Are there really more ways to disrupt than improve?

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. BobRyan

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. Fasteddious

I love when evos post. They don't realize that their own words undermine the claims of their own position. ET

Seversky first claims that,

There are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ mutations in any absolute sense.

But then, right after that, he immediately claims that,

They will be beneficial or detrimental depending on the environmental context in which they occur.

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,

"There are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ mutations in any absolute sense."

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,

Evolution Presupposes Intelligent Design: Case of the Coronavirus – Michael Egnor – April 7, 2020 Excerpt: Aristotle saw this in his definition of chance in nature — chance is the accidental conjunction of purposeful events. Without purpose there can be no chance. His example is instructive: he considered a farmer who ploughs his field and by chance discovers a treasure buried by someone else. The treasure is discovered by chance, but everything else — the farmer’s ownership of the field, his decision to plough it, the accumulation and burial of the treasure by the other man — is purposeful, and in fact the only reason the accident of discovery happened is because it is embedded in a world of purpose. Chance can’t happen — the word has no meaning — in an entirely accidental world. Chance presupposes design. https://evolutionnews.org/2020/04/evolution-presupposes-design-the-case-of-covid-19/

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.’”

Pauli’s ideas on mind and matter in the context of contemporary science – Harald Atmanspacher Excerpt: “In discussions with biologists I met large difficulties when they apply the concept of ‘natural selection’ in a rather wide field, without being able to estimate the probability of the occurrence in a empirically given time of just those events, which have been important for the biological evolution. Treating the empirical time scale of the evolution theoretically as infinity they have then an easy game, apparently to avoid the concept of purposesiveness. While they 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.’” Wolfgang Pauli (pp. 27-28) https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/234f/4989e039089fed5ac47c7d1a19b656c602e2.pdf

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.”

“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.” Murray Eden, “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory,” Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, editors Paul S. Moorhead and Martin M. Kaplan, June 1967, p. 109.

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?”

Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness – Talbott – Fall 2011 Excerpt: The situation calls to mind a widely circulated cartoon by Sidney Harris, which shows two scientists in front of a blackboard on which a body of theory has been traced out with the usual tangle of symbols, arrows, equations, and so on. But there’s a gap in the reasoning at one point, filled by the words, “Then a miracle occurs.” And the one scientist is saying to the other, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.” 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?” http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/evolution-and-the-illusion-of-randomness

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,

What Is Chance? – Nicholas Nurston Excerpt: “The vague word ‘chance’ is used as a substitute for a more precise word such as ’cause’. “To personify ‘chance’ as if we were talking about a causal agent,” notes biophysicist Donald M. MacKay, “is to make an illegitimate switch from a scientific to a quasi-religious mythological concept.” Similarly, Robert C. Sproul points out: “By calling the unknown cause ‘chance’ for so long, people begin to forget that a substitution was made. . . . The assumption that ‘chance equals an unknown cause’ has come to mean for many that ‘chance equals cause.’” Others who reasoned in this fashion, Nobel laureate Jacques Monod, for one, used this chance equals cause line of reasoning. “Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, (is) at the root of the stupendous edifice of evolution,”… https://books.google.com/books?id=bQ5OAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT25&lpg=PT25

Charles Darwin himself admitted that his appeal to ‘chance’ is to “acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause “,

“I have hitherto sometimes spoken as if the variations—so common and multiform in organic beings under domestication, and in a lesser degree in those in a state of nature—had been due to chance. This, of course, is a wholly incorrect expression, but it serves to acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause of each particular variation.” Charles Darwin – Origin – Chapter V

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'.

"It is difficult (if not impossible) to find a genome change operator that is truly random in its action within the DNA of the cell where it works. All careful studies of mutagenesis find statistically significant non-random patterns” James Shapiro - Evolution: A View From The 21st Century - (Page 82) WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT? Fully Random Mutations - Kevin Kelly - 2014 Excerpt: What is commonly called "random mutation" does not in fact occur in a mathematically random pattern. The process of genetic mutation is extremely complex, with multiple pathways, involving more than one system. Current research suggests most spontaneous mutations occur as errors in the repair process for damaged DNA. Neither the damage nor the errors in repair have been shown to be random in where they occur, how they occur, or when they occur. Rather, the idea that mutations are random is simply a widely held assumption by non-specialists and even many teachers of biology. There is no direct evidence for it. On the contrary, there's much evidence that genetic mutation vary in patterns. For instance it is pretty much accepted that mutation rates increase or decrease as stress on the cells increases or decreases. These variable rates of mutation include mutations induced by stress from an organism's predators and competition, and as well as increased mutations brought on by environmental and epigenetic factors. Mutations have also been shown to have a higher chance of occurring near a place in DNA where mutations have already occurred, creating mutation hotspot clusters—a non-random pattern. http://edge.org/response-detail/25264 Probability of change in life: Amino acid changes in single nucleotide substitutions - June 2020 Excerpt of Abstract: mutations are assumed to be random in the bereft of selection pressures,,,, (Yet) Our calculations reveal an enigmatic in-built self-preserving organization of the genetic code that averts disruptive changes at the physicochemical properties level.,,, Discussion We found in-built intrinsic biases and barriers to drastic changes within the genetic code. Within single mutational events, there are fixed probabilities for the type of change in selection pressure-free conditions that are far from random. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0303264720300393

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.”

Ask an Embryologist: Genomic Mosaicism – Jonathan Wells – February 23, 2015 Excerpt: humans have a “few thousand” different cell types. Here is my simple question: Does the DNA sequence in one cell type differ from the sequence in another cell type in the same person?,,, The simple answer is: We now know that there is considerable variation in DNA sequences among tissues, and even among cells in the same tissue. It’s called genomic mosaicism. In the early days of developmental genetics, some people thought that parts of the embryo became different from each other because they acquired different pieces of the DNA from the fertilized egg. That theory was abandoned,,, ,,,(then) “genomic equivalence” — the idea that all the cells of an organism (with a few exceptions, such as cells of the immune system) contain the same DNA — became the accepted view. I taught genomic equivalence for many years. A few years ago, however, everything changed. With the development of more sophisticated techniques and the sampling of more tissues and cells, it became clear that genetic mosaicism is common. I now know as an embryologist,,,Tissues and cells, as they differentiate, modify their DNA to suit their needs. It’s the organism controlling the DNA, not the DNA controlling the organism. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/02/ask_an_embryolo093851.html

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."

"In the twentieth century, the theory of evolution predicted that mutations are not adaptive or directed. In other words, mutations were believed to be random with respect to the needs of the individual. As Julian Huxley put it, “Mutation merely provides the raw material of evolution; it is a random affair, and takes place in all directions. … in all cases they are random in relation to evolution. Their effects are not related to the needs of the organisms.” (Huxley, 36) Or as Jacques Monod explained: “chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition—or the hope—that on this score our position is likely ever to be revised.” (Monod, 112) Ronald Fisher wrote that mutations are “random with respect to the organism’s need” (Orr). This fundamental prediction persisted for decades as a recent paper explained: “mutation is assumed to create heritable variation that is random and undirected.” (Chen, Lowenfeld and Cullis) But that assumption is now known to be false." https://sites.google.com/site/darwinspredictions/mutations-are-not-adaptive

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.

"In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality." Karl Popper 2 Corinthians 10:5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;

bornagain77

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

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 kairosfocus

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. Blastus

ET, bad arguments are nothing new. Mung

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

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. Mung