Yesterday, PaV drew our attention to this story from Marlowe Hood at Phys.org:
Sweeping gene survey reveals new facets of evolution
Here’s another swatch from it, of interest:
“another unexpected finding from the study—species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there’s nothing much in between.
“If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies,” said Thaler. “They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space.” The absence of “in-between” species is something that also perplexed Darwin, he said.”
More.
If this replicates, it will do for textbook Darwinism what the Cambrian explosion did.
See also: Startling Result–90% of Animals Less than 200 kya
and
Researchers: Cambrian explosion was not an explosion after all (It was just an intense detonation of complex new life… )
The preceding study, in over the top fashion, also confirms what Michael Denton had found over 30 years ago in his book “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis”. Specifically Michael Denton found that, “However, the most striking feature of the matrix is that every identifiable subclass is isolated and distinct. Every sequence can be unambiguously assigned to a particular subclass. No sequence or group of sequences can be designated as intermediate with respect to other groups. All the sequences of each subclass are equally isolated from the members of another group. Transitional or intermediate classes are completely absent from the matrix. 4”
Something else that is found to cluster by species are alternative splicing patterns.
Moreover, Alternative splicing can produce variant proteins and expression patterns as different as the products of different genes.
Alternative Splicing patterns (and overlapping genetic codes in general) cannot be explained by the Darwinian mechanism of Random Mutation and Natural Selection:
It’s hard to think of a result more in keeping with “textbook Darwinism” than the idea that species form distinct clusters without intermediates… it’s from Chapter 4 of The Origin..
Modern evolutionary biology doesn’t need selection to render divergent species distinct, but the idea is still very mainstream.
as to: “It’s hard to think of a result more in keeping with “textbook Darwinism” than the idea that species form distinct clusters without intermediates.”
Really?
So Darwin did not predict intermediates?
Besides this study in genetics, missing intermediates is practically a defining characteristic of the entire fossil record:
Moreover, this top down pattern in the fossil record, which is the complete opposite pattern as Darwin predicted for the fossil record, is not only found in the Cambrian Explosion, but this ‘top down’, disparity preceding diversity, pattern is found throughout the fossil record subsequent to the Cambrian explosion as well.
Folks, islands of configuration based functionally specific organisation at molecular level, and that in s-t-r-i-n-g structures. This underscores the challenge to bridge said islands and undermines continent of function or stepping stones claims. Remember, a sol system wide chance and necessity based blind needle in haystack search cannot plausibly create even 500 bits worth of fresh functionally specific complex organisation and associated information (FSCO/I). Contrary to the suggestion at 2, this utterly undermines gradualistic narratives that try to account for the tree of life on blind darwinist mechanisms. A short step in Hamming distance space is much more plausible pwe blind search than a large jump, where configuration based function is to be preserved. The presence of large leaps as this result implies points strongly to intelligently directed configuration, design. KF
PS: Recall, we don’t just have mitochondrial evidence but evidence of islands in AA sequence space, including that there are a lot of protein clusters that have few members and mark significant jumps between seemingly close neighbour species.
Ambly:
What modern evolutionary biology needs, though, are intermediate forms in the fossil record. And they are not to be found.
Origin of Species, Chapter 6:
Show me the intermediates, and I will change my mind about Darwinistic evolution.
There are loads of transitionals. Archeopteryx, Tiktaalik, all those whales…
as to: “There are loads of transitionals. Archeopteryx, Tiktaalik, all those whales…”
Like all the other supposed evidence for evolution, the only place these fossils are transitional is in your imagination.
Ambly:
I’m afraid if you believe this, you’ll believe anything.
Darwin, of course, because of his gradualism, thought that the fossil record, in length and complexity, ‘before’ the Cambrian would be much like what we see ‘since’ the Cambrian.
Darwin was wrong about that, too.
If Darwin had been right about that, I would also have changed my perspective.
I mean… I’ve only been here a little while and I can say with some confidence that you wouldn’t have.
The overall fossil record, despite the concerted effort of Darwinists to squeeze imaginary, even fraudulent, transitional fossils into it wherever they can, simply does not match up with Darwinian presuppositions:
Moreover, as far as empirical evidence itself is concerned, the reductive materialistic framework that undergirds Darwinian evolution is now, empirically, found to be grossly inadequate for explaining how any particular organism might achieve its basic form. Moreover, to state what should be glaringly obvious, since neo-Darwinian explanations are grossly inadequate in their attempts at explaining how any particular organism might achieve its basic form, then the imaginary neo-Darwinian speculations (just so stories) for how one type of organism might transform into another type of organism are based on pure fantasy and have no discernible experimental basis in reality.
i.e. Darwinism, since it is basically impervious to any empirical falsification no matter how devastating that falsification is, is not a science
BA77, to your point…and more recently…
Evolutionary biologist Eugene Koonin:
“Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity. …. The cases in point include the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of viruses; archaea and bacteria, and the principal lineages within each of these prokaryotic domains; eukaryotic supergroups; and animal phyla. In each of these pivotal nexuses in life’s history, the principal “types” seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate “grades” or intermediate forms between different types are detectable.”
That’s just about everything.
Gradualism is nowhere to be found.
Why is it that atheists and evolutionists don’t link to YouTube videos, fringe conspiracy web sites, popular press books and Christian web sites to highlight our points? Are we missing a large source of science discourse?
AK, Like this heavily referenced to the primary literature “fringe” Creationist site?
Might I suggest that anyone who believes that the ‘beyond belief’ human brain can be an accident is not playing with a full deck? Or is that just too much sanity for you to handle at one time AK?
Allan Keith @ 14 – we do use YouTube videos too.
Allan Keith:
Because lying, bluffing and misrepresenting are much easier.
You don’t care about science.
Those are alleged transitionals. And for whales there are thousands that are missing.
No one knows if any amount of genetic change can take a population of swimming fish and produce Tiktaalik. And no one knows if any amount of genetic change can take Tiktaalik and produce tetrapods.
Allan Keith:
I’m still waiting for you to tell us what law of physics would be violated by an object in orbit having its orbit reversed.
Feel free to google any source you like.
Mung,
We weren’t talking about any old object. We were talking about the moon. And for the moon to reverse its orbit would require massive amounts of energy or a violation of these two laws:
The law of gravitational attraction.
The law of inertia/motion.
To suddenly reverse orbit would tear the moon apart. To slowly change the orbit would result in it crashing into the earth. The only alternative would be for some beings to expend massive amounts of energy to slowly reverse the orbit while keeping the law of gravity from pulling the moon to earth. Remember what the original discussion was about. I said that I would have no problem inferring god should I wake up tomorrow and the moon had reversed its orbit. My inference could still be wrong, as the inference to design in biology is, but I would require other evidence (e.g., massive energy signature or the presence of aliens) to discard the inference to god.
It is almost as if today’s “species” are descended from a smaller number of discrete “kinds”.
Allan Keith:
The inference to design in biology is strongly supported by the evidence and the methodology to differentiate between what nature, operating freely, produce vs. what it takes intelligent agencies to produce. In other words the inference to design in biology is strongly supported by our knowledge of cause and effect relationships.
And to date there aren’t any other testable alternatives to the design inference in biology.
It is almost as if there were a (relatively recent) global catastrophe, like a flood, that acted as a genetic bottleneck.
AmblyRhyncus (or is it Blunt-Nose, as in a reference to Darwin?):
You seem to know a lot—even what’s going on in my mind.
FYI, I have a degree in Zoology/Biology. I accepted Darwin’s theory for a long time. Then two things happened: I read parts of Origin of Species, specifically the chapter on “Difficulties on the Theory” and realized that all that Darwin expected would one day be found in the fossil record had, in fact never been found. Then I read Michael Denton’s book, “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis.” That, as you know, is a devastating critique of the theory.
So, you are wrong. I would change my mind.
And, let me go further: if we had found the “Silurian” (Darwin’s term for the period before the Cambrian) to be similar in many respects to what is documented “post-Cambrian”, I don’t think UncommonDescent would even exist today. The ID argument would be almost moot in the face of this evidence.
But, of course, that’s not what we see. That’s not what has been found.
So, I suspect it’s only because you don’t have good answers to what I’m pointing out as defects in Darwin’s theory—per Darwin!
Allan Keith:
If it only applies to the moon then it’s not a law of physics. Laws of physics are general. So you made up a bogus test.
Mung,
Nonsense. I was asked what it would take for me to infer god from something I observed. I said that the moon suddenly reversing its orbit would probably do it. Something, surely, that is not beyond god’s capabilities.