None of that is relevant, and no one ever said that variation “produced evolution alone.” I cannot fathom why you wrote that, nor can I understand why you write so much falsehood about Dawkins. It really hurts the forum IMO.
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I guess that depends on how you define “new organisms”. By some definitions, both you and I are new organisms. Every single human, except for identical twins, is different from each other at the genetic level.
There is also neutral evolution, and this can include physical and genetic changes that result in speciation. So even without positive and negative selection you can get observable changes and speciation.
Is natural selection important? Absolutely. No one is saying otherwise, including Dawkins and Darwin. Are selective pressures from the environment (i.e. ecology) important? YES!!! Again, everyone from Darwin to Dawkins agrees.
Who is not admitting it???
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@Relates has been told over and over again that evolutionary biologists are quite aware of the importance of ecology. It has made no difference.
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There is always selection. There is no “selection” is there is no change in “fitness,” which can only be determined of there is no selection out.
The definition for Darwin’s concept of natural selection was survival of the fittest and was very simple. Of one survived it was fit because it survived. If one did not survive it was unfit. This is circular thinking, bit when the great thinker Karl Popper pointed this out, instead of fixing the swfi9nition so it could be falsified, people put great pressure on him to retract his statement, which he did. However, what Popper did was to say that survival of the fittest could be falsified, but now how it could and as far as known it has not be proven not to be a circular statement. Therefore the basic definition of Natural Selection is still a circular statement , Meaningless as as a scientific statement because it cannot been and has not been verified.
Both Darwin and Dawkins were intent in proving for themselves if no others that the universe was not created by God. They disproved the model of Paley, which is fine, because it was not the best model, but just because God did not create flora and fauna one way, even thought it may be the most obvious way does not mean the God did not create them.
If the universe were rationally structured by natural selection, that would be evidence that it was created by a rational God. The Bio world is rationally structured by ecological selection, so we know it was created by a rational God. It is that simple.
I am not saying that you as an evolutionary biologists do not think that ecology is unimportant, but it is clear that Dawkins has a stance counter to symbiosis and he has a outsized influence in the field. What I hear when I present my view is an ad hominem argument that I don’t know what I am talking about, not that I am overstating my case.
I am not against Darwin and Dawkins, I am for a rationally proven Theory of Evolution that all can agree with because it demonstrates that we live a a rational good planet that we can all share and enjoy. If that is wrong, I apologize. .
It’s what you wrote: “We know that evolution is affected by the ecology. Why not just admit it?” How very sad that you won’t even try to tell the truth about ecology/evolution and now about what you just wrote.
You can’t document this. Because it’s false.
You write falsehoods. You write them repeatedly, and you do this after you have been told that you write things known to be false. It is sad (for you) and deeply disrespectful (to the forum) to engage in this behavior. The solution is to commit yourself to truth-telling. After that, if you make that commitment, I suggest you write about ideas and theories, instead of what you do now, which is to write falsehoods about other people, over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
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No offense, but how long ago was this?
Okay, this is one of my pet peeves. Sorry. I see it all the time from anti-evolution Christian apologists. You’re confusing the origin of life (OOL) with evolution. Biological evolution is an explanation of how existing organisms change over time. I happen to believe that this particular problem may be too difficult to solve, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want people to stop trying to solve it. More on that later …
Never trust your intuition, or your own math. Haha.
See above. The earliest forms of life were microbes around 3.7 billion years ago, followed by cyanobacteria 2.4 billion years ago. The first “animals” (sponges) appeared around 800 million years ago. According to the evidence, bacteria took 1.6 billion years to evolve into something more complex “in the wild.” Complaining that nothing has happened in 50 years? Hmmm. I wouldn’t trust your back of the envelope calculations.
Some modifications might occur quite quickly. For example, here’s an article that explains how the complex protein haemaglobin arose from a simple monomer in only a few steps:
Story: Extinct proteins resurrected to reconstruct the evolution of vertebrate haemoglobin
Scientific article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2292-y
Here’s another interesting example. One point mutation in the ancient gene ARHGAP11A may have been enough to cause the neocortex of the human brain to start expanding.
https://www.mpi-cbg.de/news-events/latest-news/article/news/evolutionary-key-for-a-bigger-brain/
Primates possess only the ancient gene, while humans possess ARHGAP11B, which substitutes a C for a G at a single point, thereby triggering the production of a larger neocortex. Interestingly, a 2015 article on the subject says Neanderthal and Denisovan possess both genes (paralogs). How did that happen? I know @sfmatheson is interested in the subject. Frankly, I didn’t understand 3/4 of the paper, but I’m well-versed enough in the English language to get the gist.
A single splice site mutation in human-specific ARHGAP11B causes basal progenitor amplification
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/2/12/e1601941.full.pdf
I know that no one ever changes their mind on this site or anywhere else in internet-land, but let me throw out a few things for you to chew on (and spit out).
I know your big beef is with Methodological Naturalism, but take a deep breath and step back for a minute. MN is really nothing more than a “method” of doing science. It’s the scientific method in modern dress, and the inventors of the scientific method were almost exclusively Christians.
That aside, the method of MN really means nothing more than scientists must keep looking for a natural explanation as long as that possibility exists. That means that however impossible the problem may appear, scientists should never stop looking for an answer. It doesn’t matter whether they’re atheists or Christians. The quest for understanding never should end with “too hard, so God did it.” I happen to agree with you that the question of the origin of life is too complex to answer, but that doesn’t mean I want scientists to stop looking for an explanation.
Well, I would never say that any problem is definitely “too complex” to solve, but I suspect that certain problems are. I’ve already identified one in the origin of life, but I may be proven wrong one day. We’ll see.
Now, you’re mistaken in giving MN some sort of mystical power as the be-all-end-all motivation behind evolutionary creationism (EC). That’s simply not true. The only time I give MN a thought is when it’s brought up here. I do care about truth and strive to believe things that are true, not false, but that’s why I accept evolution. It is a fact of history supported by mountains of evidence. I didn’t decide to exclude God and seek a natural explanation for the beautiful variety of life on this planet. That’s just not how it works in real life.
I was a Christian long before I learned anything of evolution, let alone even heard of Methodological Naturalism. My commitment is to Christ, not to a philosophy. As for determining what is true, science is never the final word.
What you’re talking about here is the stupendous string of “coincidences” that resulted in the final product. I happen to agree with you about that fact. I also chalk it up to God, but I don’t agree on a couple of points. First, the “hiddenness of God” extends to mathematical proofs of his existence. If God exists (which I believe he does), then he obviously has left humanity in an ambiguous position. Absolute proofs of God’s existence or non-existence are denied to us. That’s why I place the same confidence in mathematical proofs as I do in Anselm’s philosophical proofs, which is to say “none.” Second, I defer to Pascal:
… it is certain that those who have the living faith in their heart see at once that all existence is none other than the work of the God whom they adore. But for those in whom this light is extinguished, … to tell them that they have only to look at the smallest things which surround them, and they will see God openly … is to give them ground for believing that the proofs of our religion are very weak. And I see by reason and experience that nothing is more calculated to arouse their contempt.
The deck was stacked, but that’s our Christian interpretation. Facts never stand alone. Science never has the final word. We have to integrate factual knowledge about the world with all sorts of other types of knowledge about the world. Simply because a person accepts that common descent is a fact doesn’t mean their interpretation of the world stops there.
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It is too bad that you are impelled to question my integrity, not that I cannot stand some some self-examination for time to time. It is because we need to work together on the problems of faith and science in this time of anger and divisiveness and this does not help.
It’s your choice, Roger, not mine. You can resolve to write truthfully. I hope you make that choice. Telling the truth about what others write and believe (most notably Richard Dawkins, but often entire fields of inquiry) will have no effect on your case for altered views of evolution nor will it harm work on “the problems of faith and science.” In fact, if you stop writing known falsehoods, that work might actually get just a tiny bit easier.
Make better choices.
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So, how do you deal with the multiple levels of exponentiation necessary for life as we know it to exist? The situation is even worse than I mentioned, and this problem is very simple to see.
The only response I’ve ever seen from experts is blind belief that random variation, natural selection, and billions of years is sufficient. Very hand wavy and no hard numbers and calculations. Billions of years mean nothing when you are dealing with a single exponential. Incrementing the exponent is doubling the time. Say it takes 6 billion years to check 2^N options. It’ll take 12 billion to check 2^(N+1) options. And things become much much worse when the exponentials stack.
If you know the basics of search algorithms, you’ll know that assuming a search process can effectively navigate a combinatorial explosion requires extremely optimistic assumptions about the landscape. Dawkins’ assumption that we can gradually take small steps to climb Mt. Improbable is an enormous assumption, even granting the fitness function has a decent correlation to the actual landscape. His book TBW is full of his gut intuitions about search algorithms that he would know are completely false if he had a computer science background.
In my opinion, this is the fundamental problem with the field of evolutionary biology. Biologists are proposing a mathematical model that is outside of their expertise. No number of biological facts and observations will tell them anything about the mathematical properties of combinatorial optimization, but that is in fact what evolution by random variation and natural selection actually is. So, evolutionary biologists are talking about something that is completely outside their realm of expertise.
Back to your point, yes biologists know way more about biology than I do, and when they talk about biology I defer to their expertise. But, when it comes to speculating about what a combinatorial optimization process can do in the unobservable past, I have much more expertise about what we can expect from random variation and natural selection than a biologist does.
This is why the forum is an insult to science and a blight on the already dismal reputation of Christianity.
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What Stephen is trying to say is that it is profoundly disrespectful to talk to actual science professionals as if all their expertise is based on
Why do you believe that you and a small minority of people with no real credentials are in a position to evaluate what scientists know? You aren’t. It doesn’t matter how brilliant you are, you don’t have the requisite background knowledge to even begin evaluating claims you say you are evaluating.
And that is all it is. An opinion, that it seems you acquired from the internet. Please don’t confuse your engineering experience with a PhD in biology.
No, you don’t. That is not what you have done on this thread at all. You have consistently dismissed their expertise and assumed you know things you don’t know, and when it has been pointed out that you should attempt to educate yourself, you haven’t really shown much evidence that you have. None of this is intended to be hostile, just an objective explanation of why people are responding to you the way they are.
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If it is so simple why do the people who are experts in this field fail to see it? Of course you will attribute willful ignorance on their part which really reflects poorly on you and not them.
Any argument that is basically “the experts don’t know what they are talking about but I who am only a rank amateur do” generally falls on deaf ears around here.
Which I do BTW. Problem being since you don’t understand evolution your application is flawed.
Which since you are not very knowledgeable in the field is just about worthless.
So when are they going to grant you your PhD in the field?
I am sorry, but just how big is your ego?
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wkins [quote=“glipsnort, post:43, topic:43175”]
@Relates has been told over and over again that evolutionary biologists are quite aware of the importance of ecology. It has made no difference.
[/quote]
Bro. Steve,
I am asking a specific question about the importance of ecology/environment that has not been answered to my satisfaction, which is, What is the important role of the environment in the process of Natural Selection?
The environment of the earth has changed dramatically over the past 4.5 million years, but this does not seem to be reflected in the literature concerning Natural Selection that I have read.
Asked and answered a bajillion times. Please give the whole ecology thing a rest and don’t try to derail yet another thread into discussion (and yet another rebuttal) of your idiosyncratic views.
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No answer will ever satisfy you. I know that from years of experience.
That’s like going to Antarctica and not seeing the snow. btw, the earth is about 4.6 BILLION years old, not 4.5 million.
@Daniel_Fisher I share your skepticism and generally agree with your opening three posts. My own experience was similar. Let me join on one point anyway.
Hi @T_aquaticus! Always a pleasure to see you. First I do appreciate you engaging with actual numbers, since I agree with Daniel that there is a mathematical problem. Let’s take the Cytochrome C example and Yockey’s claim that there are 2.3e93 working amino acid sequences. In an over-simplified analysis, that would go in the numerator. Typically Cytochrome C is about 100 amino acids long and with 20 to choose from, the denominator is 20^100. So the raw probability of coming up with a working Cytochrome C from a random collection 100 AA divides to about 1 / 10^36 or e-36. So I would suggest the numerator is not helpful without considering the denominator. Also in the numerator could be the several functions of Cytochrome C. And yes, there could be other fitness peaks out there, and we don’t know.
But I think what @EricMH was trying to say is that no protein functions in isolation. It is always part of a chain. And in order for the chain to work, multiple functioning proteins are needed. The improbabilities multiply for each protein arising by chance and at the same time as its predecessors and successors in the chain. You could have trillions of potentially functional Cytochrome C proteins form, but unless other parts of the operational chain are also present, they will never do anything.
The Drake equation was an attempt to mathematically assess the possibility of alien life, and was wonderfully “back of the napkin.” It gets press, I think, because the (now questionable) assumptions in it lead to a positive result. But I don’t see thoughtful biologists doing the math around evolution and coming up with something workable for how to get a set of complicated proteins. Yockey’s daughter on their website finds it necessary to insist her father was not a creationist. And I find frequent arguments against attempting the math. Sure, some do it poorly but I don’t find that an adequate explanation for why no one has done it well.
How about somebody run the math on coming up with the electron transport chain in chloroplasts. Assume you already had some chemotrophs at the deep sea vents, could a reasonable facsimile of that chain (including ATP Synthase) have evolved by natural processes in only a couple hundred million years? Post your assumptions and the math here, and convince me it’s mathematically plausible.
Hi Daniel! Very thorough explanation for what you believe. Thank you for being thoughtful and open, especially in a community that largely disagrees with you. Understanding each other is key to progress on these matters 
So there’s a ton of stuff in there, some I’m equipped to address, others perhaps not, and frankly almost all of it has probably been covered by this point… I do want to share one thought though
I recall going to see the Mosque Cathedral of Córdoba, Spain, and my mom gazed up at the massive ceilings in the center of the structure. She stood there, mouth agape, and exclaimed, “How on earth did they do this way back then?” I take architecture for granted with today’s technology, but as I’ve visited gorgeous and enormous structures from the Middle Ages to the renaissance periods, I can’t help but agree with my mom. How the heck did they do it? It reminds me of the Egyptian pyramids, and how some people have simply assumed that people couldn’t have done it, and aliens must have instead.
But of course I believe humans built these things. We sometimes have records of them being built, and we know humans can build edifices. But… how??? I have no idea! (and I’m too busy to dive books in the subject)
As far as alternatives: Do I think advanced alien races could have built them? Heck yeah. I’ve seen Star Wars. But we don’t know if any aliens exist.
Could, say, God have built them? Well, sure, but… I’ve never seen God, and by extension, I have never seen Him build a cathedral or pyramid.
I look at evolution in the same light. We definitely have evidence that life evolved over billions of years, from fossils, signals in DNA, biogeography and more. We know that life evolves because we can observe it. Does that mean that every hypothesized step from bacterial progenitor species to species complex enough to debate these things on the internet is a slam dunk? Heck no. Sometimes I too look at those ridiculously intricate biochemical systems and think, “How the heck could evolution come up with this?” And I do research on some of this stuff!
It doesn’t mean evolution, by the mechanisms we’re aware of, definitely is the source of everything we see, but as the first commenter pointed out, it’s the best we have to go off of. Maybe aliens built the pyramids and maybe God created DNA, but we’ve never seen either of those. But we do know that humans build things and life evolves so… barring a radical discovery that causes a major upheaval in the study of biology, we’re going to keep looking for those evolution-related reasons for why life is the way it is today.
And hey, if that isn’t enough for you, can’t blame you! I’d recommend really diving into the subject if it’s something you care about though. I became convinced evolution was real in college, but it took doing scientific research on it for me to become convinced beyond reasonable doubt. Not saying you’d come to the same conclusion, but perhaps if you picked just one thing like, say, whale evolution, you could at least see what data we evolutionary biologists are so convinced by. We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the numbers and probabilities, but when we look at the organisms we study, we just find that evolutionary theory explains things really well (most of the time! 
)
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It’s a very basic fallacy, the same as Christopher_Emerling’s Mum’s. Putting cart before horse, effect before cause; looking down the wrong end of the telescope. And they will not see it. Will not. It’s a normal human, Humean failing. Evolutionary collateral.
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I’m utterly, totally and completely skeptikal of spurious permutation calculations applied backwards. It’s a schoolboy error no proper scientist makes. No statistician. No mathematician. Unfortunately that excludes Professor Sir Fred Hoyle FRS (dec.), which is why he didn’t get the Nobel. Evolution is always forwards to no end.
Or check out this snowflake given all the permutations known to be possible truly it defies imagining that it could have turned out this way. And yet so we find it.
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