Why you should think that the Natural-Evolution of species is true

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edwest said:
The instructions need to be precise and conserved. The chemicals involved must be arranged correctly and must be in a precise location.
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Yeah… but back in the day, things were much simpler, they didn’t need all this new fangle stuff like… information. 🙂
 
Rubee said:
If a precise arrangement refers to “eye” and a different precise arrangement of the exact same bits refers to “hair colour”, you have something meaningful.
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You have something useful. Meaning comes into a different category. Natural selection works with the useful, not with the meaningful.

Those human tail genes have meaning, but they are not useful. Natural selection ignores them. Any random piece of DNA has “meaning” in that it can specify a string of amino acids. In that sense, all DNA is meaningful and since evolutionary processes can increase the length of DNA, then those processes can increase the meaningful content of DNA. That destroys ID’s argument for design.
 
Since there are others engaged in this discussion, here’s my feed-back on the issues raised in this post:

It’s not beyond our paygrade, because it has been revealed to us. From the Baltimore Catechism:
  1. Q. Who made the world?
    A. God made the world.
  2. Q. Who is God?
    A. God is the Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things.
  3. Q. What is man?
    A. Man is a creature composed of body and soul, and made to the image and likeness of God.
  4. Q. Why did God make you?
    A. God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in heaven.
The Church accepts a belief in the ToE as long as that belief does not conflict with its core teachings, which include that we are all descendent from one first man who commited an original sin that brought death into the world. That the diversity we see around us is the result of random chemical reactions accumulating over time with only fatal outcomes as the guide is truly a far-fetch, cumbersome explanation. This would be so even if we were just talking about atoms, let alone living beings as they are in themselves, which includes their psychology. But sure, people are allowed to believe that, although an important component of that story is polygenism. Christian cosmology recognizes God’s hand in all of nature. Nowhere in the picture painted by the ToE, does He appear; it is not enough to say, “God did it”, as if He were merely some transcendent Deistic, all-powerful being.

It is sin which brought death and suffering into the world. Having damaged our relationship with the Cause of our being, putting our self-interest above His will to love, we have separated ourselves from His healing graces. The reality of random mutations and natural selection are “the author(s) and implementer(s) of both miscarriages and serious birth defects.” I agree and that is one reason why the ToE is untenable.

I too find “the concept that God directly plans massive killing events, such as hurricanes, tsunamis, etc.,” to be illogical, given that there exists a loving God. However, since we were made “to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in heaven”, such events serve to motivate us to do just that, and that would be why they are not always prevented. It seems to me that this has nothing to do with the fact that He created the first of our kind in His image, from the dust and maintains us in existence.

Scripture is literally true and made understandable through the graces of the Holy Spirit, whom we ask to guide the Church and each of us towards the Truth.
 
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rossum said:
Reference please. Where is your scientific data to back up this statement?
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Start here:

Mutation, Not Natural Selection, Drives Evolution​

Molecular evolutionary biologist Masatoshi Nei says Darwin never proved natural selection is the driving force of evolution — because it isn’t.

But among the people working on evolution, most of them still believe natural selection is the driving force.

If you say evolution occurs by natural selection, it looks scientific compared with saying God created everything. Now they say natural selection created everything, but they don’t explain how. If it’s science, you have to explain every step. That’s why I was unhappy. Just a replacement of God with natural selection doesn’t change very much. You have to explain how.

OK, so, explain how.

Nei makes a case for mutation-driven evolution at the 2013 Kyoto Prize awards ceremony.

MN: Every part of our body is controlled by molecules, so you have to explain on a molecular level. That is the real mechanism of evolution, how molecules change. They change through mutation. Mutation means a change in DNA through, for example, substitution or insertion [of nucleotides]. First you have to have change, and then natural selection may operate or may not operate. I say mutation is the most important, driving force of evolution. Natural selection occurs sometimes, of course, because some types of variations are better than others, but mutation created the different types. Natural selection is secondary.

Someone on the outside looking in at the debate might say you and other researchers are splitting hairs, that both mutation and natural selection drive evolution. How do you respond?

MN: I don’t study the character or the function; I study the gene that controls it. My position is mutation creates variation, then natural selection may or may not operate, it may or may not choose the good variation and eliminate the bad one, but natural selection is not the driving force.

In neo-Darwinism, evolution is a process of increasing fitness [in the sense of an organism’s ability both to survive and to reproduce]. In mutation-driven evolutionary theory, evolution is a process of increasing or decreasing an organism’s complexity. We tend to believe natural selection selects one type. But there are many types, and still they’re OK. They can survive, no problem.

For example, if blue eyes are better for some reason in Scandinavia, that mutation has a selected advantage, and then of course that advantage will occur more in that population. But first you have to have the mutation. And natural selection itself is not so clear. In certain cases it is, but not always. The gene frequency of blue eyes may have increased by chance, too, rather than natural selection. The blue eye color may be just as good as green. Both can see.

http://discovermagazine.com/2014/march/12-mutation-not-natural-selection-drives-evolution
 
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buffalo said:
in the sense of an organism’s ability both to survive and to reproduce
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And, what was it exactly that shut down the reproductive systems of millions and millions different plant and animal species?
 
Mutation is a random event. Natural selection determines whether the mutation is beneficial or detrimental.
 
buffalo said:
Start here:

#Mutation, Not Natural Selection, Drives Evolution

Molecular evolutionary biologist Masatoshi Nei says Darwin never proved natural selection is the driving force of evolution — because it isn’t.
…

For example, if blue eyes are better for some reason in Scandinavia, that mutation has a selected advantage, and then of course that advantage will occur more in that population. But first you have to have the mutation. And natural selection itself is not so clear. In certain cases it is, but not always. The gene frequency of blue eyes may have increased by chance, too, rather than natural selection. The blue eye color may be just as good as green. Both can see.

http://discovermagazine.com/2014/march/12-mutation-not-natural-selection-drives-evolution
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Thank you for the quote, but it does not support what you said earlier. You said:
buffalo said:
We also now know many “mutations” are directed by the software.
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Your reference says nothing of the sort. It says that mutations are the (name removed by moderator)ut to the evolutionary process. Nothing at all about “directed by the software”. You need to better understand what you are reading. It does not say what you seem to think it says.
 
Well, you see, millions of years ago these super-creatures existed that just ate everything in sight. And kept eating and eating and eating. Then one day, they got wiped out. And… uh… something, something or something.

Evolution, the greatest storytelling device ever created. I wouldn’t use it, by the way.
 
edwest said:
Well, you see, millions of years ago these super-creatures existed that just ate everything in sight. And kept eating and eating and eating. Then one day, they got wiped out. And… uh… something, something or something.

Evolution, the greatest storytelling device ever created. I wouldn’t use it, by the way.
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How many fit/unfit cycles do you estimate it took evolution to go from a microbe to the 10 million different plant and animal species we have today?
 
Techno2000 said:
How many fit/unfit cycles do you estimate it took evolution to go from a microbe to the 10 million different plant and animal species we have today?
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Consider this:

Essential reading…a trillion trillion years or more​

Uh OH! Essential reading for evo supporters.

When Theory and Experiment Collide

…As other scientists have found with other enzymes, it turned out not to be a snap. The technical details are reported in a paper just published in BIO-Complexity . [2] Here we’ll keep it simple.
Based on our experimental observations and on calculations we made using a published population model [3], we estimated that Darwin’s mechanism would need a truly staggering amount of time—a trillion trillion years or more—to accomplish the seemingly subtle change in enzyme function that we studied.
 
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Techno2000 said:
How many fit/unfit cycles do you estimate it took evolution to go from a microbe to the 10 million different plant and animal species we have today?
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I estimate about 2,739,720,400,000 generations, estimated as below:
FromToElapsedGeneration TimeNumber of GenerationsExamples
Single celled prokaryote3.5Ba2Ba1.5By6 hour2191500000000E. coli30 mins
Single celled eukaryote2Ba500Ma1.5By1 day547875000000Paramecium6 hours
Simple Multicellular Chordate500Ma400Ma100My6 months200000000Amphioxus1 month
Vertebrate fish400Ma350Ma50My1 year50000000Zebra Fish4 months
Amphibian350Ma275Ma75My2 years37500000Frog1 year
Reptile275Ma200Ma75My3 years25000000Gekko2 years
Mammal200Ma70Ma130My5 years26000000Rat6 weeks
Primate70Ma2Ma68My10 years6800000Macaque4 years
Homo/Human2MaPresent2My20 years100000Human20 years
2739720400000
Being the sort of person I am, I already had that calculation saved in a spreadsheet since I was interested in the answer a few years back. That averages out to about 900 generations for each base pair in the human genome.
 
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