How likely is it? Let’s hope discussion is allowed:
Within the field of population genetics, the phenomenon of mutational meltdown—in which a population may become extinct owing to the accumulation of deleterious mutations—has been well studied both theoretically and experimentally. The key to understanding this effect is a consideration of the efficacy of natural selection. Because there are many more ways to disrupt rather than to improve genomic function, the vast majority of new fitness-impacting mutations are deleterious rather than beneficial.
Jeffrey D. Jensen and Michael Lynch, “Considering mutational meltdown as a potential SARS-CoV-2 treatment strategy” at Heredity (Edinb). 2020 Apr 6 : 1–2. doi: 10.1038/s41437-020-0314-z [Epub ahead of print]
There are more ways to disrupt than to improve, therefore nothing can be true.
> Are there really more ways to disrupt than improve?
> Then how can Darwinism be true?
The unstated argument is as follows:
If there are more ways to disrupt than improve, Darwinism cannot be true.
There are more ways to disrupt than improve.
Therefore, Darwinism cannot be true.
This is of course a non-sequitur.
Is this something new? Especially after “Darwin Devolves”?
Something else to consider: Even improvements are relative and contingent. Contingent serendipity. And an improved fish is still going to be a fish. Improved prokaryotes are still going to be prokaryotes. The fittest lions are all still lions.
Over on TSZ- is that place still alive?- I once read a Rumraket say something about “the right mutations”. For example even though, over the last 2 million years, voles have been evolving faster than most mammals, they are all still unmistakably voles. That’s only because they didn’t get the right mutations. Seriously.
Rodent’s bizarre traits deepen mystery of genetics, evolution.
The same goes for living fossils. They may look like their modern descendants, but there has been change to the genome. The modern populations have evolved. They just didn’t get the right mutations.
ET, bad arguments are nothing new.
This does not relate to the opinion piece. I just saw an article about the evolution of synaptic cells. https://phys.org/news/2020-06-evolution-synapse.amp. It looks to me like more “just so” speculation couched as new scientific findings. Perhaps one of ya’all could take a look.
Mung,
hi.
What I think is valid is that islands of function will be rare in config spaces due to their many constraints to achieve function.
So, it will be hard indeed to create novel body plans,starting with the first. Likewise, vasriation and incremental improvements will have limits.
KF
There are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ mutations in any absolute sense. They will be beneficial or detrimental depending on the environmental context in which they occur. If an organism accumulates too many mutations too quickly which are detrimental in the environment in which it finds itself then it is likely to go extinct, like 99% of all species that have existed on this planet. Evolution is not a guarantee of survival. There are no guarantees.
Seversky first claims that,
But then, right after that, he immediately claims that,
Yet if there were no “‘right’ or ‘wrong’ mutations in any absolute sense” then it would be impossible to tell if mutations were beneficial or detrimental in any environmental context that Seversky may try to put forth.
Welcome to the world of Darwinian apologetics where blatantly self-refuting claims are made. Often, as Seversky has done here, in the sentence directly following his first claim.
Let’s look a little closer at Seversky’s first claim,
Actually Darwinists, as a primary premise, hold that mutations occur randomly and/or by chance, and that mutations are not ‘directed’. Yet, in order for us to even tell if a mutation, or a event, has truly occurred randomly and/or by chance, and that it was not a ‘directed’ mutation, it is first necessary for that mutation, or that event, to happen against an ‘environmental’ backdrop of design.
As Dr. Egnor, via Aristotle, explained,
In other words, for us to even tell if a event occurred randomly and/or by chance we must first necessarily presuppose design.
It is not all that hard to understand this principle. After all, ‘randomly’ choosing a card from a deck, by “chance”, necessarily presupposes an intelligently designed deck of cards to choose from in the first place.
Yet Darwinists deny the existence of that ‘backdrop of design’, i.e. deny the existence of the metaphorical deck of cards to ‘randomly’ choose from.
As Wolfgang (“Not even wrong”) Pauli noted, “While they (Darwinists) pretend to stay in this way completely ‘scientific’ and ‘rational,’ they become actually very irrational, particularly because they use the word ‘chance’, not any longer combined with estimations of a mathematically defined probability, in its application to very rare single events more or less synonymous with the old word ‘miracle.’”
And indeed it is the randomness and/or chance postulate itself which prevents Darwinists from ever being ‘scientific’ and ‘rational,’
As Murray Eden of MIT noted, in the paper entitled, “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory”, “It is our contention that if ‘random’ is given a serious and crucial interpretation from a probabilistic point of view, the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws—physical, physico-chemical, and biological.”
With the advance of modern science, this problem for Darwinists of defining ‘chance’ within the context of a mathematically defined probability, so that their theory may be considered ‘scientific’, has only become that much more acute for Darwinists
As Stephen Talbott noted, “In the case of evolution, I picture Dennett and Dawkins filling the blackboard with their vivid descriptions of living, highly regulated, coordinated, integrated, and intensely meaningful biological processes, and then inserting a small, mysterious gap in the middle, along with the words, “Here something random occurs.”
This “something random” looks every bit as wishful as the appeal to a miracle. It is the central miracle in a gospel of meaninglessness, a “Randomness of the gaps,” demanding an extraordinarily blind faith. At the very least, we have a right to ask, “Can you be a little more explicit here?”
In other words, it would be impossible to tell if something truly happened randomly ‘by chance’ in the cell unless it did not first happen within the backdrop of the purposely designed “highly regulated, coordinated, integrated, and intensely meaningful biological processes” of the cell.
Thus, it is literally, by definition, as Egnor via Aristotle pointed out, that “Chance presupposes design.”
Moreover, contrary to how Darwinists often portray ‘chance’ as being a cause unto itself (i.e. synomynous with a ‘miracle’ as both Talbott and Pauli pointed out), ‘chance’ is not a cause of anything but the use of the phrase ‘it happened by chance’ by Darwinists actually reflects our ignorance of the actual cause of any given situation,
Charles Darwin himself admitted that his appeal to ‘chance’ is to “acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause “,
Moreover, directly contrary to that primary presupposition of Darwinists, i.e. that mutations to DNA will occur randomly and/or occur by ‘chance’, it is now known that the vast majority of mutations are ‘directed’.
In fact it is now known, directly contrary to Darwinian presuppositions, and as Jonathan Wells noted, that “It’s the organism controlling the DNA, not the DNA controlling the organism.”
The finding that the vast majority of mutations are not truly random but are ‘directed’ directly falsifies ‘THE’ primary presupposition of Darwinists, i.e. namely that mutations will occur randomly and/or by ‘chance’
As Dr. Cornelius Hunter stated, “that assumption is now known to be false.”
Thus in conclusion, directly contrary to Seversky’s claim that “There are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ mutations in any absolute sense”, we are in fact now able to tell ‘right’ from ‘wrong’ mutations, and the type of mutations that we find occurring are directly contrary to the type of ‘right’ mutations that Darwinists need in order for their theory to be considered feasible. i.e. The vast majority of mutations are found to be ‘directed’ not random.
As I have stated several times before, if Darwinian evolution were normal scientific theory that was subject to the criteria of falsification (Popper), instead of being basically an unfalsifiable religion for atheists, this finding should count as yet another devastating falsification of Darwin’s theory.
I love when evos post. They don’t realize that their own words undermine the claims of their own position.
Clearly there are more ways to disrupt than to improve any complex system. Otherwise, we would occasionally see 747’s coming out of tornados passing through junk yards.
Take any gene of, say 100 amino acids. In principle, there may be one amino acid change that somehow improves the resulting protein performance. But then there would be 99 or more (multiple changes possible at each site) that would damage or destroy the resulting protein. In addition, there would be always be some chance that the life form having it would die off or be killed before passing along the modified gene.
That assumes the gene can be improved at all. However, most proteins (and hence their genes) are already finely tuned, or even optimized for their function, so 100% of mutations would make it worse.
There are two ways that the Darwinian mechanism can improve the fitness of the species. One is to take a mediocre protein/gene, and through trial and error, make it better. But if most genes and proteins are already optimal for their purpose/function, then that mechanism merely helps keep out bad versions of the gene/protein. i.e. natural selection can keep bad genes from being passed on – in some cases.
The second way is Behe’s devolution process, wherein a species accosted by some new threat can damage a gene that makes a protein (or enzyme of course) which allows the threat to cause harm, and thereby survive the threat, minus one protein. That sort of mutation can spread through the population, and accumulate for subsequent different threats, until the species can only survive under certain precise conditions. If the conditions change, the species cannot recover lost functions easily and may well go extinct.
This is the “burn your bridges” approach to a military retreat: prevent your defeat by destroying infrastructure, in the hopes of regrouping and coming back to fight again – sans bridges, of course.
How can there be any beneficial mutations in a chaotic state? Chaos does not create order, only more chaos, which is the primary reason given for not having free will. The hypothesis of macro-evolution is based on order Darwinists deny exist. If mutations are random, then there can be no speciation. All species will evolve and devolve over time. To argue speciation is to argue some form of order exists. If there is order, than every argument falls apart.