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 ...
I don't share that impression, so I really have no idea.
I would advise against throwing that "testable explanation" rock, Mr. Glass House.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. The theory of evolution certainly makes testable predictions. And a bunch have them have been observed to be fulfilled. That's part of its strength as a theory.
I certainly do not propose a testable natural explanation.
Okay...I'm not sure why you say that as though it's a good thing. Behe doesn't either, which is part of why intelligent design is such a weak theory. He could tell us what evidence an intelligent designer might leave behind and predict where we might find it, so others could help him look for it. But no.
Pointing out something similar is not going to cut it -- you are crowing about finding a narrow, shallow spot in the Grand Canyon.
Now you've totally lost me. You wrote, "take one of [Behe's] examples and show how it evolved (or could have evolved.)" I pointed you to Ken Miller, who's made something of a hobby of doing just that, or many of the results you get if you Google "irreducible complexity debunked." I don't feel like paraphrasing them for you, and I don't understand your Grand Canyon metaphor.
You're welcome. And thank you for all the information you've shared. I'm not a scientist myself--more of a science fan and occasionally a science writer. So I'm enjoying what I'm learning. I never knew that a challenge for experimenters with...was it bacteria?...is to keep them from evolving. That's pretty cool.
Actually... depending on the system, 43 generations is overkill. I think the longest I ever used a cell line in an experiment was 24 generations (about 12 weeks). Even with minimizing selective pressures, the cells simply evolve too quickly to be sure that the ending cell line is the same as the beginning cell line (and being able to show that is a must for getting the results published).
As for your overall discussion, the view that the literal creationists seem to be advancing now is that not only is it impossible for a nucleotide soup to spontaneously assemble into a human (or whatever endpoint of choice) genome, but that this spontaneous assembly of nucleotides to form a genome must occur at every generation in order for evolution to proceed. The premise is faulty from the get-go.
So a billion years ago something that took a supercomputer to replicate today took place by chance? Do you see the dichotomy? Viruses are proteins that need a host to replecate. How could primitive proteins reproduce without a host? You are so lost.
First of all, Behe's claim that blood clotting suddenly sprang into being in its fully functional form is simply wrong. What you need to understand is that every component of the blood clotting cascade had another function before it changed to become part of the clotting system. In order to understand the evolution of blood clotting, you need to examine each component of the system. The structure and behavior of the von Willebrand Factor are not very unusual within a biological system: there are countless proteins that self-assemble upon various triggers such as a change in pH or a chemical signal. We also have countless proteins that change in conformation (shape) upon some sort of signal. The behavior of proteins is an unavoidable consequence of them being physical molecules that respond to physical stimuli.
It also is not unusual for cells such as platelets to catch each other and form little colonies; for them to do this upon sensing a specific signal is also not unusual. This ability evolved long before complex multicellular organisms appeared: the slime mold, Dictyostelium, is a fascinating organism that lives as single cells or forms a body, all dependent on external stimuli.
Okay, now that we've established that the two major players in the blood clotting system use fairly common mechanisms for their function, all we have to do is propose a likely sequence of mutations that led to them cooperatively working together to clot blood. At this point, there are many different possible sequences of mutations, and I can generate a multitude of testable hypotheses. If I were a graduate student interested in writing my dissertation on some aspect of the evolution of blood clotting, this is the point where I would hit up PubMed and start reading up on the work already done in the field. Then I would identify an area where very little work has been done (competition among scientists is brutal: I don't want to spend 4 years in research and then be unable to publish because I got scooped), propose an overall working hypothesis, and start generating a whole bunch of little working hypotheses that keep me busy in the lab from week to week.
Behe's idea of "irreducible complexity" is not meant to be scientific: it's meant to discredit scientists, and to discourage people from even examining science too closely.
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 only mechanism that determines whether the "right" answers are "conserved" is reproduction. Selection doesn't play that much of a role (evolution proceeds whether selective pressures exist or not; it's a consequence of the highly mutable nature of DNA). Any organism that survives to reproduce is successful.
Scientists heavily referencing the work of other scientists in order to advance their own work are not, in fact, an "echo chamber". They're wisely building upon the work already done, instead of starting over from scratch. The fact that research in the life sciences consistently supports the theory of evolution also does not mean an "echo chamber" is in effect. The laws of physics are invariant and immutable; no matter how many researchers examine physical phenomena, I expect their results to be consistent.
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.
The only reason Behe fails to "fall in line with evolution" is that he actively avoids having anything to do with the subject. He has never done any research that shows that any aspect of evolutionary theory is invalid, nor does he even propose workable hypotheses with which to test the validity of evolutionary theory. He's not communicating the results of his research to the general public (which would be fine); he's using his scientific education to hoodwink people by presenting fallacious ideas in what sounds like a sciency fashion to people who don't have the educational background to be able to tell the difference.
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.
Actually, I love explaining things. What I am responding to here is not that anyone is asking questions; it's that you're trying to claim a level of education that you don't demonstrate. I do try to answer questions as if they are asked with an open mind, even when they clearly are not.
"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
Ah, yes, now we get to quote mining. Of course, no one has yet falsified Darwin's theory of evolution using that set of criteria. Behe certainly hasn't.
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.
Not all of those are Michael Behe, the literal creationist who actually earned a PhD in biochemistry. The first reference by that Behe is #6. When you click on that title, a citation appears. In the citation, it lists the author's affiliation which is Lehigh University. Since we can verify through other means (i.e. Google) that Behe works at Lehigh University, we can be reasonable sure that this is the "correct" Behe. When you click on his name within the citation, another list of 41 references pops up, and these are all the M Behe that we are looking for. One of the references is a duplicate; therefore, there are 40 references. My previous analysis of Behe's career was based on looking at those references; since I know the conventions of scientific publishing, the form of the references tells me a lot.
That's a challenge when working with any microorganism or cell line. Explaining how one controlled for evolution is SOP when doing those kinds of experiments.
Correction: Explaining how one controlled for evolution is SOP when communicating the results of those kinds of experiments.
No, I didn't. Behe and others have. Evolution science has failed to provide that map. You think that because you found B you have solved the problem, but that still doesn't provide a map.
Also, since you seem so dead-set on trying to disprove the central theory of biology, what do you propose as an alternative?
I do not need to propose an alternative. That will be your job when the scientific community realizes that evolution is implausible. It doesn't take a tailor to realize when the emperor is naked.
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.
You killed the rest through natural selection. You can't breed one cat. But seriously, this illustrates an assumption evolutionists make: That all the many negative to neutral mutations will eventually add up to produce a positive change. While that may be possible, it produces a show your homework requirement. But rather than do the homework, you point to the cat on the other side of the chasm. You haven't ruled anything out, you are just claiming credit for what happened. You haven't demonstrated how the cat evolved.
The material at your link was clearly not written by scientists. I prefer articles backed up with scientific references, like this one.
Did you bother to read it? It basically repeats the link I posted as to the problems with RNA self-replication, it just doesn't stress them.
Really? To my knowledge no large scale change or drift in genetic code has ever been observed. Certainly some bacteria has gone through quite a few generations and the changes observed do not merit your blind faith in evolution.
I don't feel like paraphrasing them for you, and I don't understand your Grand Canyon metaphor.
There is no possible road. Pointing out something in the middle suggests there might be a path, but it doesn't define the path.
That's good. Is that an original?
No, that isn't what I was trying to say. You are forming an opinion of Behe by reading the opinions of people who think like you do. There are charlatans in intelligent design and creation science (and every other endeavor), but I make that determination based on whether they are telling the truth, not whether I agree with them or how much other people may like them.
He's not communicating the results of his research to the general public (which would be fine); he's using his scientific education to hoodwink people by presenting fallacious ideas in what sounds like a sciency fashion to people who don't have the educational background to be able to tell the difference.
He has said that evolution science has not bothered to really put evolution through Darwin's own test and given specific examples.
What I am responding to here is not that anyone is asking questions; it's that you're trying to claim a level of education that you don't demonstrate.
What level of education would that be? I have no claims with regard to my education that I recall. As I posted before, you don't have to be a tailor to know the emperor is naked. If evolution is really so esoteric that you can't defend it to the masses you should stop trying to market it to the rest of us. You don't want an open mind, you want an audience of bobbleheads.
You are narrow-minded but I never once said or implied it was because of your chosen career. Why did you turn what I said into something I didn't say? Did it suit your purpose to make a critic look petty and deflect the criticism? It sure looks that way.
You are narrow minded because of the way you respond to or dismiss people who have not chosen your career, regardless of how valid their criticism of evolution or your assertions may be.
Worse yet, you then impute motives and attack those motives rather than confront the criticism. Those who don't agree with you are anti-science, charlatans, in it just for the money and worst of all, creationist. The only person I have seen in this discussion broadcast their credentials as if that makes their word final has been you.
I wrote “There is no theory of science that requires that a challenge of the theory must offer an alternative theory, yet you persist in attacking an alternative of your choice as if its either a choice between evolution or the alternative.”
You responded “I'm sorry, but that is so convoluted as to almost make no sense at all. Are you really trying to say that if one does not like a theory, they do not have any responsibility to propose what they think is a better, more explanatory/predictive theory?”
I said “challenge a theory” which you turned into “like a theory”. A challenge is evidence, regardless of the source or motive, that a theory has a flaw, one that may be sufficient to overthrow the theory. No one has an obligation after demonstrating the flaw to offer a correction to the theory or an alternative theory.
There are three experiments that challenge the invariance of the speed of light (Fermi Lab, Rio and CERN). Other researchers revisiting the Michelson-Morely data believe they may have been too ruthless eliminating data as background noise and may have reached a wrong conclusion as a result. If any one of the experiments can be reproduced and no systemic or logical flaws are found, then it can be proved that the speed of light is not invariant. If any one or all three experiments do the same, the General Theory of Relativity will either need a major overhaul or replacement. None of the experimenters is required to do the overhaul or propose the alternative. That would be a ridiculous burden. Science doesn't work that way and you should know better. Yet I see you repeat this claim in a later post.
You go on to say “If a theory is rejected, and there is no alternate theory to take its place, how can scientists possibly continue to do research?”
Rejection of a theory does not bring research to a halt and in fact, has exactly the opposite effect. From the description of some work you did, you said you had to account for the effects of evolution on a cell line. Actually, you were accounting for the fact the cells would mutate. A mechanism, or theory explaining the reason for the mutation was irrelevant as long as you had a sound method based on experimental data to account for those mutations.
You later assert “The challenges which are, in your words, “based on mathematics, information theory and a sprinkling of good old common sense,” are, in reality, based on a fundamental lack of understanding of biology and the nature and purpose of scientific theory. Not one challenge has been based on a legitimate science-based argument.”
Quite the contrary. A mathematician is not required to have an understanding of the physics behind the development of the Field Equations to validate or invalidate a particular solution of those equations. In fact, the prediction of the existence of blacks holes was based on a purely mathematical solution. It is astronomers, not physicist that are turning up the evidence to support the mathematical solution. Whether the astronomers have training is theoretical physics or not is irrelevant to their discoveries and only relevant when they try to explain the nature of what they observe. Biology is no different because if it were, it wouldn't be a science. Trying to shield a theory from scrutiny on the pretense you suggest is anti-scientiffic.
I said “By the way, I did a lot more reading about horse evolution and found most of the disputes are within the evolutionist community.”
You turned that to “Your objections here are to the nature of science. It is true that scientists often disagree with each other on the details, and spend inordinate amounts of time discussing those disagreements.”
I wasn't objecting to anything but making an observation. Again, you deliberately misrepresent what I said. I was illustrating how science works and that some people involved in the development of evolutionary theory were sincere in the pursuit of science while others were playing games. The point was evolution is not a “settled science.”
You continued with “It is a fact of life that new research often reveals flaws in older research that necessitates revising details and even renaming species. As I've pointed out before, science is an iterative process. That's the nature of science.”
No kidding. I would never have known that unless you said it [sarc].
I said “I don't have a degree in the life sciences, thank God, or I might be in that universe of small minds that defend their theories by devious and disingenuous means.”
That was sarcasm if you didn't get it, but you responded “What a shame that you've never had enough curiosity about the natural world to be motivated to pursue an education in the life sciences. How sad that you must narrow your world-view so that you won't encounter anything that contradicts your belief that a creation story from the Bible is meant to be believed as a literal account, instead of being taken as a moral lesson.”
Considering you have no idea of who I am, my education, experience, interests and beliefs, you prove exactly what I stated, that you are a narrow minded person who, if you cannot defend the criticism of the science, attack the critic, making up whatever you want about them as you go. That is being devious and disingenuous.
*Sigh.* Okay, for one, there are the mosquitoes in the London Underground. They were bird-biting when they got trapped it the tunnels when the system was being built, and now they prey on rats and people, and they are almost impossible to breed with their aboveground cousins. "The ones underground are well on their way to becoming a separate species."
And then there's my personal favorite, the lizards on the island in the Mediterranean. Scientists moved 5 pairs of lizards to a new island, then war broke out and they couldn't get back for a while. When they finally did, 36 years later, they found "striking differences in head size and shape, increased bite strength and the development of new structures in the lizard’s digestive tracts."
Now, that article says "What could be debated, however, is how those changes are interpreted—whether or not they had a genetic basis." I'm sure scientists are examining that question right now. Is Behe or any other intelligent design advocate looking for evidence of the designer's touch during those 36 years? Yeah, sure they are.
Pointing out something in the middle suggests there might be a path, but it doesn't define the path.
Yes, but with enough stuff in the middle, we can assume there's a path until we define it (unless we refuse to). If someone shows me a series of snapshots of them in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Denver, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, time-stamped in sequence a day apart, I could assume there's some path linking them. Or I could insist they flew to Cincinnati, flew back to Philly, flew to St. Louis the next day, flew back to Philly, and so on, or that the photos must be Photoshopped, until they document to my satisfaction every turn, every rest stop, every gas station they stopped at along the way.
And once I accept that they took that path, I can predict that I could find evidence for it if I looked in Kansas. Which brings me to another testable prediction of evolution: the discovery of Tiktaalik. Paleontologists determined there was a gap in the fossil record, figured out how old the rocks that contained the missing fossil would be, used geological maps to find where rocks of the right age were, went there, and found the transitional form they predicted would be there. Testable prediction, confirmed.
Not quite. We'll assume that my cat is extra strong because of a de novo single point mutation in one of the muscle protein genes. The mutation is most likely dominant, since the mutation would have occurred in a parental germ cell, either the egg or the sperm. Since the other parental germ cell would have had the normal protein gene, my super cat has one normal and one mutant "super" gene. Thus, when she delivers her kittens, half of them have the same mutation (because she gives half of her genes to each kitten) and can leap 10 feet. The other half, with the normal copy of the gene, end up at the bottom of the chasm with the 9,999 cats who were already there. As long as the cats have to jump across the chasm to get their food and water, only the ones who can leap 10 feet survive to reproduce. Eventually, the "normal" gene all but disappears, and the majority of kittens born are all super jumpers.
Meanwhile, all those cats down in the chasm are busy trying to learn to build ladders. But that's another story...
Lizards: This article makes claims about their appearance but provides no evidence. In fact, those kinds of large scale changes that quickly mean that the lizard either mated with other lizards or had the genes already.
Tiktaalik: A, B, C.
Dogs can undergo major changes in size, head and body shape, bite strength in one generation. It is called sexual reproduction, not evolution. The species already has the genes -- they aren't mutating. And they aren't changing into cats.
Yes, but with enough stuff in the middle, we can assume there's a path until we define it (unless we refuse to).
You don't have enough stuff, especially when it comes to cellular biochemistry. If you can't build those systems piece by piece intentionally, how on earth can they come about randomly? Science is not the business of assuming, it is the business of testing.
Behe and the other creationist charlatans have done nothing of the sort. Behe has not done a single experiment that shows that genetic drift, selective pressures, chromosome rearrangement, horizontal gene transfer, random spontaneous mutation, random induced mutation, etc., etc., etc., do not happen. Or, to put it shortly, he has done nothing to show that DNA is static and unchangeable, which would be an important step in establishing that evolution is actually impossible. All Behe has done is snipe at scientists.
I do not need to propose an alternative. That will be your job when the scientific community realizes that evolution is implausible. It doesn't take a tailor to realize when the emperor is naked.
I can't imagine any circumstance which would cause scientists to reject the central theory of life science. Its strength as a framework that ties all the facts together into a coherent whole, and its utility for formulating workable and testable hypotheses are simply too great.
I think that at anti-science sites like Answers in Genesis (.org), they try to paint a picture where scientists are trying desperately to "prove" evolution (instead of, I presume, doing the research trying to cure diseases and so forth, which they're paid to do). The truth is that the science community was aware of evolution long before Darwin and others formulated theories about it. Even the ancient Greeks were aware of it.
You killed the rest through natural selection. You can't breed one cat. But seriously, this illustrates an assumption evolutionists make: That all the many negative to neutral mutations will eventually add up to produce a positive change. While that may be possible, it produces a show your homework requirement. But rather than do the homework, you point to the cat on the other side of the chasm. You haven't ruled anything out, you are just claiming credit for what happened. You haven't demonstrated how the cat evolved.
So, I go to the pound and get another cat, which I breed to my surviving cat. Or I keep making more cats jump the chasm until I have a male and female survivor. That's a digression, anyway--the take home message is that it doesn't matter how many organisms don't survive, the only criterion is being able to survive to reproduce.
Of course I demonstrated evolution in the cat. That one cat had a mutation that, under the cats' normal environment may have spread through the population or disappeared because it was essentially neutral; when a selective pressure was applied, that mutation was favored. Evolutionary mechanisms such as those and others operate constantly.
Did you bother to read it? It basically repeats the link I posted as to the problems with RNA self-replication, it just doesn't stress them.
I looked at the link long enough to ascertain that its author(s) used a common tactic of anti-scientists: build up a straw man as if it accurately reflects scientific knowledge, and then maybe find one reference in the literature that contains one sentence or paragraph that can be cherry-picked to support the ensuing tearing apart of the straw man. The text at that link had the superscripted numbers 1, 2, and 3, and mentioned some names as if it was actually referencing something, but there were no actual references. It took about 30 seconds to determine that the link wasn't worth reading, much less time than it has taken me to explain the features that alerted me that it's not worth reading.
If you want to know how to discern whether an article is a legitimate discussion of the science, look at the references. An anti-science article uses a minimum of references, which the author quote-mines and then discusses the mined quotes at great length, not only misrepresenting them, but exaggerating their significance. A legitimate science article uses a lot of references, and does not give undue significance to any of them. Where the anti-science article may devote several paragraphs to discussing a single quote mined from a reference, almost every sentence in a legitimate article is referenced, sometimes with more than one reference.
Note how many references were included in this research article. The portions of the article where the authors describe their experiments and results contain relatively few references, but the introduction and discussion, where they give the context behind their work and its relevance to the body of existing knowledge are heavily referenced. This article has the format typical of most scientific research articles.
Mosquitoes, lizards, Titkaalik.
I don’t know how the scientists know the mosquitoes used to prey on birds. It’s an article in the London Times quoting two scientists. I don’t have any particular incentive to think they’re making this up. You apparently do.
No, the article in National Geographic doesn’t provide the evidence about the lizards. Nat’l Geo isn’t that kind of magazine. I don’t have any particular incentive to think they or the scientists are making this up. You apparently do.
I’m sure the scientists in both cases have published their evidence somewhere. Go find it, if you’re curious.
Tiktaalik: they didn’t have B. They predicted it would be found between A and C, and it was. Testable prediction, confirmed. What were you saying about glass houses?
I’ve heard the “species already has the genes” argument before. I’m not impressed, because the people making it never try to identify the genes the species has beforehand and thereby predict what changes they will undergo. They just wait until the changes are done and then claim, with no evidence, that the capability was there the whole time. That’d be another fruitful line of investigation for Behe et al., by the way: analyze an animal’s genes and predict what changes it will undergo if it changes its environment. If the genes are already all there, that should be easy, right? As someone once said, do the work.
> And they aren’t changing into cats.
Yeah, nobody claims lizards change, or will change, into cats. Saying such a thing is a telltale sign of complete misunderstanding of how evolution works.
> You don’t have enough stuff,
Sez you.
He has asked evolution scientists to do it with regards to the evolution of cellular biochemistry. All you have done is point to two similar systems and expect everyone to jump to the conclusion that one evolved from the other.
I can't imagine any circumstance which would cause scientists to reject the central theory of life science. Its strength as a framework that ties all the facts together into a coherent whole, and its utility for formulating workable and testable hypotheses are simply too great.
LOL. Every example provided requires some form of a leap of faith. Humans do pattern matching very well, but it can lead you astray. That is all you are doing. Has it not occurred to you that all your "evidence" only seems to matter to people who want to believe it in the first place? I suppose that is why you want to embed this in the minds of grade schoolers early on, before they learn to think critically.
That's a digression, anyway--the take home message is that it doesn't matter how many organisms don't survive, the only criterion is being able to survive to reproduce.
Aren't you aware as a biologist that there are already tremendous pressures on wildlife populations holding them in check (in fact, an exploding population can be disastrous for an organism because it can produce too large a die back)? Once you reduce the population far enough it won't recover.
I looked at the link long enough to ascertain that its author(s) used a common tactic of anti-scientists: build up a straw man as if it accurately reflects scientific knowledge, and then maybe find one reference in the literature that contains one sentence or paragraph that can be cherry-picked to support the ensuing tearing apart of the straw man.
Both articles made the same point about the difficulty of RNA self-replication. The "non-scientific" link I posted simply distilled it down to just that message and stressed that unless that issue was addressed, it simply is not a workable theory. The wikipedia link noted it as a problem but ultimately just glossed over it.
The only way evolution can continue to exist as a scientific theory is because you close your eyes to every problem and reject anyone who questions it. In your world people fit neatly into precisely two categories: pro-evolution and anti-science. You have a more closed mind on this subject than any stereotypical little old lady thumping her bible in church on Sunday morning. I don't much blame you, it is a pitiful theory that can't survive any real criticism (that is why any scientist who questions it must be a charlatan).
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