Fallacy of “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution,”

Natural selection is an OBSERVED mechanism. We observe it all of the time in nature.

1 Like

When have scientists had to backtrack on DNA?

1 Like

Say what?!?

Of course there is branching of shared features in automobiles. Forget Toyota, Ford and Chevy -
you have to follow the right tree - group them by category and you will see buses don’t share much with sedans and with utility trucks, bikes, motorcycles, golf carts and wagons.

Yes, some nuts will be the same just as enzymes and proteins might be shared by various animals. Conversely, if a woman has 3 children and then she acquires HIV, her following 4 children will likely share HIV as well (mass production).

You must account for mass production being different than reproduction. But once you do this right, I don’t see any difference.

You can do the same with organisms: by color, weight, length, etc.

And no one can argue that a Volvo sedan should be categorized with a BMW sedan while a Volvo truck with a MAN truck.

Like I said, a human construct that is all in your head. Btw, Linnaeus started this classification way before the Darwinist theory and he wasn’t the first.

What selection? Who, How and Why would do this selection? What’s fitness? Is a muscular athlete that dies before having kids of an unknown heart disease fit? How fit are you? Who is more fit? You or your friend? This whole “natural selection” is pure hocus-pocus magic.

What kind of logic is this? Predict something you will find in the future, not something that you have already found. It’s very easy to come up with “just so” explanations.

Don’t be fooled by adaptations like skin color, beak size and pesticide or antibiotic resistance. These all revert when conditions change.

@NonlinOrg

I think you are missing the point here. Yes, we can put autos into nested hierarchies. But automotive nested hierarchies do not correlate to “similar origins”, “similar histories” and common “components” the way that genetically-driven “Nested Hierarchies” do.

@T_aquaticus will have no problem explaining the differences to you. The question is will you understand the explanation?

Let’s look at this animal example again:

When molecular comparisons are made for each “bucket” or “nest”, we generally see genetic “imperfections” or “novelties” passed “upstream” [for the purpose of this discussion, we will have to use the term Upstream, instead of the more intuitive Downstream, simply because the chart has been arranged in the reverse order, with currently existing life forms at the top of the image, instead of at the bottom of the image].

When there are observable fossilized attributes in animals from middle layers of rock, these attributes are typically passed on (if passed on at all) to the animal groups with fossils in the more recent layers of rock. You don’t find fish fins popping up on rabbits. But you might find genetically-based vitamin difficiencies being passed on, just like the human problem with vitamins can be found in some closely related primate groups.

When we do find a category of problem popping up in unrelated (or "lesser-related) animal groups, it is frequently a problem produced by a completely different set of genes. See how that could help explain why Common Descenty is seen as a logical outcome of Evolution?

In the auomotive version of a chart like this, we could easily find “retro elements” from older successful models being “revived” in newer models to make statements in style, or to re-capture a wave of nostaligia. And such retro-attributes may well be made of completely new materials, or with new manufacturing techniques.

In the animal world, the traits that are passed on are being produced with very few changes in the genetic machinery that makes them.

Are you following this logic, NonLin?

1 Like

@NonlinOrg

Reading your objections is like listening to my son explain to me that objects with darker colors fall faster than objects with brighter, lighter colors.

“Fitness” is calculated on “averages”. There is “noise” in every system, and there is nothing noiser than the wilderness. But like anything else, even noise can be quantified and compared.

Typically fitness is calculated as “the number of offspring (directly and indirectly) produced by sub-groups representing various categories of traits.”

The mathematics can be applied to just one trait, or a combination of two traits, or any other measurable trait.

How do we know? We know just by looking at the fast-forward photography of microscopic bacteria!

Remember this ?

How many times are you going to bombast your audience with your rejection of something as obvious as Natural Selection? There are even Creationist institutions that recognize the validity of Natural Selection. There objections are not based on Natural Selection being meaningless - - but on the issue of Time - - with 6000 years of Earth’s history being impossibly short of Natural Selection to create new species, let alone new Phyla of creatures.

Are you accusing these Creationist groups of being lunatics because they concede the validity of Natural Selection?

Only 8 days ago I wrote this (to you!!!) in the thread linked above:

“Please do not repeat the same error by claiming natural selection is meaningless.”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This youtube video includes schematic lines clearly showing how “natural selection” has obliterated colony after colony, while the surviving populations are the sources of new innovation for surviving the next higher concentrations of anti-biotics!

Watch the video linked below:
.

Please take a nap and sleep on it…

5 Likes

Don’t be fooled by geological features like mountains, oceans, and canyons. These all revert when conditions change. :laughing:

5 Likes

@NonlinOrg

I thought I’d help you out by showing how evolutionary “nested hierarchies” can be applied to dead-ends… to extinctions of populations that were not able to “adapt to their environment” quickly enough …

The survivors are the ones who pass on the distinctive history of their genetic adaptations to future generations.

And sometimes there are genetic double-crosses!

One population produces a variation that allows them to prosper in a newly changed environment. But in the process, there may have been a genetic variant exploited that is geared more for the “sprint”, rather than the “marathon”.

Suddenly, the neighboring populations that was struggling with mid-level toxic levels ends up having the genetic equipment perfectly suited to jump past the most toxic of all the environments …

While the population that looked like it solved the problem of the day (a few hours back) - - suddenly finds that it doesn’t have what it takes to make it all the way to the highest concentrations of deadly toxin.

That’s a technical impossibility. And sweeping predictions in regard to DNA, such as that of exons and introns, have had to be scrapped in the face of new evidence. You cannot tell me that all such predictions were accurate, because I know they weren’t. And as for sweeping generalizations of the character of the evo track record, the Drake Equation is a perfect example.

@Daniel_Pech,

What I see is you playing “semantic gotcha” with @T_aquaticus to an exquisite hair-fine degree.

You truncate his sentence “the full complexity of an organism is seen…” before he relates it to Nested Hierarchies. I don’t think @T_aquaticus is asserting that E.very S.ingle C.omplexity of an organism is being revealed… only that enough of the complexity is being revealed to show predictions being satisfied and explaining the trajectory of Evolutionary Theory.

What are your alternatives to Evolution?

I’ve lost track of whether you are a disaffected scientist? A YEC? An alchemical wizard?

If you are a YEC, then all these diversions are understandable.

But if you are reaching into a black bag to explain the science of speciation more effectively than Evolutionary principles generally discussed here, I’m all eyes. It’s time to pull your hand out of the black bag and show us what you have brought!

Flea flicking is not really helpful in these discussions … so I’m hoping you have something material and substantive to offer that would justify this torrture you are putting your audience through.

Your turn, Daniel.

1 Like
  1. What predictions in regard to DNA are you referring to?
  2. How are exons and introns related to those scrapped predictions?
  3. What is the new evidence that is doing the scrapping?
  4. What do you know about predictions related to DNA that are inaccurate?
  5. What is the Drake equation?
  6. What is the Drake equation a perfect example of?
  7. How is the Drake equation related to DNA?

I’m probably wasting my time, but I’m taking a shot and hoping you might answer some of these questions specifically.

4 Likes

I can find a bunch of different shared similarities. For example, you can find a car, bus, and SUV that use diesel. If you group by the use of diesel you get a very different tree. You can also construct a tree for which vehicles use propane and get yet another different tree. You can group them by the presence of Michelin tires and get yet another tree. You can group them by being electric powered and get yet another different tree. You get wildly different trees for different features. That is not so for life.[quote=“NonlinOrg, post:54, topic:36621”]
And no one can argue that a Volvo sedan should be categorized with a BMW sedan while a Volvo truck with a MAN truck.
[/quote]

I could certainly argue that. I could organize the tree by the use of diesel and have a Volvo and BMW on one branch and other Volvos and BMW’s on other branches. I could organize by the presence of a turbo charger or overhead cams. I could organize by hybrid systems. All of these would produce wildly different trees with some Volvos sharing more with a BMW than other Volvos.[quote=“NonlinOrg, post:55, topic:36621”]
Don’t be fooled by adaptations like skin color, beak size and pesticide or antibiotic resistance. These all revert when conditions change.
[/quote]

I don’t see how neutral drift falsifies positive selection. Can you please explain?

Of course selection pressures are going to change if the environment changes. How is this a problem?

Fitness is measured by the ability to pass on your genes, so genes that prevent you from passing on genes are less fit. Genes that increase your chance of passing on your genes are more fit. It really isn’t that hard to understand, and there is nothing magical about it.

The theory of evolution predicts a nested hierarchy for both morphology and genetics. These predictions are tested anew every time a new living species is found, a new fossil species is found, or a new genome is sequenced. This prediction has been tested millions of times, and it has passed those tests.

3 Likes

What predictions have been scrapped? You keep making these allegations, but you have yet to support them.

Also, the Drake Equation has nothing to do with the theory of evolution.

Added in edit:

Here is a picture of the exon/intron data I am talking about. This is from the UCSC genome browser:

If the picture doesn’t load, you can go the page here.

Those boxes on the top line are exons for the human MMP9 gene. The lines between them are introns. The line with the spikes on them is a measure of conserved sequence across 100 vertebrates. As you can see, there is a lot of conserved sequence that lines up with the exons but not the introns. This is EXACTLY what the theory of evolution predicts, and it is what we see. As Dr. Francis Collins, head of the NIH and former head of the Human Genome Project, describes it . . .

“It is not just a human/mouse comparison one can do. Eric Green at the Genome Institute has looked at this same region in many other species and, in fact, you can find this same CAPZA2 gene in everything from chimps down to zebra fishes and a lot of things in between (see Figure 4). Notice the pattern. The chimpanzee is almost 100% identical to the human, except the chimp has a deletion just before exon 2 that we do not have. Otherwise the match-up, as in most cases of human and chimp comparison, is about 98.5% to 99%. You can see that the baboon is starting to diverge. The cat and the dog and the cow all look a lot alike, and again if you look at the CAPZA2 exons, you will see that every one of those species has a nice conserved little segment there. But as you get further away to rats, mouse, chicken, two different kinds of pufferfish and then a
zebra fish, about the only thing you see is the protein encoding regions, while the rest of the scattered noise goes away. Again, this is a very compelling kind of pattern in terms of what one would expect from evolution.”–Dr. Francis Collins, “Faith and the Human Genome”

2 Likes

All such predictions? No. But many, many predictions about genetics have been made based on evolution and then proven accurate from new data. Why do you think that is the case?

2 Likes

The prediction is a statistically significant phylogenetic signal. Pointing to minor noise due to known biological processes like ILS does not make the phylogenetic signal go away. The signal overpowers the noise, and that is the prediction.

1 Like

I assume you mean ‘the Drake Equation did not inform the theory of evolution’.

The DE is a product of the ToE, so it is misleading to say that the two have nothing to do with each other.

How is the DE a product of the ToE?