Here’s their paper.
Abstract: Mutations drive evolution and were assumed to occur by chance: constantly, gradually, roughly uniformly in genomes, and without regard to environmental inputs, but this view is being revised by discoveries of molecular mechanisms of mutation in bacteria, now translated across the tree of life. These mechanisms reveal a picture of highly regulated mutagenesis, up-regulated temporally by stress responses and activated when cells/organisms are maladapted to their environments—when stressed—potentially accelerating adaptation. Mutation is also nonrandom in genomic space, with multiple simultaneous mutations falling in local clusters, which may allow concerted evolution—the multiple changes needed to adapt protein functions and protein machines encoded by linked genes. Molecular mechanisms of stress-inducible mutation change ideas about evolution and suggest different ways to model and address cancer development, infectious disease, and evolution generally. – Devon M. Fitzgerald, Susan M. Rosenberg, What is
mutation ? A chapter in the series: How microbes “jeopardize” the modern synthesis April 1, 2019https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1007995 (open access)More.
Dangerous talk.
Jonathan Bartlett of the Blyth Institute responds,
Interesting article, especially to note it as a challenge to the modern synthesis (though the actual details have been known for a while). The infographic showing how the different DNA polymerases mutate differently was really good.
What keeps on being left out is a discussion, quantitatively, of whether these mutations are targeted to potential future benefit. I can’t tell if that is being left out intentionally so as to quell the fears of the Darwinists, or if it is just un-studied, perhaps due to the lack of theoretical tools to do so.
Also extremely aggravating is the nonsense evolutionary gloss
given to these systems. “Therefore, mutation rates have, presumably, been finely tuned, apparently through second-order selection” and other such nonsense.Also endless appeals to how this isn’t really against the modern synthesis: – “Stress-induced mutation mechanisms, first discovered in bacteria, challenge historical assumptions about the constancy and uniformity of mutation but do not violate strict
interpre- tations of the Modern Synthesis. Mutation is still viewed as probabilistic, not deterministic, but we argue that regulated mutagenesis mechanisms greatly increase the probability that the useful mutations will occur at the right time, thus increasing an organism’s ability to evolve and, possibly, in the right places. Assumptions about the constant, gradual, clock-like, and environmentally blind nature of mutation are ready for retirement”.Note how the fact that mutations are no longer considered “environmentally blind” was thrown in at the end, almost as if they were hoping that reviewers didn’t catch it.
Okay, but at least they still have jobs and can work.
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See also: Researchers: Microorganisms can make evolution work faster for their hosts
and
“Fairly Sophisticated” Bacterial Communications Pose Stark Question Re Evolution
The first sentence affirms Behe’s new book and his ‘First Rule of Adaption.’ So, when the Darwinists whine that Behe doesn’t know what he’s talking about, we can refer them to this sentence.
The second sentence demonstrates all that is wrong with Darwinism/Evolutionary Biology: evolution as a ‘fact’ is assumed and then what is observed is interpreted accordingly. But true science works in just the opposite fashion: one observes what happens, interprets why it may be happening and then tests this hypothesis. When observed results confirm the hypothetical mechanism suggested by the original observations, then the hypothesis is confirmed.
As to what the authors really see: they see that the rate of mutation of an organism is “fitted” to the environment and needs of the organism. This “fit’ of the mutation rates to the environment is what they term “fine-tuned.” And what is the ‘mechanism’ of this ‘fine-tuning’? “Second-order selection.” If Darwinists have rejected ‘selection’ in favor of Nei’s “mutation-driven” evolution, how in the world does “second-order selection” solve anything?
So, the authors see everything through the lens of evolution–and can see things in no other way. Too bad. You know, engineers design things so that various parts work in a coordinated fashion. Thus, isn’t this ‘fine-tuning’ pointing in the direction of a Designer? Isn’t this the more logical conclusion?
And provide further proof that many in the ID community don’t know what they are talking about. This is how Behe describes his rule:
So it’s about how fitness increases, by degradation of function.
LoL! @ Bob O’H- That is Behe’s point. That the easiest way for chance mutations to increase the fitness of an organism seems to be by damaging existing functions. Existing functions that it cannot account for in the first place.
Bob O’H:
Bob, you’ve probably not read Behe’s book. He distinguishes between the molecular and the phenotypic. Genes are ‘degraded’ molecularly, but, have a beneficial effect on the living organism, increasing their “fitness,” that is, the number of offspring that survive.
LoL! @ ET – there’s no such thing as “fitness” – see why: http://nonlin.org/natural-selection/. No wonder Behe & Co get no traction. How can you defeat the Darwinist nonsense by accepting it’s nonsensical concepts? Sad and pathetic…
ET @ 3 – thank you for restating my point.
PaV @ 4 – yes, that’s what I wrote, so well done. But the sentence you referred to mentioned decreasing fitness, and made no mention of degrading function. So it doesn’t help (or, to be fair, hinder) Behe.
Bob (and weave) O’Hara states:
Says the man who is oblivious to the fact that he himself has ‘lost his mind’.*
* Reductive materialists, in denying the reality of the immaterial realm altogether, also end up denying the reality of their own immaterial mind, and thus they have actually, literally and figuratively, ‘lost their mind’:
Neutral Model, genetic drift and the Third Way—a synopsis of the self-inflicted demise of the evolutionary paradigm
by Jeffrey P. Tomkins and Jerry Bergman
https://creation.com/evolutionary-mechanisms
The abstract in TJguy’s reference deserves to be highlighted:
i.e. In short, Darwinists have ‘lost their minds’! 🙂
Bob O’H @6:
Evolutionists are loathe to admit that the preponderance of mutations are deleterious, though well-known. I was simply pointing out that it sometimes happens that the truth is told.
But the larger point was this supposed “second-order selection.” What is this supposed to mean? Why is making up words acceptable in science? Just because you ‘name’ something that doesn’t mean you understand anything about it at all. These kinds of words are no more than pseudo-science. This happens all too often in biology.
Bob O’H:
Your point was that you don’t have a mechanism capable of producing functioning genes?
ET
Forgive me if I believe the thousands of scientists who disagree with you.
Brother Brian:
Of course you would just blindly accept whatever you think supports your lame position. Unfortunately those alleged thousands of scientists have to be given everything they need to explain in the first place- that is living organisms complete with the genetic code, genes and genetic compilers. And even given that, not one of them can demonstrate that blind and mindless processes produced new genes that produced functional proteins. They just assume it.
And again, I understand why you would never question them.
Do you think it’s possible to produce all literature by copying one book but adding errors along the way?
BB, rather than appealing to collective authority, could you kindly summarise the decisive evidence? Newton long ago now put on the table the principle that a proposed explanation for what is in itself unobserved or unobservable should be seen to produce the like result now. Or else, it should not be admitted as a serious explanation. Intelligence is a routine cause of functionally specific, complex organisation and associated information. There are trillions of cases in point. I put it to you that there are precisely zero observed cases of such FSCO/I coming about by demonstrable blind chance and/or mechanical necessity. Further to this, it is easy to show that for FSCO/I of 500 – 1,000 bits complexity, the atomic resources and reasonable time for the sol system or the observed cosmos are manifestly incapable of more than a negligibly small search in configuration spaces of 3.27*10^150 to 1.07*10^301 and beyond, every additional bit doubling the space. That is, blind mechanisms at OOL or at origin of a novel body plan are simply not credible as causal agents. A genome for OOL would need 100,000 – 1 mn bases and a typical body plan 10 – 100+ mn bases. KF
PS: Notice, Lewontin’s cat-out-of-bag admission:
KF
By that logic plate tectonics should not be considered as a serious explanation for mountain formation.
Plate tectonics is a design requirement for a habitable planet.
It seems our evo friends are ignorant of the arguments for Intelligent Design. The case has been made that plate tectonics is required for a habitable planet in “The Privileged Planet”.
1- Plate tectonics makes possible the carbon cycle, which is essential to our planet’s habitability
2- This cycle is actually composed of a number of organic and inorganic sub-cycles, all occurring on different timescales
3- These cycles regulate the exchange of carbon-containing molecules among the atmosphere, oceans and land.
4- A terrestrial planet with plate tectonics is also more likely to have a strong magnetic field, since both depend on convective overturning of its interior.
And that is just a cursory look at the book. It amazes me how willfully ignorant the people who oppose ID are proud to be.
PaV @ 10 –
Really? I’ve never seen that. Can you provide some evidence?
“we re-examine Fisher’s Theorem, showing that because it disregards mutations,,,,”
I guess Darwinists will readily admit that the preponderance of mutations are deleterious publicly, but when it comes to their theoretical mathematical models their honesty apparently disappears.
PaV- Even the beneficial mutations are deleterious. They don’t seem to be able to find function-gaining mutations of the type required for universal common descent.
BB, we observe plates and their movements now [another structural and quantitative phenomenon], associated volcanic processes etc. The distractor fails. KF
We observe plates and their movements TODAY, using sophisticated GPS receivers, but back in the sixties, what finally tipped the balance towards continental drift was the discovery of thousands of miles of alternating strips of magnetism on the ocean floor which we finally realized showed the tracks of several million years of continental plates drifting about. THEN, armed with this new theory, we started looking for evidence that the continents were moving. We never even had a reason to look before that.
MS, IIRC, the fit between S America and W coast of Africa was reason to consider such motion. That went way back, continental drift. Then, we have zones of quakes etc showing what we now recognise as subduction zones, connexions to volcanic island arcs being also suggestive. Going deeper, large internal currents are called for in the context of a magnetic field for the planet. That scale of motion could motivate drift of continent scale crustal elements. I also believe one reason for corner reflectors left on the Moon by Apollo 11, was lidar studies that would track continental distances — and BTW, those who think it was a hoax can try the reflectors still. KF
PS: The distractor still fails.
Humans have been feeling the plates move ever since humans existed. No GPS required.
Wiki mentions speculation going back to the 1500s. Noticing the fit of the continents goes back to Alfred Wegener in 1912. Wegener also called attention to coal belts that started in Europe and continued in North America and other evidence. But nobody actually believed that whole continents moved thousands of kilometers until we discovered those magnetic tracks buried in the ocean floor. Even then, it took about a decade to become commonly accepted.
It’s not a distractor. BB is right. We were pretty sure from theory and evidence that the continents moved, then we finally developed means to measure the movement.
And who is the distractor here? On one hand we have plenty of real time examples of natural selection creating small scale (and not so small scale changes). And we have an extensive fossil record with many examples of gradual changes. Not to mention genomics, cladistics and several other independent yet supportive lines of evidence. Yet there are many here who say it is preposterous to use these observations to infer that natural selection and other “natural” processes are responsible for the diversity of life we see.
On the other hand, these same people are willing to infer plate tectonics as the cause of the formation of massive mountain ranges, thousands of feet in elevation, when we have never directly observed a tectonically caused change in elevation of more than a few feet.
This is a classic example of a double standard. You gladly accept plate tectonics as the cause of mountain formation yet demonstrate a classic example of selective hyperskepticism when presented with a theory (evolution) that has a far greater body of evidence supporting it than mountain formation by plate tectonics does.
So, again, who is the distractor?
BB, again, fail. Small scope incremental changes (often based on deterioration of function) have nothing to do with origin of life or of major body plans requiring novel integrated complex functional organisation well beyond the search capability of the atomic resources of the sol system or observed cosmos. It was pointed out that the threshold of 500 – 1,000 bits worth of possibilities easily overwhelms search capability of 10^57 to 10^80 atoms with fast chem rxn rates 10^14/s or so, on 10^17s, as can easily be verified. The linked notion of easy, well behaved functionality spaces with more or less smooth gradients is equally ill-founded, we know starting with protein fold domains that there are thousands in the sequence space, many of which contain one or a few cases and which simply are deeply isolated on distance metrics. In effect, we demonstrably have deeply isolated molecular islands of function. But of course if one is caught in the Lewontin trap, it must have happened so it did. That’s a circular ideological frame of thought driven by a priori materialism. It utterly fails to account for the relevant facts starting with complex algorithmic information in the genome. KF
MS, the point is, observations are there, which show that we are not talking speculations. The contrast on origin of functionally specific, complex organisation and associated information is utterly clear. We DO have direct observation on origin of FSCO/I, trillions of cases — uniformly, by design. There are precisely nil cases of such origin by blind chance and/or mechanical necessity, backed up by search challenge problems and observed deeply isolated islands of function. If you deny such, simply provide a valid observed case beyond 500 – 1,000 bits by demonstrable blind forces per our observation: _______ . I note, random text generation exercises are a factor of 10^100 short on scope of config space searched. We have every epistemic right to infer that the known source of FSCO/I is intelligently directed configuration, and that it is a signature of design. The case of plate tectonics simply is not a valid parallel that undermines the force of the point or that of Newton’s point on eliminating pointless empirically ungrounded speculation — the facts of fit were there from early observation, for instance, as were the implications of the planetary B-field and that of island arcs, volcanoes and quakes which can be scaled on energy implying a scale of available energy. Even, continuity of rock formations was there. KF
ET, prezactly. Big ‘quakes and visible displacement of land in their aftermath also speaks. The San Andreas fault line speaks for itself, as a zone where things moved visible distances laterally after big earthquakes. KF
Brother Brian tries to infer that plate tectonics is some sort of off hand proof for evolution:
Two problems with BB’s inference. Problem number one, although BB, as an atheist, naively assumes that plate tectonics is a given that somehow just randomly happened, plate tectonics itself is found to be a finely tuned intelligently designed process. A finely tuned process without which higher life would not exist on earth.
In fact, as of 2018, the ‘sudden emergence’ 2.5 billion years ago of ‘continental landmass formation’, is found to support Hugh Ross’s Old Earth Creation model.
Another irresolvable problem with BB’s overall thesis that plate tectonics somehow supports the Darwinian notion that small scale changes can, over millions and billions of years, add up to large scale changes is that, unlike plate tectonics where one land mass eventually, over billions of years, became several different landmasses that were separated by large bodies of water, in the fossil record we find that the large distances separating the species appear first, then the subsequent diversification occurs. In fact, the fossil record is ‘upside down’. i.e. Exactly the opposite pattern of what BB and other Darwinists have a-priorily expected in the fossil record from their atheistic model of Darwinian evolution.
Likewise, the genetic evidence is far more antagonistic to Darwinian presuppositions than BB and other Darwinists are ever willing to honestly admit:
Moreover, as kf pointed out, BB doesn’t even have evidence that unguided Darwinian processes can create even a single protein fold, much less all the diversity of life on earth. In short, BB”s claim that, “(evolution),, has a far greater body of evidence supporting it than mountain formation by plate tectonics does”, is a pipe dream that does not exist in the real world and that exists only in BB’s (an other Darwinists) imagination.
Broter Brian:
Do we? How was it determined that the mutations were chance events?
And yet your position cannot account for the existence of eukaryotes. You don’t have a mechanism capable of producing them.
Not to mention they do not support blind watchmaker evolution.
Because the evidence doesn’t support that scenario. Again, you don’t have a mechanism capable of doing it.
TWO. VERY. DIFFERENT. THINGS. And some people say it was catastrophic plate tectonics that made the mountain ranges because the slow motion we observe now couldn’t have done it. Erosion would have worked just as fast.
Liar. For one, there isn’t a scientific theory of evolution. And you still don’t have a mechanism that can produce the diversity of life.
So you are either a liar, a bluffing loser or just deluded.
KF
Yes, we feel earthquakes, and we have observed faults shift, and we have observe uplift, and we have observed volcanic cones form over short periods of time. But our conclusion that mountain ranges are formed by plate tectonics is based on extrapolation from very small observed changes extended over long periods of time. Very few people, with the noted exception of young earth creationists, doubt that this is the process by which mountain ranges form. Yet the same people who believe that small changes over long periods of time to create mountains flatly refuse the theory that small changes, combined with selection pressures (and other mechanisms), over long periods of time can result in significant change in biological structures. Sounds like selective hyper-scepticism to me.
BB, mountain formation is not a simple or single process. Maybe you don’t know that I live on an island where mountains have been created and destroyed repeatedly over the past 24 years, I was looking at the latest one and discussing whether dust on the table deposited in the hour since the last dusting was fresh ash or old –16 – 24 year old is “old” enough (and the colour has gone from grey to brownish tan in that period . . . last really heavy ashfall was 2003) — ash redeposited through construction work about four hours ago. Tectonic processes are observably connected to mountain-building here and now, with known available energy levels of adequate scale. That has simply nothing to do with the information, organisation, language and algorithm gaps to be bridged at OOL, or the further gaps for origin of body plans. Your attempt to discredit Newton’s principle that we should explain on forces observed to have relevant capability fails. KF
BB, as usual you got nothing, see 30 and 31.
KF
Yes, I am well aware that mountain formation is not a simple or single process. Volcanic mountains can form and be destroyed in observable time. But I am talking about mountain ranges like the Rockies, the Himalayas, the Andes, etc. These are not formed by volcanoes, although they may contain some volcanic cones. For the rest of these ranges, we have never observed any of them being formed.
I was not attempting to discredit Newton’s principles, just your inappropriate use of them.
BB, predictable. We see forces on a mountain building and destroying scale, we observe — these days, realtime — crustal plate motion, etc and you want to suggest this is parallel to a case where we have an actual known force capable of creating FSCO/I but it is ideologically unacceptable so forces that have never been seen doing the like job and which are easily seen to be overwhelmed by configuration space search challenge are put up and locked in as the only factors open for acceptable consideration. That’s the sad pass we are in. KF
BB, we do observe small scale changes that are sufficient to explain the Rockies, the Himalayas, the Andes, etc.. Whereas on the other hand we do not see small scale changes that are sufficient to explain all the diversity of all life on earth. In fact, the small scale changes that we do observe are overwhelmingly degenerative in their effects. To complete your analogy, instead of expecting ‘mountains of new species to be continuously forming’ we should instead expect, when extrapolated over millions of years, to see the ‘mountains of already existing species’ dissolving into the oblivion of the ocean with NEVER any new ‘mountains of new species’ gradually arising. And as was pointed out in post 31, that is exactly what we see in the fossil record. Sudden appearance of brand new phyla, with ‘downhill’ diversification and eventual extinction from that point of the sudden appearance of the phyla.
Also see Behe’s book Darwin Devolves and Sanford’s book Genetic Entropy.
If you are going to try to use an analogy, at least use it properly! 🙂
Brother Brian:
It is all the same change just with accumulation. It is very different than biological change.
So it’s a faith thing.
That is because the biological changes observed cannot be extrapolated into macroevolution. You don’t even have a mechanism capable of producing eukaryotes. Endosymbiosis isn’t of any help.
Nathan Lents’ book “Human Errors” is a great supplement to Michael Behe’s “Darwin Devolves”. We have tons of evidence for degrading mutations and very little, if any, for constructive mutations.
We still have no idea how to test the claim that nature invented vision systems (Lents’ claim in the book is that nature invented vision systems).
We reject your claims because they are untestable. Yes, we are skeptical of the claim that blind and mindless processes did it because there isn’t any supporting evidence for the claim.
At least mountain formation can be run on a computer simulation. Yet we don’t even know enough about living organisms to simulate their evolution.
Brother Brain, like all Darwinists before him, wants to extrapolate deep into time. But time, (since it is deeply connected to entropy), instead of BB’s hero, is the villain of his plot.
A few related notes showing that even the entire 13.8 billion year history of the universe is too short for Darwinists:
Of note: although Dr. Behe had been mercilessly vilified by neo-Darwinists for daring to suggest that there could possibly be an ‘Edge’ to evolution (i.e. possibly be a limit to what Darwinian processes could be expected to accomplish), Dr. Behe’s was vindicated when his 10^20 number was verified in the lab in 2014.
Of related interest is Dr. Richard Sternberg’s and Dr. John Sanford’s work on the ‘waiting time’ problem:
Bottom line, BB simply does not have the empirical warrant to extrapolate deep into time as he keeps trying to do. i.e. Actual scientific evidence coupled with math is NOT a friend of Darwinists.