ID and public education

[Jay313 (Jay Johnson)]

@MarkD

you may be underestimating the power of (content edited by moderator) God (content edited by moderator) imbued with omnipotence and omniscience. Who is to say just how far back such a being could have begun the trajectory of life to ensure that we wind up where we find ourselves today?

Fixed it for ya.

And just in case anyone is keeping score, that doesn’t happen to be my personal view.

[Jay313 (Jay Johnson)]

@gbrooks9

I am one of those who endorses God’s influence, direct, comprehensive and specific, all the way back to creation … alternating as necessary between God’s work performed by engaging in natural lawful operations and God’s work performed by engaging in miraculous (non-lawful) operations.

This makes me wonder: Would George endorse a similarly worded statement about the inspiration of the Bible?

I am one of those who endorses God’s inspiration – direct, comprehensive, and specific – of the authors and compilers all the way back to Moses … alternating as necessary between God’s inspiration performed by engaging in natural, regular operations (inspiration through secondary means) and God’s inspiration performed by engaging in miraculous, irregular operations (inspiration through direct means, such as visions and the like).

Hmmm. Methinks that is a bridge too far… haha

[gbrooks9 (George Brooks)]

@Jay313

Hmmm. Methinks that is a bridge too far… haha

Unitarians don’t like bridges.

But we do, at times, enjoy “big picture metaphysics!”

[Jay313 (Jay Johnson)]

@gbrooks9

Unitarians don’t like bridges.

You have to admit, your formula works just as well as a model for the inspiration of Scripture as it does for God’s influence in evolution.

[MarkD (A Whateverist, not a Christian)]

I’ll have to take your word for it.

[T_aquaticus]

@groovimus

A specific question regarding a ‘repair system’ that undoes presumably degrading random mutations.

The DNA repair mechanisms undo many mutations, but it has no way of knowing which are beneficial, neutral, or detrimental. Even with DNA repair mechanisms there are still some mutations that slip through.

@groovimus

A repair system that does not undo all mutations, somehow has the information necessary to allow beneficial mutations to remain.

It is natural selection that allows beneficial mutations to increase in numbers within a population over time. The repair mechanisms will randomly let mutations through and has no way of knowing which mutations are beneficial, neutral, or detrimental.

@groovimus

My specific question is this: where is it proven that such a system was built up by truly random mutations?

The DNA repair mechanisms are found deep in the evolutionary history of eukaryotes, so I find that you will be quite disappointed if you are looking for a blow by blow explanation for how they came about. Of the changes we are able to evidence they are consistent with random mutations, as shown in this essay.

@groovimus

I don’t need an extrapolation that says [in general] observations are consistent with random mutations because I am wanting specific proof that a system which can discriminate between various mutations and weed out the harmful ones, is not some some sort of information processor that can discriminate between random mutations and J. Cairnes’ “directed mutations” based on his research. In other words I was asking for a specific proof of the advent of this information processing system as a result of “truly random” mutations that somehow ‘knew’ (possessed information) to ignore the home stretch of mutations that built itself? Where is that specific proof?

DNA repair mechanisms don’t weed out the harmful ones.

@groovimus

Apparently this evidence is not on par with what is considered irrefutable proof. The paper I linked above by Barry Hall analysing the work of Cairnes states: In 1988, John Cairns and his collaborators took the first step toward fulfilling that prediction when they showed that some spontaneous mutations are very non-random in that they occur as specific responses to selection pressures (Cairns, Overbaugh & Miller, 1988). They pointed out that the existence of adaptive mutations had not been adequately tested, and they provided some evidence for the occurrence of such mutations in the lacZ gene of E. coli (Cairns, Overbaugh & Miller, 1988). D The link again: Adaptive mutagenesis: a process that generates almost exclusively beneficial mutations | Genetica

Without access to the whole paper its a bit tough to address.

However, Patricia Foster was one of the original researchers on the subject, and she is now saying that these mutations are not directed:

Fairly early on in our studies, Cairns and I eliminated the hypothesis that mutations were “directed” toward a useful goal. The first negative evidence was obtained not with FC40, but with SM195. SM195 has an amber mutation in lacZ and so reverts both by intragenic mutations and by the creation of tRNA suppressors (11). The continued appearance of extragenic suppressors during lactose selection allowed us to dismiss the hypothesis that the selective conditions “instructed” the cell to make appropriate mutations—in the case of extragenic suppressors, there is no direct path from the phenotype (Lac+) to the mutated gene (encoding a tRNA) (23). Later it was shown that about two-thirds of the late-appearing Lac+ revertants of SM195 were due to slow-growing ochre suppressors that probably arose during growth prior to lactose selection (57). Nonetheless, the continued appearance of fast-growing amber suppressors in addition to the true revertants demonstrated that mutations appear elsewhere than in the gene directly under selection (24).

The second piece of evidence against directed mutation was obtained by putting a second revertible allele, a +1 frameshift in the tetA gene, close to the Lac− allele in FC40. During lactose selection, Tetr revertants appeared at about the same rate as did Lac+ mutations and had the same genetic requirements (21). The frequency of double Lac+ Tetr mutants in these experiments indicated that the two events were not independent (21). Nonetheless, the occurrence of nonselected mutations during lactose selection demonstrated that the mutational mechanism was not directed at a specific gene.
Foster (2004)

It has been known for a while that starvation conditions result in an SOS response in E. coli which changes the gene expression of some genes and also increases the random mutation rate. This is why they were seeing higher than expected mutants.

@groovimus

There are plenty of other workers saying things that are not in line with your answer. James Shapiro for one: In combination, cytogenetics and molecular genetics have taught us about many processes that lead to biological novelties “independently of natural selection” — hybridization, genome duplication, symbiogenesis, chromosome restructuring, horizontal DNA transfer, mobile genetic elements, epigenetic switches, and natural genetic engineering (the ability of all cells to cut, splice, copy, and modify their DNA in non-random ways). As previous blogs document and as future blogs will discuss, the genome sequence record tells us that these processes have accompanied rapid changes in all kinds of organisms. We know that many of them are activated by stress under extraordinary circumstances. link: Does Natural Selection Really Explain What Makes Evolution Succeed? | HuffPost Impact

All of those are random changes to DNA sequence with respect to fitness.

@groovimus

Got that? and modify their DNA in non-random ways. - independently of natural selection Please don’t ridicule that it was said in a popular forum. He is a microbiologist at a world class university, stating his position. And I know that he does not verbally support ID. Everyone knows that his publishing career would be finished in the life sciences if he did.

Shapiro can attach all the fancy names he wants to random mutagenesis. It is still random with respect to fitness.

[Mervin_Bitikofer]

@gbrooks9

Unitarians don’t like bridges.

What about one-way bridges? [and you get to choose which way … ]

[gbrooks9 (George Brooks)]

@Mervin_Bitikofer

What about one-way bridges? [and you get to choose which way … ]

The “bridge of inspiration” that @Jay313 was particularly interested in fails me for one simple reason:

there are too many hurdles in the natural world around me for me to reconcile to some rather brittle narratives in the Old Testament. YECs, by refusing to budge on any figurative interpretations, drove me away from embracing any of their premises.

I see this happening even more in the generations after me …

[MarkD (A Whateverist, not a Christian)]

@gbrooks9

YECs, by refusing to budge on any figurative interpretations,

George, you acknowledge a place for interpreting the bible figuratively? Hallelujah. I’ve never been able to understand the insistence by so many that the bible is some sort of marching orders from God or even a contract specifying what both God and a believer owes the other and can expect in return. Is your approach pretty common amongst universalists?

[gbrooks9 (George Brooks)]

@MarkD

Is your approach pretty common amongst universalists?

@MarkD,

I would say that the approach is virtually a definition of how Universalists (or more completely, Unitarian Universalists) interpret the Bible.

I remember escorting one nice elderly lady to Easter service as a favor to a friend. She the lady was visiting from out of town and was hoping to find a U.U. church to attend for the holiday. And I was hoping the Texas-style U.U. church wouldn’t be too modern or non-traditional for her tastes.

I was raised in both Catholic and Nazarene traditions; I thought the U.U. minister did a nice job of offering reverence and recognition on this “very Christian” morning. After we headed back towards the car, I asked my senior companion what she thought of it?: “I think there was all together too much talk about Jesus!”

I was floored… and never took made assumptions about age and religion again!

In New England, where many an old fire-and-brimstone church would eventually be taken over by new “Universalist” generations, the saying is:

“Congregationalists kept the faith; Universalists kept the furniture!”