Intended mutations

To Everyone,Please avoid both general and specific denigrations of the other side.Please stay on topic. The opening post questions whether it is really possible that the mutatations required for adaptation to environmental changes could arise by chance, almost as if nature had foresight and intent, and suggests that a designer is required. Please focus on the thread's topic.Just to be clear, this thread is not about the evolution of charity or morals, not about the evolution of new genera, not about abiogenesis, and not about the impossibility of evolution because of analogies to tornados in junkyards. These are all valid topics, but please discuss them in the appropriate threads, or if none are currently active, propose a new thread.Thank you!

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

My reply didn't address this issue in any detail because it is not the topic of this thread. If abiogenesis interests you then you can visit the [forum=-13] forum and see if any of the recent topics are of interest, or you can propose a new thread in the [forum=-25] forum. I mentioned that women often aren't aware of miscarriages in the first or second month to point out that unviable fetuses occur much more often than people think. The origin of the higher orders of classification is not the topic of this thread. You're saying this as if evolution has some disconnect with the real world, but the reality is that the theory of evolution developed out of observations of the natural world. The book that established the science of evolution is full of observational evidence. Descent with modification combined with natural selection was proposed to explain those observations.But this is all peripheral to the topic of this thread. Populations take advantage of inherent variation to evolve to take advantage of their environment. There is no intent or direction required.--Percy

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If your math is telling you it isn't possible, and yet you're looking at it, your math is wrong.

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Extrapolated off of the works of mathematicians and molecular biologists alike, the odds that just one, solitary paramecium arranging DNA by chance is 1 in 10 to the billionth power. The figures don't lie, even at the demand of liars to the contrary.

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Or is it just that words like "species" and "genus" are interchangable to you?

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I make the distinction because speciation exists when subspecies are introduced into a lineage of any given specie. Ultimately, however, macroevolutionary progress requires an ever-increasing walk through the taxonomic line which doesn't happen. The stark fact remains that such occurances have never, ever been witnessed. Since it never has been witnessed, nor is there any legitmiate reason for it to compel any one of us to believe otherwise, it is clearly a matter of faith -the exact kind of faith some people chastize the creationists for.

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5.9.1 Coloniality in Chlorella vulgaris
Boraas

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So, Chlolera grew in a petri-dish. Is that the extent of the abstract? I guess I'm not seeing the significance. Can you explain it further?

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The fossil record proves the exact opposite.

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If that's the case, then why did Gould and Eldridge invent punctuated equilibrium? The fact that they had to come up with a plausible scenario for why there are no transitional forms and why there should be no actual evidence for ever finding any is a condemning testimony. Punc Eq states that organisms will experience an abrupt explosion of evolution followed by long epochs or era's of stasis. In other words, don't expect to find any evidence because the nature of it doesn't allow for it. But this is an extremely asinine solution to the problem, because looking at any given specimen over long periods of time would clearly show evidence of evolution. But it doesn't.

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What they call "lactose intolerance" is actually the normal development of a human being.

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So, what you're saying is that humans aren't designed to ingest their own mothers milk? Human milk has high concentrations of lactose. And lactose aids in the absorbtion of minerals and vitamins. I can drink a gallon of unpasteurized milk, a block of cheese, and a whole pizza w/o adverse effects. My son, however, has to drink Lactaid, a lactose-free milk that is highly pasteurized. I guess he didn't inherit my good genes or my wife's.

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I don't see the relevance of this statement. Yes, organisms die. They also give birth. This proves that the history of a population over time is not a thermodynamic process, as far as I'm aware.

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Entropy doesn't encompass thermodynamic principle soley. But death does. What is death? Dying of old age comes from molecular breakdown, does it not? The system has become, over time, less ordered and more disordered. And if the this law doesn't get to apply to things on earth because we are in an open system, then neither does the First or Zeroeth Law either. We can't pick and choose what physical law we want to accept. But alas, this is common-place.

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If they got you to help them, then they aren't so weak, are they?

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The mods are pretty adament on straying into this topic. So I'll only say one more thing about it. Keeping people alive fits no where in the concieved notion of Darwinian evolution. Charity of any kind fits no where in the concieved notions Darwinian evolution.

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If your math is telling you it isn't possible, and yet you're looking at it, your math is wrong.

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Extrapolated off of the works of mathematicians and molecular biologists alike, the odds that just one, solitary paramecium arranging DNA by chance is 1 in 10 to the billionth power. The figures don't lie, even at the demand of liars to the contrary.

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I'll remind you of what you said in Evolution Simplified thread: So, if there is a large amount of confirmed, unequivocal evidence that evolution has occurred (and there is), then there is either something wrong with your math or with your assumptions that lead you to believe that the math you are doing is relevant to the problem.I am reminded of Lord Kelvin's determination of the age of the earth. He assumed that the earth started as a molten ball, and calculated how long it would take to cool to the temperatures they had measured when they dug deep mine shafts. He calculated, I believe, something like a few tens of millions of years.Of course, the geologists at this time already had a great deal of evidence that the earth was at least hundreds of millions of years old. As it turns out, there was nothing wrong with Lord Kelvin's calculations. His problem was that he did not know there was an additional source of heat -- namely radioactivity -- that caused the earth to cool much, much slower than his assumptions led him to believe.So, evidence triumphed over theory.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

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I mentioned that women often aren't aware of miscarriages in the first or second month to point out that unviable fetuses occur much more often than people think.

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If it occurs much less than people think then how would you know what the frequency of spontaneous abortion was to begin with?

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The book that established the science of evolution is full of observational evidence.

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I assume you are referring the The origin of species by means of natural selection: or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. You know, I liked Darwin. Its some of his contemporaries that are difficult to stomach. (I've heard the same about Jesus and His followers). Point taken. Those are tough shoes to fill.... Er, um, tough sandals to fill. I think Darwin was a very intuitive man known best for his candor. And everytime he was confronted with a problem within his own theory, he recognized and addressed some of the more impotent subtheories within the theory. But sometimes Darwin made good observations only to come to some bad conclusions. And you know what? I don't fault him for that. For what he was dealing with back then, he came up with some excellent theories. But I can't help to wonder had he read Gregor Mendel's book, published a few years before his, that he might not have drawn some of the conclusions that he did.“If my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties must assuredly have existed" -Charles DarwinI couldn't agree more with him.

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Populations take advantage of inherent variation to evolve to take advantage of their environment. There is no intent or direction required.

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“That a mindless, purposeless, chance process such as natural selection, acting on the sequels of recombinant DNA or random mutation, most of which are injurious or fatal, could fabricate such complexity and organisation as the vertabrate eye, each component part must carry out its own distinctive task in a harmoniously functioning optical unit, is inconceivable. The absence of transitional forms between the invertebrates retina and that of the vertebrates poses another difficulty. Here, there is a gulf fixed which remains inviolate with no seeming likelihood of being bridged. The total picture speaks of intelligent creative design of an infinitley high order." -H.S. Hamilton, MDI think this opthamologist could safely say the same thing for every organ in the body of every creature that has ever lived on earth. When you look at the precision necessary for life, do you fault me for what I see?

Okay, so I was getting beat like Bruce Lee, in the final scene in The way of the dragon. But now I've taken a breather, and adapted;Irrefutable AddendumThe parsimonious evolutionists are basically treating the topic like this;evolution happened therefore all that was required was nature and chance without intention.That's not logically correct because it must assume it was so without proving it.I need an example to show you what I mean; You have a man who inflates a balloon. You have a machine that inflates a balloon. In both examples, the end result is the same.Your argument is that because you have an inflated balloon in your posession, then that proves conclusively that the balloon was inflated by the machine, because it is possible to inflate it with a machine, without the man..But all that is really proven, is that it is possible to inflate a balloon without a person. There's a difference between this proper conclusion and the incorrect conclusion that it DID happened without intention.You know you have a balloon, you know it can come about independently. Did it? You cannot say. Observing logic, you have to concede this or you commit intellectual suicide and throw out everything that is good and objective about your sport.(I apreciate and have taken into account the experiment on computers, Mod'.)(P.s. I will read any posts to me, but basically this concludes my participation.). Bye for now.This message has been edited by mike the wiz, 05-07-2006 12:45 PM

AdminNosy: The subject of the origin of life is not on topic when discussing the nature of mutations.

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evolution happened therefore all that was required was nature and chance without intention.

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That's not logically correct because it must assume it was so without proving it.

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That's an excellent point. It should also be added that disproving evolution does not confirm a higher intelligence as the root cause either. I recognize that and take that into consideration. However, when the day is done, there really are only two options from which to choose from. And that is, either we are the product of intent or chance. If you remove chance, you are left with only one other option, and for many, the other option is inconceivable to concede to.“There are only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility. Spontaneous generation, that life arose from non-living matter was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasture and others. That leaves us with the only possible conclusion that life arose as a supernatural creative act of God. I will not accept that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God therefore, I chose to believe that which I know is impossible; spontaneous generation arising from evolution.” -George Wald; evolutionary biologist“Modern biologists, having reviewed with satisfaction the downfall of spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with nothing.” -George Wald; evolutionary biologistSpontaneous generation is very much applicable to the theroy of evolution, because w/o it, it could not have gotten off the ground without some intervention of some level of intelligence. And if a Creator of some sort caused this, then why are the masses gathered together to destroy creationism? How could anyone state otherwise?It comes down to simple motivation; a philosophical one, not a scientific one.“In 1874, the theologian, Charles Hodge, asked his congregation a question. He asked, “What is Darwinism?” After a careful and thoroughly fair-minded evaluation, his answer was unequivocal. “It is Atheism.” -Phillip JohnsonThis message has been edited by AdminNosy, 05-07-2006 01:45 PM

This has been studied by the medical profession. Most people don't know aobut the results of these studies (though I expect it is often mentioned during fertility counseling) and so are unaware that many conceptions abort spontaneously and unnoticed in the first or second month.But this is off-topic and irrelevant. I only mentioned it to help make the point that many conceptions have genetic problems, more than people think. I was responding to your comments about devolution and agreeing with you, in part, by pointing out that there are even more problems with accurate genetic copying than is commonly believed. Spontaneous abortion in the first and second month was only an example. We don't seem to be getting any closer to the topic. This isn't on-topic, either. Natural selection isn't a chance process. Organisms are not selected randomly to pass their genes on to the next generation, but according to how well suited they are to the environment relative to other organisms. Transitional forms are not the topic of this thread. If you would like to discuss transitional forms then you could go to the [forum=-5] forum and see if any recent threads are appropriate, or you could propose a new topic in the [forum=-25] forum. Continuing with the eye as an example. In the land of the blind, the creature with a single light-sensitive cell is king. Keeping this in mind, we have on this earth multitudinous examples of different types of eyes, with only fine gradations between the various types. These different eye types, ranging from light sensitive cells and increasing in complexity until you reach the mammalian eye, show that all levels of complexity and competence are useful in the appropriate niche.They also clearly show that an eye without all its components is still a useful eye. Humans without color vision get along mostly okay, as does most of the animal kingdom. There are creatures with lenses that do not focus. There are creatures with no lenses. There are creatures with eyes that have no directionality. There are creatures that have no control over how much light reaches the eye. And all these creatures with all their differently abled eyes are able to compete successfully within their ecological niche.What this shows is that the eye that evolves is the one required by the ecological niche the organism is competing for. People with only light spots for eyes could not compete very well with normally sighted people, but for planariums light spots work fine.The same sequence of increasing complexity of eye types that you can find today in the natural world is representative of how evolution would have gradually added capability and the associated complexity over time in response to the changing requirements of the organisms' environment.--Percy

AdminNosy: TOPIC WARNING! The discusion of the development of the eye is too large and only peripherally connected to this topic. Do NOT persue it here.

(To NJ: The development of the eye is dicussed extensively here and on the web in general. If you are unaware of it I suggest that you make less pronouncements in areas that you have committed no effort to learning about.)

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Natural selection isn't a chance process.

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Yeah, I've heard this quite a bit, but I disagree with it fundamentally. Any exhibition of intent indicates some level of cognizance. You could say that nature has a mind if it intentionally chooses the stronger over the weaker. Its a crap shoot otherwise, which in that case would constitute 'chance.' Playing your odds is still all about chance as well. Any which way we slice it or cleverly repackage it, it is chance if you say there is no cognizance behind it.

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Continuing with the eye as an example. In the land of the blind, the creature with a single light-sensitive cell is king.

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“To suppose that the eye with all it’s inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in it’s highest degree.” -Charles DarwinAfter testifying to how seemingly absurd it would be for the eye to develop all on its own, he goes on to speak about it as if it were certainly true. All proof is exhausted in the struggle to prove the possibility of such a marvelous eye that to say nothing at all about the probability of such an occurrence, much less the certainty required by science, is insuperable. But for how amazingly complex the eye is, Darwinism attempts to explain it as having arose by chance. As you've elucidated, the first eye was said to have come by pigmentation in the skin, perhaps a freckle or a mole. Then, they say, rays of sunlight converged on this organism and caused a sunspot where it developed into a cluster of light sensitive cells. Then, they claim that the organism could feel the energy from the sun and so it turned towards the source. They purport that a nerve came out of it all, thus, evolving the first eye. But this is an unsubstantiated claim founded on no empirical facts. It sounds somewhat plausible, and so, its pawned off as some kind of scientific certainty. Consider this question: If evolution occurs through small gradations over time, how could the separate parts of the eye, such as the lens, retina, pupil, and whatnot, have come about since none of these structures by themselves would have made vision possible? Without all of the mechanisms in place from the organisms inception, vision is not possible. Ask anyone blinded from even the seemingly smallest accident how critical each component is to the overall function of the eye to allow vision to take place. In other words, what purpose would a partial eye serve and how should any organism benefit from it prior to its full development? What enhanced its survival, that it should have developed, and thus, evolved this feature? These are the burning questions that deserve a worthy response.This message has been edited by AdminNosy, 05-07-2006 02:37 PMThis message has been edited by AdminNosy, 05-07-2006 02:40 PM

However, you are forgetting a large large portion. 1) it is not by 'chance'. Chemestry goes by specific rules. 2) The development of the
various molecules is inremental, not all at once. 3) There is a filter known as natural selection that influences the dna over time, and 4) you are also looking at the chances of one possible selection out of an unknown number.Because of those factors, the 'probablity' arguement is based on false assumptions.Let us also look at the probablity from another response.If you buy a lottery ticket, what are the chances of you winning? What are the chances of someone out of hte millions upon millions of people winning? The chances of you winning are pretty small. The chances of someone winnning is a lot better.The incremental development is like lots and lots of people playing. Not only that, it isn't limited to just one lottery at once, but rather millions upon millions of lotteries running at the same time. The whole planet had billions of these 'micro labs' running at one point. That is what those 'probablity' arguements don't take into account.

Ok, but what's the relevance of that? Paramecia are complex, single-celled organisms that are the product of 4 billlion years of evolution. If you're calculating the odds of paramecia arising spontaneously, then you're looking at the odds of evolution skipping to the end. The relevant odds would be the odds of evolution starting at the beginning, and you haven't provided those. It's not clear how that could be calculated, since we don't know so little about the earliest lifeforms. I'm sorry? Are you referring to me as a liar? But that's exactly what does happen. I mean, that's what we keep telling you. Existing clades expand over time to include more and more new species. What we call "dogs" is one species now, but over time, becomes a genus, and then a family; that's exactly what we expect from evolution and the observation of new species proves that's what's going on. No, not Cholera, Cholrella v.. A blue-green unicellular algea is observed to evolve multi-cellularity, and in doing so, keys taxonomically into a different family than it started in.It's all in the precis, if you read it. Am I to assume that you did not? Punk Eq is not an "explanation for why there are no transitional forms." Since there are thousands of transitional species, why would anybody invent a theory to explain their absence? Why would Gould and Eldridge waste their time explaining something that didn't need to be explained, because it didn't exist?There are thousands of transitional forms. Puncuated equilibrium explains why we find them in the patterns that we do. It isn't an explanation for not finding them, because we've found thousands of them. That doesn't make any sense. No single fossil specimen should show any evidence of change over time, except as the remains degrade from environment, etc. No matter how long you leave the bones out sitting on your desk, you'll never see any signs of evolution.Evolution is visible in the pattern of fossils over time. Imagine you had a picturebook of a cross-country journey. No one individual picture - say, of you standing under St. Louis's Gateway Arch - shows that you traveled from one place to another, because all the pictures show you standing in place. But taken together and placed in chronological order, you can see a record that proves you went from New York to Los Angeles. Not after adulthood, no. Like all mammals, humans evolved adult intolerance to lactose as a weaning aid. But humans from cultures that domesticated dairy animals have a greater chance of having a mutation that prevents that change.That's why we see lactose intolerance so commonly in some cultures, and not in others. People who can consume milk inherited a beneficial mutation that allows them to do so. It's likely that either you and your wife are heterozygous for lactose tolerance, and your son had the 1 in 4 outcome of being homozygous recessive for that trait. Another possibility is that he mutatively reverted to wild type. Given that our genetics are read in three-codon reading frames, that's not an impossibility. No, it does. It's a concept of thermodynamics because it refers to thermodynamic states.Therefore, things - like the history of life over time - that aren't thermodynamic, in other words can't be modeled as the movement of heat within a system, don't experience entropy. Yes. But species don't experience a molecular breakdown, because entropy doesn't "carry over" from the parent to the child. If they did, the child of 50-year-old parents would start out older than the child of 20-year-old parents.We know that that's not the case. All offspring start out at the same age, no matter how old their parents are. This proves beyond a shadow ofa doubt that the history of life over time is not a thermodynamic process, and entropy as a concept has no relevance to it. I've proven how this is not the case. You're under an obligation to defend your assertions by expanding your arguments and providing evidence, not by merely repeating the same assertions over and over again. No matter how often you repeat it, it doesn't become true.

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Punk Eq is not an "explanation for why there are no transitional forms." Since there are thousands of transitional species, why would anybody invent a theory to explain their absence? Why would Gould and Eldridge waste their time explaining something that didn't need to be explained, because it didn't exist?

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There are thousands of transitional forms. Puncuated equilibrium explains why we find them in the patterns that we do. It isn't an explanation for not finding them, because we've found thousands of them.

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I like the way you said this.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

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AdminNosy: TOPIC WARNING! The discusion of the development of the eye is too large and only peripherally connected to this topic. Do NOT persue it here.

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How should I go about talking about intended mutations without using some basis for comparison? I'm a little confused on what the forum wants to see. Please forgive me, I'm still learning the rules of EvC.

This may be wrong, but AdminNosy can let me know if he disagrees with this analysis.I think AdminNosy gave the warning not because you were off-topic, though he thought you were, but because it is becoming so difficult in this thread to recognize anything that is on-topic. Almost everyone is taking every opportunity to jump into other topics, and when someone finally contributes some relevant discussion it can be very difficult to recognize unless explicit efforts are made to indicate the tie-in to the thread's topic.Again, AdminNosy can tell me I've got this wrong, but I think discussing mutations related to eye evolution as an example of why intent and direction is present in mutations would be okay.--Percy

The eye topic is a little bit related to this topic. It is, as noted, too large to contain within one thread.The topic is discussing how many, many small changes that are filtered can produce an appearence of intentional design. While the eye is a well documented example of this it is larger than needs to be dealt with here.There are other reasons for leaving it out here:
1) You have not demonstrated a grasp of the concepts posted so far in this thread.
2) The development of the eye and reasons for accepting it have been discussed in depth on this site and other places.
3) It is not necessary to pick on a larger example to discuss the issues.