BillB:
As a computer scientist, you will appreciate the points -- and the parallel drawn between computational systems and DNA-based biological ones -- made by Mr Schutzenberger [inter alia late of the well-known Wistar consultation of 1966], on the reason functional complexity -- his term -- will appear in phase spaces as islands, here.
An illustrative side-light on this on the bio side can be had from the overwhelmingly dominant pattern of the fossil record: sudden appearance, stasis of general body form, disappearance or continuation into the current world. that is, islands of function, on the principle that form follows function.
GEM of TKI
PS: Challenges come in degrees, as do circumstances. I pled guilty with X-plan'n, not for X-culp'n.
PPS: We can now definitely trace the roots of that often derided descriptive term FSCI, to 1966.kairosfocus
August 13, 2009
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tragic,
I assume you went to this museum before nebraska man was debunked in 1927?
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/citation/66/1720/579Khan
August 13, 2009
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Nebraska Man? The heart and soul of primate evolutionary theory, second only to Piltdown? I envy you, tragic mishap… :)Lenoxus
August 13, 2009
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I knew I recognized that room. Anyway, I used to go to that museum when I was a kid. In the basement they had several large sculpture displays of artist's renditions of our primate ancestors. Yes, one of them was Nebraska Man. :D
Needless to say, those displays are all gone now.tragic mishap
August 13, 2009
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bornagain,
There is nothing to stop erosion from freeing bacterial spores on a continual basis. That, plus the rampant HGT that occurs between bacteria, tells us not to expect much difference betweeen surface bacterial strains and these ancient ones. Sanford's current project sounds like it suffers from some flawed assumptions. Not a good start.Dave Wisker
August 13, 2009
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I'm pretty sure most of the arguments made here can be summarized as "but look at all the gaps that remain in the story of all evolution ever". When it comes to these whales, I believe there are only four arguments ID has left to choose from:
1. None of the changes, even between two seemingly very similar fossils, could have come about as a result of genetic mutation. (For example, maybe genes actually don't code for the size and shape of skulls.)
2 (my personal favorite, I just think it's cool to think about). None of these organisms could have survived in their environments at the time; naturalistic science is at an utter loss explaining what sort of niche they could find. Clearly, some sort of non-natural phenomenon was responsible for such creatures not drowning or otherwise suffering the consequences of being stuck between the worlds of land and sea. (Perhaps the same phenomenon provides for the survival of present-day cetaceans as well.)
3. Whale evolution is not and never has been a problem for ID, which is only concerned with the irreducible complexity of "basic" but complex biological structures such as the BF, and the question of the origin of information in the first place.
4. The fossils are simply hoaxes.Lenoxus
August 13, 2009
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BillB,
The deal with the anology between computer software and biological specified complexity is simple. If you have undirected changes the "form", as you put it, will change. The reality here is that the 2nd law of thermodynamics does not promote and upward climb in complexity and certainly not in specificity. This is why we don't see great increases in useful specificity and complexity in software when it contracts a virus or develops errors. In fact we throw out the computer or take it to get fixed when this happens- and yes it requires an intelligence in the computer engineer to fix the damaged program. This raises the question of the origin of beneficial error protection functions within the cell- but hold on-
The reason why software and genetics are a good analogy is because they are both beholden to unguided or non-purposive change, and they both exist in a physical dimension where the 2nd law rules.
Most importantly though as Steve Meyer points out in his new book- the origin of the first life is even more perplexing here because you have no base system to appeal to- in other words you can no longer say that the genome is more receptive to unguided variants than a computer program because the genome does not yet exist. There is nothing to naturally select either- so all the functions with the cell must come from an undirected fitness landscape and material changes.
Obviously when you are dealing with the origin of the genome itself- you run into the biggest gulf of improbability and unguided organization that needs to be bridged. Why should complexity increase? And more importantly what are the odds that it will in a specified and functional way? How this can be explained without intelligent guidance is the fundamental lacuna- and the same one we face when extrapolating the efficiency of the unguided Darwinian mechanism to all of the novel body plans presupposed in the tree of life and required for that model to preserve continuity and remain rational.Frost122585
August 13, 2009
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Dave,
Your conjecture is a lame excuse for stasis, not a concise explanation for why we have morphological and molecular stasis for as far back as we find bacteria in the fossil record as well as in salt mines.
I laid out a brief outline of the "poly-constrained" reason for why we should expect extremely limited plasticity in a poly-functional genome, and this is ignored by you...Blind faith driving science once again! Far be it from me to argue with such a religious fanatic as yourself as you show yourself to be on this blog. Believe as you want I will waste my time no longer.bornagain77
August 13, 2009
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Mr Jerry,
As soon as one points outs how ridiculous it is, someone will pull out a couple more that will be better.
I think a lot of the good sites for fossil whales are in the middle of a war zone right now in Pakistan. We might have to wait a while before they find more examples to fill out the sequence. :(Nakashima
August 13, 2009
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Mr Wisker,
You'd also expect the bacteria that get trapped in salt deposits to be pertty specialised for living in high salt content water. That would be a niche that would punish change pretty harshly. I think a lot of extremophiles have strongly conserved genomes.
(Alternatively, the environment could also enforce a convergence on a few solutions to the salinity problem.)Nakashima
August 13, 2009
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Mr Vjtorley,
Thank you for your response.
With regard to the KF-san's point about the landscape, it is not that it is smooth, just that it have a continuously positive slope. Even this is not strictly true in real life. For example, a gene that was only slightly deleterious might persist in a population long enough to meet up with another gene, and in that new combination it is no longer deleterious but beneficial.
As you say, some changes must come quickly together to be useful. The devil is in the details of that kind of argument. Again details of population size, selection pressures and whether the population is sexual or asexual play a big role in whether these kind of changes are plausible or implausible. But even 1,000 changes in 100,000 years is quick on one scale, and a change every 100 years from another, more human, perspective.
I certainly feel priveleged that humans are here and centaurs are not! ;) I think the natural progression of the fine tuning/priveleged planet position is that the universe is set up so that life is easy to form, and Earth is set up so that life can easily evolve - to humans, if you agree with Simon Conway Morris. In this view, evolution is as inevitable a consequence of the laws of physics and chemistry as nuclear fusion, and both have been used to create a place for humanity to figure out their relation to God. Along the way, a lot of neutrinos got formed, a lot of beetle species got formed, but it is all for our benefit.
However, if the number of required anatomical, physiological and biochemical changes is several orders of magnitude higher (say, 10^6 times higher) than 5 billion, then we must suppose that on average, a single base pair change resulted in a very large number of different effects (say 10^6, or one million) at the anatomical, physiological and biochemical levels – instead of just one change or a few changes, as we might expect.
Your previous post was pretty well grounded in numbers (round numbers, yes, I agree) most people would agree with, but here you've speculated beyond that. The genetic continuity between us and bacteria is strong. The common use of HOX genes and developmental regulators like FOXP2 across animals is the same argument at a different level of organization. We only have a few hundred cell types in our bodies. Your agrument would require genes that have thousands of simulataneous different effects to every cell type. I've never heard of even one such superpowerful gene being found, much less an argument that all genes are that powerful. I think you should retire this speculation as not supported by the facts.
Thank you for such a rich and on-topic conversation!Nakashima
August 13, 2009
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born,
if the bacterial population on the surface keeps getting continually infused by ancient bacteria, and has been for millions of years, what exactly are 'modern' bacteria? The logical answer is, there is no 'modern' bacteria that is a descendant of a long evolutionary lineage. And how different should we expect those on the surface now as compared to those found in the most ancient deposits? Considering that the ancient strains are continually infusing the surface, and have been doing so for millions of years, "not much".Dave Wisker
August 13, 2009
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Dave,
For whatever reason there is zero change in 250 million years,,,yet you have danced around this glaring deficit as if you have somehow defended the farce called evolutionary science. Yet there is much more evidence than just the ancient bacteria to give us good reason to believe Genomes have very limited plasticity:
To put it plainly, the finding of a severely poly-functional/polyconstrained genome by the ENCODE study has put the odds, of what was already astronomically impossible, to what can only be termed fantastically astronomically impossible. To illustrate the monumental brick wall any evolutionary scenario (no matter what "fitness landscape") must face when I say genomes are poly-constrained to random mutations by poly-functionality, I will use a puzzle:
If we were to actually get a proper “beneficial mutation’ in a polyfunctional genome of say 500 interdependent genes, then instead of the infamous “Methinks it is like a weasel” single element of functional information that Darwinists pretend they are facing in any evolutionary search, with their falsified genetic reductionism scenario I might add, we would actually be encountering something more akin to this illustration found on page 141 of Genetic Entropy by Dr. Sanford.
S A T O R
A R E P O
T E N E T
O P E R A
R O T A S
Which is translated ;
THE SOWER NAMED AREPO HOLDS THE WORKING OF THE WHEELS.
This ancient puzzle, which dates back to 79 AD, reads the same four different ways, Thus, If we change (mutate) any letter we may get a new meaning for a single reading read any one way, as in Dawkins weasel program, but we will consistently destroy the other 3 readings of the message with the new mutation.
This is what is meant when it is said a poly-functional genome is poly-constrained to any random mutations.
The puzzle I listed is only poly-functional to 4 elements/25 letters of interdependent complexity, the minimum genome is poly-constrained to approximately 500 elements (genes) at minimum approximation of polyfunctionality. For Darwinist to continue to believe in random mutations to generate the staggering level of complexity we find in life is absurd in the highest order!bornagain77
August 13, 2009
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Hi borne,
Re: ancient bacteria being very similar to modern bacteria. A question to consider is this: if we can revive ancient bacteria, recovered from old salt deposits, then the process of erosion could also be continually releasing older bacterial strains onto the surface of the earth, could it not? What about the actions of man? Think how much mined salt is deposited on roads every winter. Both proceses could significantly (and continually) reintroduce ancient bacteria onto the surface. Both of these sources makes me wonder if we should expect modern bacteria to be as radically different from ancient bacteria as we might think.Dave Wisker
August 13, 2009
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KF:
1 - I'm dyslexic so I frown on it being used as an excuse for poor communication.
2 - I've virtually completed a PhD in computer science so I know what debugging is.
3 - My understanding of genetics is that whilst some genetic change can bring you close to catastrophic failure, others introduce changes in morphology, some subtle, some sudden. This (the evidence) suggests continental patterns of functionality. Genes and development are very robust to perturbation and very unlike some computer systems.
4 - Your cut and paste does not aptly describe biological systems, it describes computational systems. At best it is weakly analogous to biological systems but not nearly strong enough to make the inferences that you like to make. You need to show that biology is as brittle as these other systems before you can make claims about the topology of function landscapes.BillB
August 13, 2009
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In the second last sentence of my preceding post (#28), "our appearance of Earth" should read "our appearance on Earth." Sorry.vjtorley
August 13, 2009
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Mr Nakashima,
Thank you for your post. I take your point about population size; however, in my example, I was simply counting the number of beneficial mutations that would have occurred along one particular lineage from a primordial proto-cell to a particular human being.
It seems that our intuitions clash, regarding the possibility of getting from a proto-cell to a human being in 5 billion steps. You make a very good point when you remark that "5 billion beneficial mutations is larger than the size of the entire human genome, and certainly larger than the number of differences between our genome and E. coli’s genome" - although as kairosfocus astutely observed, you need to assume the existence of an improbably smooth fitness landscape, which allows the original bacterial proto-cell to transform itself into a human being in incremental steps.
I suppose that an evolutionist might reply that although the fitness landscape is very nice from a human perspective, it is not so nice from the viewpoint of a hypothetical centaur, as there is no smooth series of incremental changes leading from proto-cells to centaurs. (If there were, presumably centaurs would have appeared at some time in the past.) An evolutionist might then argue that there are probably zillions of hypothetical intelligent life-forms which have never come into existence because they could never have evolved in a stepwise fashion from a primordial proto-cell - we humans being one of the very few intelligent life forms that were somehow able to do so. Still, to suppose that even one intelligent life-form could evolve in a step-wise fashion from a proto-cell is a very big "if" indeed. (Putting it another way: why isn't Earth one of those unfortunate planets where evolution never got beyond the stromatolite stage?)
Even if we grant your "if," I would argue that 5 billion steps from "goo to you" will suffice only if we the universe we happen to live in is a very nice, "evolution-friendly" universe, where the laws of nature are rigged in humanity's favor.
Here's why. From an engineering perspective, when you are transforming one kind of organism into another (say, a forest-dwelling four-footed animal into a whale), you have to make a large number of more or less parallel changes to the body's internal organs and also to the systems needed to maintain life. (I use the term "more or less parallel" because I'm not trying to argue that all these changes would have to be perfectly synchronized. Still, they'd have to be fairly well-synchronized.) Not being a biologist, I have no idea how many system changes you'd need, and I wouldn't even know where to look for information like that, but I'd guess that maybe 10^2 or 10^3 different kinds of more or less parallel structural and physiological changes would have needed to occur in the ancestor of the whale, for instance, judging from what Berlinski said in his video on whale evolution.
At the anatomical, physiological and/or biochemical level, the notion that just a few billion changes should suffice to transform a bacterial proto-cell into Homo sapiens strikes me as unlikely. There are so many different structures and systems that would need to be created and made to work in harmony with other systems, that the number of transformations over 4.5 billion years would surely be orders of magnitude higher than 5 billion.
Now, you might reply that evolution takes place at the level of the gene, not at the level of the anatomical organ or biochemical system. And you would be right. If you're thinking purely in terms of base pair changes, a few billion alterations should certainly be enough to get us from a proto-cell to a human being.
However, if the number of required anatomical, physiological and biochemical changes is several orders of magnitude higher (say, 10^6 times higher) than 5 billion, then we must suppose that on average, a single base pair change resulted in a very large number of different effects (say 10^6, or one million) at the anatomical, physiological and biochemical levels - instead of just one change or a few changes, as we might expect. Now, if that has been happening throughout the entire history of life, then the laws of nature which are responsible for our appearance of Earth must indeed be rigged in our favor. Evolution itself becomes a miracle; the universe must be "fine-tuned" for it to happen.vjtorley
August 13, 2009
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Ah, BillB:
I assume you have seen my response in the other thread. Pardon, again, my accidental use of the same abbreviation with two distinct meanings. [Us dyslexics tend to use abbreviations heavily . . . ]
Now, on topic: it is rather convenient to dismiss a key characteristic of program-type digital strings ( = language-coded algorithms plus associated data structures) isn't it: namely, as a rule they are quite vulnerable to perturbation i.e they come in islands of function in which some degree of error detection and correction can save function, but move much away and the function vanishes.
Indeed, so much so, that no serious program is ever right the first time, as the programmers know all too well to their cost.
That's why there has been a migration from machine code [very efficient, if you can get it to work; which is hard as it is so counter-intuitive . . . as well I recall: FCBC 12FD . . . moving up to hex code (which is a simplification from bit code!) ] to assembly then higher level languages, only to see bugs following along. And, so, there is a whole field of praxis called debugging. Wiki, as just linked, begins:
Debugging is a methodical process of finding and reducing the number of bugs, or defects, in a computer program or a piece of electronic hardware thus making it behave as expected. Debugging tends to be harder when various subsystems are tightly coupled, as changes in one may cause bugs to emerge in another.
Tightly coupled?
Well, that aptly describes the step by step processes not only in the cell but in the process of embryonic development. And in turn that means -- starting from first life -- we have to credibly get to the irreducibly complex networks of interacting systems that are deeply embedded at many levels in body plans.
And so, islands of function are a very natural expectation and observation: how many genes gone bad does it take to get a fatal defect, starting with the very well founded fear of cancer due to radiation damage?
GEM of TKI
PS: This ARN page on an interview with Schutzemnberger on functional complexity -- looks like this pushes my FSCI timeline back to Wistar 1966 -- makes interesting related reading. Have fun.kairosfocus
August 13, 2009
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kairosfocus (22),
"Think about noise and the rather precise statements in programs, thus what would happen by overwhelming probability if random bits in programs were to cumulatively vary.]"
This is one of those areas where the software analogy breaks down. The genome isn't precise, and we know that random mutations do crop up that don't change the function of the organism at all. Try that with a single bit of a computer program and you're likely to crash.
The comparison of biology with engineering and/ or software is interesting as an analogy, but like all analogies it breaks down.Gaz
August 13, 2009
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Do genomes have the plasticity needed? NO!
there are many ancient bacterium recovered and "revived" from salt crystals and amber crystals which have been compared to their living descendants of today. Some bacterium spores, in salt crystals, dating back as far as 250 million years have been revived, had their DNA sequenced, and compared to their offspring of today (Vreeland RH, 2000 Nature). To the disbelieving shock of many scientists, both ancient and modern bacteria were found to have the almost same exact DNA sequence.
The Paradox of the "Ancient" Bacterium Which Contains "Modern" Protein-Coding Genes:
“Almost without exception, bacteria isolated from ancient material have proven to closely resemble modern bacteria at both morphological and molecular levels.”
Heather Maughan*, C. William Birky Jr., Wayne L. Nicholson, William D. Rosenzweig§ and Russell H. Vreeland ;
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/19/9/1637
and this:
Revival and identification of bacterial spores in 25- to 40-million-year-old Dominican amber
Dr. Cano and his former graduate student Dr. Monica K. Borucki said that they had found slight but significant differences between the DNA of the ancient, 25-40 million year old amber-sealed Bacillus sphaericus and that of its modern counterpart, (thus ruling out that it is a modern contaminant, yet at the same time confounding materialists, since the change is not nearly as great as evolution's "genetic drift" theory requires.)
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/268/5213/1060
30-Million-Year Sleep: Germ Is Declared Alive
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CEFD61439F93AA25756C0A963958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2
In reply to a personal e-mail from myself, Dr. Cano commented on the "Fitness Test" I had asked him about:
Dr. Cano stated: "We performed such a test, a long time ago, using a panel of substrates (the old gram positive biolog panel) on B. sphaericus. From the results we surmised that the putative "ancient" B. sphaericus isolate was capable of utilizing a broader scope of substrates. Additionally, we looked at the fatty acid profile and here, again, the profiles were similar but more diverse in the amber isolate.":
Fitness test which compared the 30 million year old ancient bacteria to its modern day descendants, RJ Cano and MK Borucki
Thus, the most solid evidence available for the most ancient DNA scientists are able to find does not support evolution happening on the molecular level of bacteria. In fact, according to the fitness test of Dr. Cano, the change witnessed in bacteria conforms to the exact opposite, Genetic Entropy; a loss of functional information/complexity, since fewer substrates and fatty acids are utilized by the modern strains. Considering the intricate level of protein machinery it takes to utilize individual molecules within a substrate, we are talking an impressive loss of protein complexity, and thus loss of functional information, from the ancient amber sealed bacteria.
a small calculation for the Chimp/Human scenario, using reasonable estimates for detrimental mutation rates, yields:
Man has over 3 billion base pairs of DNA code. Even if it were true that body plans were encoded directly by the DNA code and that there was only 1% difference between the DNA of chimps and humans, that would still be 30 million base pairs of DNA difference. It is easily shown, mathematically, for it to be fantastically impossible for evolution to ever occur between monkeys and man, or monkeys and anything else for that matter. Since, it is now a clearly established fact at least 999,999 in 1,000,000 of any mutations to the DNA code will be slightly detrimental, harmful and/or fatal for the organism, then it is also an obvious fact there is at least a 999,999^30,000,000 to 1 chance that any monkey will fail to reach man by evolutionary processes. The monkey will hit a dead end of slightly detrimental, harmful and/or fatal mutations which will kill him, or slowly mutilate him before killing him. The poor monkey barely even gets out of the hypothetical evolutionary starting gate before he is crushed by blind chance. This would still be true even if the entire universe were populated with nothing but monkeys to begin with. This number (999,999^30,000,000 to 1), is fantastically impossible for any hypothetical beneficial mutation to ever overcome.
Some materialists say symbiotic gene transfer, cross-breeding (yes, believe it or not, some materialists have even suggested cross-breeding with monkeys as a solution to the 'information problem'), gene duplication and multiplication of chromosomes, alternative splicing etc .. etc .. are the reasons for the changes in DNA between humans and apes. Materialists postulate numerous unfounded hypothesis with the utmost confidence without ever a rigid basis in science to support them, and then many times, they will then relentlessly ridicule anyone as an ignoramus who dares question their unfounded mechanisms. Incredibly all this obfuscation and ridicule is done in spite of many solid evidences to the contrary for the consistent detrimental nature of mutations. Indeed, even if a truly beneficial random mutation/variation event to the DNA ever did occur it would be of absolutely no use for the mutation would be swallowed in the vast ocean of slightly detrimental mutations which are far below the culling power of natural selection to remove from a genome.
Contamination of the genome by very slightly deleterious mutations: why have we not died 100 times over? Kondrashov A.S.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ap/jt/1995/00000175/00000004/art00167
The Frailty of the Darwinian Hypothesis
"The net effect of genetic drift in such (vertebrate) populations is “to encourage the fixation of mildly deleterious mutations and discourage the promotion of beneficial mutations,”
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/07/the_frailty_of_the_darwinian_h.html#more
High genomic deleterious mutation rates in hominids
Excerpt: Furthermore, the level of selective constraint in hominid protein-coding sequences is atypically (unusually) low. A large number of slightly deleterious mutations may therefore have become fixed in hominid lineages.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v397/n6717/abs/397344a0.html
etc...etc...etc...bornagain77
August 13, 2009
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KF-san,
Yes, but that was Mr vjtorley's assumption, that you could string together 5 billion beneficial mutations cumulatively. Nilsson and Pelger make the same assumption in their work.
I think that common descent - the fossil and genetic evidence - does argue for what you have termed continental patterns of functionality.Nakashima
August 13, 2009
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KF:
Why do you assume that a fitness landscape that makes evolution along certain trajectories possible must be implausible?
Applying 'noise' to a computer program is very different than allowing a genome to vary. You need to demonstrate why your argument from analogy is valid in this context. Does the analogy still work when discussing languages like Lisp?
what would happen by overwhelming probability if random bits in programs were to cumulatively vary.
Without any selection the program would stop doing what it was written to do and end up doing something else. With selection, well if the noise were applied within a framework like GP, then the program would also change but now that change would be, on average, positive with respect to some measure of function.BillB
August 13, 2009
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"Their ancestor was a Picses!"
That explains why we take showers.jerry
August 13, 2009
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Nakashima-san:
The big problem is that his would require a continental pattern of functionality, i.e spanning the configuration space with a rather implausible fitness landscape. Think about noise and the rather precise statements in programs, thus what would happen by overwhelming probability if random bits in programs were to cumulatively vary.]
GEM of TKIkairosfocus
August 13, 2009
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Mr Jerry,
There must be a water gene somewhere in both the hippo and the whale.
Their ancestor was a Picses! ;)Nakashima
August 13, 2009
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Mr vjtorley,
Thank you for the quick calculation. I would make two points.
1 - population size in general would have a great effect on the number of changes explored per time step
2 - 5 billion beneficial mutations is larger than the size of the entire human genome, and certainly larger than the number of differences between our genome and E. coli's genome. That says to me that ther are plenty of resources for the Darwinian mechanism to work.
You could alternaively work backwards from the human genome of 3 billion bases, say a beneficial mutation was necessary to create every one of them (assuming there is no junk DNA) and ask at what rate must beneficial mutations occur. 4.5 billion years / 3 billion required beneficial mutations = 1.5 years per beneficial mutation. Can an ocean full of proto E. coli come up with one beneficial mutation every year and a half, dividing every hour or every day? I would take those odds!
I realize all these calculations are crude, but this does show that Deep Time is Darwin's friend.Nakashima
August 13, 2009
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Lamarck
You wrote:
Maybe I’m just not looking, but I’d like to see some math go into how many mutations are needed to go from the first step beyond abiogenesis to humans. And contrast this to the known time frame per the fossil record. Is not enough data known about mutations to do this?
Let me state at the outset that I'm not a biologist or even a scientist, but I'll have a go anyway. Here's the formula I'll use:
Number of changes
(i.e. "mutations" or other events)
=
Number of generations leading up to you
x
average number of events per nucleotide per generation
x
average number of nucleotides in the organisms that were your ancestor.
(Yes, I'm aware that there are many kinds of changes in organisms - Professor Allen NacNeill has catalogued 47. I'm using the word "mutation" as a cover-all term.)
Next, I'll make the following simplifying assumptions:
1. Life has been around for 4.5 billion years.
2. For the first 4 billion years, the average generation time of the super-successful lineage leading up to you was equivalent to that of modern bacteria, during the exponential phase of their growth - i.e the phase during which bacterial cells grow most rapidly. According to Teresa Tiel, of the Department of Biology, University of Missouri, St. Louis, the fastest growing bacteria have generation times of 15-20 minutes under optimum growing conditions (see http://www.umsl.edu/~microbes/pdf/introductiontobacteria.pdf ).
3. For the last 500 million years, the average generation time was the same as that of fish or frogs (say, one year), but the mutation rate per generation was the same as for modern humans (I'm being generous here).
4. Because your ancestors were such a smart, reproductively successful bunch compared with the other lineages, most of whom fell by the wayside, let's say that during the first 4 billion years, their mutation rate was 1,000 times the normal rate.
Now, according to Professor Lawrence Moran (Department of Biochemistry, University of Toronto), the average mutation rate for bacteria, worms, mice and humans alike is about 10^-10 per nucleotide per replication. E. coli bacteria have 4.2 × 10^6 base pairs. "Every time a bacterium divides this amount of DNA has to be replicated; that’s 8,400,000 nucleotides (8.4 × 10^6)"
( http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2007/07/mutation-rates.html ). Let's say 10^7 for round figures. If the mutation rate in your unicellular ancestors was 1,000 times the normal rate, then that's 10^3 X 10^-10, or 10^-7 per nucleotide per generation. Thus we can expect one mutation per generation.
Now, if one generation equals 15 minutes (one quarter of an hour), then the number of generations from the first organism up to 500 million years ago was (4 x 10^9) years x 365 days/year x 24 hours/day x 4 quarters/hour = approx. 1.4 x 10^14. Since there's one mutation per generation on our optimistic assumptions, that's 1.4 x 10^14 mutations up to the first fish, 500 million years ago, on a very, very generous estimate. Let's be extremely generous and assume that all of these mutations were beneficial, and not neutral or deleterious. Then we have 1.4 x 10^14 beneficial mutations.
Now for the mutation rate in the line leading from the first ancestral fish (500 million years ago) up to modern humans. Professor Larry Moran quotes Douglas Futuyma (2005) as saying that "Each of us was born with at least 350 new mutations that make our DNA different from that of our parents." Let's say 1,000 for the sake of generosity. Although the human generation time is about 25 years, let's very generously assume the same number of mutations per generation in each generation leading from the ancestral fish 500 million years ago up to you, and let's also assume a mean generation length of just one year, as fish reproduce faster than humans do. That's 500 million x 1,000 mutations per generation, or 5 x 10^11, which is negligible when compared to 1.4 x 10^14, so the total number of steps could not be more than 1.4 x 10^14.
More realistically, E. coli usually divide about once every 24 hours (100 times slower than the rate I postulated), and probably the mutation rate was 10, rather than 1,000 times higher than the general background rate for the lineage leading up to you. Also, let's say that only 1% of mutations are beneficial. Then that brings us down by a factor of 10^2 x (10^3 / 10) x 100, or 10^6. Thus the number of beneficial changes up to the first fish might have been only 1.4 x 10^8.
If only 1% of mutations are beneficial, then the number of beneficial mutations from ancestral fish to you could be no more than (5 x 10^11) / 10^2, or 5 * 10^9, which interestingly is higher than the more realistic figure of 1.4 x 10^8 for the number of mutations up to the first fish.
The interesting result of all this is that we don't know whether more mutations were required to get us from primordial cell to fish or from fish to human. But realistically, the number of transformations (or changes) from the first cell to you is likely to have been no more than about 5 billion.
Is that enough for Darwin's mechanisms to do their work? Personally, I doubt it.vjtorley
August 13, 2009
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As well, This scenario of cloven hoofed animals evolving to whales clearly highlights the alchemical methodology Darwinists have always used in trying to make their case, for we have no evidence from foundational molecular biology or foundational physics that anything like this can happen in 50 million years, or can even happen in the entire age of the universe for that matter:
The malaria parasite, due to its comparatively enormous population size, has in 1 year more mutation/duplication/selection events than all mammal lineages have had in the entire +100 million years they have been in the fossil record. Moreover, since single cell organisms and viruses replicate, and mutate/duplicate, far more quickly than multi-cellular life-forms can, scientists can do experiments on single celled organisms and viruses to see what we can actually expect to happen over millions of years for mammals with far smaller population sizes.
Malaria and AIDS are among the largest real world tests that can be performed to see if evolutionary presumptions are true.
"Indeed, the work on malaria and AIDS demonstrates that after all possible unintelligent processes in the cell--both ones we've discovered so far and ones we haven't--at best extremely limited benefit, since no such process was able to do much of anything. It's critical to notice that no artificial limitations were placed on the kinds of mutations or processes the microorganisms could undergo in nature. Nothing--neither point mutation, deletion, insertion, gene duplication, transposition, genome duplication, self-organization nor any other process yet undiscovered--was of much use." Michael Behe, The Edge of Evolution, pg. 162 Swine Flu, Viruses, and the Edge of Evolution
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/05/swine_flu_viruses_and_the_edge.html
A review of The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism by Michael J. Behe
The numbers of Plasmodium and HIV in the last 50 years greatly exceeds the total number of mammals since their supposed evolutionary origin (several hundred million years ago), yet little has been achieved by evolution. This suggests that mammals could have "invented" little in their time frame. Behe: ‘Our experience with HIV gives good reason to think that Darwinism doesn’t do much—even with billions of years and all the cells in that world at its disposal’ (p. 155).
http://creation.com/review-michael-behe-edge-of-evolution
Thermodynamic Argument Against Evolution - Thomas Kindell - video
Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI1RiTOQ4do
Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgzWMccWOe8
Part 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQBjguaBueE
Romans 8:18-21
I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.bornagain77
August 13, 2009
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Lamark,
Here are a few quotes from Gould on the stasis of the fossil record that I think you were referring to:
The long-term stasis, following a geologically abrupt origin, of most fossil morphospecies, has always been recognized by professional paleontologists –Gould
The fossil record may, after all, be 99 percent imperfect, but if you can, nonetheless, sample a species at a large number of horizons well spread over several million years, and if these samples record no net change, with beginning and end points substantially the same, and with only mild and errant fluctuation among the numerous collections in between, then a conclusion of stasis rests on the *presence* of data, not on absence! — Gould
http://www.blavatsky.net/newsletters/fossil_record.htm
Whales Blowing Bubble Rings
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXqjMvGcrns
Here is an old UD post on the subject from someone whose handle escapes me right now:
The hypothetical example of the evolution of whales supposedly took place over approximately the last 50 million years. In about 50 million years a hippopotamus-like animal supposedly transformed into creatures incredibly well adapted to life in the sea such as dolphins and whales. The body systems of these creatures have marvelously engineered sonar systems, adaptations for deep diving, fast swimming, underwater birth, etc. etc. These systems would require scores of books to describe the engineering designs in the exhaustive detail required, and more scores of books to describe the growth development schemes for these systems. In the dolphin evolution example, the biological sonar system is just one of many different systems that had to be elaborated simultaneously by selection from random variation. These are just some of them, for just the sonar system: - Sound signal emitter to produce an optimal very short broadband pulse - Hearing mechanism, middle ear, cochlea, adaptations for aquatic life - Hearing perception acuity and frequency coverage matching echoes received from produced sounds - Computation of distance and direction from echo delay and phase characteristics - Neural pattern recognition and processing including ability to extract features and classify the extracted features from modulations and amplitude of returned echoes - Feedback processes to optimize the emitted signal and the return reception process for particular types of targets and distances. - Time variable receiver gain to greatly reduce hearing sensitivity during signal emission - Emitter power gain control to reduce power as range decreases - Emitted 'click' rate control to increase rate as range shortens - Accompanying behavioral modifications to accommodate this in hunting, reproduction, etc. At the same time the same sort of processes had to be going on in a coordinated way to develop the other amazing features like underwater birth, deep diving adaptations, food gathering structures and behavioral strategies, etc. etc. The genetic coding for just one of these organic machinelike systems must contain at least the sort of amount of information as a design manual for a Boeing 747. The real problem of the entire animal is orders of magnitude greater, where an analogy would be trying to convert and modify an M1 battle tank into a submarine. The multitude of separate coding elements required by the organism to build and operate each evolving organ system must have changed in a coordinated parallel fashion with the others, where the phenotypical reproductive advantage of any one genetic change is partly a function of vast numbers of other genetic coding elements that are themselves changing at different rates. Any single gene modification would often require another or multiple particular different genetic modifications to happen simultaneously for there to be an adaptive advantage in the right direction, or even to avoid death. To put it mildly, The numbers just don't work for this as a Random Variation + Natural Selection process. Romans 1:20 For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, 'even' his everlasting power and divinity; that they may be without excuse:bornagain77
August 13, 2009
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Dawkins should be in comedy.
He's good at telling fanciful stories but terrible at anything close to thinking clearly.Borne