Sometimes a negative result is meaningful, especially when logic admits of the possibility that the experiment was impossible in the first place. From someone who knows far more than either of us about synthetic chemistry, and what is required to build organic molecules.
Ann Gauger's latest salvo against Dennis Venema's arguments against an original pair of human beings
Look, there are always some questions that are beyond the reach of experiment. One can say, either we donât have the tools to ask the question, or the question is ill-framed. Negative results are meaningful results: What you are doing isnât working. Stop and think about why that might be the case.
OOL scientists may continue as long as they still receive funding. If they succeed in creating life I will be astonished. But asking ID scientists to create life in the lab is as fruitless as OOL studies now. We propose the missing ingredient is agency, but agents canât be bottled. They can, however, be inferred from the considerable amount of organization and information that needs to go into making a cell.
It takes a great deal of faith to believe it assembled itself without guidance.
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I certainly do prefer positive evidence of design. But repeated failure is evidence too.When a field runs into roadblock after roadblock, the evidence against it begins to pile up. I am no expert in OOL research and cannot speak as to the current state, but others can and have. I gave you a link to James Tour before. Hereâs a quote: LIFE REQUIRES carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids, and proteins. What is the chemistry behind their origin? Biologists seem to think that there are well-understood prebiotic molecular mechanisms for their synthesis. They have been grossly misinformed."
I will spend time discussing these matters ONLY if you demonstrate an understanding of the chemistry proposed for the various synthetic routes postulated for this area. I have pasted such chemistry below from two reviews and will wait for your comments.
The general statements that I pasted previously, speak to the extreme improbability that, even if precursors were to form in concentrations required for the synthesis, they are in differing conditions that needed for the synthesis, and thus we have a âmagicalâ transport invoked to bring the precursors (and the mixture) to another place, enrich the concentrations, add required catalysts, and presto. Such a scenario beggars belief for a planetary system.
I find it ironic that even though everyone admits the conditions cannot be reproduced, belief that science will somehow show it all, is absolute. I see the argument against ID repeated, but instead of intelligence, we need a mysterious force to achieve the impossible. Gotta laugh out loud, and I gotta run.
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Fair enough. But sometimes there is no way to make it work
That specific is an interesting one, too. Let me quote a longish, but instructive paragraph, from a book on cladistics - the science of nested hierarchies par excellence:
Linnaeus and his successors recognized that organisms could be described as species and then be arranged into more inclusive natural groups, such as genera, families, and orders, each of which could be categorized by similarities [ie nested hierarchies - my interjection]. Linnaeus believed he was reconstructing the plan of Creation and that characters used to group genera and families were the essences corresponding to such a plan. Darwinâs (1859) contribution was to suggest that hierarchichal relationships between genera and families were âbloodâ relationships or kinships caused by descent from a common ancestor. His often cited dictum in the Origin of Species summarised his view of relationships: âour classifications will come to be, as far as they can be made so, genealogies; and will then truly give what may be called the plan of creation.â Darwinâs expecations have mostly failed to materialize because classifications are constructed for two purposes - to express phylogenetic relationships and to act as identification keys that summarize similarities, or dissimilarities, between different groups. As Patterson (1982a) pointed out, it has traditionally been understood that these two aims conflict because relationships based on common ancestry are almost invariably more complicated than relationships of similarity or differences on which keys are based. (Humphries and Parent, Cladistic Biogeography p43.)
Now, although history is rapidly forgotten in evolutionary science, this is the reason that Olivier Rieppel, one of the early Cladists, writes in his recent book on turtle evolution that Cladism, which ignores ancestry and strictly deals only in sister-groups, was suspected by the conventional taxonomists in the early days of promoting Creationism!
The point is that (as the example of Linnaeus proves) nested hierarchies are potential evidence both for evolution and special creation (and anything in between), so are not persuasive positive evidence for one over the other. In the case of evolution, there is arguably a greater problem in accounting for the many dysjunctions between cladistic phylogenies and morphology: ancestry ought to produce clean family trees, whereas a Creator can pick and choose.
No doubt Jerry Coyne presented lots of positive evidence (even though, contra the original assertion about ârealâ scientists" he did choose to use negative theological arguments!), but nested hierarchies wouldnât have been a good argument for anyone with either a philosophical background or a knowledge of history. Fortunately for Coyne, his target audience has neither.
You canât trump scientific facts with philosophical speculation.
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The âfactsâ and the âphilosophical speculationâ being what, exactly? I believe I cited correctly the arguments of two current working scientists who are cladists, and therefore expert in their understanding of nested hierarchies, and one pre-Darwinian one (Linnaeus), who established the existing system of taxonomy.
The specific issues raised were (a) theological reasoning by scientists (rife in the Origin of Species as well as Jerry Coyne), and (b) a philosophical interpretation (common descent) drawn from scientific fact (nested hierarchies, albeit imperfect), for which other interpretations existed before the evolutionary ones, making the value of nested hierachies untenable as evidence for common descent, and of course as evidence for any particular theory of evolution such as the Modern Synthesis even more so.
Itâs the imperfections in the hierarchy that transformist taxonomists have interpreted as the contingent vagaries of RM & NS (and which, as Rieppel points out, others have taken as evidence for saltational emergence). But the only scientific facts involved are nested heirarchies, and exceptions to nested hierarchies. They donât absolve Coyne or anyone else from the laws of logic (which, being philosophical, do indeed trump many scientific conclusions, if not the facts from which the conclusions are deduced, or in fact âspeculatedâ when the reasoning is poor.
As so often, Jon, you seem to shoot your comments from the hip to make a rhetorical point without actually grasping in any detail what is being argued. I suppose thereâs some reason behind that.
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I donât see how this conclusion follows from what youâve written, or that itâs in fact true. Yes, perfect nested hierarchies are completely consistent with special creation. Imperfect nested hierarchies are also completely consistent with special creation, and the complete absence of nested hierarchies would be completely consistent with special creation. The observation of imperfect nested hierarchies therefore cannot be evidence for special creation; the observed state does not follow logically from the hypothesis.
In contrast, nested hierarchies do follow logically from the hypothesis of common descent, provided a number of other conditions are true, e.g. about the rate of evolution and the degree of horizontal transfer of traits. So the observation of nested hierarchies should count as evidence for common descent, as far as I can tell. I donât know how philosophers choose between a hypothesis that makes correct predictions and one that makes no predictions, but I know which one scientists will choose. Note that even imperfectly fulfilled predictions can generate a research program. Nested hierarchies are quite badly violated in prokaryotes, for example. If common descent it true, that it must be the case that the secondary conditions for nested hierarchies are violated for prokaryotes â which turns out to be the case, since horizontal gene transfer turns out to be common in bacteria but not in animals.
Itâs because the hypothesis of common descent does make predictions that can be tested with empirical data, and because the combination of hypothesis and data then engender further hypotheses that can also be tested, that common descent is a scientific rather than a philosophical conclusion.
âArguablyâ is difficult to assess until you provide the argument. Why should common ancestry produce cleaner family trees than special creation? Why should it produce clean family trees at all?
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The fact of evolution, in contrast with your philosophical speculation that nested hierarchies are not evidence for evolution.
But you donât seem to understand what they said, or the implications of what they said, and your argument was not scientific but philosophical (and even theological). And the fact that you think Coyne is making theological arguments when he presents evidence for evolution, is simply symptomatic of the fact that you donât accept the scientific evidence.
But they donât trump scientific facts, and itâs scientific facts which are under discussion here. As for the laws of logic, Steve Schaffner has done a good job of explaining how your argument fails to adhere to the laws of logic; your argument is a non sequitur.
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You really enjoy your snarky potshots at the philosophical naivete of others, donât you?
Just an observation: It detracts from the overall winsomeness of your arguments. You might consider trying to drop it.
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I would think that the two major mechanisms would be pedigree collapse and the possibility of positive selection from ongoing infections. With just pedigree collapse you can produce a single ancestor for mitDNA and the y chromosome in a continuous and relatively large population. From the Bergstrom et al. (1998) paper we see that the coalescence time for the 4 allele trees varies quite a bit, from 180,000 years to 890,000 years. That sure looks like a constant turn over of alleles to me.
However, pop gen is not my strongpoint so I welcome any corrections anyone has, and take what I have said with a large grain of salt. I could have something drastically wrong.
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Take a look at the von Salome tree. It is based on more complete data. The tree doesnât coalesce in th same way.
I am not a population geneticist either. I have been told that the long branches may be due to the balancing selection of the HLA gene. But Iâm not sure if that actually will work in this case. Why should they coalesce to 4 lineages over such a long period?
As glipsnort states, what wouldnât be evidence for special creation? For 30 taxa there are 1x10^38 possible trees. Thatâs a lot of trees special creation could produce. Evolution can only produce one tree out of all of those, or rather a limited set within the confines of statistical significance and the amount of phylogenetic information you have. So out of all the nearly infinite possible trees that special creation could produce, why would it produce the extremely limited set of trees consistent with evolution? That doesnât make much sense. What do we see with cytochrome c and 30 established taxa with 1 x 10^38 possible trees? We see a perfect match to the predictions made, as seen here.
When we have a theory that doesnât make any predictions and a theory that makes very specific predictions that match the observations, we go with the theory that makes specific and accurate predictions. This is why nested hierarchies are such strong evidence for evolution. You might as well say that we should throw out forensic evidence such as fingerprints and DNA evidence because it is also consistent with God planting the evidence at the crime scene.
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This is it exactly. No one is doing science with special creation. Methodological naturalism is working just fine.
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Jon
I believe that you cannot describe someone who died in 2009 as current.
More important, you did not cite the most important evidence. Are you not familiar with it?
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The point is that (as the example of Linnaeus proves) nested hierarchies are potential evidence both for evolution and a special creation WHERE GOD MAKES IT APPEAR THAT EVOLUTION HAPPENED.
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I notice that no one bats an eye at phylogenetic inference in other contexts. When we concluded that the West Africa Ebola outbreak was the result of a single zoonotic introduction of the virus into the region, or that Zika virus was introduced multiple times into the US, in both cases based on reconstructed phylogenies, no one complained that we drawing philosophical conclusions or that the phylogenies were equally good evidence for repeated special creation of the viruses.
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I agree, but Iâm pretty sure that they would call upon the false dichotomy of micro- vs. macroevolution hereâŚ
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