YEAH! About 10^33 snowflakes have fallen and each one is UNIQUE!!! What are the chances eh? That the specific one I can see on your glasses could have arisen by chance!!! I don’t know about you, but I’D say that’s absolutely impossible for all intents and purposes. BUT THERE IT IS!!! HAH!
@MarkD, I am understand that snowflakes are subject to temperature for the for their shape. Their shapes are not random, but are determined by another factor, just as the forms of new species are shaped by ecological and other firms of natural selection.
I don’t really know, lets ask google.
Being the first to grow them artificially in the lab, Nakaya demonstrated how the intricate shapes of crystals are primarily determined by the tandem effects of temperature and humidity. While all snow crystals have a hexagonal symmetry due to the hydrogen bonding pattern of water in ice, each of them acquires their own features as they tumble from the clouds. Each crystal ultimately forms uniquely as it collects more frozen water molecules on its surface and delicately dances through the variable temperature and humidity of the sky.
This artificial creation of crystals laid the groundwork for the more recent efforts of Dr. Kenneth G. Libbrecht at the California Institute of Technology. Libbrecht has created what he refers to as ‘identical twin crystals’ using snow crystal producing machines to control crystal growth conditions. Upon first glance, these crystals appear to be identical but are not when closely examined.
This may not be peer reviewed but for now I’m inclined to believe they may in fact be everyone one of them unique. Leastwise, as with the existence of the multiverse, there may be insurmountable difficulties with gathering conclusive evidence either to confirm or rule it out.
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Every snowflake is impossible. Just like us. But I won’t admit that outloud for fear of being thought a snowflake.
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Wow! You so aggressively criticize other people’s views as “schoolboy errors” and then you post an internet atheist argument as trite as this to counter? Assuming to yourself superior knowledge is not the same as demonstrating it.
Someone could calculate an approximate number of potential snowflake shapes and it would vastly exceed 10^33, yet every snowflake will take on a shape. The raw probability of any shape would be 1 over that vast number.
So far the same is indeed true of random polypeptides. But wait! There’s more! And that’s where you have failed to consider your analogy completely breaks down: while every snowflake does what any snowflake will do, not every polypeptide performs a useful life function. In fact given the calculations above, the chances of getting a useful Cytochrome C by random chance may approach 10^-36. But snowflakes will be fine if none of them is a useful shape because, well, none of them is a useful shape! So the probabilities of any given snowflake shape … Simply. Don’t. Matter. But getting a useful polypeptide shape? Now that matters.
It’s a schoolboy error but don’t feel bad. According to Klax you’re in good company here.
Aggressively well played Marty! I’ll see your schoolboy error and raise it: Going forward in abiogenesis how does polypeptide (at least 22^50, counting the 20 canonical but not counting non-proteinogenic which first rainfall Earth would have foamed with 4 gya) shape matter?
Furthermore where did I post an internet atheist argument (in that others use the snowflake analogy?)? I’m not an atheist apart from with regard to divine intervention above grounding being, outside incarnating, below transcending, beyond ineffably by the Spirit. And where is the argument? I see a satire. Hoping toward the flesh tearing.
I admire the schizophrenia of Dr. Kurt Wise. Although he has a way to go in intellectual honesty, and will never get there. He should stick to YEC and a lying God.
No Stephen, this forum is essential as it allows us to refine our game. So keep playing. The only blind belief is by fundamentalists, which is code for conservatives of all denominations and religions, who are all textists, Biblicists in this case. Science is a subset of disinterested rational enquiry and it fails here because no textist can play that game and the vast majority of players for and against are on the same false dichotomy spectrum. We have to beat them at their own game by exposing it at source. The source of error is terror.
The question is not, Are snowflakes unique?. The question is, Are snowflakes randomly formed?. The answer is that they are determinately formed based on temperature and humidity.
Therefore, your analogy/model does not support the assertion that evolution is a strictly random process. The model of snow crystallization supports the model of a determinative evolutionary process powered by Natural Selection.
The importance of the six sided crystalline nature of ice is that it makes ice to expand and thus be lighter than water, instead of heavier as other solids are, and thus float. This is the real “miracle” of ice and snow that make life like our possible on earth.
Christopher, thank you very much for your sincere thoughts and kind engagement. Your thoughts are very much appreciated. If I may, let me toss some further thoughts back to you, as it may clarify to you and others my core concerns.
True enough, and any such assumptions I would agree are problematic. However, if someone had some kind of discreet or evidence that demonstrated that people couldn’t have done it, that would be worth listening to. I don’t remain dubious of Darwinism becuase I (or anyone else) assume that natural selection + random mutations couldn’t have done it, but because such is purported to be demonstrably unable to achieve said achievements. Because however I stretch my brain, explore the claims, examine the evidence, it seems plain to me that the proposed mechanism is simply impossible.
My difficulty would be more akin to finding evidence of ancient human settlement on a desert island in the middle of the pacific, and being told that this proves that humans got there by swimming. It wouldn’t be so much an “assumption” that people couldn’t have done that, it is that swimming thousands of miles is simply outside of what we know by experience humans to be capable of.
It is the best we have to go off of if we embrace methodological naturalism. it is the best alternative available to the methods utilizing methodoligcal naturalism. It is argued here on these pages so often that this is the only “scientific” way forward; I dispute that, but this is more a matter of semantics. But bottom line, I am more interested in the question of what is true. This remains my core philosophical objection, and how you said it here is I’m afraid another prime example… to note further…
Philosophically speaking - may I kindly ask… could you, would you, might you, consider it a legitimate scientific possible conclusion for a scientist to examine some biological data, some biological systems, and legitimately come to the conclusion (even if a tentative conclusion or working hypothesis)… would it be legitimate to consider the possibility that evolution, in fact, could not come up with such?
If you say no (which it seems is your perspective, though I may have misread), then with as great a respect and deepest kindness as I can express, and with all admiration to your scientific study, I simply cannot be interested in your conclusions. You would have begged the question from the start; you would have embraced a method where the naturalistic conclusion (“unguided evolution has produced this biological feature”) was a foregone conclusion - that conclusion was assumed before the research even began.
A comparison that can may put it in perspective. C.S. Lewis addressed what was essentially “methodological naturalism” in Biblical studies:
I find in these theologians a constant use of the principle that the miraculous does not occur. Thus any statement put into our Lord’s mouth by the old texts, which, if He had really made it, would constitute a prediction of the future, is taken to have been put in after the occurence which it seemed to predict. This is very sensible if we start by knowing that inspired prediction can never occur. Similarly in general, the rejection as unhistorical of all passages which narrate miracles is sensible if we start by knowing that the miraculous in general never occurs…The canon ‘If miraculous, unhistorical’ is one they bring to their study of the texts, not one they have learned from it.
This I ran into all the time in my undergrad religious studies. For me, who wanted to explore and discuss the real question of whether Christ indeed had made real predictions, or who worked real miracles, I found it terribly frustrating to have people dismiss the discussion with the hand wave Lewis describes above. Thus the feeding of the multitudes was explained by everyone bringing out their hidden food from their backpacks once they were shown up by the gratitude of the young boy; the resurrection the wish-fulfillment hallucinations of the distraught apostles, etc. But these were the foregone conclusions that resulted from the presuppositions they brought to the texts, they came not from their study of it, as Lewis so sagely observed.
When someone utilizes a naturalistic method, which is guaranteed to arrive at a naturalistic conclusion, the fact that they claimed to carefully examine the evidence and arrived at a naturalistic conclusion is singularly uninteresting to me. I found this the case in biblical studies, and I fear I find the same problem regarding the biological question. If a scientist is precluded, philosophically (or for any reason), from ever being allowed to reach the conclusion, “unguided evolution could not have achieved this,” then their claim that “unguided evolution could have achieved this” is entirely uninteresting and irrelevant to my core question.
It is in fact one I have examined in at least some detail. Let me pick one item, that also addresses the charge from some that I am “painting a bull’s eye around the previously shot arrow.” I grant the possible danger involved in that fallacious line of thinking, but I do not think it applies here.
Take the echolocation in dolphins. I would grant it would be akin to painting a bulls-eye around a target to say, “Wow, echolcation [in general] happened… Dolphins make noise, and have adapted to be able to tell what direction possible prey are, and this helps them feed.” or something like that. I could understand the charge if that was my essential claim. That fact that something occurred, and I claimed it as extraordinary, when it was just as likely as any other outcome, would be painting the proverbial bulls-eye after the arrow was shot.
But I at least know something about sonar principles. There is a certain “bulls-eye” of near perfection of the science, the technology, and the principles at work that remain an objective reality. There is an objective, proverbial “royal flush” in designing a sonar system to get certain outcomes. pinpoint accuracy as opposed to general direction; directional and focused narrow-beam high-frequency pings as opposed to broadband broadcast signals, small discrimination of minute sizes to detect very, very specific objects, and small ones at that. Receiving array of multiple hyodrophone/sound receiving sensors to be able to instantaneously determine exact distance and bearing.
Dolphins don’t just have some vague “echolocation” that I have arbitrarily painted a bulls-eye around. They have hit the absolute bulls-eye on the most perfected, most specialized, most sophisticated, most hyper-accurate, sonar system that our modern technology and scientists could dream of. We have been for nearly a century now, our best scientists and technology, been working to continually improve our mechanical sonar systems, learning the science behind it, improving by field trial and use, labs that continually develop more and better specialized systems… and we are still very, very, very far from the objective “bulls-eye” of the practically perfect high-frequency, pointpoint accurate, system with such extremely sensitive discrimination that evolution stumbled on, in the (evolutionary) blink of an eye in some 1,000,000 generations or so. I’ve seen what our best high-frequency sonar can do. By comparison to the dolphins, we haven’t even hit the side of the barn, to say nothing of the bulls-eye in the center.
There is a danger indeed in such fallacious thinking - the possibility of painting a bulls-eye around the arrow we’ve already shot. But I submit this is most certainly not such an example. Dolphin echolocation hit an amazing and quite objective bulls-eye by any reasonable standard.
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I still owe you a proper response to what you wrote there - I haven’t yet had time to go through the articles you linked, but I am interested and want to give them the proper time they deserve so I can give them a fair reading and consideration. Just wanted you to know I’m not ignoring you. Will get back sometime soon, hopefully.
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Of course, no problem at all. I figured that you would need some time. Thank you for taking my questions seriously.
Appreciate the thoughts. One thing I ought to add at some point, and I hope I don’t come across as if I am moving the proverbial goal posts… (Im perfectly willing to grant some of those who posted here the touchdowns and the extra points in providing the examples of some proteins or protein segments wherein biological functions are found with relaitive ease… such that it is not prohibitively unrealistic.)
But yes, I can completely grant that some biological functions would not seem to require great amounts of specificity. Certain proteins/enzymes (or sections thereof) catalyze reactions or possess certain functionality and apparently don’t need great deal of specificity across their entire structure, etc. I should have noted this at first, and their observations are indeed good counter examples. I believe I have discussed this in other posts, but as i said, i’m not trying to appear to be moving goalposts… i wasn’t clear on this, and i’ll happily concede and grant some of the posters here their legitimate points. If I understand rightly, even some RNA molecules are capable of performing certain biological/enzymatic functions.
Nonetheless, insofar as i’m willing to grant that, i would hope that some are likewise willing to recognize, or at the very least consider, the reverse… that some biological systems, proteins, and molecules indeed are so specific, in shape and function, that their formation from a random search would indeed be prohibitive.
For instance, it was pointed out that a (relatively) small search found 4 protein sequences that bind to ATP. now, i’m speaking out of my ignorance, but this doesn’t seem particularly surprising. From the little i know, it wouldn’t seem you would need a great deal of specificity to find some protein sequence which will simply bind to an ATP molecule.
Now, if the same search/library found four proteins that were able to make ATP, i.e., random search found four proteins capable as acting as an ATP synthase, this would be far more striking to me.
That would only be for the specific cytochrome C fitness peak that we currently see. There could many other fitness peaks that we don’t know about.
This assertion needs evidence. One would need to show that this has been true for all proteins throughout the history of life.
That’s because predicting function from sequence is extremely difficult. This is also why many of us are extremely skeptical of the numerous ID claims about improbabilities because there is simply no way to calculate them.
You are drawing the bulls eye around the arrow. The Sharpshooter fallacy seems to be quite popular among those who reject evolution.
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You claim to be able to demonstrate these claims, but then you fall back to the claim that you just can’t believe it. It is one or the other.
For example, I demonstrated to you how there was more than enough mutations in the human and chimp lineages to produce the genetic differences we see. I have also shown that the pattern of substitutions is consistent with natural processes. Any comment on that?
What is true may be different from what you deem to be common sense or believable.
Numerous and major violations of a nested hierarchy among complex species would be a good start. If a new species emerged right in front of us that used completely different codons and metabolic pathways would be another great example. A group of species magically poofing into being in front of us would certainly be compelling.
That isn’t true. Sometimes a scientific research program arrives at “I don’t know” or “Not that”. When someone utilizes the scientific method they are simply starting with observable facts and a testable hypothesis. If this isn’t adequate for discovering the supernatural then it isn’t the fault of science. If you could demonstrate that a different method is more useful for modeling the universe then we would ditch the scientific method.
- Shuffle a deck of cards.
- Deal yourself 5 cards.
- Draw a card from the deck.
- If the card improves your hand discard the weaker card.
- Repeat multiple times until you hand hasn’t improved for an entire deck.
What you will find is that with this simple process of random draws and selection you will end up with 4 of a kind or a royal flush.
What you need to show is that small improvements to echolocation would not be helpful. You also need to show that their echolocation is absolutely perfect. For example, can they locate a fish 100 miles away?
We can’t assess the prowess of echolocation in ancient species. I’m not sure why you keep making these claims about how it was perfected in a short time when we have no evidence that this was the case. On top of that, the fossil record is always going to be gappy so we can’t know for sure how long it took for this evolutionary adaptation to take place.
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Good to see you around, Marty. I’m glad you seem to have evaded any nasty viruses and are here to make us think carefully. 
This is a really good point, Marty. The question we should be asking isn’t the probability of finding Cytochrome C, it’s whether a polypeptide can perform a useful life function of any kind.
Just to illustrate the point we are working on, I am going to pull a number out of a hat: Suppose (for the sake of argument) there is a grand total of 1026 useful-for-life proteins that can be made with 100 amino acids. Then the probability of finding a useful-for-life protein by putting 100 AAs in a blender, then letting them coalesce would be 10-10 per trial.
Would you agree, Marty? I’m going to stop here before I go on because it seems like a critical point.
Also, does this mathematical logic make sense to you, @Daniel_Fisher?
Best,
Chris
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The theory of evolution has moved on quite a bit in the last 150 years. The current theory includes concepts like constructive neutral evolution. Neutral theory has been a big addition that Darwin simply didn’t know about.
You are inventing history.
Again, disagreeing with a concept or scientist in the field of ecology does not make one anti-ecology.
I’ve skimmed through the first three topics, let me respond briefly so we can continue the discussion, and i’ll try to get to the others when i can.
briefly, i don’t have any issue with the concept, in itself, of whole duplication, transposition, horizontal transfer, etc.
1.Unless I misunderstand, none of these even attempt to explain the new complexity that is the core of my skepticism. They offer new pathways, or processes, within which the evolutionary process proceeded, but all of those three above processes, by themselves, simply move already existing complexity, or rearrange it. It in no way introduces anything categorically new. they are useful pathways, or tools, within which the proposed mutation/selection mechanism may work, and increase the diversity of the canvas… i,e, give it various helpful new “canvases” on which to work, i would understand, but any genuinely new form, function, organ, etc., must still arise by mutations in the genetic code, assisted by nature’s process of eliminating unhelpful mutations. please correct me if i have misunderstood.
2.By comparison, i have used methods comparable to the above in my computer programming… I have occasionally copied an entire program wholesale and then used it as the starting point to rewrite an entirely new program, and i have certainly copy and pasted elements or procedures of other programs into another existing program to add or change some subordinate function, etc.
but those methods, by themselves (apart from my “intelligent programming”) simply rearranges existing design. The processes you mention above alone may well indeed be able to create a radically new program, by mixing and matching, etc. But there is still in toto nothing essentially “new.” anything truly new in a computer program comes not from copying the whole program, or transposing or borrowing elements… but from the programmer.
3.Any intelligent design hypotheses can equally incorporate the 3 above methods as potential tools or methods used by said intelligent designer, no more or less than blind evolution is thought to have used them. Indeed, if i consider a future where geneticists were able to reengineer animals wholesale and cause some kind of intentional, directed evolution, i could hardly believe they would not utilize such methods… start by copying wholesale an entire genome that will be a good starting block for their new organism; borrow, transpose, or otherwise splice other extant genetic material into their working genome in order to include relevant functions, etc.
thus…
i don’t disagree in principle, that these methods could in theory help explain quick rise of novel organisms… but again, in themselves, they would only explain new organisms as rearrangements of preciously existing complexity. those methods, again, unless i radically misunderstand them do not even attempt explain the appearance of new complexity, in the same way as mutation/natural selection is purported to.
Again, these could indeed make help explain, and provide great assistance to adaptation in general (the kind i have no disagreement with), as organisms could borrow beneficial elements from already extant genetics. but it doesn’t seem to in any way explain actually new complexities, by themselves, without their cooperation of the natural selection/mutation process.
So again, I’d grant that these processes may theoretically assist and benefit the Darwinistic mutation/natural selection process. But they in themselves have no explanatory power to explain new complexity, so far as i can see.
this is certainly worth considering. i i’ll give that last point some further thought. Forgive my ignorance… is it demonstrated that these processes are absent from eukaryotes, such that this could explain why the processes in them can be expected to be so different than prokaryotes and/or multicellular organisms?
I would say that human evolution fits this definition perfectly. Humans don’t have any new body parts or new physiology, just modifications of what already existed in our ape ancestors. So why do you reject human evolution?
In fact, the same could probably be said of vertebrate evolution, going back to the earliest jawless urchordates in the Cambrian. More to the point, can you show us the actual emergence of a single biological system that wasn’t a rearrangement of what already existed since life began diverging from the proposed universal common ancestor?
Did your programs form a nested hierarchy? The evidence for evolution is not shared features. I will repeat. The evidence for evolution is NOT shared features. The evidence for evolution is the nested hierarchy. It is the PATTERN of shared features and differences that points to evolution. It is this pattern that ID needs to explain.
Can you produce two programs that have almost the exact outward appearance but are programmed in entirely different coding and machine languages? You probably could, right? If life were specially created why would we expect them to share anything? More to the point, why would we expect to see a nested hierarchy when there is absolutely no known functional reason why a designer would need to create life in such a manner?
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If you are playing a card game you know what cards make up a winning hand. If you keep drawing cards until you have a winning hand, that is not random chance. That is called drawing cards until you get the ones you want, which is not the way to play cards.
Nature cannot think. Nature does not know what combination of genes is the right one for a given allele, so nature is unable to “select” the right gene and “discard” the wrong one.
However, if God were to set up the process of “natural selection” so that it could act in a rational way through the environment, then we would have a true rational evolutionary process.
What card you get next is random, just like mutations. The fitness of the hand is compared to the rules of poker just as a mutation is judged against the environment. No thinking is needed, just follow the simple rules.
Nature doesn’t need to know what the right gene is. The fitter individuals will naturally have more descendants.
At least to my eyes, natural selection works in the same way as natural gravitation, natural chemistry, natural meteorology, etc. It would seem your theological view would probably extend to all of nature. Is that correct?
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