Is Darwin's Theory of Evolution True? Part 4.1

[PetraG]

Intelligent Design is the better explanation.

The problem is developing the idea to a point that it qualifies as a scientific explanation…that is, that it gives the scientist or scientists somewhere to go in the laboratory and a way to ask whether observations will support or refute the idea. That is the coin of the realm in science: Is there a way to look for evidence to support or refute the idea? (This is why miracles don’t qualify…a scientist cannot put God to the test, but only the natural laws God put into motion.)

This, for instance, is a theory that would qualify as explaining life as the result of Intelligent Design rather than random chance:

A New Physics Theory of Life

A physicist has proposed the provocative idea that life exists because the law of increasing entropy drives matter to acquire life-like physical properties

www.scientificamerican.com

…“I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”…

England’s theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab.

“He’s trying something radically different,” said Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an experiment after learning about England’s work. “As an organizing lens, I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, it’s going to be very much worth the investigation.”…

 

[Techno2000]

A minimal reduction in temperature meant that a minimal amount of insulation kept you hunting for a minimal period longer each day, so you were minimally more reproductively successful.

How do you know that temperature fluctuation causes DNA mutations ?

 

[PetraG]

How do you know that temperature fluctuation causes DNA mutations ?

It doesn’t. Temperature fluctuations only change the playing field: which set of genes give the biggest advantage?

If you’re living in Africa, for instance, it turns out that if your hair grows in a tight helix and your skin is dark, it gives you better protection when running in the sun. You can hunt at midday and by cooperation run your quarry down to exhaustion fairly quickly at a time of day when every other predator is staying out of the sun. (I should say, “could”…this is a theory about how on earth humans living on a savanah instead of in the trees like other great apes could avoid becoming food for the lions and hyenas and how the physical features of Africans could be advantageous in such a situation.

If you’re living well to the north, however, those same accidental features wouldn’t carry the same advantage. Fair skin might allow you to make more Vitamin D out of the relatively low amount of sun that hits your body or maybe the same mutation that causes fair skin might give a resistance to some disease or other, while the climate is so different that having very tightly curled hair and dark skin is no longer any advantage in hunting.

That would be a way that one variation or another that easily happens in the human genome might be favored or disfavored, depending on the climate the people are living in, generation after generation. The environmental pressures would lead to the people in one area looking quite different than in another, even though the people are not different species but only populations of the same species living in very different climates for generation after generation.

 

[edwest211]

Science is, by definition, incomplete. If anyone posts here, they should be ready to accept or reject Divine Revelation.

The current problem in biology is researchers are not getting enough information. So, like taking apart a machine to identify which parts do what and how and why they fit together are just some of the problems. Molecular switches, for example, can have more than on or off settings. They are designed, in some cases, to make sure a sufficient amount of some fluid goes from point A to Point B. Staying on too long or too short may lead to disease or degrade functionality. One journal had the line “we don’t know what most of these switches do.”

The Scientific American article is just baloney. A sort of ‘throw it against the wall and see if it sticks’ or ‘let’s try anything.’ Not a sound approach because someone has to fund such research and backers want results. With something as sophisticated as this, that means access to the right equipment as well.

“Bioinformatics… is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combines Computer Science, Biology, Mathematics, and Engineering to analyze and interpret biological data.”

Bioinformatics will show design.

 

[Curious11]

throw it against the wall and see if it sticks’ or ‘let’s try anything.’

This is coming from someone who believes in a completely unproven book claiming to be from God. I cannot believe my eyes. It’s extremely hypocritical to demand exactitude when your religion has failed to deliver just that for 2000 years!!!

Where is YOUR proof? YOUR evidence? Stop being a pain in the arse if you’re not ready to prove your own claims!

 

[PetraG]

Science is, by definition, incomplete. If anyone posts here, they should be ready to accept or reject Divine Revelation.

The Bible is full of people resisting what God was doing because it violated their theological constructs, too.

The Vatican does not say that evolution necessarily violates any dogma. Rather, it is possible that it could be a mechanism of Divine Creation. What is forbidden is concluding that God had no hand in creating the natural world, rather than recognizing that no force in nature arose outside of either the direct action of God or the permissive Will of God.

 

[Techno2000]

In a population of a ten thousand or so, it would take five hundred years before any difference was even noticeable.

Since these changes are so small, what is it that’s killing off this previous generation. They had been surviving for five hundred years, being fruitful and multiplying what’s going to kill them off?

 

[PetraG]

This is coming from someone who believes in a completely unproven book claiming to be from God. I cannot believe my eyes. It’s extremely hypocritical to demand exactitude when your religion has failed to deliver just that for 2000 years!!!

Where is YOUR proof? YOUR evidence? Stop being a pain in the arse if you’re not ready to prove your own claims!

To be fair, you are comparing apples and oranges. Religion claims to be based on divine revelation or on some person’s unique insights. Science, in contrast, is an evidence-based activity rather than authority-based belief system.

This is reasonable. Science concerns itself with only those propositions about reality that can be put to the test. Science is a method of pursuing the truth, self-limited by the nature of the enterprise. Science does not speak to the veracity of statements that cannot be verified by observation of the physical realm. It does NOT say that proposals which cannot be demonstrated are not true. Science says that proposals which cannot be demonstrated are not scientific, rather than untrue, because those who engage in science can point to so many things that could not be demonstrated or even perceived in the past but can be observed now. If it was wrong to say those things did not exist in the past, it only stands to reason that there are still things which do exist but cannot be perceived.

 

[Curious11]

Ever heard of climate changes?

 

[edwest211]

God works infallibly in His Creation, evolution does not.

“According to St. Thomas Aquinas: “The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency” (Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1). In the Catholic perspective, neo-Darwinians who adduce random genetic variation and natural selection as evidence that the process of evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science. Divine causality can be active in a process that is both contingent and guided. Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so. An unguided evolutionary process – one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence – simply cannot exist because “the causality of God, Who is the first agent, extends to all being, not only as to constituent principles of species, but also as to the individualizing principles…It necessarily follows that all things, inasmuch as they participate in existence, must likewise be subject to divine providence” (Summa theologiae I, 22, 2).”

 

[Curious11]

So quoting Aquinas somehow “proves” your claims.

Should I quote Darwin? Is that what’s keeping you from believing in evolution? You should have told me earlier, I could have arranged that for you as my very own gift

 

[Techno2000]

Ever heard of climate changes?

The climate does change… spring, summer, fall, and winter.

 

[buffalo]

Uh yes it does. Humani Generis specifically excludes polygenism.

 

[PetraG]

So quoting Aquinas somehow “proves” your claims.

Should I quote Darwin? Is that what’s keeping you from believing in evolution? You should have told me earlier, I could have arranged that for you as my very own gift

It would be an explanation of why he’d believe it, but according to our own religion a person who considers the evidence in good faith and does not believe because he lacks the grace of faith through no fault of his own would not be culpable. We couldn’t hold it against you that you do not accept some religious argument or other, because only God can know whether or not you have the faith needed to do so.

Even among the faithful there are some kinds of evidence which may be believed because they are in accord with divine revelation and those which must be believed because they are dogma. There is no dogma that forbids a Roman Catholic to believe that God may have elected to use a mechanism such as that proposed by Darwin to accomplish creation of nature as we see it.

Likewise, a person who bases their beliefs about the natural world on science could theoretically have reservations about Darwin’s theory, provided the reservations were based on the real possibility of alternative physical explanations. (Not everyone who rejects of one or more of the most popularly-accepted versions of the question does so on religious grounds, after all.)

 

[Hugh_Farey]

How do you know that temperature fluctuation causes DNA mutations ?

I dont’t know anything; I’ve already told you that. Evolution, all science, in fact, is an explanation of observations, not a dogma.

DNA mutations are caused various ways, somewhat randomly, by miscopying as cells divide, or by alteration by cosmic rays, or various other mechanisms. Unless they are directly deleterious, these ‘mistakes’ can propagate throughout a population by general descent, without causing any disturbance to the overall appearance or behaviour of the species. However, if there is an environmental change by which any of these mutations lead to increased reproduction, then the ‘favourable’ genes spread more rapidly, simply by virtue being copied more times.

Since these changes are so small, what is it that’s killing off this previous generation. They had been surviving for five hundred years, being fruitful and multiplying what’s going to kill them off?

Nobody kills them off. Those variations which breed more successfully outcompete the variations which breed less sucsessfully, so that a smaller snd smaller proportion of the species is restricted to the ‘old dispensation’. Eventually the last ‘non-mutated’ individual dies childless, and the transformation is complete. Except, of course, that it isn’t really, as already new environmental conditions are favouring different mutation, and new, even better adapted creatures are beginning to outperform the champions of the previous generations.

 

[Techno2000]

Eventually the last ‘non-mutated’ individual dies childless, and the transformation is complete.

More details about this part …please.

 

[buffalo]

Are humans genetically loaded for extinction?

An idea called “genetic load” was developed in the 1930s by famed biologist J.B.S. Haldane, referring to any genome that had increasing numbers of deleterious mutations. The more mutations in a population, the more likely that members of that population couldn’t survive, ultimately threatening the fitness of that population. With enough mutations, a group couldn’t adapt as well to environments, and members would die off. Thus, there’s a limit to natural selection.

Are humans genetically loaded for extinction?

Genetic load--the idea that we've had too many mutations to thrive--is making a comeback. A debate's brewing over whether it's real.

geneticliteracyproject.org

 

[Hugh_Farey]

More details about this part …please.

In a population of 100, 10 have a genetic abnormality that that slightly increases their reproductive ability. The forty-five pairs of ‘normal’ animals have an average litter of five, while the five ‘odd’ pairs have an average litter of six. The next generation has 45 pairs x 5 ‘normals’ and 5 pairs x 6 ‘odds’. The proportion of ‘odds’ has risen from 10/100 (10%) to 30/225 (12%). Let’s say that normal predation and disease attacks normals and odds alike, so that the population remains roughly constant at 100. After 40 generations or so, the last few normals do not live to breed. If a generation is two or three years, the change occurs in less than a century.

Of course, in actuality the numbers are more likely to begin with a breeding population of ten thousand, of which there are only two or three ‘odds’, and their average litter size is 5.1 rather than 6, but the effect is the same in the long term.

 

[edwest211]

Primitive humans? Bah.

https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2020/09/08/biotechnology-timeline-humans-manipulating-genes-since-dawn-civilization/

 

[Richca]

ALL abilities are built in abilities in natural selection. That’s the point.

There’s a bunch of trees in the savannah with fruits: giraffes don’t grow long necks to get he fruit, ONLY those giraffes with ALREADY long enough necks that they get through RANDOM mutations will eat the fruit and not die of hunger like the others. Only those giraffes will survive and pass on their genes to their kids who will inherit this condition, and so on.

I believe this is an example of a tautology or circular reasoning. To the question of which giraffes survive, the answer is: those with long necks. But to the question of which giraffes are those with long necks, the answer is: those that survive.