Darwin? You mean CHUCK Darwin??
Posted on 02/06/2002 5:59:35 AM PST by callisto
SEATTLE, Feb. 6 /U.S. Newswire/ -- A mutant shrimp is being claimed as "a landmark in evolutionary biology" that proves creationists wrong, but it's not. Whatever its implications for creationism, molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, a senior fellow at Discovery Institute in Seattle, Wash., calls the claim "greatly exaggerated," and describes the mutant shrimp as "an evolutionary dead end that tells us little or nothing about how insects might have originated."
A research team headed by William McGinnis at the University of California at San Diego just reported discovering a DNA mutation that produces shrimp without hind legs. Since shrimp normally have lots of legs, and insects have only six, the researchers claim they have discovered the genetic mechanism that caused terrestrial insects to evolve from aquatic ancestors hundreds of millions of years ago. The researchers also claim that this discovery undercuts a primary argument used by creationists against the theory of evolution, because it shows that major mutations do not result in dead animals.
The paper is being released today by the journal Nature.
Wells points out, however, that the mutation reported by McGinnis and his colleagues occurs midway through development, after the embryo is already a shrimp. "The mutation does not transform the embryo into anything like an insect, but only into a disabled shrimp. Whatever produced the first insect would have had to transform the embryo from the very beginning." Wells adds that critics of Darwinism have never claimed that major mutations result in dead animals, but only in animals that are less fit, and thus likely to be eliminated by natural selection. According to Wells, "this report does nothing to refute that criticism."
Wells says he is not surprised that the researchers are making so much of their discovery. "Evidence for the major changes required by evolutionary theory is lacking, so Darwinists often exaggerate the evidence to make the theory seem better supported than it really is."
The really big lie which is being promulgated by the evos is that the dialectic is between evolution and religion. That's BS. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, so that the debate would be between the evolutionists, and the voodoo doctors: Dick Dawkins vs Jr. Doc Duvalier.
But the real dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.
Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...
To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:
God hates IDIOTS, too!
The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.
Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.
For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.
In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.
All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.
And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.
Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.
Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.
And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:
Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....
You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.
But it gets even stupider.
Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.
Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).
Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:
1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could see or hear them, they wouldn't be witches...) The best example of that sort of logic in fact that there ever was was Michael O'Donahue's parody of the Connecticut Yankee (New York Yankee in King Arthur's Court) which showed Reggie looking for a low outside fastball and then getting beaned cold by a high inside one, the people feeling Reggie's wrist for pulse, and Reggie back in Camelot, where they had him bound hand and foot. Some guy was shouting "Damned if e ain't black from ead to foot, if that ain't witchcraft I never saw it!!!", everybody was yelling "Witchcraft Trial!, Witchcraft Trial!!", and they were building a scaffold. Reggie looks at King Arthur and says "Hey man, isn't that just a tad premature, I mean we haven't even had the TRIAL yet!", and Arthur replies "You don't seem to understand, son, the hanging IS the trial; if you survive that, that means you're a witch and we gotta burn ya!!!" Again, that's precisely the sort of logic which goes into Gould's variant of evolutionism, Punk-eek.2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.
And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:
They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:
ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!
Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.
I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?
The whole mess is downright funny for those of us with a sense of humor, isn't it?
Darwin? You mean CHUCK Darwin??
It's not because John Walker is a particular Wahabite that he was not interested in the muslim religion in the first place. It's not because Stalin relied on Lysenko's fanaticism that he was not a Darwinist at the root.
One difficulty in debating evolutionists and exposing their claims is that they are masters at the art of equivocation, which means to use misleading language and arguments in order to obfuscate the actual facts of the case. They do this in a variety of ways; from bringing in extraneous data and arguments that lend an air of polish and create the appearance of proof by the very amount of scientific verbiage, while clouding the issue at hand; repetition of the same argument over and over again, even after it has been refuted; bringing up false and tautologous arguments that in essence state nothing but are cleverly contrived to appear as though they are the result of a logical process; cleverly constructed fibs that are cloaked in scientific nomenclature that snare those unaware of their techniques; propagating the myth of Darwin that has been repeated ad nauseam for the past century; and sometimes by straight, old fashioned, bald faced lies and misrepresenting the position of their opposition.
In Thinkplease's rambling FAQ he presents absolutely no evidence of any type of evolution, no evidence of any species change at all, and all of the supposed changes in Drosophila merely produced blind fruitflies, fruitflies with appendages coming out where their eye should be, crippled fruitflies, wingless fruitflies or fruitflies that couldn't fly as well as the original model, sterile fruitflies, dead fruitflies, etc. etc. and producing nothing else except a fruit fly, and not a better, more fit fruitfly that would have survived in the "struggle for existence" in Darwin's strange evolutionary world; again, no evidence of evolution after all the fireworks. It is much so-called scientific clatter about nothing, which shows the desperation of evolutionists to prove their case with so much research producing such meager evidence.
From the paper:
"On the basis of these results, we propose that Ubx proteins in some crustacean/insect ancestors uncovered a limb-repression function by the mutation of C-terminal Ser/Thr phosphorylation sites. Together with the restriction of Ubx expression to the posterior trunk and expansion of a QA-rich domain, the loss of these sites would have contributed to the evolution of the hexapod body plan. The putative phosphorylation-mediated regulation of transcriptional repression function in arthropod Ubx proteins may occur by a similar mechanism to that recently described for the Drosophila Even-skipped protein. In both cases, such a mechanism would provide for the mediation by signal transduction of the control of transcriptional activation and repression functions of homeobox(HOX) genes.
To our knowledge, this is the first experimental evidence that links naturally selected alterations of a specific protein sequence to a major morphological transition in evolution. There are at least two major reasons why the mutation of mutiple Ser/Thr residues that inhibit a repression function might be advantageous from an evolutionary aspect. First, mutating the residues would give dominant phenotypes, eliminating the need to fix two recessive mutations in a morphologically evolving lineage. Second, the successive removal of Ser/Thr residues might quantitatively influence repression function and morphology, allowing viable microevolutionary steps toward "hopeful monsters" with macro-evolutionary alterations in body shape."
Note the words "we propose". There is no Writ from God here. Just a proposal that the expression of this protein, along with the expression of a few others, could lead to the evolution of insects from crustations 500 million years ago. They didn't create a new species of shrimp, just played with the existing DNA.
Another note: Wells says the following:A mutant shrimp is being claimed as "a landmark in evolutionary biology" that proves creationists wrong, but it's not. Whatever its implications for creationism, molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, a senior fellow at Discovery Institute in Seattle, Wash., calls the claim "greatly exaggerated," and describes the mutant shrimp as "an evolutionary dead end that tells us little or nothing about how insects might have originated."
There were no mutant shrimp that came to term here. The article says nothing about shrimp with less legs running around the lab tank, or anything about survival rates. If there's anyone doing the exaggerating, it's Wells and the Discovery Institute. It looks to me like they read the press release by UCSD (never trust the media), and not the original Nature Paper. Bad form.
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The above are excerpted from an Evo-Devo Lecture Slide Series.
In a Discovery Institute press release dated Feb. 6, Jonathan Wells accuses three developmental biologists of making "exaggerated claims" in a recent paper in Nature (advance online publication, Feb. 6, 2002). But it is Wells, in his zeal to criticize any research supporting evolution, whose claims are "exaggerated."
One wonders whether he actually read the paper. For example, the press release states: "William McGinnis at the University of California at San Diego just reported discovering a DNA mutation that produces shrimp without hind legs." He did? If Wells has indeed read the paper, currently published at this site, then he should know that no shrimp were mutated in the production of the research. Further, no mutant shrimp were mentioned in a UCSD press release announcing the Nature paper, which is what Wells apparently relied upon for his critique. Wells appears obsessed by illusory shrimp when he asserts: "The mutation does not transform the embryo into anything like an insect, but only into a disabled shrimp."
As plainly explained in the Nature paper, the research involved inserting the crustacean Ubx gene into a fruit fly, and observing that it did not function as a limb inhibitor (as the fruit fly Ubx gene does). Further, the researchers experimented on the crustacean Ubx gene and specifically isolated the mutations that cause the Ubx gene to become a limb inhibitor. This is exciting research because crustaceans have many pairs of limbs, while insects have just three pairs, and it is the Ubx gene that controls limb development in both. The authors conclude that this shows that specific micromutations can cause large-scale phenotypic effects, thus helping us better to understand the processes that may have been involved in the evolution of the insect body plan and by extension those of other animals as well. Wells's hostility toward the biological fact that genes govern the evolution of new body plans seems to have blinded him to the obvious: There were no mutant shrimp.
Wells wastes a press release on thinly disguised creationist pontifications about research that he apparently could not be bothered to read. Intelligent Design proponents in general have been repeatedly told that if they want to be taken seriously, they must produce scientific research of their own rather than uninformed and irresponsible criticism of the work of real scientists. They claim that Intelligent Design is not just antievolutionism, but Wells's press release is no more than that. We keep waiting for real scientific research to emanate from proponents of Intelligent Design but if Wells's latest effort is any indication, then -- to paraphrase a Russian proverb -- we may be waiting until shrimp begin to whistle.
Contact: Alan D. Gishlick, Post-Doctoral Scholar
February 7, 2002
Did someone hit you with a microscope ?
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