Posted on 05/26/2012 9:47:00 PM PDT by eekitsagreek
Richard Leakey predicts skepticism over evolution will soon be history.
Not that the avowed atheist has any doubts himself.
Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, the Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist expects scientific discoveries will have accelerated to the point that "even the skeptics can accept it."
"If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it's solid, that we are all African, that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive," Leakey says, "then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Yes, I'm aware of that. I acknowledged as much, and so did Dawkins. The point is that your monkeys example doesn't reflect the way evolution works in nature either. Anti-evolutionists like to talk about the probability of getting from AKDIBMENT IBJSLES JEPL VCNBW to METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL in one jump--as in the monkeys example--but no one claims evolution works like that. It doesn't work exactly like Dawkins's example, either, but it does conserve some "right" answers rather than starting from scratch each time. (Of course, it doesn't "know" it's "right.")
I actually agree with you and I stated Huxley was criticized in an earlier post but for the application of probability to endpoints. The author of this criticsm appears to playing a word game. What is the difference between “some particular replicator” and “any interesting replicator”? It sounds like a preference, not a criticism of the method. It may be a particular interest of the critic but it certainly doesn’t refute the validity of the point choices as being an incorrect approach
In any case, endpoints are used everywhere in the physical sciences for probability calculations. “How did we get here” is a common question.
Now that's something you don't see a lot in these discussions. Thank you.
What is the difference between “some particular replicator” and “any interesting replicator”?
It's the difference between "how do we get to an Embassy Suites with a heated pool and wi-fi?" and "how do we find a motel for the night?" The odds of the first are much lower than the odds of the second. When you're looking at "some particular replicator," your figuring out the chances of generating a human or a clam or a tree or a bacterium or something else you specify. When you ask for "any interesting replicator," you'll take any of the above along with anything else that meets the criteria, including things that don't already exist. It's a much wider net, and that affects the probability calculations.
“How did we get here” is a common question.
Sure, and a valid one. And like I said about the rivers, "why is there an oxbow in this river right here?" is a perfectly good question, with lots of improbable events in the answer. But that doesn't mean the existence of some river between the mountains and the sea is equally improbable.
That is where Behe comes in because he proposes cases where it pretty much has to work like that such as blood clotting. And his question is why haven't these things been broken down into a possible sequence of mutations. You don't have to explain exactly how it happened, but rather how it could have happened gradually.
Functionally you can't assume that you get to conserve "right" answers without explaining the mechanism that keeps them. You are proposing something other than natural selection. It is pretty easy to point out that right answers in the end are very often wrong answers all along the way to that end. So you are left in a situation where natural selection has to throw away right answers to make evolution work, yet it has to keep them to make evolution work.
The situation is especially critical at the level of the cell. A line of feathers down my back, while suboptimal, might not keep me from reproducing. But badly functioning cells certainly will.
And according to other biochemists--presumably most of them, since Behe's criticism hasn't carried the day--those case don't have to work like that. Google Ken Miller, who's written a lot about how Behe's examples don't hold up. (And Behe's responded, and Miller's responded, etc. etc.) Miller's arguments seem pretty cogent to me, plus I've never been much for arguments from ignorance.
It is pretty easy to point out that right answers in the end are very often wrong answers all along the way to that end.
But they're very often right answers to something. Like, feathers could be the right answer to staying warm before they're the right answer to flying. And, of course, a lot of things might not be the answer to anything until they combine with something else.
That's one of the mistakes anti-evolutionists often make: thinking that an organism gets one chance at developing the right mutation, and that only one individual develops it. Consider, on the other hand, the possibility that say 30 percent of a population has a given mutation at any one time. It's not harmful, so it's not selected out; but it's not particularly helpful in the current environment, so it's not selected for. It's neither a right nor a wrong answer--it's just there. But if the environment changes, it could become part of a right answer. Or 20 percent of the population develops another mutation, and the 10 percent that have both do better for some reason. It's not always a binary right vs wrong situation.
The work needs to be done regardless. You can't go on forever with playground arguments. (No, you will never cover everything but it should be very rich ground.) You have to be able to come up with a specific and plausible evolutionary path for any and every cellular mechanism. I keep hearing how evolution has implications and has helped push science forward, but even cogent arguments are ultimately worthless next to real work. Miller's arguments seem pretty cogent to me, plus I've never been much for arguments from ignorance.
On what basis do you label him ignorant? This thread is going on 200 replies and no one has bothered to actually refute Behe beyond calling him names. The refutation would be: Post a list of what Behe says doesn't exist (real work into the biochemical evolution of protein mechanisms) or take one of his examples and show how it evolved (or could have evolved.)
But they're very often right answers to something.
They don't have to be right answers to anything, but they can at worst only be mildly harmful. And Behe is far more specific than a large scale system like feathers. But even allowing this, you still can't assume that every necessary change is not harmful, you need to show it.
That's one of the mistakes anti-evolutionists often make: thinking that an organism gets one chance at developing the right mutation, and that only one individual develops it.
Behe is asking the exact opposite question you are accusing "anti-evolutionists" of asking -- how did this come about in a stepwise fashion. And posing a large scale system like feathers is doing exactly what you accuse others of doing: The scale of DNA changes for something like that is enormous. I see no point in speculating at that scale until you address far simpler (but still hideous complex) evolution of interacting protein mechanisms.
Well, yes. And those thousands of papers exDemMom keeps suggesting people read? That's where the work is being done.
You have to be able to come up with a specific and plausible evolutionary path for any and every cellular mechanism.
Or what? Or that proves evolution didn't happen? Until we fill in every gap in the theory, we should assume it's wrong? It's a good thing medical science doesn't work that way.
This is what I mean by an argument from ignorance. It's not that Behe is necessarily personally ignorant; it's that he points to what we don't know and insists we can never know it. Is he out there doing the work of trying to figure out how the blood clotting mechanism evolved; or on the other hand, is he looking for evidence of where, when, and how the intelligent designer intervened to install it? Not as far as I've ever heard.
The refutation would be: Post a list of what Behe says doesn't exist (real work into the biochemical evolution of protein mechanisms) or take one of his examples and show how it evolved (or could have evolved.)
First of all, notice how you (and Behe) are asking people to prove something did happen that he says couldn't. If he were really interested in doing the work, he'd offer a testable explanation of what he thinks did happen and make some predictions based on it that other people could try and confirm. But instead all he does is snipe. (Kind of like my ex-wife, who was much better at explaining what was wrong with all my ideas than she was at coming up with ideas of her own.)
Second, if you want an explanation of how one of his examples could have evolved, look up Ken Miller, as I suggested before, or just Google "irreducible complexity debunked."
Why do I get the impression I could make a better case for the work that is being done than either of you?
Or what? Or that proves evolution didn't happen? Until we fill in every gap in the theory, we should assume it's wrong? It's a good thing medical science doesn't work that way.
You omitted the relevant sentence: This is work you will never finish, but it should greatly add to our understanding of cellular mechanisms regardless and it will silence one avenue of criticism *if* you can pull it off.
It's not that Behe is necessarily personally ignorant; it's that he points to what we don't know and insists we can never know it.
That is hardly an invalid point, but it does mean there is a clear path to discredit his argument: do the work.
First of all, notice how you (and Behe) are asking people to prove something did happen that he says couldn't. If he were really interested in doing the work, he'd offer a testable explanation of what he thinks did happen and make some predictions based on it that other people could try and confirm.
I would advise against throwing that "testable explanation" rock, Mr. Glass House. I certainly do not propose a testable natural explanation.
Second, if you want an explanation of how one of his examples could have evolved, look up Ken Miller, as I suggested before, or just Google "irreducible complexity debunked."
Pointing out something similar is not going to cut it -- you are crowing about finding a narrow, shallow spot in the Grand Canyon.
Thanks for the support. It helps to have someone point out the same concepts I've been trying to explain, but with a different perspective.
Lest anyone think I don't read the literature I keep referencing: I do. Once you've read a few hundred scientific papers, you get a good feel for what is a good solid paper, and what isn't.
As I recall, you insulted me by calling me "narrow-minded" for having chosen a career in the sciences. I responded in kind. If you don't want people to descend to your level, don't descend there yourself.
The odds that mixing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and a smattering of other chemicals together and applying energy will result in them forming amino acids which can then join together to form peptides (small proteins) is actually pretty high. I don't see any reason they couldn't form large proteins, under the right conditions. Proteins are merely chemicals. Chemicals react all by themselves.
Ok, seems simple enough. When are the scientist going to create life's building blocks? If artificial proteins can be synthesized with all our knowledge we should be able to speed things up so that it doesn't take random chance and 1 billion years to reproduce life. Right? Get cracking little lady.
Let's put it this way. The idea of "transitional" forms has been taken by creationist hucksters and skewed so far from its original usage that I'm not going to waste time with it, beyond pointing out that there are no flocks of scientists digging in the shale muttering "If only I could find a transitional fossil, then I could finally prove evolution is true!" Because of the continuous nature of the evolutionary process, ALL forms are transitional.
Now, if you would like to see human fossils as they existed at discreet points during the evolutionary process, I would suggest trying your local natural history museum, if it has an exhibit on human evolution. Or you can try google, but it's a bit more challenging to separate legitimate scientific websites from those of creationist hucksters hoping to trick a few more people out of some money. Most human fossils are catalogued and stored for use by researchers; they are not displayed.
You are missing the point that any form of life is not simply one astronomical trial that went right but an astronomical sized array of trials, for each of which the odds of any result being compatible with life is astronomically small.
I can still picture one of my undergraduate school biology professors talking about that. He liked cats, so all of his examples involved cats. He said that if you have 10,000 cats, and the test for viability is that they can jump over a 10 foot chasm--the 9,999 cats who fell into the chasm don't matter. Only the cat who successfully jumped matters.
It seems like you're overlooking the fact that once a successful viable combination has occurred, the process of making another viable combination doesn't then start from scratch. It starts from the viable combination that already exists. The earth is large enough, and contains enough raw material, that the odds against the formation of a self-replicating RNA molecule (which is thought to be the first life-like molecule) forming really aren't that high.
Darwin provided the rule for falsifiability of evolution, and evolution science has been steering a wide swath around it ever since.
Behe's charge is not that there can never be a similar collection of proteins, but rather than the smallest change in these systems breaks them. In this case, C and C prime are farther apart than C and B.
That C and B are similar is pattern matching, not causation.
. He said that if you have 10,000 cats, and the test for viability is that they can jump over a 10 foot chasm--the 9,999 cats who fell into the chasm don't matter. Only the cat who successfully jumped matters.
That is just flat wrong -- if mutation and natural selection are merrily killing off cats you don't wind up with supercat, you wind up with nocat. But that is a whole other logical fallacy of evolution to be argued ad nauseum. In fact, among those seriously studying real evolution, it is very arguable that the results paint a picture of evolution as a wholly negative process and that the only complexity created is the complexity of chaos.
The earth is large enough, and contains enough raw material, that the odds against the formation of a self-replicating RNA molecule (which is thought to be the first life-like molecule) forming really aren't that high.
More handwaving. RNA Self Replication euphoria, as usual, ignores the actual chemistry involved.
I do not need to read anything by Behe to conclude that he is a charlatan: he has a reputation. It only takes a few minutes with Google to verify that the reputation is accurate.
Most of the people who write books on scientific subjects are not scientists. They are writers who talk to scientists and read scientific literature; while they try to get the details correct, they don't always succeed because they don't have the depth of knowledge that a trained scientist has. Most working scientists don't write books; they're too busy writing grant proposals, reviewing grant proposals, writing journal articles, attending conferences and other meetings, reading scientific journals, and so forth.
Behe is in a class of his own. He actually is a trained scientist, and is a university professor (although I didn't check if he is full professor, or some lower level). Normally, someone in his position has dozens of research-based publications in various journals, along with a fair number of reviews and other articles. One of my professors from graduate school has 182 publications dating from 1977 onwards. By contrast, Behe has 40 publications dating from 1978, of which 5 are letters to the editor and 3 are reviews. One is a theoretical article trying to show that a specific pair of amino acids will mutate simultaneously only once in 10^9 generations (I already talked about this one; it's full of wrong assumptions, GIGO). Of the remaining research articles, the vast majority are pure biochemistry--meaning that he's only looking at structure, without analysis of evolutionary factors. Surprisingly, one does touch on evolutionary factors and the results are completely consistent with the current understanding of evolutionary principle. He has not published a research based article since 1998, and apparently has not had a graduate student since 1997. The long story short here is that Behe is NOT an evolutionary scientist and there is no reason to think he knows very much about evolutionary theory, and his career isn't very impressive for a college professor. (BTW, I don't know why I could only find 11 Behe references yesterday and 40 today.)
As far as any imaginary "scientific publishing apparatus", there is no body of editors censoring whatever doesn't fit some imaginary scientific consensus. Any scientist can be asked to review a manuscript, and if the manuscript is scientifically sound and reasonably well-written, they'll recommend it for publishing.
So now I am too stupid to read an abstract?
You can read it, but do you have the educational background to understand its implications, what experiments were done, the background assumptions, etc., without reading the paper? On the basis of the abstract, can you judge whether the work described in the paper is of high enough quality to make reading the paper worthwhile?
If you posted the evolutionary sequence of the cilium, flagellum, coagulation (he actually deconstructs some work done on this, which was one of the only examples when his book was published in 1996), or various other protein mechanisms in the cell that Behe discusses, I missed it.
As Ha Ha Thats Very Logical already pointed out, it is not necessary to identify every single mutation that took place to know that the systems evolved. Behe's invention of "irreducible complexity" does not have any scientific validity. The simplest statement I can make on "irreducible complexity" is that if a system is not too complex to be formed during embryonic development--in which a single-celled zygote "reads" its DNA and builds an organism of several trillion cells formed into all kinds of complex tissues and organs--then it cannot be too complex to have evolved. For a more thorough discussion, I suggest reading the Wikipedia article, Irreducible Complexity.
I was being intentionally vague. If you can confidently slander Behe as a charlatan, you should have at least enough of a passing knowledge of "Darwin's Black Box" to provide answers to the specific cases I gave above without being prompted. You don't have to show how these mechanisms work, you just need to provide the steps on their evolutionary path. It has been sixteen years since Behe published his book. Surely someone has provided some research in that time?
If I'm going to read science fiction, I'll choose something that isn't trying to pass itself off as fact, and that has entertainment value. It's not worth my time, otherwise. Not that the scientific community at large is all that concerned about specifically refuting Behe (as I pointed out, we're a pretty busy bunch and must spend our time wisely), but just about all of his "examples" of "irreducibly complex" systems are the subjects of active research. It really isn't up to me to dig up the references to show you. If you genuinely want to know how fairly simple structures such as cilia, or more complex structures such as the heart, form or evolved, you have only to go to www.PubMed.org and search. Anyone can access PubMed. The search engine is, IMHO, very user friendly. Many of the articles indexed in PubMed can be accessed free. The information is there if you want it.
Too late, it's already been done.
Every component of a cell can be fabricated artificially in a lab. I did most of my PhD research on proteins I engineered myself.
...
For a more thorough discussion, I suggest reading the Wikipedia article, Irreducible Complexity.
Ever hear of an "Echo Chamber"?
Most working scientists don't write books; they're too busy writing grant proposals, reviewing grant proposals, writing journal articles, attending conferences and other meetings, reading scientific journals, and so forth.
...
By contrast, Behe has 40 publications dating from 1978, of which 5 are letters to the editor and 3 are reviews.
So not only has he committed the sin of not falling in line with evolution, he communicated his ideas to the general public. You admit yourself that means he has less time to publish "serious" papers, and that is your basis for calling him a charlatan.
On the basis of the abstract, can you judge whether the work described in the paper is of high enough quality to make reading the paper worthwhile?
I am confused, are you a scientist or a priest? It must really get under your skin when us second class citizens dare to ask you to explain things to us.
Behe's invention of "irreducible complexity" does not have any scientific validity.
"If it could ever be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." - Charles Darwin
The search engine is, IMHO, very user friendly. Many of the articles indexed in PubMed can be accessed free. The information is there if you want it.
It has an M. Behe as authoring or co-authoring 131 articles. I have read several (none by Behe) that looked promising on identifying evolutionary paths, but all proved disapointing.
A and C are ten miles apart, and the satellite photos show a network of roads in between. You have not made the case that it is impossible to get from A to C.
Also, since you seem so dead-set on trying to disprove the central theory of biology, what do you propose as an alternative? C looks a lot like A, although it clearly is not A. Sufficient genetic material was preserved to determine that C and A share over 90% genetic homology; the next highest level of homology between C and any other organism is 75%. C is dated to be 20 million years newer than A. What alternative to evolution do you propose, keeping in mind that a viable alternate theory must explain and tie together all known facts, not just what I presented, and provide predictive power for guiding more hypothesis-driven research? Even more important, how does the story that ~6,000 years ago, God spoke and all of the plants and animals sprang into existence (no mention of the other three kingdoms, but nvm) explain those measurable quantitatable facts, and what useful predictive powers does that story provide?
That is just flat wrong -- if mutation and natural selection are merrily killing off cats you don't wind up with supercat, you wind up with nocat.
Nope, you end up with the cat that made it alive across the chasm. When you breed that cat, you'll multiply the number of cats with the extra strong leg gene that enables them to jump the chasm.
More handwaving. RNA Self Replication euphoria, as usual, ignores the actual chemistry involved.
The material at your link was clearly not written by scientists. I prefer articles backed up with scientific references, like this one.
“Nope, you end up with the cat that made it alive across the chasm. When you breed that cat, you’ll multiply the number of cats with the extra strong leg gene that enables them to jump the chasm.”
Alright, your 10,000 cats are on an island. An earthquake makes the 10’ chasm, leaving the food on one side and the fresh water on the other. Each cat tries to leap across, only your one cat makes it. Luckily, she is pregnant, from one of the deceased 6’ jumpers, and she gives birth to a litter of 8’ jumpers. The end.
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