Study in Nature shoots down three basic claims of evolutionary theory

Faith & Science Conversation
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Ah, @Dredge, I had such high hopes… I naively hoped that with enough assurance that Bible-believing, Christ-following, brothers and sisters with scientific experience agreed with the vast majority of evidence from multiple scientific fields that supports ToE, then you might open yourself up to scientific arguments. It appears I was sadly mistaken.

Who made this claim? I have never read anything from Lenski making such a claim. However, his data is very interesting and is useful for countering the argument that “mutations are never beneficial, only harmful!”. Here is the abstract from a very recent paper:

“Evolution is an on-going process, and it can be studied experimentally in organisms with rapid generations. My team has maintained 12 populations of Escherichia coli in a simple laboratory environment for >25 years and 60 000 generations. We have quantified the dynamics of adaptation by natural selection, seen some of the populations diverge into stably coexisting ecotypes, described changes in the bacteria’s mutation rate, observed the new ability to exploit a previously untapped carbon source, characterized the dynamics of genome evolution and used parallel evolution to identify the genetic targets of selection. I discuss what the future might hold for this particular experiment, briefly highlight some other microbial evolution experiments and suggest how the fields of experimental evolution and microbial ecology might intersect going forward.”

It contains nothing about common ancestry. You wouldn’t possibly be setting up a straw man, would you?[quote=“Dredge, post:68, topic:35830”]
(according to this logic, human beings will one day run the 100m-sprint in one second!)
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I really don’t know what to do with this other than point out that arguing in the absurd does NOT increase the validity of your argument.

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Innovators always destroy the old dogma. Deeper understanding is damaging to previous shallower understanding. The old Darwinist dogma must go as the theory fails all five tests for scientific hypothesis: Observed? Replicated? Falsifiable? Predictive power? Illuminates other areas of science? “In the case of Evolution…well…no…no…no…no…and no” (Tom Wolfe); let me add “illogical”.

This makes no sense. 1) Pure breeds are kept isolated to stay “pure”. 2) Yes, so? How would this be different that “natural evolution”? 3) Breeders don’t want regular mutts but the craziest “most evolved” dogs - if possible, even dogs with wings, neon color, ultra smart, big as an elephant, etc. etc.

Before replying, read. It is presented as “evolution in action” - only there’s no evolution at all.

Yes they are very different and that’s the point: mix in transition regions, but no gradualism. Get it?

I don’t. You do! Remember “evolution”?

Please don’t insult by “explaining” modeling. Your problem is: modeling cannot contravene reality. And what modeling did Darwin do when he postulated gradualism? None whatsoever.

What does this fluff even mean? Bottom line, Lenski’s is sold as “evolution in action”, hence snake oil. What “speciating” mice? I searched and see more fluff that amounts to no evidence of anything. Besides, no such thing as species, remember?

Chris, your comments suggest that you gouge your eyes out to demonstrate that you don’t see how illogical Darwin’s evolution is. How does this look? And how about refraining from this type of comments?

A statement without support. Why am I not surprised? Better take some time to think through this horizontal-vertical gradualism.

What on earth is Lenski even saying? 1) and 2) Dude, you’re in a lab with conditions that you create - you are the “natural selection”. 3) Meaning what? Everything mutates all the time. What changed in the lab you control? 4) How do you know is “new ability”? What happens when you release these in the wild? Do they die or take over the e-coli universe with their dual metabolism? 5) Meaningless fluff.

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You haven’t supported your claim that science is done by the outsiders by definition. Could you list some of the outsiders – people not even trained in science – who have made important contributions to the development of physics in the last 150 years? [quote=“NonlinOrg, post:75, topic:35830”]
A statement without support. Why am I not surprised? Better take some time to think through this horizontal-vertical gradualism.
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Were you under the impression that you had offered any support for your claim?

Okay, I’ve taken some time to think through horizontal-vertical gradualism. My conclusion is that your claim on the subject reflects a deep misunderstanding of evolution. When two populations cease to exchange genetic material, they begin independent trajectories in evolution. There is no reason at all that their descendants should form a continuum in all or in any traits. If you think there is a reason, offer it.

Similarly, when a population speaking a single language splits into two, the language evolves independently in both, and there is no reason to expect their descendants to display a continuous range of language between the two descendants. Why would you expect there to be horizontal gradualism between speakers of modern German and modern English, for example?

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I don’t have the patience to keep repeatedly countering each of your arguments, especially when you either ignore evidence or change you arguments mid-conversation.

Let me point out that you brought up Lenski as a “failed experiment” because E. coli is still E. coli, even after 27 years.

I point out that no one expected a completely new organism to have evolved in such a short time frame. Your argument abruptly changes to:[quote=“NonlinOrg, post:75, topic:35830”]
Before replying, read. It is presented as “evolution in action” - only there’s no evolution at all.
[/quote]

Why does your argument about Lenski change so dramatically from one post to the next? Could it be that you simply misunderstand the science behind it, so you can’t critique it fairly?

I don’t see how the development of mutation-based functional changes over time does not constitute “evolution in action”. You have repeatedly demonstrated a lack of understanding regarding what evolution is or what it does. How can you expect to do anything innovative if you don’t understand the basic principles?

I would love to come up with innovative ways to reduce traffic congestion, but I would have to know a little bit about what it is and how it works before I came up with any innovative solutions.

I realize there was a lot more to your post, but I’ll not address it unless you promise to actually consider someone else’s counter-argument instead of immediately dismissing it.

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I do and you do, but most people don’t. We need to help them.

Outsiders to the establishment. Don’t read what’s not there.

Yes, you did think more. Under gradualism their descendants or some sort of “convergent evolution” - I don’t care - would form a continuum. As long as the environment transition is smooth, biologic diversity should also transition smoothly. Instead we have overlap of drastically different biology over the same environment. Your population example is opposite to what you want as Germanic people occupy the same extended region, with the only abrupt transitions explained by natural and later administrative barriers. Recently we have migration but mixed marriages are once again smoothing these differences. This is not what we see in nature.

Where do you see a change? E.coli into e.coli is not “evolution”. Simple! What “mutation-based functional changes”?

What “lack of understanding”? Disagreements are not “lack of understanding”. Do you understand the disagreements?

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In fact, I do not, and neither does “evolution,” because all descendants of dogs will still fall into the classification ‘canid’ no matter how morphologically bizarre they may become.

There, I supported @glipsnort’s claim for you! Do you believe it now?

It was rather tempting to quote everything you’ve ever said about evolution as supporting evidence, but that would be a daunting amount of work and frankly I don’t think you’d change your mind about much, if anything.

If you’re only in this to refine counterarguments, and you have never even considered re-evaluating the validity of your core propositions, and you don’t cite sources or support your statements when asked, except to insult the asker, why should it be worth our time to present you with thoughtful, researched responses?

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@cwhenderson

Eventually, I’m sure the Moderators will figure out a “best practice” for giving the missionaries a “grace period” for all their preaching …

A component of the “Best Practice” might include the idea that “Repetition Has Consequences!” :

When after they repeat the same issue, say… , three (3) times … (or maybe four times?) … They are put in a restricted digital “play area” where compassionate and loving Evolutionists can still debate with them (on the same topics, over and over and over again) … without disrupting everyone else.

But I’m an old man; I have little optimism that I will see such a day here in BioLogos…

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@NonlinOrg,

Again with the dogs.

I will “Flag” all your future posts that even mention dog breeding/speciation. The Dog situation (and the others as well) has been well explained to you. I’ll state a one sentence summation as a courtesy: “A dog breeder that developed a breed that could no longer be crossed with all the other dog breeds would lose access to thousands of phenotypes lovingly cultured in the dog species by thousands of breeders.”

Your expectation that dog breeders should be creating new dog species is wrong, wrong-headed, and an indication of how little you understand how speciation occurs in nature.

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I read what was there. You contrasted outsiders to science with “experts in the fields of chemistry, physics, astronomy…” Assuming you intended your remark to mean anything, it meant that experts in those fields were not the ones doing real science. So I’ll try again: who are some of the non-experts who have contributed to the development of physics?

Why? I asked for a reason, not a restatement of your claim. [quote=“NonlinOrg, post:78, topic:35830”]
Your population example is opposite to what you want as Germanic people occupy the same extended region, with the only abrupt transitions explained by natural and later administrative barriers.
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So you’re saying that natural barriers can produce abrupt transitions in later populations, populations that started out identical? And you agree that when English-speakers and German-speakers migrated to the same area (say, Pennsylvania), that they didn’t form a linguistic continuum, right? You appear to be agreeing with me. What was your argument again? Should there be a linguistic continuum between English-speakers and German-speakers today or not? Is there one or not?

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The following changes occurred in the population of E. Coli in Lenski’s experiment due to genetic changes:

  • Specialization into L and S sub-populations. L grow in large colonies and thrive on glucose; S grow in small colonies and do better in the absence of glucose.
  • Increased cell size
  • Ability to metabolize citrate in aerobic conditions. The mutations occurred in 3 stages: (1) a potentiation stage with 2 neutral mutations; (2) an actuation stage with one mutation (a tandem duplication); and (3) a refinement stage, with additional mutations that increased the aerobic citrate metabolism capability.

All of us have models in our head. None of them are completely accurate; none of us is omniscient. In other words, all models contravene reality.

But some models are very useful approximations that have explanatory and predictive power. These are the models that eventually prevail in the scientific community.

You have never addressed the fact that physics has models, chemistry has models, meteorology has models, geology has models… They are all “gradualistic” in that they employ gradients and continuous functions where the reality is in fact discrete. They all work quite well in spite of their generalizations regarding discrete phenomena, just as the biological models (like evolution) do.

You have never addressed the fact that, since Laplace, scientists have been fruitfully modeling traits with probability distribution functions rather than discrete points. You have never addressed the fact that Einstein’s Nobel was for applying a mathematical treatment of randomness (again, via probability distribution functions) to Brownian motion. And thus the evolutionary models that biologists use are following well-trodden paths in science.

Speaking of models, I proposed a model for your behavior in the Biologos forum, and it turns out to have been wildly successful:

Since you have introduced the subject of Darwin, I would like to respond. You seem to think that all of us should throw out over 150 years of hard work by hundreds of thousands of biologists, and agree instead that The Origin of the Species represents the state of the art in biological science. If that’s not your opinion, I invite you to restate your argument.

After I refuted your claim about Dawkins’ views of speciation, I see you have begun to address my argument in detail.

Actually…on further review I see that you are simply repeating your previous claim as if I had never said anything at all.

Thank you for your thoughtful comment.

And now it is time to move on to other activities. Have a great day.

Remembering the sacrifice of Father Clement Falter,

Chris Falter

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@Chris_Falter,

This is pretty much how NonLin operates. It might be a good time to start “flagging” his posts when they are non-responsive. But the flagging has to be timely … within a few hours of it being posted.

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I said “Don’t read what’s not there”. If you’re going to continue like a politician I will start ignoring you.

This is ridiculous. You claim “gradualism”. I show you no horizontal gradualism whatsoever and no gradualism especially in descendance - as observed by Mendel in 1865 and confirmed ever since - and you ask me “why we should expect gradualism under the gradualism assumption”?

I said neither 1) nor 2). What does 2) even mean?

Chris, last time I repeat: e-coli to e-coli is not proof of evolution but snake oil like Miller-Urey and all other evolution “experiments”. Stop going in circles - aren’t you dizzy already?

How can you make this broad statement? Did you see a chemical reaction modeled as 1.55 molecules of X reacting with 0.78 molecules of Y? How about 0.5 male fertilizing 0.45 female?

Stay on topic. You have this tendency to say “if evolution is not true, then the sky is falling and nothing else is true”. Granted, if evolution is not true, then Santa Claus from the North Pole is not true.

Darwin is still revered as the religious prophet that he is. I am only disputing some of his concepts that are still “state of the art” today. If you think they’re not valid anymore, then what’s the point of your arguments?

Not that I care about Dawkins, but he did change his mind from your quote in 2005(?) to the one I showed you from 2014.

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You have once again demonstrated a lack of understanding about evolution. Evolution is hereditary change over time, which Lenski’s experiment certainly shows. A vast majority of educated scientists do not distinguish between “micro” and “macro” evolution as you seem to be doing. Is it examples of speciation that you want? You have been offered multiple examples. I’ll reiterate some, if you want them. AiG is very much “on board” with speciation, by the way, since their model would require ~1,000 land animal species evolving into hundreds of thousands (if not millions) in the last ~4,000 years.

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One: I think you are going overboard about Darwin revered as a religious prophet.

Two: Since you think Darwinism is a form of Atheism, then obviously Darwinism is not particularly relevant to the work of BioLogos. The term is sometimes used as shorthand for Evolution. But that’s about it.

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A new world record-time for the 100m sprint is analogous to microevolution. I’m led to believe that microevolution is an unlimited process and therefore eventually adds up to macroevolution. So I’m comparing unlimited microevolution to a human evetuall running 100m in one second.

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[quote=“Dredge, post:89, topic:35830”]
A new world record-time for the 100m sprint is analogous to microevolution. I’m led to believe that microevolution is an unlimited process and therefore eventually adds up to macroevolution. So I’m comparing unlimited microevolution to a human evetuall running 100m in one second.
[/quote][my own emphasis added]

I think you can be safely disabused of that notion. The claim that microevolution is just a small but seamless part of macroevolution is not the same as claiming there are no limits. All sorts of practical, environmental (and genetic) limits would exist I’m sure. A claim that one species can speciate and even eventually produce an entirely different species is not a claim that they will eventually become anything at all, much less arbitrary benchmarks that we might set. There are practical reasons from physics that would prevent any land animal from ever running nearly a third the speed of sound.

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I apologize, Dredge. I was harsher with you than I should have been. It is true that sincerity does not imply accuracy, but I argue that I “listen to both books” - the book of God’s Word and the book of God’s Works. When decades of good, solid science indicate something about God’s creative process, I take that into account.

Now, back to Lenski (sorry, one clarification to make). It is very interesting to see what is happening to these bacterial populations on a small scale, but believe it or not, scientists are often very careful about making conclusions. It is reasonable to look at Lenski’s results and conclude that it demonstrates evolution in action, but it would be unreasonable to look at the same project and conclude that is supports common ancestry. There are a lot of other lines of evidence that support common ancestry, but the Lenski experiment in itself admittedly doesn’t do that.

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@Dredge,

Then you would be referring to the hyper-speciation proposed by several schools of Creationism who confess that to have the diverse pattern of terrestrial life we have today, there had to be a spurt of speciation by the Ark’s survivors … into ecological niche’s around the world that were now devoid of competition.

The post-Ark hyper-speciation is, by definition, hundreds of times faster (having to occur within 5000 years) than anything Evolutionists have proposed… which even for humanity took hundreds of thousands of years!

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I take it, then, that you are unable to name any non-experts who contributed to the development of physics. Nice attempt to deflect the blame on me, but you made the claim about who contributes to science, and you appear to be unable to support it.[quote=“NonlinOrg, post:86, topic:35830”]
This is ridiculous. You claim “gradualism”. I show you no horizontal gradualism whatsoever and no gradualism especially in descendance - as observed by Mendel in 1865 and confirmed ever since - and you ask me “why we should expect gradualism under the gradualism assumption”?
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I claim gradualism (more or less) of descent. You claim that this implies horizontal gradualism between living species today. I want you to explain why one implies the other. Could you please do so?[quote=“NonlinOrg, post:86, topic:35830”]
I said neither 1) nor 2). What does 2) even mean?
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It means that two linguistic communities, once they develop separate languages, don’t form a horizontal continuum, even if they reside in the same place. In exactly the same way, two populations, once they have developed into separate species, don’t form a horizontal continuum, even if they reside in the same place. You assert they should, and have failed to support your assertion.

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Since Luria and Delbruck we have been able to track mutations, and we do observe that they are clicking away in the background without any detectable tie to the needs of the organism. Using the plate replica assay you can actually enrich for antibiotic resistant bacteria without any of those bacteria being in the presence of antibiotics, and you can sequence their genomes to find the mutations that produced the resistance.

Wikipedia: "Fitness (often denoted w {\displaystyle w} w or ω in population genetics models) is the quantitative representation of natural and sexual selection within evolutionary biology. It can be defined either with respect to a genotype or to a phenotype in a given environment. In either case, it describes individual reproductive success and is equal to the average contribution to the gene pool of the next generation that is made by individuals of the specified genotype or phenotype. "

No evolution, no fitness.[quote=“NonlinOrg, post:32, topic:35830”]
The only selection I know is done by intelligent organisms on themselves or on other organisms. Do you know any other? Selection never happens - it is an active effort of the living. Hence, no unguided, purposeless “natural selection” and no “mountains of evidence”.
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You can read about natural selection for mutations in the MCR1 gene amongst rock pocket mice:

http://www.pnas.org/content/100/9/5268.full

In this example, coat color is under strong natural selection so that you have black mice in areas with black lava rocks and brown mice in the brown colored desert.

It has everything to do with evolution. Darwin himself called evolution “descent with modification”. Heritable traits has been a foundation of evolution from the very start. Also, the reason that we can identify Neanderthal DNA in modern humans is because speciation is a real thing. The reason that we can detect Neanderthal DNA is because of divergence between the genomes, divergence that can only occur if there is very limited interbreeding, otherwise known as speciation.

Shared genetic markers evidence common ancestry, and transitional hominid fossils demonstrate that transition from the ancestor that we share with chimps. You have to be living under enforced ignorance not to know of this evidence.

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