired, begging the question what else unintelligent non-design might be capable of.
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Again, I ask you how you can ask me to show that mutations were not the cause of our evolution, when you can't prove that they did?
It's quite easy, the scientific concensus is that humans evolved from earlier organisms and that a major factor in that, as in all evolutionary processes, is mutation. Mutation has been observed and we find genetic differences between our ourselves and our ape cousins that have been caused by mutation so we form a conlusion.
So over to you - tell the world's scientists we're they went wrong.
Again you pigeonhole me as a creationist, it shows your extremely narrow view.
Forgive me, it's just that I've never met anyone arguing against evolution that is not also a creationist. I note that you're not denying that you are one though?
I don't know how old the earth is
Why not, science does?
I'm think that you're walking like a duck, quacking like a duck and also ducking and diving like a duck - well you know the rest... But do put me right.
and I'm certainly not as arrogant as evolutionists to think that I know how life was created.
No evolutionist knows how life was created - or even if it was created at all, so you're in good company here at least.
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Do you truly think it fair expecting creationists to prove the changes were not the result of mutations, when you can't prove that they were?
(for this thread I am going to use the word "prove" in the form of "prove beyond a reasonable doubt")
Creationists are the ones who are claiming that mutations can't produce the biodiversity we see today, so it is incumbent on them to show that these differences could not be produced by mutations.
As to proving that these were caused by mutations, this proof is found in the divergence rates of exons and introns/junk DNA. The removal of deleterious mutations in functional DNA is the proof that these were random mutations.
That asked, the chances of the mutations required between human and primate, occurring in the right gene and often enough in the population to change the genome of the entire species, are next to naught.
You are drawing the bulls eye around the arrow.
Let's use the lottery as an example. Lets say that the odds of winning are 1 in 100 million. For each lottery 100 million tickets are bought by 100 million people. For each lottery there is 1 winner. The winners of those lotteries are Frank, Susan, Mark, and Joanne. What are the odds that those specific four people would win? That would be 100 million to the 4th power, or 1 in 1000000000000000000000000. Therefore, it shouldn't have happened, right? And yet, even with those odds, it is nearly assured that 4 people would win.
When something happens the odds of it happening are 1 in 1. There is no "right place" for those mutations to occur. There are only the mutations that did occur. There are nearly an infinite number of species that could have evolved, but only a handful of species did evolve. This is just the same as the millions and millions of losers with just a handful of winners for the lottery. What you are leaving out of your calculations is all of the species that didn't evolve.
By themselves, random base substitutions, and deletions, resulting in beneficial changes to the organism, do not occur frequently enough.
Let's see your math.
As for genetic insertions and recombinations, while occurring fairly often, aren't random processes like mutations, but are functions inherent in the genome.
The problem is that the 'result' that you claim evolution produces, is always 'pre-specified', because it is incredibly complex and cannot function without all it's parts. Michael Behe in his book 'Darwin's Black Box' states, for example,
How does this apply to the chimp and human genomes? What human features are there that differ from chimps and require multiple parts that are without function except as part of the whole?
Noted, but the poster cannot prove that the genetic differences were the produced by ME processes, any more than I can prove they were not.
If you can not prove that these differences were not produced by mutations, then why do creationists claim that they could not be produced by mutations?
Some biochemical systems are irreducibly complex, meaning that the removal of any one part of the system destroys the system's function. Irreducible complexity rules out the possibility of a system having evolved, so it must be designed.
Source: Behe, Michael J. 1996. Darwin's Black Box, New York: The Free Press.
Response:
Irreducible complexity can evolve. It is defined as a system that loses its function if any one part is removed, so it only indicates that the system did not evolve by the addition of single parts with no change in function. That still leaves several evolutionary mechanisms:
deletion of parts
addition of multiple parts; for example, duplication of much or all of the system (Pennisi 2001)
change of function
addition of a second function to a part (Aharoni et al. 2004)
gradual modification of parts
All of these mechanisms have been observed in genetic mutations. In particular, deletions and gene duplications are fairly common (Dujon et al. 2004; Hooper and Berg 2003; Lynch and Conery 2000), and together they make irreducible complexity not only possible but expected. In fact, it was predicted by Nobel-prize-winning geneticist Hermann Muller almost a century ago (Muller 1918, 463-464). Muller referred to it as interlocking complexity (Muller 1939).
Evolutionary origins of some irreducibly complex systems have been described in some detail. For example, the evolution of the Krebs citric acid cycle has been well studied (Melndez-Hevia et al. 1996), and the evolution of an "irreducible" system of a hormone-receptor system has been elucidated (Bridgham et al. 2006). Irreducibility is no obstacle to their formation.
Even if irreducible complexity did prohibit Darwinian evolution, the conclusion of design does not follow. Other processes might have produced it. Irreducible complexity is an example of a failed argument from incredulity.
Irreducible complexity is poorly defined. It is defined in terms of parts, but it is far from obvious what a "part" is. Logically, the parts should be individual atoms, because they are the level of organization that does not get subdivided further in biochemistry, and they are the smallest level that biochemists consider in their analysis. Behe, however, considered sets of molecules to be individual parts, and he gave no indication of how he made his determinations.
Systems that have been considered irreducibly complex might not be. For example:
The mousetrap that Behe used as an example of irreducible complexity can be simplified by bending the holding arm slightly and removing the latch.
The bacterial flagellum is not irreducibly complex because it can lose many parts and still function, either as a simpler flagellum or a secretion system. Many proteins of the eukaryotic flagellum (also called a cilium or undulipodium) are known to be dispensable, because functional swimming flagella that lack these proteins are known to exist.
In spite of the complexity of Behe's protein transport example, there are other proteins for which no transport is necessary (see Ussery 1999 for references).
The immune system example that Behe includes is not irreducibly complex because the antibodies that mark invading cells for destruction might themselves hinder the function of those cells, allowing the system to function (albeit not as well) without the destroyer molecules of the complement system.
By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution.
The conclusion made by Behe and others is that IF evolution cannot produce them, THEN they must have been made, designed, created.
Let's review the logic of this argument:
(P1) complex systems exist in biological organisms where there are multiple parts involved in a process, feature or function, and where the removal of any part of the system renders the whole process non-functional.
(P2) if NO such system can evolve then it must be developed by some other process, and then, AND ONLY THEN, the existence of any "IC" system is evidence that "some other process"MUST have occurred.
(C1) Therefore such a system MUST be made, designed, created by some other process.
Leaving aside for now the logical fallacy of the false dichotomy (and the fact that precept (P2) of this argument is basically based on ignorance or denial of how such systems could have formed), we can still show that the concept is falsified if we can show that ONE such "IC" system HAS evolved: if ONE such "IC" system evolves then it invalidates the "then AND ONLY THEN" condition that is necessary in order that "some other process" MUST be involved.
Without the "then AND ONLY THEN" condition, the argument is reduced to it MAY have happened on any system where we just don't know whether it evolved or not (thus depending on ignorance of any mechanism to even be considered), and the specific conclusion is invalid (as several other conclusions can be made with equal validity, one of which is "we don't know") ... or at this point it becomes a non-falsifiable concept, a god-of-the-gaps, a moving-goal-post concept that avoids scientific pursuit of answers at all costs. Without the above condition the conclusion becomes
(C1b) Therefore such a system MAY or MAY NOT have evolved OR it MAY or MAY NOT have been made, designed, created by some other process, OR the universe may have sprung into existence last thursday fully formed, OR some other answer: we don't know.
This is not a testable conclusion and does not add any intellectual advantage to investigating the biology of the system with only science - the pursuit of knowledge based on what we DO know.
This is why the principle of falsification is used by science.
On to the experiments in question:
As noted in Ken Miller's website, just such an "IC" system was seen, observed, and documented as evolving in a couple of experiments run by Barry Hall:
quote:In 1982, Barry Hall of the University of Rochester began a series of experiments in which he deleted the bacterial gene for the enzyme beta-galactosidase. The loss of this gene makes it impossible for the bacteria to metabolize the sugar lactose. What happened next? Under appropriate selection conditions Hall found that the bacteria evolved not only the gene for a new beta-galactosidase enzyme (called the evolved beta-galactosidase gene, or ebg), but also a control sequence that switched the new gene on when glucose was present. Finally, a new chemical reaction evolved as well, producing allolactose, the chemical signal that normally switches on the lac permease gene, allowing lactose to flow into the cell.
Does Barry Hall's ebg system fit the definition of irreducible complexity? Absolutely. The three parts of the evolved system are:
(1) A lactose-sensitive ebg repressor protein that controls expression of the galactosidase enzyme (2) The ebg galactosidase enzyme (3) The enzyme reaction that induces the lac permease
Unless all three are in place, the system does not function, which is, of course, the key element of an irreducibly complex system.
It's "irreducible" and it evolved. Thus precept (P2) is invalidated, falsified, refuted, and ALL conclusions based on it are invalidate. Q.E.D.
Denial of falsification is not faith, it is delusion: something believed in spite of evidence to the contrary.
There is another interesting aspect to all this complexity talk. Something that any professional designer (eg, an engineer) could tell you: Complexity is a designer's worst enemy and spells doom for the design.
Most of the life cycle of a design lies in the maintenance phase. That is where bugs get fixed and features get added. When a design becomes overly complex (eg, "irreducibly complex"), then maintenance becomes extremely difficult if not impossible. Therefore, the amount of complexity in a design can be used to measure how badly designed it is.
However, it turns out that complexity is an expected feature of a design that has evolved. Evolutionary processes and methods naturally generate complexity. Many engineers, especially software engineers, have accidentally employed evolutionary processes -- primarily in the "copy something that performs one function and modify it to perform a slightly different function" manner -- and they have learned from bitter experience that the result is a near-exponential growth of complexity in the overall design. The complexity of that "evolved" design increases to the point that hardly anybody can figure out anymore just exactly how it works. And the code has become so intertwined that a very simple change in one place can cause catastrophic changes in totally unrelated parts of the code. Hence this photo of a t-shirt in an engineer's office:
Complexity is anathema to design.
More formally, there have been experiments using evolutionary processes to "evolve" useful designs. In some, there are extra parts that don't do anything, basically "vestigial remains" in the more classical sense (to short-circuit standard creationist quips, I mean parts that serve no purpose at all, not parts that still serve some kind of purpose, just not the primary purpose it used to serve). But in some experiments, they ended up with a highly complex, "irreducibly complex" even, design which would have been impossible for any human designer to have created.
The one I remember is evolving the design of a particular kind of amplifier using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Now, in my professional work for over 25 years, most of our designs included an FPGA -- before that, the US Air Force had trained me in 1977 as an electronic computer systems repairman (AFSC 305x4 -- USAF uses a different designation now), so I do have some understanding of digital electronics (eg, in one civilian job, the electrical engineer only knew analog electronics, so he consulted with me, the software engineer, regularly about digital electronics). Basically, an FPGA is an array of logic circuits which you can program by loading into it a file that tells each element in that array what kind of logic circuit it is (eg, AND gate, OR gate, NOT gate (AKA "inverter"), flip-flop) and exactly how it is connected to all the other elements in that array. I have no direct experience with that, since it's the electrical engineers who work directly with FPGAs (my only involvement is that they define read and write ports into that FPGA that my software then communicates with to control it and to read its status.
I also learned a few things about electronics, both analog and digital, in Air Force tech school. The supposed dichotomy between analog and digital electronics is purely artificial. All electronics is analog. What digital electronics chooses to do is to define only two narrow voltage ranges as valid. Depending on the actual logic definitions (a very salient point in the Data Systems Technician Chief Petty Officer advancement exams, one which it took me a second time to finally figure out), you have two and only two binary values, 0 and 1, both represented by a rather narrow range of voltages. What about the voltages between them? My Air Force training called that "The Forbidden Zone", meaning that those are voltage levels that have no real digital meaning and should never happen -- AKA "ambiguious", which is death to digital.
So now back to this experiment. They were using this one FPGA. And they were "evolving" a programming file to download into this FPGA so that they could then evaluate its performance as an amplifier of whatever type they were shooting for -- obviously, their measure of fitness was how well it performed. The result of this experiment was an FPGA that functioned well as the kind of amplifier they were seeking
Funny things about that design:
It was "irreducibly complex", meaning that if you were to change any single element of that design it would cease to work.
The design that had evolved made use of the analog electronic characteristics of the FPGA. This is something that no human designer could have ever possibly included into his design.
OK, so here's a bugaboo that electrical engineers have to deal with all the time. It is never just pure electronics. Every wire contains some internal resistance. In addition, every wire contains some inductive reactance (ie, you pass a current through a wire, it's going to generate a magnetic field). And everywhere that any two wires come close enough to each other, such as in an inductive coil, you also have some capacitance. You thought that biology was messy? Try some time to get down to the lowest levels of electrical nitty-gritty (actually, electronics is still orders of magnitude less messy than biology is).
Despite all the quality control we can throw at it, the production of digital circuits still includes some variances. So long as you take these circuits and use them in the prescribed manner (eg, digitally), none of those variances will ever mean anything, will make no difference whatsoever. But the moment you open those minute variances up for exploitation (as in those experiments), then all bets are off!
The thing about that FPGA design is that it naturally, with absolutely no intelligent intervention whatsoever (since what human could have possibly worked out all those analog operations of the digital circuits of the FPGA), created a working design that was "irreducibly complex."
Therefore, complexity, even "irreducible complexity", is the natural product of evolution. Not of "design".
"Elementary statistical theory shows that the probability of 200 successive mutations being successful is then () , or one chance out of 10 . The number 10 , if written out, would be "one" followed by sixty "zeros." In other words, the chance that a 200- component organism could be formed by mutation and natural selection is less than one chance out of a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion!" - Henry M. Morris, Ph.D.
As is standard in such creationist treatments, Morris' probability model assumes a single sequence of steps in which each step must succeed. That then produces a probability calculation of pn where p is the probability of one step succeeding and n is the number of steps. Since p is always less than 1, pn becomes smaller and smaller as n grows; eg, for p=0.5 and n=1000, pn = 9.3310-302 -- my understanding is that such a small probability is classified as "virtually impossible".
However, such a probability model does not describe what happens in evolution, which renders such creationist probability arguments moot and completely irrelevant. Creationists' probability arguments serve no purpose other than to deceive their audience.
Evolution doesn't work on a single individual, but rather on a population of individuals. Thus, instead of a single path, evolution uses multiple parallel paths. Thus the probability of a step (AKA "a generation") succeeding would be expressed by a calculation like P=1-(1-p)s, where p is the probability of success and s is the size of the population. That is to say, what is the probability that at least one individual in the population succeeds, which is the inverse (ie, q=1-p) of the probability of every single member of the population failing. So in a population of 1000 where the probability of success is 0.5, that means the probability of failure is 1-0.5 = 0.5. The probability of every individual failing is then 0.51000 = 9.3310-302. The probability of at least one individual succeeding is then 1-9.3310-302 = 1 approx. A probability of 1 is dead certainty.
Let's change the values a bit: let p=0.01 and s = 100. q = 1-p = 0.99. qs = 0.366 . 1 - 0.366 = 0.634.
Since others have named Morris' faulty argument as a lottery argument, let's look at the probabilities in a lottery. In California's Super Lotto Plus, five numbers are drawn from 47 and then one super-number is drawn from 27 balls. The probability of winning is 1 in 1,533,939 or 6.51910-7. Let's assume that every person in Calfornia buys one lottery ticket, which amounts to 41,416,353 tickets. We already know how unlikely it is for a given person to win, but what is the probability that somebody will win?
Well the probability that a person will lose, q = 1-p = 0.99999935 (virtual certainty). The probability that 41,416,353 people will all lose, q41,416,353, is 1.879510-12, fairly small. So subtract from 1 to get the probability that somebody will win and you get 0.999999999998120, virtual dead certainty.
If it's a slow half-week and only a million tickets are sold, then the probability that someone will win drops to 0.478. About 50/50, but still fairly likely, unlike the odds of a specific person winning.
The object lesson here is that when you try to use math to prove or disprove something, you must develop a math model that accurately describes that something.
We know from experience that the probability of a creationist constructing an accurate mathematical model of evolution is virtually zero.
Edited by dwise1, : Added 1,000,000 ticket case.
Edited by dwise1, : Added "the probability of a creationist constructing an accurate mathematical model of evolution"
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