A new paper pubished in Cell has serious implications for IDist arguments of "no new information" and "mutation only breaks things".
The researchers have found that a gene responsible for neuron development has been duplicated twice in humans only. One of the copies produces a truncated peptide at high levels which interferes with the original protein. This interference has the result that neurons form more connections and over longer distances.
The duplication etc is seen only in humans. It demonstrates how a duplication of existing information, followed by a "breaking" of the gene can have profound events.
1.Ccile Charrier, Kaumudi Joshi, Jaeda Coutinho-Budd, Ji-Eun Kim, Nelle Lambert, Jacqueline de Marchena, Wei-Lin Jin, Pierre Vanderhaeghen, Anirvan Ghosh, Takayuki Sassa, Franck Polleux. Inhibition of SRGAP2 Function by Its Human-Specific Paralogs Induces Neoteny during Spine Maturation. Cell, 2012; DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2012.03.034
Come on, folks, you're all complaining about the lack of scientific debate, so here's summat to get your teeth into. Even if no IDists participate, we can at least get this on record for lurkers.
The early XEROX machine effect is what I always called that. The early machines often seemed prone to getting hung on the print cycle and even though you asked for one copy, the machine decided you really needed more. But not all the copies were the same, some toner heavy, some showing roller markers, some with voids where words used to be.
Life is like that sometimes.
Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!
A new paper pubished in Cell has serious implications for IDist arguments of "no new information" and "mutation only breaks things".
What does it prove? An IDist or an agnostic could say: Yes a mutation can bring new information.But the crucial question is if this mutation is random or not.It could be that the Creator had coused this mutation, or the environmental information had facilitated it after original creator's regulation, or natural laws lead to this, through environmental information again.
Edited by zi ko, : No reason given.
'If that much-spoken 'evidence" of followers of random mutations is this 'some evidence' of Panda, then there is a serious matter of credibility in this forum.
If you're not going to base your participation upon evidence then please do not post to this thread.
If you're not going to focus your attention on the specific points from the opening post that outline the topic then please do not post to this thread.
If you'd like to discuss any of the off-topic issues you raised, such as the cause of a mutation, then please propose a new thread over at Proposed New Topics, but keep in mind that any thread proposal must be at some level rooted in evidence.
There does seem to be an annoying trend amongst some IDists/Creationists to continually divorce actual real biological function from their preferred abstract 'measures' of information.
They seem only to be ready to consider mutations as beneficial if they satisfy some indefinite criteria for increasing 'information' rather than if they actually confer improved fitness on the organism in which they occur.
In some cases they actually seem to try and define information in such a way as for it to be well nigh impossible for it to increase, which seems to often tie into the creationist fall narrative where there was some original ideal genetic sequences which constitutes the maximally informationally rich genome for a particular organism and any change from that must reduce information, regardless of the biological effect. To see this being attempted with mathematics look at the Durston et al. (2007) where they try to use conservation as a basis for defining 'functional' informational content, which is not an unreasonable approach, but forget to actually look at biological function in any meaningful way.
There does seem to be an annoying trend amongst some IDists/Creationists to continually divorce actual real biological function from their preferred abstract 'measures' of information.
They seem only to be ready to consider mutations as beneficial if they satisfy some indefinite criteria for increasing 'information' rather than if they actually confer improved fitness on the organism in which they occur.
I have noticed this as well. They are trying so hard to disprove evolution that they lose sight of reality and fail to explain biology. What happens is that they define "new information" so that evolution can not produce it, but they fail to recognize that evolution doesn't need to produce this "new information" in order to produce the biodiversity we see today. I think it could even be argued that evolution actually requires a loss of information as defined by ID/creationists.
I don't see what you mean when you see that creationists define information deliberately so that it cannot be increased through random mutations. The definition of information that they use, at least from what I have read, is the same definition given by information science. They are making the point that more complex structures in an organism can only come about by new information that corresponds to those structures. The changing of a bird's beak or wing-shape, to make it more apt at doing one thing may be beneficial, but it does not require any new information, and thus cannot be used as an example of evolution. The new information needed by evolution can only come by incremental steps, and there is no example whatsoever of any new information being added to DNA that benefits it.
Even if you say that evolution does not require an increase in complexity, but can also be characterized by a decrease, that still doesn't explain how the increase occurs by means of that same evolution.
Take a look at this video and see the degree to which "unintelligent design" is able to produce the very things we see in evolution.
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.
Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.
I don't see what you mean when you see that creationists define information deliberately so that it cannot be increased through random mutations. The definition of information that they use, at least from what I have read, is the same definition given by information science.
Not usually. Can you give an example?
The changing of a bird's beak or wing-shape, to make it more apt at doing one thing may be beneficial, but it does not require any new information, and thus cannot be used as an example of evolution.
Of course it can be used as an example of evolution, since it is a heritable change in a lineage (I presume that when you say a bird, you are not speaking literally; and would adivse you to cultivate a habit of precision.)
The new information needed by evolution can only come by incremental steps, and there is no example whatsoever of any new information being added to DNA that benefits it.
In order to say that, you would need to say how you're quantifying information and determining whether it's "new". This is usually where creationists fall down.
Even if you say that evolution does not require an increase in complexity, but can also be characterized by a decrease, that still doesn't explain how the increase occurs by means of that same evolution.
Well, given the range of mutations we know to occur, substitution, insertion, deletion, fission and fusion of chromosomes, etc, it is manifestly the case that there is a sequence of mutations (indeed, an infinite number of such sequences) that would get you from any genome to any other --- from a monkey to a man, or a frog to a fish, or whatever. Whether this would involve "new information" I cannot say, since creationists are infuriatingly vague about what they mean by that --- but it is certain that this is all that is required for evolution to have taken place.
Of course it can be used as an example of evolution, since it is a heritable change in a lineage (I presume that when you say a bird, you are not speaking literally; and would adivse you to cultivate a habit of precision.)
When interpreting what other people are trying to say, I find it a good rule of thumb to suppose that they're making as much sense as possible given the constraint that their meaning has to be consistent with what they're saying.
Now a change to an individual bird would not be considered evolution by anyone at all (what with all the Larmarckists being dead) and so I suppose he's using "a bird" as a sort of synecdoche.
So by precision in language, you are hoping he is talking about a change in beak type among a population of birds over time? That would be evolution. A change to an individual bird over its lifetime is not evolution, I agree. Do you realize that many people are meaning the former when they speak in the latter way? I know that I do if I am not being careful. I am not speaking of an individual bird even though the language may seem to indicate that.
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