Are they really new species or simply a new expression from the existing genome where a range of potential expressions are designed in? If indeed it’s a new species, how did you show that it’s not simply a new expression? Why are you confident that it’s a new species?
Intelligent to whom? Your question triggers my memory of Rom 11:33 -
“33 Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!
34 “For who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has become His counselor?”
35 “Or who has first given to Him
And it shall be repaid to him?”
Is this not a text book illustration of a strawman?
Not to those who know what a strawman is.
I reject your conclusion that my argument is a strawman. Again, the point is that SE is a solid scientific discipline that poses a serious challenge to neo-Darwinian evolution as the best explanation of biological data. Its implications are that random changes to the genome are overwhelmingly destructive, and that evolution is far from the best explanation of the data. ID seems far better. Do you deny that design is easily recognized? Do you believe that wind, rain, erosion, freezing and thawing are the best explanation to Mt Rushmore?
Technically no, because the “earliest version” of anything is in the past and is therefore not alive. We can compare current versions and infer how they changed from a previous version, either by very lucky access to fossils or perhaps collections over time (the latter limits us to a very tiny slice of evolutionary time), or by careful inference, or by reconstruction (aka resurrection) of potential ancestors. That last approach can really only be done for genes and not for whole organisms.
Nevertheless, the LTEE run by Richard Lenski at MSU was designed from the beginning to allow a particular kind environmental change drive evolution for thousands of generations, while preserving a sample of every generation. This has allowed Lenski and his collaborators to do just what you seem to seek: map phenome onto genome, and track population-level genetic change, over evolutionary time. It’s still a tiny slice of time, but it’s pretty cool.
Another example where we can see species-relevant differences side-by-side is the phenomenon known as a ring species. For other examples of evolutionary change where we have access to the underlying events, see a list I made a while back: ERV evidence for pastor with a lawyer's mind - #50 by sfmatheson
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Apes are still alive!
You haven’t shown a single solid reason to accept that point. Your claim is hopelessly wrong. But it’s not a strawman.
This is known to be false, and this has been shown to you over and over and over. THIS is a strawman.
I will have no further conversation with you about the strawman concept. Biology is more interesting.
The apes from which we descended aren’t. This is such a simple concept. Would you please think more before responding?
Your responses are nothing more than denial. Your understanding of SE is as bad as my understanding of biology. Notwithstanding, scientific thinking solidly supports SE and its implications regarding evolution are real and crying out for someone to address it other than calling it a strawman.
Good luck to you!
Exactly. What looks like a drunken walk to us is just God having things exactly as He desires. We don’t know His mind so who are we to criticize how He accomplishes the task?
Thanks. That should be interesting reading.
Actually, Steve Matheson told you all you need to know in his very first reply to you:
"The notion that one little change requires some epic “coordination” to avoid catastrophe… is falsified every time an animal (including a human) produces live offspring. "
What he didn’t spell out (perhaps because he didn’t realize how ignorant you are of basic biology) is that “every time an animal…produces live offspring”, the offspring inherit an appreciable number of essentially random mutations which come about during the reproductive process. For instance, your genome has around fifty (give or take) mutations relative to your parents’ genomes. These are not simply the normal reshuffling associated with sexual recombination, but bona fide, de novo alterations, such as altered base pairs. And these mutations accumulate, generation after generation, so you have some 200 mutations relative to the genomes of your great-great parents. And that is true for all 7 billion humans on the planet.
Would making 200 random changes in a typical computer program almost certainly wreck it? YES.
Does making 200 random changes in the human genome almost certainly wreck it? NO. [1]
So your analogizing with human computer programming and systems engineering is simply not valid.
You can accept this reality, and read the references given to you above in order learn more details on the robustness of biological systems (relative to human-designed systems) or you can keep on insisting evolution violates (human-designed) SE principles. Your choice.
[1] Just to nuance this statement a bit: Most conceived human embryos and babies do fine with their accumulated mutational load. But not all. As I recall, something like 40% of fertilized eggs end in spontaneous abortions (miscarriages), due at least In part to genetic problems, and something like 3% of live births result in children with some identified genetic defect (inherited medical condition). Thus, biological systems are quite robust (much more so than a typical computer program), but not 100%.
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¯_(ツ)_/¯
Thanks for trying.
The actually interesting and currently unanswered question is quite the opposite of what @Raymond_Isbell has asserted. Humans (and many other animals) experience relatively high mutation rates. The implication is that mutations are accumulating in the human population, and because some subset of these mutations is deleterious to some extent, the genetic load (burden of disadvantageous genetic elements) should become dangerous to the population. (The really bad mutations are weeded right out, but lots of moderately or weakly disadvantageous variants will stay.) But… news flash… we’re not dead. Why not?
People are working on this question as we speak (I know one of them really well). Epistasis is one big obvious potential answer, and a major paper a couple of years ago (below) made a strong case for it, but apparently it’s not necessarily the complete story.
The basic message is that the belief that mutations will destroy the human genome is a belief so far from accurate that it can be completely inverted logically to yield an actual ongoing research question.
I read them both, and didn’t find them to be convincing either in support of evolution or ID. There’s wiggle room in both. The examples are just not clear cut enough to resolve the issue.
I know you don’t want to offend, and if I were a snowflake, I might get offended when I read a phrase like “he didn’t realize how ignorant you are of basic biology.” You may not realize it, but I think you guys are beating me up much worse than I am beating you up. Steve Schaffner noted that I was pretty strong in my challenges. I accepted it and am trying to do better. That said, it’s becoming more obvious to me that you guys don’t really understand the engineering principles that I’m trying to convey. You claim you do, but post like yours and Steve Matheson tell me otherwise. The cell is an engineering marvel, and everything that goes on in the cell follows the laws of physics. SE provides an organized framework in which to view it. That organization allows one to see order, structure, and ensure that the laws of physics are not being violated. That’s why designers use it. It keeps up from designing junk that will fail. Some of the claims you guys are making sound like magic, and a way to avoid having to deal with the details that scientific laws and principles impose. Certainly, I don’t know biology that well, but I do understand the physics behind much of what I’m seeing as I learn, e.g., DNA specifying and building proteins. I suspect that I also see much that you don’t see, e.g., the need, but still unknown, command, control, communications, and computing (information management) that’s going on to support all the activities in the cell.
Yes, there’s clearly an impressive capability within the genome to accommodate changes. (I’ve learned that from you guys and I’m grateful for it.) The question is, however, does that accommodation come from random or designed modification. Having learned from you guys about the robustness, flexibility, and redundancy that’s obviously built into the cell (you think evolution provided it, and I suspect that design provided it), I’m actually more impressed at the marvel of the design. That kind of functionality is even less likely than if it were not there. In fact, the probability of that kind of functionality randomly coming into the genome is many orders of magnitude less likely than without it. The level of coordination across all the cell subsystems would be much greater if you’re building into it these capabilities (robustness, flexibility, and redundancy). The way you worded your description of 200 random changes wrecking a computer program is spot on. However, I could design in the robustness, flexibility, and redundancy to make a computer program much more “fault tolerant.” (The cell is clearly fault tolerant.) Fault tolerance is often a design requirement particularly in systems where failure is costly. It’s expensive to include fault tolerance, but it may be more expensive to have a higher failure rate of the system. Again, it all goes back to the system’s mission. (In evolution, there is no mission if I understand evolution.) If human lives depend on it, you can be sure a big part of the budget will be devoted to building in fault tolerance. Failure mode analysis and fault tolerance is an important element of designing a large system-of-systems. I took a course in grad school titled “Probabilistic Systems in Engineering Science” where we learned to model systems with random variables. The purpose of the course was to teach us how to estimate and address the likelihood of failure in a system. Some of the probability density functions (PDFs) had a high level of kurtosis (relatively flat so that choosing design parameters was not cut and dry.) In those cases, you must be really careful in the failure mode analysis and design of fault tolerance. That you have that in the cell is truly impressive. To conclude it came about by chance and natural selection really challenges credulity.
@Raymond_Isbell you appear to be a Christian that currently finds ID persuasive. Am I correct?
If so I would like to ask you how you see God fitting in with ID.