Do you have a suggestion for a better over arching explanation for the change in living organisms over time, why varying organisms have succeeded in every available niche over billions of years during which life has existed on this planet? As I understand it, evolution is the consensus best explanation for connecting the most dots. It isn’t settled fact (though parts of it are), just the current champ among contending theories. But it isn’t enough to say the general consensus best theory is inadequate unless you have something more adequate to offer. I’m pretty sure the volume, strength and popularity of criticism leveled against your alternative would make the fault you find with evolution look like strong praise by comparison. It might even make you feel as if you were being singled out by academia for persecution.
Do you suspect that the majority of scientists secretly agree with you, but hold back from joining you for fear of going against the herd? Or could it be that you’re missing something or possibly smuggling in assumptions that the rest don’t? It seems right to me for science to concentrate on explanation based on observable and measurable phenomena. If you are more interested in establishing that what can measured is concordant with the traditional creation beliefs of one religion than in seeing how far natural explanations can take you, it seems to me that you are engaged in a theological hybrid kind of activity and not science. If that is where your passion leads you, go for it. But you can’t seriously expect the entire course of modern science to revolve around any one set of traditional beliefs.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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I guess any number of traditional creation stories. I think most cultures have one. Depending on how you hold the truth of the story, it can make accepting science seem disloyal. Yet what matters in traditional creation stories is probably not the empirical truth claims which sets science apart. So there needn’t be a conflict or any disloyalty and God has no reason to be jealous of our interest in science. Makes me think good theology is adaptive for the times we live in.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
157
Aye Mark. But none of them is theoretical in any way.
The evidence does support the conclusion that the same mechanisms producing mutations now were responsible for the mutations that separate the chimp and human lineages. It seems that we agree on this point.
If you want to discuss the evidence for random mutations with respect to fitness then I would suggest checking out my thread on the topic. The thread quickly went off on tangents, but the opening post should contain what you are looking for:
You jumped to a different topic. What @glipsnort and @evograd have pointed to is the evidence tying differences between species to the observed mechanisms that produce mutations in modern populations. The additional conclusion of randomness is supported by other experiments, as discussed in the thread I linked to above.
No, definitely not. I have no interest in proving any religion correct. What I am interested in is the truth, specifically the empirical scientific truth that I can test for myself with rigorous quantifiable techniques. I want to find this for evolution, and haven’t found it yet. “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for”
I’d assume most here are kindred spirits in this endeavour, but that appears not to be the case.
Do you agree that the near-perfect correlation between observed mutation spectra and inter-species genetic differences matches what we’d expect under evolution? No one is denying that it’s possible to come up with a vague ad hoc idea of guided mutations that just so happen to mimic the expected mutational spectrum, the question is whether this kind of explanation deserves being taken seriously and given a seat at the table.
I’ve yet to see you flesh out your claims about significant correlation between distal sequences - a few histograms missing any kind of documentation, or even informative axes, aren’t good enough.
Seems a little presumptuous to suggest that scientists interested in evolution just aren’t seriously interested in the truth. Obviously what motivates you is looking for the finger prints of the intelligent designer which you’re convinced is necessary, not The Truth wherever that may lead. I think that is where you and the scientific consensus have diverged.
First, I find it disingenuous saying you want to find evidence for evolution. Without bothering to go back and find the bread crumbs, you’ve made it pretty clear from the start that the opposite is true. Second, the caveat that every bit of science be testable by armchair scientists is unreasonable. If the only things you can believe are things you test for yourself, that’s a pretty small subset of scientific knowledge.
In any case, your human-chimp genome questions have been talked about ad nauseum before you arrived. Search is your friend. Here’s a sample:
I have yet to see an explanation that makes any sense. You keep harping on some reference to randomness, but randomness is not part of this evidence. You claim there are global patterns not explained by the local distribution, but that sounds like word salad. Could you explain that more?
Why do you and others make so many assumptions about my motivation? I have no skin in the game either way.
But! I want something that is actually reliably verifiable by me!!! I do not want “well all the scientists say it is good so just believe them”.
Science is all about being able to verify things for ourselves, not appealing to authority, being skeptical, driven by quantitatively rigorous analysis, etc. Why are we not doing that here?
Looking at the literature, it appears to me evolutionary scientists are very credulous regarding their fundamental assumptions. No one tries to rigorously verify if indeed evolution is responsible for what we see. Instead, over and over again I see scientists starting with the assumption that evolution occurred, and then from there trying to fit the data and explanations to that assumption. The overall endeavour does not look very scientific to me, albeit the scientists use very mathematically and experimentally sophisticated processes to make a circular argument.
First, I like how you accuse me without evidence. That’s great.
Second, I like how you misrepresent what I am seeking. I don’t ask that everything be verifiable by little old me. What I ask is at least one thing about evolutionary science be verifiable by little old me. And without having to appeal to authority, but with some dataset that I can download, run an algorithm, poke and prod myself. That is all! For a theory over 150 years old and supposedly as well established as physics itself, why is this so hard?!?!?!
Well, I mined through that long thread and found this:
So, if I were to take @glipsnort literally here, he is saying there is at least a 5.5% divergence between the human and chimp genome. Much higher than the 1.5% or 2% number in the popular press. At 3Gb that 5.5% difference is a 165 Kb difference.
However, what I am really looking for is a way to verify myself. I thought I could just BLAST the genomes at NCBI, but for whatever reason my BLAST queries cannot find any similar portions between human and chimp genomes.
Didn’t mean to impugn your motivation, only looking to support the scientific consensus - something I at least must rely on as I haven’t the disposition to become an online conspiracy theorist and no one can be a polymath in every field any longer. As a species we have so much in depth knowledge across so many fields I do not hold out hope of personally vouchsafing every finding and theory. I’m happy to have a general lay knowledge in some areas. Personally I prefer literature and philosophy but am quite happy that others are willing to do the nitty gritty heavy lifting.
But I don’t see why you don’t acknowledge your devotion to ID. I cop to my atheism and nothing bad has happened.
I said up front that I wouldn’t bother to go back and find the breadcrumbs. You aren’t that important to me to waste hours finding “evidence.” Many folks have been reading your posts since you showed up, and your motives have been obvious from the start. Pretty sure they would agree with me. Please don’t insult our intelligence by pretending to be “objective” on the subject of evolution.
I’m not sure what to take away from this paragraph (except that you don’t seem to know what the technical term ‘sufficient statistic’ means). If you have an alternative explanation for the observed patterns, present it.
Why would we do that? Why are you introducing natural selection here at all?
It would be helpful if you would explain what it is you’re seeing, since all you’ve done so far is present uninterpretable histograms of … something, without saying what it is. In any case, what you should be seeing (if you want to look for it for some reason) is a strong autocorrelation in the number of mutations across all distance scales, for both mtDNA and nuclear DNA. You should also see a correlation in the types of mutation seen. What I don’t understand is why you’re looking at this, or why you think it undercuts the point about the observed patterns in substitutions.
