Study in Nature shoots down three basic claims of evolutionary theory

Faith & Science Conversation
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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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84

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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85

@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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91

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”?
[/quote]
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?
[/quote]
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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That’s false. The bad theology of creationism has turned many folks into atheists. It is the creationists who say that if a literal Genesis is false then the Bible is false. When Christians are faced with mountains of evidence that a literal Genesis is false, what choice do they have? You might as well say that Christians have to be Geocentrists.

“The tragedy of young-earth creationism is that it takes a relatively recent and extreme view of Genesis, applies to it an unjustified scientific gloss, and then asks sincere and well-meaning seekers to swallow this whole, despite the massive discordance with decades of scientific evidence
from multiple disciplines. Is it any wonder that many sadly turn away from faith concluding that they cannot believe in a God who asks for an abandonment of logic and reason?”–Dr. Francis Collins, “Faith and the Human Genome”

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In discussions like these, your reply tells us that you don’t understand how evolution works. You don’t understand how basic phylogenies work.

If evolution is true then all descendants of canids will be canids. THAT’S HOW IT SHOULD WORK. What can happen is that the diversity of canid species will increase over time.

The same applies to all lineages. The common ancestor we share with monkeys was a primate. Both us and monkeys are STILL PRIMATES. The common ancestor we share with bears was a mammal. We are still mammals. The common ancestor we share with fish was a vertebrate. WE ARE STILL VERTEBRATES. Do you see a pattern? You don’t evolve out of your ancestry, you just add to the diversity of descendants. Most of all, you don’t evolve into already existing species like cats and rats.

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What you ignore is that the species at the ends of those forks are contemporaneous and separate species.

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First, you don’t observe or replicate a hypothesis. You test a hypothesis. As far as testable and falsifiable predictions made by the theory of evolution, here are 29 of them:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

You have to ignore massive parts of science in order to claim that the theory of evolution is not able to construct scientific hypotheses.

Multiple beneficial mutations occurred and were selected for in those lineages of bacteria. That is evolution.[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.
[/quote]

You are the only one thinks that vertical gradualism is the same as horizontal gradualism. Dawkins certainly didn’t think that. You are probably the type of person who doesn’t understand the difference between grandparents and cousins.

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Who has ever claimed that Lenski’s experiment supports universal common ancestry?

I dare you to quote a single person saying that.

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At least you admit that creationists have to tune out the facts in order to be creationists.[quote=“NonlinOrg, post:78, topic:35830”]
Under gradualism their descendants or some sort of “convergent evolution” - I don’t care - would form a continuum.
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There is a gradualistic line back to your grandparents. Your cousins also have a gradualistic line of heredity back to those same grandparents. however, there is no direct line from your cousins to you. You are not the descendants of your cousins. Do you understand this difference or not?[quote=“NonlinOrg, post:78, topic:35830”]
Where do you see a change? E.coli into e.coli is not “evolution”. Simple! What “mutation-based functional changes”?
[/quote]

Yet more examples of creationists having to ignore reality in order to keep on being creationists.

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101

There is no horizontal gradualism and no one has ever shown vertical gradualism (your dreaming doesn’t count). Hence no gradualism, hence Darwin fails.

“Once they have developed into separate species” presupposes Darwinism and Gradualism so it’s circular logic. When not separated by borders, humans do come together like the Mexicans that integrate quite well with the Anglos - remember the melting pot?

So “fitness” can only be measured as “survive-ability”, hence no independent “fitness” function?

But isn’t the predator doing the selection? Someone (intelligent organisms) does, not the so-called and impersonal “natural selection”.

You have observed “heritable traits”, but not “evolution” which pretends to link bacteria to humans.

What is “very limited interbreeding”? Bonus: you get to define “speciation” as you please.

No! “Shared genetics” only demonstrates “shared genetics”. Fossils may belong to independent third party and definitely none looks like ancestors of the chimp. Sorry, until you get a human from a chimp in the lab, you’re only imagining the “descendance”.

Ironically, modern cosmology is saying that center of the universe is everywhere, so why not Geocentrist when it’s all relative? Anyway, we’re not discussing Belief here. Darwinism pretends to be Scientific …despite the fact that there is no Science separate from Religion Philosophy, Religion, and Science – NonLin. Is Francis Collins not fallible human too?

Can we get them in neon color at least? Wings? Smart as a human? Such a let-down. You do realize that all “lineage” is a human construct, right? And that Linnaeus is well known for it from well before Darwin?

All failed. Pick your favorite and let’s discuss.

Don’t you have to prove this gradualism assumption somehow? And if there is no observable gradualism, then what? Can you refrain from cheap shots?

My gradparents don’t look like fish. Neither do my cousins look like chimps. Maybe in other families you know. Now, that would prove evolution indeed.

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@NonlinOrg

The observable gradualism is literally in front of your eyes when you examine Ring Species all around the planet … and especially when we have a conclusive case of gradualism with the Alaska and Florida rabbit populations…

How stubborn can you be?