Is Darwin's Theory Of Evolution True? Part Two

[Ender]

I think the process you refer to is that the life experiences of individual organisms impacts the genetic code in a way that makes offspring better able to handle those experiences than their parents, thus making random variation unnecessary.

I’m referring to the difference between the Darwinian process of evolution and the Lamarckian process. These are fundamentally different, and Lamarckism, ridiculed for over a century, appears to be making a comeback.

Interestingly, the significance of such a resurrection appears to be less scientific than social.

 

[Ender]

No, unless you are going to claim that it falsifies evolution. Absent that claim then the details are unimportant. If you wish to use it as a “gotcha” against evolution then I will need the reference to check that any secondary source is not misusing/misunderstanding the original research.

This doesn’t address my reason for asking. I’m trying to get you to identify the significance of the study before you know whether the experiment was as I explained it or not. You don’t want me to use it as a club with which to beat up on Darwinism. OK, but that seems to imply you believe it would be damaging to the theory if it was in fact true.

Obviously if the experiment is flawed it isn’t even a paper weapon, but what if it is valid? What does it mean then?

 

[Techno2000]

The giraffe also eats from the ground. The blood pressure must be regulated. It is much higher when the giraffe’s head is fully upright. Learn about the mechanisms that must have “evolved” to protect the giraffe when it moves his head to the ground.

Of course, we know evolution did it.

Yes, evolution used the Carrot and Stick method to get that neck to stretch out.One day random mutations detected that the giraffe’s neck was too short. So random mutations immediately got together with it’s plant division come up with a plan. And the plan was simple, just mutate a tree that would alway grow a few inches beyond the giraffe’s reach for millions of years.

 

[Aloysium]

1. living forms are largely composed of matter. If matter within us changes, and it does over time, then we and other life forms must logically change as well.

2.What you call “genetic disorder” could be bad news, no news (recessive), or good news. It is the “powerhouse” that adds new “energy” to the gene pool. Without it, evolution would be extremely limited. You might consider googling “genetic mutations”.

3.The “foundations” have been very well established for well over a century now, but it was even known before that that life forms change.

OTOH, there is not one shred of objectively-derived evidence for a theistic causation of life forms or our universe, so if one accepts it, they must do so on the basis of faith, not empirical evidence.

1. We express our humanity through our bodies. That humanity is not a product of our bodies. It was not an increase the brain size of nonhuman hominids that transformed them into human beings. Free will, the arts and sciences, the capacity to love are aspects of that being which incorporates the billions of cells that make up the various integrated tissues, working together to form the person who is whole and one, existing in relation to the world and God.
2. Except in the hypothetical world of modern evolution, physically caused beneficial mutations in a functional genome do not exist. Sickle Cell or Mediterranean anemias, are not examples of evolution, but of mutations resulting in illnesses that confer some protection in the case of malaria. We are on the verge of doing something about these disorders through gene therapy. That it depends on the idea of random mutation as a driver is a major failure of the standard theory of evolution.
3. I’m not sure what you mean by this. No one has been arguing against adaptation. The issue has to do with life not being a change in atomic configuration, an acacia tree not being the result of a change in bacteria and human beings not being made male and female a billion years ago in the form of algae.

I go with both faith and empirically derived evidence. There is no emprical evidence for an evolutionary cause of our existence.

 

[rossum]

So, the food must have slowly grown higher over a period of millions of years to give the giraffe a chance to evolve it’s neck.

You are right, trees had been growing to different heights well before the first giraffes evolved.

rossum

 

[Aloysium]

Thanks for your posts and links - always interesting!

 

[Metis1]

There is no emprical evidence for an evolutionary cause of our existence.

The basic ToE does not explain the cause of our existence, so it neither affirms nor denies theistic causation.

The unfortunate reality is that so many people are told by some others that if one believes in evolution that then cannot believe in God. I quickly learned when I first started teaching anthropology that this was one thing I had to explain to my students wasn’t the case because so many of them were brought up to believe in that false paradigm. One of our greatest anthropologists was Fr. Pierre Teilhard deChardin, for one example, who was the world’s foremost expert on Homo erectus when he was alive.

 

[rossum]

I’m trying to get you to identify the significance of the study before you know whether the experiment was as I explained it or not.

Was it significant? I don’t know. How much of the flagellar code was removed, a small part, a large part or all of it? Were sufficient checks made for related pseudogenes or active close matches in the bacterial DNA? Were sufficient precautions taken to prevent contamination by outside bacteria with complete code? Were genetic markers used to ensure that the bacteria with restored flagella were actually descended from those that had the code removed?

That kind of exacting detail will be in the original paper, but is unlikely to have survived into a secondary journalistic source. HGT from a contaminating bacterium is a known evolutionary process. Complete regeneration from a zero start would indeed cause a great deal of scientific interest. What date was the original paper? If is is as you say, then there should be a lot of follow-ups around, duplicating the original experiment and taking a more detailed look at what happened.

rossum

 

[buffalo]

Did God know what Adam would look like?

 

[Ender]

Was it significant?

I’ll move on…I think the advances in genetics have already demonstrated that the classical neo-Darwinian mechanism for evolution cannot be true.

The point of this discussion is that our current knowledge of genetic change is fundamentally at variance with neo-Darwinist postulates. (James Shapiro, 1997)

That was 20 years ago. The situation has not improved for the theory of evolution by random mutation.

Localized random mutation, selection operating “one gene at a time” (John Maynard Smith’s formulation), and gradual modification of individual functions are unable to provide satisfactory explanations for the molecular data, no matter how much time for change is assumed. There are simply too many potential degrees of freedom for random variability and too many interconnections to account for.

What does credibly allow for evolution is natural genetic engineering: including among other things the ability of cells to recombine their own DNA.

The second major lesson of molecular studies into the origins of genetic change is that all cells possess multiple biochemical agents for natural genetic engineering–processes that include the cutting and splicing of DNA molecules into new sequence arrangements

It appears that cells are more like computer programs that respond depending on what kind of (name removed by moderator)ut they receive.

This is the growing realization that cells have molecular computing networks which process information about internal operations and about the external environment to make decisions controlling growth, movement, and differentiation…Bacterial and yeast cells have molecules that monitor the status of the genome and activate cellular responses when damaged DNA accumulates. … These inducible DNA damage response systems are sophisticated and include so-called “checkpoint” functions that act to arrest cell division until the repair process has been completed. When the checkpoints do not function, cell division proceeds before repair is completed, and the damaged cells die or produce inviable progeny. One can characterize this surveillance/inducible repair/checkpoint system as a molecular computation network demonstrating biologically useful properties of self-awareness and decision-making.

 

[Rau]

One day random mutations detected that the giraffe’s neck was too short.

No, no detection involved. The taller giraffes simply were more successful in feeding because they were able to reach better and or more plentiful food sources. Your attempts at ridicule and derision do not help your case.

 

[Techno2000]

The taller giraffes simply were more successful in feeding because they were able to reach better and or more plentiful food sources.

How do you even know for certain that there was such a thing as an short neck giraffe ?

 

[rossum]

How do you even know for certain that there was such a thing as an short neck giraffe ?

Because we still have them: Okapi.

Yes, Okapi and giraffes are closely related.

rossum

 

[LeafByNiggle]

LeafByNiggle:

Let’s verify that they didn’t “screw it up” before speculating about what it would mean.

No. Let’s address what it would mean first. Noble has claimed that acquired characteristics can be inherited, which is what Lamarck said… If the experiment is valid, does it support this claim? If it doesn’t then does it have any significance at all?
If it lacks significance even if it is valid then we don’t need to concern ourselves with it.

Since I don’t think it is a scientific possibility, I already don’t need to concern myself with possible ramifications.

 

[LeafByNiggle]

LeafByNiggle:

I think the process you refer to is that the life experiences of individual organisms impacts the genetic code in a way that makes offspring better able to handle those experiences than their parents, thus making random variation unnecessary.

I’m referring to the difference between the Darwinian process of evolution and the Lamarckian process. These are fundamentally different, and Lamarckism, ridiculed for over a century, appears to be making a comeback.

As with many things, appearances can be deceiving. Every single properly controlled experiment to demonstrate Lamarckism has failed. While Darwinism for small adaptations has been demonstrated numerous times.

But where is your answer to my objection based on the development of poisonous frogs?

 

[Techno2000]

Techno2000:

How do you even know for certain that there was such a thing as an short neck giraffe ?

Because we still have them: Okapi.

Yes, Okapi and giraffes are closely related.

rossum

So, the true short neck giraffes… died out from starvation, but these things didn"t .

 

[Ender]

Since I don’t think it is a scientific possibility, I already don’t need to concern myself with possible ramifications.

OK, well I think this is the experiment, which is slightly different than what I described.

The soil bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens was engineered so that it could not make its ‘propeller-like’ flagellum rendering it unable to move.

So, the bacteria were created without flagellum, but found a way to recreate them demonstrating an active response to the threat posed by immobility.

“Amazingly, we found that just a single tiny change to one of these genetic switches was enough to convert it from being a switch that would normally turn on the genes for using nitrogen into a switch that now turns on the genes to build the flagella. The result is that the bacterium had, in effect, evolved a way to hotwire its motor practically overnight.”

“Evolution has been described as a process of ‘tinkering’, but this work shows that evolution can be remarkably repeatable. When the situation is desperate, life finds a way.”

If evolution is repeatable - not to mention rapid - it is hardly Darwinian.

 

[LeafByNiggle]

The problem with this experiment is that we cannot be sure that all traces of genetic information on how to build a flagellum was removed. All we know is that we did something to the DNA and now it does not make a flagellum. The process of correcting that corruption is not the same thing as the process of evolving the structure in the first place. The former might occur in 4 days while the latter took a million years.

 

[Ender]

As with many things, appearances can be deceiving. Every single properly controlled experiment to demonstrate Lamarckism has failed. While Darwinism for small adaptations has been demonstrated numerous times.

There are two aspects of Darwinism to consider:
1- natural selection
2- changes occur over time from the accumulation of random mutations

Or, as Richard Dawkins explained it, “Mutations are the random changes in genes that constitute the raw material for evolution by non-random selection.”

That Darwin was right on point 1 doesn’t mean he was right about point 2, and in fact it appears that he got this point wrong, as modern biology is amply demonstrating. If mutations occurred solely by the accumulation of random changes how could we explain the transfer of genetic material between species? It is not a question of demonstrating “Lamarckism”, although it has been demonstrated that acquired characteristics can be inherited.

But where is your answer to my objection based on the development of poisonous frogs?

That I fail to guess at a possible creation of one characteristic of one species really says nothing about the validity of the objections I have raised to the problems of evolution from random mutations.

 

[Aloysium]

Clearly the matter is far more complicated than random glitches in the genome causing a viable phenotype very different from the parent. Buffalo’s provided a lot of links and quotes describing some of what has been discovered.

You are assuming it took a million years. If it did, each step along the process would have been an organism somewhere in between, capable of reproduction, each change pointing to the final outcome and unlike its progenitors. Maybe it took one minute, one day, many changes at once.

What we do is wrap what little evidence we have in a theory that suits our purposes. Natural selection will always work as an explanation that offers no explanation but merely states that a creature that thrives in its environment is suited to that environment. It is true of course but it speaks to the interrelatedness and unity of environments rather than offering validity for the standard theory of evolution over any creationist explanation.