Further to Oops. Be careful when you say “I trust scientists” …

_{Denyse O'Leary

February 27, 2015

Culture, Darwinism, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, News}

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(Someone might hear you), where I’d (O’Leary for News) written:

The interesting thing is that “vaccines, GMOs, gluten allergies, homeopathy, etc ” and “fracking” are science questions [where progressives don’t like the trend of the evidence] that have a bearing on public health and safety. “Evolution” (whatever the blowdrys think it means) generally doesn’t. Or when it does, the issues move well out of the blowdrys’ purview. For example, what if most antibiotic resistance is not Darwinian evolution (natural selection acting on random mutation) but horizontal gene transfer (HGT) among colonies of bacteria- as may well be the case? Chances are, the blowdrys have never heard of HGT. So again, why is anyone watching their shows?

So a commenter writes

In what way is HGT and its effects not evolution? It’s just another form of gene flow, which we’ve been studying for decades.

Yeah, sure. Reply:

[Commenter] at 3 presumably knows as well as anyone else that

1. Horizontal gene transfer (HGT), while validated in many cases, is NOT what the blowdrys mean by “evolution.” It also isn’t what Darwin or the Darwinians/neo-Darwinians mean by evolution (they mean natural selection acting on random mutations, with VERTICAL transmission – at least get the angle right, and we are sailing).

2. Whatever is or isn’t a mechanism of evolution is not at issue here. If it were, the blowdrys would not be asking Scott Walker. They wouldn’t likely understand, for one thing. No reasonable person would involve them. Their skills are limited to playing Gotcha! Flyover moron! Their followers’ skills are limited to applause.

3. The blowdrys have zero interest in science as such. If they did, they would be all over any number of “science-based” scams and the ongoing scandal of peer review, especially in medical science—where science matters most to the most people. Crickets? Anyone hear the crickets?

Again, people. Why was the navbar invented?

Don’t look for someone to free you. Free yourself. Then free others.

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Comments

"You’ve gone on abut this many times, but never defended these strange views." Wd400, the links provided by ba77 answers your question. "But the point is to see if you accept the mainstream evolutionary position on evolution or a religous objection to that." This statement is dishonest. #One can object to evolution on a purely scientific basis #a lot of non religious people object to evolution #a lot of religious people accept evolution Objections to evolution are based on common sense, critical thinking and logic, all of which one needs to suspend in order to believe such nonsense. Evolution is a filter with which to view our world and explain our place/purpose in it. If you feel it makes sense that is your prerogative but to claim that science supports this particular belief system is highly dishonest.humbled_{February 28, 2015
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You've gone on abut this many times, but never defended these strange views.
1. Horizontal gene transfer (HGT), while validated in many cases, is NOT what the blowdrys mean by “evolution.” It also isn’t what Darwin or the Darwinians/neo-Darwinians mean by evolution (they mean natural selection acting on random mutations, with VERTICAL transmission – at least get the angle right, and we are sailing).
In what way does HGT invalidate "natural selection acting on random mutations". When a gene get's into a new lineage it's frequency is still 1/population_size. It is unlikely to take over a population by drift, much more likely to if the variant has some selective advantage. Moreover, the gene also has a history before it's jumping from one lineage to another, which (almost certainly) involves random mutations and natural selection. ...
3. The blowdrys have zero interest in science as such. If they did, they would be all over any number of “science-based” scams and the ongoing scandal of peer review, especially in medical science—where science matters most to the most people. Crickets? Anyone hear the crickets?
This is more or less true -- in the US belief in evolution is a shibboleth in a culture war. But the point is to see if you accept the mainstream evolutionary position on evolution or a religous objection to that. That HGT is a source of variation is some lineages is the mainstream evolutionary position (in text books as Bob point's out), so I fail to see the relevance here.wd400_{February 27, 2015
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Claiming HGT is 'part of evolution' testifies much more to the unfalsifiable nature of Darwinism than it supports Darwinism: The following article goes through a bit of the history of how neo-Darwinists have come to use horizontal gene transfer to 'explain away' contradictory patterns in the genetic evidence;
Evolutionists Celebrated This Prediction But When it Later Failed They Didn’t Care - Cornelius Hunter - April 2012 Excerpt: Sometimes their use of this lateral or horizontal gene transfer mechanism is a real stretch. And in any case, their story calls for evolution to have created this incredible mechanism which then was so important for adaptation and the supposed subsequent evolution. In other words, evolution created evolution.,,, In some cases evolutionists have no idea, beyond pure speculation, about how it could have happened. As they admit in one paper: "An alternative and more plausible possibility is that the STC gene has been laterally transferred among phylogenetically diverged eukaryotes through an unknown mechanism." http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2012/04/evolutionists-celebrated-this.html An Enzyme’s Phylogeny Reveals a Striking Case of Convergent Evolution – Jonathan M. – February 11, 2013 Excerpt: The authors attempt to account for the incongruity by positing that “the STC gene has been laterally transferred among phylogenetically diverged eukaryotes through an unknown mechanism.” They thus attribute the shared genes to horizontal gene transfer (with no offered mechanism), a proposition that has become a catch-all to explain away severe conflicts between evolutionary phylogenies.,,, “phylogenetic conflict is common, and frequently the norm rather than the exception” (Dávalos et al., 2012). Is it possible that the real reason for such striking and widespread phylogenetic discordance is that evolutionary biologists are looking at biology through the wrong lens? Could the reason that there is so much difficulty in correlating organisms to a tree be that no such tree exists? http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/02/an_enzymes_phyl068911.html
Moreover, HGT is now found to be 'non-random':
Don’t Judge Too Quickly - Fazale Rana - September 2010 Excerpt: Researchers long thought that the insertion of transposable elements into the genome took place at random locations, but recent work, including the efforts of the UT Arlington scientists, indicate that transposon insertion events are repeatable. (Thus suggesting a underlying 'designed mechanism' for explaining why some sequences are inserted at specific locations). Many people regard shared DNA sequences as the best evidence for evolution and common descent. But, as this recent work from UT Arlington demonstrates (along with other studies), there are other mechanisms beside common ancestry that can introduce the same DNA sequences in organisms unrelated via common descent. These types of studies indicate that evolution’s best evidence may not support it at all. (Similar sequences may very well be a consequence of some other type of mechanism, like parasite-mediated Horizontal Gene Transfer, as well as the result of common design). http://www.reasons.org/dont-judge-too-quickly
Moreover, completely contrary to what Darwinists would have people believe, one method of HGT, the “horizontal” gene transferring bacteriophage virus, is far more complex than many people had ever anticipated, as these following videos clearly point out:
Virus - Assembly Of A Nano-Machine - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofd_lgEymto Bacteriophage T4 DNA Packing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNQQz0NGUNQ
Here is a short video of the Bacteriophage 'landing' on a bacterium:
Bacteriophage T4 - landing - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdz9VGH8dwY
The first thought I had when I first saw the bacteriophage virus is that it looks very similar to the lunar lander of the Apollo program. The comparison is not without merit considering some of the relative distances to be traveled and the virus must somehow possess, as of yet unelucidated, orientation, guidance, docking, unloading, loading, etc... mechanisms. And please remember this level of complexity exists in a world that is far too small to be seen with the naked eye. Moreover, for Darwinists to believe that evolution created such a sophisticated systems for sharing information is beyond ludicrous!
Learning from Bacteria about Social Networks - video Description: Bacteria do not store genetically all the information required to respond efficiently to all possible environmental conditions. Instead, to solve new encountered problems (challenges) posed by the environment, they first assess the problem via collective sensing, then recall stored information of past experience and finally execute distributed information processing of the 109-12 bacteria in the colony,,, I will show illuminating movies of swarming intelligence of live bacteria in which they solve optimization problems for collective decision making that are beyond what we, human beings, can solve with our most powerful computers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJpi8SnFXHs
Verse and Music:
Psalm 139:7-12 Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. Jason Gray "More Like Falling In Love" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rzOdXJu5UA
bornagain77_{February 27, 2015
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Mere evolution isn't being debated, Bob.Joe_{February 27, 2015
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I',m not sure what the point of this post is, or the relevance of navbars. But to get to the point I was making, evolution isn't just mutation and selection. At the mechanistic level, drift, migration, and recombination are all considered important in eukaryotes, and we've known of the relevance of HGT in bacteria for a long time. A claim that it's not part of evolution is simply wrong. It's even in the textbooks (e.g. John Maynard Smith's Evolutionary Genetics). Horizontal gene flow happens. We know that: we've got the empirical evidence. So we can't ignore it as an evolutionary mechanism. I guess you could say that we're happy to follow the evidence where it leads.Bob O'H_{February 27, 2015
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