Evolution

[Anuojat]

I have not actually read any of Dawkins' books, but since nearly every other argument Meyer raises typically involves a Dawkins quote, he is definitely on my list.  Which of his books do you recommend that are most relevant to this issue? Does he have any articles, videos, or podcasts that focus on non-mutational selection or the problems of the Cambrian explosion and the origin of DNA and life?

 

 

How does the evolutionary process create these genes in the first place if they have never been expressed?  With regards to the Cambrian explosion, why would there be genes for jointed limbs, compound eyes, and 50+ new cell types in a single celled organism or even a simple animal like a sponge, whose ancestors have never had these features?  Again, you would be counting on random mutations to create these genes, this time without selective pressure to promote them (since they were never expressed in the past), which would take far longer than even the 3 billion years that life has existed prior to that (see 10⁷⁷ discussion in the first post).  Also, since many of these genes form complex integrated systems, if one of these dormant genes were mutated or did not activate in concert with the others, the organism would almost certainly be disadvantaged.

 

 

 

I completely agree that these types of changes in an existing animal population can result from the mutation/selection process.  The problem I see is equivalent to changing that existing wing code in a way that will produce a fully functional human arm.  It's not that natural selection isn't capable of creating new features or species, it's that it can't account for the astronomical increase in complexity and information needed to create 20+ new animal phyla in a few million years. 

 

All evolution in animals does is selects those traits favorable for survival. Whats often misunderstood is that by "trait" we do not mean fully formed arms or legs. Rather the arms, legs certain types of lung ect. evolve also from previous animals trough theyre children (passing on befitial traits.) These traits arent yet arms or legs but theyll eventually become such over millions of years trough the use for other useful and helpful ways. Whales for example did not gain theyre current "flippers" in single species to species chance. Many many species were inbetween and some didnt make it and some trailed to various other forms. The one which survived belongs to whales ancestors today.

 

Also cambrian explosion, where di you hear only single celled organism lived during before it and suddent there were multible celled oens all over the palce? If myers has said this then he is clearly wrong, pre-existing multitude of species were all over the place and not only that many were interrelated aswell so evoltuon would have plenty of time for selection before and after. Also enviroment during cambrian is important to keep in mind compared to what came before:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacara_biota Pre cambrian life

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion#How_real_was_the_explosion.3F Disputes over the "explosive" nature of the cambrian perioud.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestigiality Evolutionary traits as cumulative (spelling?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaptation

[shirgall]

How does the evolutionary process create these genes in the first place if they have never been expressed?  With regards to the Cambrian explosion, why would there be genes for jointed limbs, compound eyes, and 50+ new cell types in a single celled organism or even a simple animal like a sponge, whose ancestors have never had these features?  Again, you would be counting on random mutations to create these genes, this time without selective pressure to promote them (since they were never expressed in the past), which would take far longer than even the 3 billion years that life has existed prior to that (see 10⁷⁷ discussion in the first post).  Also, since many of these genes form complex integrated systems, if one of these dormant genes were mutated or did not activate in concert with the others, the organism would almost certainly be disadvantaged.

 

 

Genes don't express organs, they express proteins, transfer RNA, or small nuclear RNA. All Terran DNA is a giant laundry list of protein recipes. There are multiple systems of regulation that cause specific sequences to be copied and used to make proteins, or to combine them. The expressiveness of this system is obvious because the same system produces different types of cells (which house quite a few different types of structures) and the same system produces enough of certain types of cells to make tissues, and organs, and to continue growing them, and to stop growing them.

 

Sure there's systems to fix damage, but there are no systems that make the DNA of any one organism fit some cosmic unchanging master blueprint. The system that has survived billions of years is one that accepts dramatic change and takes a lot shots at surviving offspring.

 

It does not take tremendous changes to alter the regulation system to make startling changes. We generally hear about the problems but sometimes there are beneficial changes. Most of the time these are unnoticeable changes unless they get triggered by some event. You carry the recipe for a ton of proteins you will never express.

 

Your last sentence makes it sound like it is a catastrophe if anything gets changed... but these things get changed all the time. When a new offspring is produced totally different sequences are recombined into the new creature. Some sequences are lost. Some are combined into new sequences. Some vast swathes are copied. There's a lot of stuff that has multiple copies of essentially the same recipe. The result has to be close enough to be viable (that is, generally within the same genus, and even then a lot of these pairings fail) and even closer to be fertile (that is, the same species, and we get combinations of humans that are not fertile from time to time).

 

Contemplate freeing yourself from the "static, perfect" model of the DNA and embracing the chaotic, edge-of-the-envelope aspect of it all.

[Pelafina]

There are so many holes in the evolution theory, but for some reason the believers get upset when you bring up the inconsistencies and missing evidence.  They are putting forth their claim regarding evolution, therefore, they have the burden of proof.

 

Why don't the evolutionists just claim that they don't know how humans came to be and end it there.  

[Pepin]

I have not actually read any of Dawkins' books, but since nearly every other argument Meyer raises typically involves a Dawkins quote, he is definitely on my list.  Which of his books do you recommend that are most relevant to this issue? Does he have any articles, videos, or podcasts that focus on non-mutational selection or the problems of the Cambrian explosion and the origin of DNA and life?

 

The Selfish Gene and The Greatest Show on Earth are both great books. It is difficult to say which one to go for first, as the second book is less technical, while the first is more informative.

 

 How does the evolutionary process create these genes in the first place if they have never been expressed?  With regards to the Cambrian explosion, why would there be genes for jointed limbs, compound eyes, and 50+ new cell types in a single celled organism or even a simple animal like a sponge, whose ancestors have never had these features?  Again, you would be counting on random mutations to create these genes, this time without selective pressure to promote them (since they were never expressed in the past), which would take far longer than even the 3 billion years that life has existed prior to that (see 10⁷⁷ discussion in the first post).  Also, since many of these genes form complex integrated systems, if one of these dormant genes were mutated or did not activate in concert with the others, the organism would almost certainly be disadvantaged.

 

It isn't that the genes were never expressed, but rather that they were shut off at some point. If you look at most mammals, you tend to find that they share a lot of the same DNA, but not all of the same DNA is in use.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noncoding_DNA

 

As far as the Cambrian explosion, you'd have to read a book or talk to an expert to get all those answers. The area is very difficult to understand because life prior to it did not fossilize as easy and because so much was going on. There are many competing theories, but this isn't a problem.

 

I think it is good to understand that evolution is a theory which is heavily based on math. This was my biggest surprise when I started learning about the subject. I mean to say this because if the math was that far off, it would be like the "dark matter" for the theory of evolution. I found an article which goes into the math criticism below, unfortunately the tone of the article is a little annoying.

 

http://www.skepticblog.org/2013/08/28/stephen-meyers-fumbling-bumbling-amateur-cambrian-follies/

 

I completely agree that these types of changes in an existing animal population can result from the mutation/selection process.  The problem I see is equivalent to changing that existing wing code in a way that will produce a fully functional human arm.  It's not that natural selection isn't capable of creating new features or species, it's that it can't account for the astronomical increase in complexity and information needed to create 20+ new animal phyla in a few million years. 

 

If we are talking about the Cambrian era again, it was more in the order or 30 million years. Again, the biggest issue is more that it is difficult to probe before that time.

 

Also, if you look at my previous posts, I make the case that fossils are nice, but they aren't needed to prove evolution. We could live in a world without fossils altogether, and scientifically evolution would be just as accepted. Fossils can provide a lot insight into the specifics of evolution, but their accuracy decreases the further you go back, with the big issue being that it is very rare for billion year old fossils to remain intact. 

[Romulox]

Thanks everyone for the info; it has certainly given me some new roads to explore as I don't have a huge background in evolutionary biology.  I just wanted to clear up a few points that I may not have communicated as well as I thought I did, as I certainly don't want to misrepresent Meyer's books. 

 

- Meyer does not imply that life jumped immediately from single celled organisms to animals during the Cambrian explosion.  He has an entire chapter devoted to the Ediacran Fauna that existed before the Cambrian period (though he concludes that they are not related to the phyla that emerged during the Cambrian differences in major characteristics such as body symmetry).  The presence or absence of fossils is not required for his main argument against Darwinian evolution, but he does devote a few chapters to the discussion to note that there is still debate on the issue. 

 

- Anyone reading the book is given a basic understanding of the purpose of DNA.  To be clear, I understand that DNA does not specifically code for body parts; it directs the synthesis of individual proteins within cells, and determines the timing for when these proteins are generated.  Many of these proteins transmit signals that influence the development of different cell types, how these cells are organized, and how they interact with each other; they do not act individually, but as a complex, integrated whole, similar to the components of a circuit board.  Meyer argues that any changes to the genes that create these protein systems which determine the early development of an animal (when the overall body plan is formed) always results in catastrophic consequences for the animal; thus development of a new body plan from an existing plan or from scratch is highly unlikely. 

 

- There was also some confusion on the argument from epigenetics in included in my original post.  Meyer argues that while there are genes for the building blocks of many structures in the cell, there is no genetic information that determines how these structures are assembled.  One of many examples he gives is the microtubules that form the skeleton and protein transport system of a cell.  There are genes that generate the proteins that compose these tubes, but where the information is stored that determines their structure and location is unknown.  Since these microtubules are essential for transporting specific proteins to precise locations within the cell, their structure and location are critical to the overall development of the organism.  He concludes that since this information is not thought to reside within the DNA, genetic changes alone are not sufficient to result in a new animal body plan; concurrent changes to these epigenetic factors are required as well. 

 

The ultimate point of all of this is that the science of evolution seems to me to be far from settled.  While I may not agree with Meyer's ultimate conclusion (nor do I understand how he makes the leap from Cambrian explosion to a Judeo-Christian god), his books do provide one of the least biased set of arguments against the standard Darwinian model that I have found. 

 

Thanks again for all the info and counterarguments; my next trip to Amazon will include some Dawkins for sure. 

[Anuojat]

 

- Meyer does not imply that life jumped immediately from single celled organisms to animals during the Cambrian explosion.  He has an entire chapter devoted to the Ediacran Fauna that existed before the Cambrian period (though he concludes that they are not related to the phyla that emerged during the Cambrian differences in major characteristics such as body symmetry).  The presence or absence of fossils is not required for his main argument against Darwinian evolution, but he does devote a few chapters to the discussion to note that there is still debate on the issue. 

 

If the phyla are not related then either those phyla died out and other phyla evolved of whose ancestry we have no fossils of OR they are related but Meyer got it wrong since he is not a biologist and others on the field which he is basing his conclusion on disagree with him.

www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/13-08-07

There is no reason to assume any outside influence occured (and we are talking of aliens here since i am sure you like anyone would understand that adding any supernatural explanation here would be just god of the gaps correct?)

 

- Anyone reading the book is given a basic understanding of the purpose of DNA.  To be clear, I understand that DNA does not specifically code for body parts; it directs the synthesis of individual proteins within cells, and determines the timing for when these proteins are generated.  Many of these proteins transmit signals that influence the development of different cell types, how these cells are organized, and how they interact with each other; they do not act individually, but as a complex, integrated whole, similar to the components of a circuit board.  Meyer argues that any changes to the genes that create these protein systems which determine the early development of an animal (when the overall body plan is formed) always results in catastrophic consequences for the animal; thus development of a new body plan from an existing plan or from scratch is highly unlikely. 

 

What evidence does he provide that is highly disasterious? All living are both like and unlike theyre parents and deepers down like rest of humanity yet quite differant. These differances are exactly which allows such mutitude of species from simpler forms to more complex ones. The idea that at some point the chance would too dratic and hamrful to the body is not shown anywhere in nature. Harmful mutations and differances with offspring do occur but very seldom.

 

The ultimate point of all of this is that the science of evolution seems to me to be far from settled.  While I may not agree with Meyer's ultimate conclusion (nor do I understand how he makes the leap from Cambrian explosion to a Judeo-Christian god), his books do provide one of the least biased set of arguments against the standard Darwinian model that I have found. 

 

Thanks again for all the info and counterarguments; my next trip to Amazon will include some Dawkins for sure. 

 

Wait... you just say he makes illogical just to judeo christian god and then say he is the least biased? You do know that intelligent desing is and was proven in court to be Creationism is disguise correct? That intelligent desing is merely a position that creationist have move slowly to from earlier creationist positions and now are split (although often seem to quote each other nonetheless.)

[Pepin]

Thanks everyone for the info; it has certainly given me some new roads to explore as I don't have a huge background in evolutionary biology.  I just wanted to clear up a few points that I may not have communicated as well as I thought I did, as I certainly don't want to misrepresent Meyer's books. 

 

- Anyone reading the book is given a basic understanding of the purpose of DNA.  To be clear, I understand that DNA does not specifically code for body parts; it directs the synthesis of individual proteins within cells, and determines the timing for when these proteins are generated.  Many of these proteins transmit signals that influence the development of different cell types, how these cells are organized, and how they interact with each other; they do not act individually, but as a complex, integrated whole, similar to the components of a circuit board.  Meyer argues that any changes to the genes that create these protein systems which determine the early development of an animal (when the overall body plan is formed) always results in catastrophic consequences for the animal; thus development of a new body plan from an existing plan or from scratch is highly unlikely. 

 

Not a problem. His critique is certainly one of the better ones.

 

As far as the second part, though the concept that DNA employs all of its power through protein synthesis is true, and that fetal development is an unimaginable complex process, it has been shown that the process isn't that fragile. There has been a lot of research and experimentation in regard to genetic engineering, and it demonstrates pretty well that many changes can be made to the genome without catastrophic results. Seriously, look into this stuff as what they are doing gets kind of weird.

 

Given that a lot can go wrong in development since it is a complicated and delicate process, and that if an organism has no survivability if something goes wrong in development, it would be a very huge surprise if fetal development didn't have means to combat these problems. The organisms which had more margin for error in development would not only survive, but their offspring would be more likely to survive. Of course, if there was too much of a margin of error, it would likely cause birth defects, so there would be a balancing act.

 

Actual changes to fetal development are unbelievably slow, with modifications which do not work not surviving. Though the vast a majority of mutations that occur during fetal development will result in birth defects or not work at all, a very small  number will actually be beneficial.

 

What is actually pretty interesting is that the basic starting point of a zygote for most animals is pretty similar, which does support the claim that early development cannot be modified very much without creating large issues. But, once the base structure of the fetus is formed, it is easier for genes to affect the development without much risk of complication. Certain genes for instance, such as the one which creates a 6th finger in humans, is theorized to only be used during the process of development when fingers are formed.

 

Of course the process of fetal development is not really understood, as it is amazingly complex. Though when we talk about genes, we are always talking about the various chemicals DNA makes, it is still appropriate to talk about phenotypes in relation to genes, especially since there are particular phenotypes which are controlled only by a single gene.

[Ray H.]

 

 

- There was also some confusion on the argument from epigenetics in included in my original post.  Meyer argues that while there are genes for the building blocks of many structures in the cell, there is no genetic information that determines how these structures are assembled.  One of many examples he gives is the microtubules that form the skeleton and protein transport system of a cell.  There are genes that generate the proteins that compose these tubes, but where the information is stored that determines their structure and location is unknown.

 

It's unknown, because there is no such encoded information. Structure and location are determined by the chemical composition of the protein created and its interaction with the other intercellular chemicals such as enzymes, growth factors, hormones, etc. The cytoskeleton you refer to is structured largely, if not entirely, by aligning microtubules by their polarity. This involves the assistance of a growth factor which is also a protein encoded in the DNA. Each kind of protein has a very specific manner of folding depending on what it is chemically bound to at the moment. This folding limits the other proteins and chemicals that it can be bound to, and, so, natural selection has exploited this predictability to create structure. There's no need for encoded information about location and structure. That "information" is inherent in the chemical properties of the proteins produced.