That’s an extreme over-generalization, and also a presumption as to what the ‘quote-miner’ intends by the quote.
benkirk2 (shows up in the biologos forum email notice of reply):
It’s not analogous at all, because one can put automobiles into multiple
nested hierarchies, while their components don’t fit nested hierarchies
at all. Living things–and their components–converge on superimposable
nested hierarchies.
And why do these autos’ components not fit nested hierarchies?
Sounds like a pretty bold sweeping generalization… or is it just an exaggerated stance?
Daniel, what exactly are you trying to establish in your recent postings?
That DNA is cosmically more complex and efficient than Evo’s keep presuming to the contrary.
At risk of further offending those who think I’ve been quote-mining in ignorance and naivety, I here below quote another (taken from from ‘Splicing and dicing the human genome: Scientists begin to unravel the splicing code’ by Robert W. Carter, 29 June 2010 (GMT+10). Splicing and dicing the human genome):
Several decades ago, the “one gene-one enzyme” hypothesis was in vogue. It seemed straightforward that a single protein gene coded for a single protein. In prokaryotic organisms (bacteria), this was easy to show. The known bacterial genes had a defined starting and stopping place and the DNA letters in between spelled out a discrete amino acid sequence. The eukaryotes (organisms with a nucleus; everything from yeast, to plants, to humans) do not have a simple gene structure. Our protein genes are broken up into a series of “exons” (the parts that code for protein) and “introns” (non-coding intervening sequences). To make a protein, the gene is first transcribed into RNA, then the introns are spliced out, the exons are stitched together, and the remainder is translated into protein. Even though complex, the one gene-one enzyme hypothesis was still applied to eukaryotic protein genes.
Over time, however, it was realized that life was not so simple, especially for the eukaryotes. The one gene-one enzyme hypothesis was particularly troubling for the higher (more complex) eukaryotes. For example, the approximately 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome are used to create 100,000-300,000 distinct proteins (the actual number is uncertain). The low number of genes in the human genome was troubling for several reasons. First, this means that we did not have that many more genes than organisms much simpler than us. Second, we needed a way to create many proteins from few genes and nobody knew how this could be done on such a large scale. And third, the complexity of the genomic computer program ratcheted up to even more uncomfortable levels for those who thought we arose through random chance.
(. . .)
Alternate splicing is a brilliant design concept that allows for a streamlined genetic program that takes up a fraction of the space compared to a program that coded for each protein independently. But this added complexity comes at a price. It has been conservatively estimated that each intron adds the same amount of complexity as approximately 30 additional DNA letters. Thus, the “mutation target” for a gene is increased for each intron added. Consider that the average protein-coding gene has 7-10 introns and that the total length of introns is often longer than the total length of protein coding DNA, and one can see why this is a problem. It takes a lot to maintain such a system and the complexity makes it difficult for naturalistic theories of origins. In fact, a sizeable proportion of human genetic disease has been attributed to mutations within intron-exon splice sites. Introns are typically included in the junk DNA category, but they have specific sequences at the head and tail ends that tell the splicing mechanism where to cut, etc., so they are not without function. (Exons also have splice signals at their ends. Thus, some of the information for splicing out the introns is found within the protein-coding portion of the genome. The protein-coding sections code for both protein sequence and splicing patterns at the same time!)
You provide some nice replies to the regulars on this site - it’s good to see your fresh thinking.
However, what do you mean by this quote? No matter how you look at it, the human genome is only 3 billion nucleotides (each represented as 2 bits for ACTG) so that’s about 6Gb or less than 1GB of data. I carry that much in my pocket and can assure you that not enough to specify the manufacturing of a car from scratch let alone a human and much less the development of a human from scratch. We have to look elsewhere (not at DNA) for the essence of life.
Features do not “produce” a phylogeny which is in fact a human construct and a label we attach to living organisms.
What else is present in a zygote that you propose is responsible for the complexity of the human organism?
This is why BioLogos exists… to help reinforce the connection between God and the “essence of life”.
Dobzhansky’s statement is an obvious example of a sweeping generalization that is not meant to be some absolute statement about evolution or biology. What Dobzhansky is saying is that evolution explains a lot about biology. If you nit pick and find little exceptions, it really doesn’t change the sentiment that Dobzhansky was trying to get across.
No, there isn’t. There is no branching pattern of shared derived features among automobiles. For example, a Toyota sedan and pickup truck can share the same engine while two Toyota sedans of the same model will have different engines. You can find the same tire on a Ford sedan and a Chevy sedan while finding two different tires on two different cars from the same Ford model. Things that are designed don’t fall into a nested hierarchy while things that evolve through common ancestry do.
What they don’t tell you is that the branching structure still exists for eukaryotes. They try to mask this finding by throwing in prokaryotes which participate in lateral genetic transfer.
Phylogenies are an objective fact, not a human construct.
“Although it is trivial to classify anything subjectively in a hierarchical manner, only certain things can be classified objectively in a consistent, unique nested hierarchy. The difference drawn here between “subjective” and “objective” is crucial and requires some elaboration, and it is best illustrated by example. Different models of cars certainly could be classified hierarchically—perhaps one could classify cars first by color, then within each color by number of wheels, then within each wheel number by manufacturer, etc. However, another individual may classify the same cars first by manufacturer, then by size, then by year, then by color, etc. The particular classification scheme chosen for the cars is subjective. In contrast, human languages, which have common ancestors and are derived by descent with modification, generally can be classified in objective nested hierarchies (Pei 1949; Ringe 1999). Nobody would reasonably argue that Spanish should be categorized with German instead of with Portugese.”
Any theory needs to explain this objective fact. Evolution is the only theory that can explain why we see this objective pattern of shared derived features.
Why would the complexity and efficiency of DNA falsify the theory of evolution?
Because they don’t. It’s a bit like asking why a circle is not a square.
Added in edit:
Below is a picture of how nested hierarchies work. The shared features (e.g. hair, amniotic egg, bony skeleton) llisted on the nested hierarchy are shared by all of the species upstream from where it is found on that nested hierarchy. This same pattern of shared features doesn’t exist for automobiles. Yet another example is the air bag. This feature first appeared in a single car model. If automobiles did fit into a nested hierarchy then only the descendants of that first car would have air bags. Instead, that feature spread to all car models with no branching pattern. If the same thing happened in biological species then we would see some birds with hair, some fish with feathers, and some sharks that have eggs with amnion. We don’t see this.
Dobzhansky’s statement is an obvious example of a sweeping
generalization
Exactly. That’s what I’m saying. That’s why it is not necessarily exaggeration-to-make-a-point. I assumed that such pointed exaggeration is what you all have been meaning by the term ‘hyperbole’.
What Dobzhansky is saying is that evolution
explains a lot about biology.
‘Explains’ biology is a long way from ‘only within which makes sense of biology’.
It does nt falsify the idea that the hierarchy in biology is the product of biogenetic change. It merely points out that the track record of those who espouse and employ that idea to the big issues in biology is a miserable record. It’s miserableness is seen the most clearly in the failure of the Drake Equation.
How is the complexity of DNA related to the Drake Equation? How does the Drake Equation attribute miserableness to the idea of nested hierarchies?
Or more succinctly, “Huh?”
You are missing my point. Not only are autos not integral members of their environment, they tend to be independently designed. A Yugo does not have the same designer as the Model T Ford. These two factors, combined, are the whole issue. The entire cosmos is a life-support system, and that system is a particular binary: involving a relationship between the general and the special. In the most encompassing sense, that is the wider universe and Earth. And that binary is instantiated in a nested hierarchy that itself is the same binary: non-life and life. For the planet, that is geophysical and ecological. There are no Model T’s here. It’s all one system.
So there is no need to invoke ‘evolution’ to explain it. In fact, such invocation has consistently underestimated, and even often trivialized, the intimacy and complexity of any part of it. Consider just that for human musical perception:
The nature of the relation between human musical perception of sound and human sonic-vocal language has, on the part of some scholars, been so overlooked as to trivialize this human musicality as an non-adaptive phenomenal quirk. This seems more-or-less to be that done by Dutton (see reference list below) and Kivy (see Reference list below).
Dutton, for his part, claims that humans’ ‘aesthetic tastes and interests do not form’ any kind of ‘rational deductive system’, but instead look ‘more like a haphazard concatenation of adaptations, extensions of adaptations, and vestigial attractions and preferences.’
That is, Dutton reasons that, due to the terrestrially foreign conditions of another planet, other-worldly life forms that principally are as intelligence as humans just might find, say, smells aesthetically pleasing instead of ‘music’. The idea here seems to be is that human perceptual musicality (HPM) is just a disjointed accident of evolution, and that sonic-vocal language is the only real adaptive function of the two.
Complicating this picture is Pinker’s (see link below) suggestion that music is the evolutionarily inevitable result of human-level intelligence, namely as a ‘pleasure technology’ of which a requisite level of intelligence could, and would, see to produce. Specifically, music is the clever assembling of sonic ‘signals of fitness’ into a single package, and then repeatedly stimulating the package (‘music’). Pinker’s metaphor for the package (‘music’) is ‘auditory cheesecake’: a concentration of various simple, high-value substances that nevertheless lack the far more sophisticated nutrients necessary for a brain’s supposedly normal function of ‘wringing bona fide fitness increments from the harsh world’. The metaphor here either contradicts the ‘pleasure technology’ theory, or outright supports a far more profound and adaptive theory as to the nature of human perceptual musicality.
As to this ‘harsh world’ of adaptive fitness to which human perceptual musicality does not belong, the theorized no-holds-barred territory of bio-evolutionary struggle seems to be at odds with the inevitability of a ‘pleasure technology’ that, despite its claimed adaptive nil value, has lasted through the many centuries or eons since humans first supposedly invented it.
To this latest thought, the nil-adaptive ‘pleasure technology’ theory can reply that the human instinct for this ‘pleasure technology’ has been allowed to continue to exist by the handicap-supportable capacity of human’s general cultural learning. Accordingly, despite the recursive nature of sonic propagation and its biological instantiation, HPM is rendered pure phenomenal pleasure rather than admitted to constitute an immediate fractal-sensing awareness of fundamental sonic and organic reality. Pinker effectively is saying that we have need have no pleasure in being alive and being curious, so that we have any pleasure to begin with only as reward-inducement for ‘wringing bona fide fitness increments from the harsh world.’
But this nil-adaptive ‘pleasure technology’ theory flies in the face of the realization, made centuries ago, that our phenomenological being is mutually inherent to our rational capacity, not alien to it. (((see, for example, ‘PETER HARRISON SCIENCE RELIGION AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp67uHdsPsQ)))
Further, if there are such things as basic biological needs, of which nutrition is only a most basic example, then comparative disadvantage may not be a simple either/or matter. It is a disadvantage for prey ever have any need of intake of external matter save what constantly is provided by breathing. To have to stop to eat is a risk for prey animals, even if some species of prey animals are themselves predators. But biological needs are not so much a binary logic as a dynamic hierarchy, and in which there is a spectrum: beginning from the most basic and constant needs to a very fine gradation of ‘lesser’ and ‘lesser’ kinds of needs.
And though air is one of the most constant and thus most basic of needs over which an animal has some control, the very existence of sound as the intra-motional relations of all matter is even more basic. How this relates to the musicality of a creature made in God’s image, as a function of its sensibility to the sonic dimension, may not be so brutishly obvious. In fact, under given assumptions, taking whatever is brutishly obvious as the only primary standard of judgment has had a very poor track record in all fields of inquiry.
Dutton, Dennis (2009) , The Art Instinct, pg. 219
Kivy, Peter (1990). Music Alone.
Kivy, Peter, (2007). Music, Language, and Cognition.
Pinker, Steven (1997) How The Mind Works: http://hampshirehigh.com/exchange2012/docs/Steven%20Pinker%20-%20Ho… (page 524 middle)
Bottom line: Is it
(A) a single system, with errors added post-completion
or
(B) a random mess of stuff that randomly-yet-progressively improved?
Bottom line: Is that
(A) a false dichotomy
or
(B) a very, very silly false dichotomy?