Researchers: Microbes “jeopardize” neo-Darwinism (and Jon Bartlett’s response)

'Gene-centric Neo-Darwinism has FAILED'. 1O Reasons. https://thebestschools.org/dialogues/evolution-denis-noble-major-statement/ Truthfreedom

Of related interest is Dr. Richard Sternberg's and Dr. John Sanford's work on the 'waiting time' problem:

Whale Evolution vs. (The Waiting Time Problem of) Population Genetics – Richard Sternberg and Paul Nelson – (excerpted from ‘Living Waters’ video) (2015) https://youtu.be/0csd3M4bc0Q The Origin of Man and the “Waiting Time” Problem – John Sanford – August 10, 2016 Historically, Darwin-defenders have argued that time is on their side. They have claimed that given enough time, any evolutionary scenario is feasible. They have consistently argued that given millions of years, very large amounts of new biologically meaningful information can arise by the Darwinian process of mutation/selection. However, careful analysis of what is required to establish even a single genetic “word” (a short functional string of genetic letters) within a hominin genome shows just the opposite. Even given tens of millions of years, there is not enough time to generate the genetic equivalent of the simplest “word” (two or more nucleotides). Even in a hundred billion years, much longer than the age of the universe, there is not enough time to establish the genetic equivalent of a very simple “sentence” (ten or more nucleotides). This problem is so fundamental that it justifies a complete re-assessment of the basic Darwinian mechanism. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2016/08/the_origin_of_m103062.html The waiting time problem in a model hominin population – 2015 Sep 17 John Sanford, Wesley Brewer, Franzine Smith, and John Baumgardner Excerpt: The program Mendel’s Accountant realistically simulates the mutation/selection process,,, Given optimal settings, what is the longest nucleotide string that can arise within a reasonable waiting time within a hominin population of 10,000? Arguably, the waiting time for the fixation of a “string-of-one” is by itself problematic (Table 2). Waiting a minimum of 1.5 million years (realistically, much longer), for a single point mutation is not timely adaptation in the face of any type of pressing evolutionary challenge. This is especially problematic when we consider that it is estimated that it only took six million years for the chimp and human genomes to diverge by over 5 % [1]. This represents at least 75 million nucleotide changes in the human lineage, many of which must encode new information. While fixing one point mutation is problematic, our simulations show that the fixation of two co-dependent mutations is extremely problematic – requiring at least 84 million years (Table 2). This is ten-fold longer than the estimated time required for ape-to-man evolution. In this light, we suggest that a string of two specific mutations is a reasonable upper limit, in terms of the longest string length that is likely to evolve within a hominin population (at least in a way that is either timely or meaningful). Certainly the creation and fixation of a string of three (requiring at least 380 million years) would be extremely untimely (and trivial in effect), in terms of the evolution of modern man. It is widely thought that a larger population size can eliminate the waiting time problem. If that were true, then the waiting time problem would only be meaningful within small populations. While our simulations show that larger populations do help reduce waiting time, we see that the benefit of larger population size produces rapidly diminishing returns (Table 4 and Fig. 4). When we increase the hominin population from 10,000 to 1 million (our current upper limit for these types of experiments), the waiting time for creating a string of five is only reduced from two billion to 482 million years. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4573302/

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. bornagain77

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.

Shining Light on Dark Energy – October 21, 2012 Excerpt: It (Entropy) explains time; it explains every possible action in the universe;,, Even gravity, Vedral argued, can be expressed as a consequence of the law of entropy. ,,, The principles of thermodynamics are at their roots all to do with information theory. Information theory is simply an embodiment of how we interact with the universe —,,, http://crev.info/2012/10/shining-light-on-dark-energy/ Time: The Unlikely Villain Excerpt: When confronted with the problem of equilibrium, most scientific materialists will appeal to the magic ingredient of time. In chapter one we saw this appeal by Nobel Laureate, George Wald: "Time is in fact the hero of the plot. Given so much time the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: Time itself performs the miracles." 49 However, Dr. (Harold F.) Blum, who is a materialist, points out that Wald's faith in the miraculous ingredient of time is mere wishful thinking. Prolonged time periods, he asserts, actually worsen the dilemma: "I think if I were rewriting this chapter [on the origin of life] completely, I should want to change the emphasis somewhat. I should want to play down still more the importance of the great amount of time available for highly improbable events to occur. One may take the view that the greater the time elapsed the greater should be the approach to equilibrium, the most probable state, and it seems that this ought to take precedence in our thinking over the idea that time provides the possibility for the occurrence of the highly improbable." 50 (Emphasis added) According to Dr. Blum, the magic bullet of time does not increase the likelihood that chains of DNA or proteins will form by chance chemistry. In fact, according to Dr. Blum, increasing the time factor actually ensures that any primordial soup would consist of predominantly unbonded amino acids and nucleotides! http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/esp_ciencia_life13.htm

A few related notes showing that even the entire 13.8 billion year history of the universe is too short for Darwinists:

Origin: Probability of a Single Protein Forming by Chance - video https://youtu.be/W1_KEVaCyaA Douglas Axe: Can Evolution Work (even) if you have Billions of Years? https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLR8eQzfCOiS3-MQT4SEaLNloU5v2poZKf&v=npJyQLhz7Ic “Shared Evolutionary History or Shared Design?” – Ann Gauger – January 1, 2015 Excerpt: The waiting time required to achieve four mutations is 10^15 years. That’s longer than the age of the universe. The real waiting time is likely to be much greater, since the two most likely candidate enzymes failed to be coopted by double mutations. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/01/happy_new_year092291.html When Theory and Experiment Collide — April 16th, 2011 by Douglas Axe Excerpt: Based on our experimental observations and on calculations we made using a published population model [3], we estimated that Darwin’s mechanism would need a truly staggering amount of time—a trillion trillion years or more—to accomplish the seemingly subtle change in enzyme function that we studied. http://biologicinstitute.org/2011/04/16/when-theory-and-experiment-collide/ About a Bike Lock: Responding to Richard Dawkins – Stephen C. Meyer – March 25, 2016 Excerpt: Moreover, given the empirically based estimates of the rarity (of protein folds) (conservatively estimated by Axe3 at 1 in 10^77 and within a similar range by others4) the analysis that I presented in Toronto does pose a formidable challenge to those who claim the mutation-natural selection mechanism provides an adequate means for the generation of novel genetic information — at least, again, in amounts sufficient to generate novel protein folds.5 Why a formidable challenge? Because random mutations alone must produce (or “search for”) exceedingly rare functional sequences among a vast combinatorial sea of possible sequences before natural selection can play any significant role. Moreover, as I discussed in Toronto, and show in more detail in Darwin’s Doubt,6 every replication event in the entire multi-billion year history of life on Earth would not generate or “search” but a miniscule fraction (one ten trillion, trillion trillionth, to be exact) of the total number of possible nucleotide base or amino-acid sequences corresponding to a single functional gene or protein fold. The number of trials available to the evolutionary process (corresponding to the total number of organisms — 10^40 — that have ever existed on earth), thus, turns out to be incredibly small in relation to the number of possible sequences that need to be searched. The threshold of selectable function exceeds what is reasonable to expect a random search to be able to accomplish given the number of trials available to the search even assuming evolutionary deep time. ——- (3) Axe, Douglas. “Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds.” Journal of Molecular Biology 341 (2004): 1295-1315. (4) Reidhaar-Olson, John, and Robert Sauer. “Functionally Acceptable Solutions in Two Alpha-Helical Regions of Lambda Repressor.” Proteins: Structure, Function, and Genetics 7 (1990): 306-16; Yockey, Hubert P. “A Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by Information Theory,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 67 (1977c): 377-98; Yockey, Hubert. “On the Information Content of Cytochrome C,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 67 (1977b) 345-376. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2016/03/about_a_bike_lo102722.html “The immediate, most important implication is that complexes with more than two different binding sites-ones that require three or more proteins-are beyond the edge of evolution, past what is biologically reasonable to expect Darwinian evolution to have accomplished in all of life in all of the billion-year history of the world. The reasoning is straightforward. The odds of getting two independent things right are the multiple of the odds of getting each right by itself. So, other things being equal, the likelihood of developing two binding sites in a protein complex would be the square of the probability for getting one: a double CCC, 10^20 times 10^20, which is 10^40. There have likely been fewer than 10^40 cells in the world in the last 4 billion years, so the odds are against a single event of this variety in the history of life. It is biologically unreasonable.” – Michael Behe – The Edge of Evolution – page 146 Waiting Longer for Two Mutations – Michael J. Behe Excerpt: Citing malaria literature sources (White 2004) I had noted that the de novo appearance of chloroquine resistance in Plasmodium falciparum was an event of probability of 1 in 10^20. I then wrote that ‘for humans to achieve a mutation like this by chance, we would have to wait 100 million times 10 million years’ (1 quadrillion years)(Behe 2007) (because that is the extrapolated time that it would take to produce 10^20 humans). Durrett and Schmidt (2008, p. 1507) retort that my number ‘is 5 million times larger than the calculation we have just given’ using their model (which nonetheless “using their model” gives a prohibitively long waiting time of 216 million years). Their criticism compares apples to oranges. My figure of 10^20 is an empirical statistic from the literature; it is not, as their calculation is, a theoretical estimate from a population genetics model. http://www.discovery.org/a/9461

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.

The Vindication of Michael Behe – podcast/video – 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itkxFbyzyro

bornagain77

Brother Brian:

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.

It is all the same change just with accumulation. It is very different than biological change.

Very few people, with the noted exception of young earth creationists, doubt that this is the process by which mountain ranges form.

So it's a faith thing.

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.

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. ET

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! :) bornagain77

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 kairosfocus

KF

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...

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.

Your attempt to discredit Newton’s principle that we should explain on forces observed to have relevant capability fails.

I was not attempting to discredit Newton's principles, just your inappropriate use of them. Brother Brian

BB, as usual you got nothing, see 30 and 31. bornagain77

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 kairosfocus

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.

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. Brother Brian

Broter Brian:

On one hand we have plenty of real time examples of natural selection creating small scale (and not so small scale changes).

Do we? How was it determined that the mutations were chance events?

And we have an extensive fossil record with many examples of gradual changes.

And yet your position cannot account for the existence of eukaryotes. You don't have a mechanism capable of producing them.

Not to mention genomics, cladistics and several other independent yet supportive lines of evidence.

Not to mention they do not support blind watchmaker evolution.

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.

Because the evidence doesn't support that scenario. Again, you don't have a mechanism capable of doing it.

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.

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.

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.

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. ET

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.

Erwin and Valentine's The Cambrian Explosion Affirms Major Points in Darwin's Doubt: The Cambrian Enigma Is "Unresolved" - June 26, 2013 Excerpt: "In other words, the morphological distances -- gaps -- between body plans of crown phyla were present when body fossils first appeared during the explosion and have been with us ever since. The morphological disparity is so great between most phyla that the homologous reference points or landmarks required for quantitative studies of morphology are absent." Erwin and Valentine (p. 340) http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/06/erwin_valentine_cambrian_explosion073671.html Investigating Evolution: The Cambrian Explosion Part 1 – (4:45 minute mark - upside-down fossil record) video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DkbmuRhXRY "The facts of greatest general importance are the following. When a new phylum, class, or order appears, there follows a quick, explosive (in terms of geological time) diversification so that practically all orders or families known appear suddenly and without any apparent transitions. Afterwards, a slow evolution follows; this frequently has the appearance of a gradual change, step by step, though down to the generic level abrupt major steps without transitions occur. At the end of such a series, a kind of evolutionary running-wild frequently is observed. Giant forms appear, and odd or pathological types of different kinds precede the extinction of such a line." Richard B. Goldschmidt, “Evolution, as Viewed by One Geneticist,” American Scientist 40 (January 1952), 97. “In virtually all cases a new taxon appears for the first time in the fossil record with most definitive features already present, and practically no known stem-group forms.” TS Kemp - Fossils and Evolution,– Curator of Zoological Collections, Oxford University, Oxford Uni Press, p246, 1999 “What is missing are the many intermediate forms hypothesized by Darwin, and the continual divergence of major lineages into the morphospace between distinct adaptive types.” Robert L Carroll (born 1938) – vertebrate paleontologist who specialises in Paleozoic and Mesozoic amphibians Scientific study turns understanding about evolution on its head – July 30, 2013 Excerpt: evolutionary biologists,,, looked at nearly one hundred fossil groups to test the notion that it takes groups of animals many millions of years to reach their maximum diversity of form. Contrary to popular belief, not all animal groups continued to evolve fundamentally new morphologies through time. The majority actually achieved their greatest diversity of form (disparity) relatively early in their histories. ,,,Dr Matthew Wills said: “This pattern, known as ‘early high disparity’, turns the traditional V-shaped cone model of evolution on its head. What is equally surprising in our findings is that groups of animals are likely to show early-high disparity regardless of when they originated over the last half a billion years. This isn’t a phenomenon particularly associated with the first radiation of animals (in the Cambrian Explosion), or periods in the immediate wake of mass extinctions.”,,, Author Martin Hughes, continued: “Our work implies that there must be constraints on the range of forms within animal groups, and that these limits are often hit relatively early on. Co-author Dr Sylvain Gerber, added: “A key question now is what prevents groups from generating fundamentally new forms later on in their evolution.,,, http://phys.org/news/2013-07-scientific-evolution.html In Allaying Darwin's Doubt, Two Cambrian Experts Still Come Up Short - October 16, 2015 Excerpt: "A recent analysis of disparity in 98 metazoan clades through the Phanerozoic found a preponderance of clades with maximal disparity early in their history. Thus, whether or not taxonomic diversification slows down most studies of disparity reveal a pattern in which the early evolution of a clade defines the morphological boundaries of a group which are then filled in by subsequent diversification. This pattern is inconsistent with that expected of a classic adaptive radiation in which diversity and disparity should be coupled, at least during the early phase of the radiation." - Doug Erwin What this admits is that disparity is a worse problem than evolutionists had realized: it's ubiquitous (throughout the history of life on earth), not just in the Cambrian (Explosion). http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/10/in_allaying_dar100111.html disparity [dih-spar-i-tee] noun, plural disparities. 1. lack of similarity or equality; inequality; difference:

Likewise, the genetic evidence is far more antagonistic to Darwinian presuppositions than BB and other Darwinists are ever willing to honestly admit:

Sweeping gene survey reveals new facets of evolution – May 28, 2018 Excerpt: Darwin perplexed,,, And yet—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. https://phys.org/news/2018-05-gene-survey-reveals-facets-evolution.html A New Model for Evolution: A Rhizome – Didier Raoult – May 2010 Excerpt: Thus we cannot currently identify a single common ancestor for the gene repertoire of any organism.,,, Overall, it is now thought that there are no two genes that have a similar history along the phylogenic tree.,,,Therefore the representation of the evolutionary pathway as a tree leading to a single common ancestor on the basis of the analysis of one or more genes provides an incorrect representation of the stability and hierarchy of evolution. Finally, genome analyses have revealed that a very high proportion of genes are likely to be newly created,,, and that some genes are only found in one organism (named ORFans). These genes do not belong to any phylogenic tree and represent new genetic creations. http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2010/05/new-model-for-evolution-rhizome.html Problem 6: Molecular Biology has Failed to Yield a Grand "Tree of Life" - Casey Luskin - February 2, 2015 Excerpt: When fossils failed to demonstrate that animals evolved from a common ancestor, evolutionary scientists turned to another type of evidence -- DNA sequence data -- to demonstrate a tree of life. ,,, At the end of the day, the dream that DNA sequence data would fit into a nice-neat tree of life has failed, and with it a key prediction of neo-Darwinian theory. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/02/problem_6_molec091151.html

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. bornagain77

Brother Brian tries to infer that plate tectonics is some sort of off hand proof for evolution:

"we have plenty of real time examples of natural selection creating small scale (and not so small scale changes).,,, 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."

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.

New Definition Could Further Limit Habitable Zones Around Distant Suns: - June 2009 ... liquid water is essential for life, but a planet also must have plate tectonics to pull excess carbon from its atmosphere and confine it in rocks to prevent runaway greenhouse warming. Tectonics, or the movement of the plates that make up a planet's surface, typically is driven by radioactive decay in the planet's core, but a star's gravity can cause tides in the planet, which creates more energy to drive plate tectonics.... Barnes added, "The bottom line is that tidal forcing is an important factor that we are going to have to consider when looking for habitable planets." http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090610124831.htm We may be overlooking a critical factor in our quest to find alien life - August 2016 Excerpt: Many scientists assume that plate tectonics is a given on rocky, Earth-like worlds, but this may be rarer than anyone imagined. A new study in the journal Science Advances questions the idea that rocky worlds "self regulate" their heat after forming. The implications could be enormous, says study author Jun Korenaga, a geophysicist at Yale University. Essentially, we could be overlooking another "Goldilocks" factor in our searches for worlds habitable to aliens: a planet's initial temperature. If you're a planet and you start out too hot, the thick layer of rock below the crust called the mantle doesn't give you plate tectonics. If you're too cold, you also don't get plate tectonics. The mantle is not as forgiving as scientists once assumed: you have to have the right internal temperature to begin with. "Though it's difficult to be specific about how much, it surely does reduce the number of habitable worlds," Korenaga wrote in an email to Business Insider. "Most ... Earth-like planets (in terms of size) probably wouldn't evolve like Earth and wouldn't have an Earth-like atmosphere." That would mean that many planets in the "Goldilocks" zone may not be habitable after all.,,, ,,, Mars and Venus weren't so lucky. Those planets have a "stagnant lid" of relatively unbroken crust, and in Venus' case, the consequences are clear: Without the ability to bury carbon in the atmosphere, the surface turned into an 860-degree-Fahrenheit hell. The new models suggest that rocky planets which can regulate their temperature, and thus develop all the geologic support systems life needs to emerge and thrive, are much rarer than we might hope.,,, he wrote. "[A] planet like Earth could well be the one of a kind in the universe." http://www.businessinsider.com/goldilocks-exoplanet-habitability-internal-heat-2016-8 "Without Plate Tectonics Life on Earth Might Never Have Gained a Foothold" - May 7, 2014 Excerpt: Plate tectonics -the movement of huge chunks, or plates, of a planet's surface- are crucial to a planet's habitability because they enable complex chemistry and recycle substances like carbon dioxide, which acts as a thermostat and keeps Earth balmy. Carbon dioxide that was locked into rocks is released when those rocks melt, returning to the atmosphere from volcanoes and oceanic ridges. "Recycling is important even on a planetary scale," http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2014/05/without-plate-tectonics-life-on-earth-might-never-have-gained-a-foothold-harvard-smithsonian-center-.html

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.

Rapid Landmass Emergence Affirms Creation Day 3 - JUNE 11TH, 2018 Excerpt: When I first read Genesis 1 at age 17, the plate tectonics theory was in its infancy.,,, Two years later, I had the privilege of taking a newly designed geophysics class from Jack Jacobs and Don Russell, two of the founders of plate tectonics theory. The course used the textbook they had written with J. Tuzo Wilson.1 There I learned about the emerging strong evidence that Earth has had a long history of powerful plate tectonics that gave rise to continents, mountain ranges, and volcanoes. I recognized that this model of Earth’s history was at least broadly consistent with the biblical description of creation day 3. However, Genesis 1 implies that the majority of continental landmass growth occurred within a short time period when Earth was about half or a little less than half its present age, which could correlate to the first part of day 3. So the question becomes, does Earth’s geological history support such rapid landmass growth? In 1982, geoscientists used major element chemistry of lutites (fine-grained sedimentary rock consisting of clay or silt-sized particles or both) to infer that much of the continental landmass formation occurred 2.1–2.5 billion years ago.2 Then in 2016, geoscientists used radiometric dating and the oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 (O-18/O-16) isotope ratio of shale deposits around the world to more accurately determine that indeed the bulk of continental landmass formation occurred about 2.5 billion years ago.3 Figure 1 shows the continental landmass growth as a percentage of Earth’s total surface area based on the O-18/O-16 ratio. I have been using this figure in my talks and books on the concordance of Genesis 1 with the established scientific record. In the May 2018 issue of Nature, a team of geologists and geophysicists led by Ilya Bindeman provided the most accurate constraint, to date, on the emergence of continents over the past 3.7 billion years. They are the first team to use triple-oxygen isotope ratio analysis on shale deposits from all continents.4 Shales are useful for this kind of research because they are the dominant sedimentary rock on Earth and they are the products of chemical and physical weathering of landmasses. Hence, shales are an excellent proxy for how much of Earth’s surface is comprised of landmasses. Unlike previous studies, Bindeman’s team analyzed both the O-18/O-16 ratio and the oxygen-17 to oxygen-16 (O-17/O-16) isotope ratio in the shale deposits. Theirs is also the most extensive sample of shale deposits. They analyzed shales from 278 outcrops and drill holes on all seven continents. The combined use of two isotope ratios enabled Bindeman’s team to determine exactly how the shale deposits were formed. This knowledge allowed them to accurately reconstruct Earth’s past surface conditions. Figure 2 shows the growth history of Earth’s continental landmasses based on the data presented in the Bindeman team’s paper. Figure 3 shows rough maps of the extent of continental landmasses on Earth’s surface at three different times. The full paper published in Nature includes a gorgeous image showing, in accurate detail, first the extent of Earth’s landmasses previous to 2.45 billion years ago, showing only two mini-continents or cratons, and second the extent of Earth’s landmasses after 2.32 billion years ago, showing the extent of Kenorland, the first supercontinent. The two maps show that in less than 0.13 billion years, landmass coverage expanded by about 13 times. The formation of Kenorland permitted, for the first time, recycling of nutrients from the landmasses to the oceans and back sufficient enough to sustain longterm advanced life. Kenorland’s rapid formation also coincided with the Great Oxygenation Event, which I describe in detail in my book Improbable Planet.5 The Great Oxygenation Event was critical for paving the way for sustaining longterm advanced life. The more accurately determined growth history of Earth’s continents is more consistent with the implication in Genesis 1:9 that nearly all continental landmass growth occurred within a short time period when Earth was about half or a little less than half its present age. The research achieved by Bindeman’s team affirms that the more we learn about science and the record of nature, the more reasons we gain to trust the Bible as the inspired, inerrant, authoritative Word of God. https://www.twr360.org/blog/details/2140/rapid-landmass-emergence-affirms-creation-day-3

bornagain77

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 kairosfocus

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 kairosfocus

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 kairosfocus

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? Brother Brian

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. MatSpirit

Humans have been feeling the plates move ever since humans existed. No GPS required. ET

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. kairosfocus

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. MatSpirit

BB, we observe plates and their movements now [another structural and quantitative phenomenon], associated volcanic processes etc. The distractor fails. KF kairosfocus

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. ET

"we re-examine Fisher’s Theorem, showing that because it disregards mutations,,,,"

Fisher’s proof of Darwinian evolution has been flipped? - December 27, 2017 Excerpt: we re-examine Fisher’s Theorem, showing that because it disregards mutations, and because it is invalid beyond one instant in time, it has limited biological relevance. We build a differential equations model from Fisher’s first principles with mutations added, and prove a revised theorem showing the rate of change in mean fitness is equal to genetic variance plus a mutational effects term. We refer to our revised theorem as the fundamental theorem of natural selection with mutations. Our expanded theorem, and our associated analyses (analytic computation, numerical simulation, and visualization), provide a clearer understanding of the mutation–selection process, and allow application of biologically realistic parameters such as mutational effects. The expanded theorem has biological implications significantly different from what Fisher had envisioned. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/fishers-proof-of-darwinian-evolution-has-been-flipped/ The fundamental theorem of natural selection with mutations - June 2018 Excerpt: Because the premise underlying Fisher’s corollary is now recognized to be entirely wrong, Fisher’s corollary is falsified. Consequently, Fisher’s belief that he had developed a mathematical proof that fitness must always increase is also falsified. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00285-017-1190-x

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. bornagain77

PaV @ 10 -

Evolutionists are loathe to admit that the preponderance of mutations are deleterious, though well-known.

Really? I've never seen that. Can you provide some evidence? Bob O'H

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. ET

Plate tectonics is a design requirement for a habitable planet. ET

KF

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.

By that logic plate tectonics should not be considered as a serious explanation for mountain formation. Brother Brian

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:

. . . to put a correct [--> Just who here presume to cornering the market on truth and so demand authority to impose?] view of the universe into people's heads

[==> as in, "we" the radically secularist elites have cornered the market on truth, warrant and knowledge, making "our" "consensus" the yardstick of truth . . . where of course "view" is patently short for WORLDVIEW . . . and linked cultural agenda . . . ]

we must first get an incorrect view out [--> as in, if you disagree with "us" of the secularist elite you are wrong, irrational and so dangerous you must be stopped, even at the price of manipulative indoctrination of hoi polloi] . . . the problem is to get them [= hoi polloi] to reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world [--> "explanations of the world" is yet another synonym for WORLDVIEWS; the despised "demon[ic]" "supernatural" being of course an index of animus towards ethical theism and particularly the Judaeo-Christian faith tradition], the demons that exist only in their imaginations,

[ --> as in, to think in terms of ethical theism is to be delusional, justifying "our" elitist and establishment-controlling interventions of power to "fix" the widespread mental disease]

and to accept a social and intellectual apparatus, Science, as the only begetter of truth

[--> NB: this is a knowledge claim about knowledge and its possible sources, i.e. it is a claim in philosophy not science; it is thus self-refuting]

. . . . To Sagan, as to all but a few other scientists [--> "we" are the dominant elites], it is self-evident

[--> actually, science and its knowledge claims are plainly not immediately and necessarily true on pain of absurdity, to one who understands them; this is another logical error, begging the question , confused for real self-evidence; whereby a claim shows itself not just true but true on pain of patent absurdity if one tries to deny it . . . and in fact it is evolutionary materialism that is readily shown to be self-refuting]

that the practices of science provide the surest method of putting us in contact with physical reality [--> = all of reality to the evolutionary materialist], and that, in contrast, the demon-haunted world rests on a set of beliefs and behaviors that fail every reasonable test [--> i.e. an assertion that tellingly reveals a hostile mindset, not a warranted claim] . . . . It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us [= the evo-mat establishment] to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes [--> another major begging of the question . . . ] to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute [--> i.e. here we see the fallacious, indoctrinated, ideological, closed mind . . . ], for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door . . . [--> irreconcilable hostility to ethical theism, already caricatured as believing delusionally in imaginary demons]. [Lewontin, Billions and billions of Demons, NYRB Jan 1997,cf. here. And, if you imagine this is "quote-mined" I invite you to read the fuller annotated citation here.]

kairosfocus

Brother Brian:

Forgive me if I believe the thousands of scientists who disagree with you.

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? ET

ET

Your point was that you don’t have a mechanism capable of producing functioning genes?

Forgive me if I believe the thousands of scientists who disagree with you. Brother Brian

Bob O'H:

thank you for restating my point.

Your point was that you don't have a mechanism capable of producing functioning genes? ET

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. PaV

The abstract in TJguy's reference deserves to be highlighted:

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 - 2017 "Because of grievous deficiencies in the standard neo-Darwinian Model of evolution, which is largely selection driven, scientists proposed an alternative postulate called the ‘Neutral Model’ in the late 1960s. The Neutral Model is also mutation driven, but selection is deemed to be an insignificant force of change. Instead, random genetic drift is alleged to be the main driver. Since its inception, the Neutral Model has come to be incorporated in many theoretical evolutionary scenarios at some level. However, due to numerous discoveries in genomics and genome function, the Neutral Model has also become deficient, prompting a new move in science called the ‘Extended Evolutionary Synthesis’ or ‘The Third Way’, which takes a position of blissful ignorance and offers nothing tangible to extend or support evolutionary theory. While Third Way proponents recognize the deficiency of all popular evolutionary models, they maintain that more research is needed to elucidate unknown evolutionary mechanisms and processes despite the fact that the progress of scientific discovery is revealing nothing but unimaginable complexity." https://creation.com/evolutionary-mechanisms

i.e. In short, Darwinists have 'lost their minds'! :) bornagain77

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 tjguy

Bob (and weave) O'Hara states:

"many in the ID community don’t know what they are talking about."

Says the man who is oblivious to the fact that he himself has 'lost his mind'.*

It’s Really Not Rocket Science - Granville Sewell - November 16, 2015 Excerpt: In a 2005 American Spectator article, Jay Homnick wrote: "It is not enough to say that design is a more likely scenario to explain a world full of well-designed things. It strikes me as urgent to insist that you not allow your mind to surrender the absolute clarity that all complex and magnificent things were made that way. Once you allow the intellect to consider that an elaborate organism with trillions of microscopic interactive components can be an accident… you have essentially “lost your mind.”,,, Max Planck biologist W.E. Loennig once commented that Darwinism was a sort of “mass psychosis” — then he asked me, is that the right English word? I knew psychosis was some kind of mental illness, but wasn’t sure exactly what it was, so I looked it up in my dictionary when I returned home: “psychosis — a loss of contact with reality.” I wrote him that, yes, that was the right word.,,, Once you seriously consider the possibility that all the magnificent species in the living world, and the human body and the human brain, could be entirely the products of unintelligent forces, you have been in academia too long and have lost contact with reality — you have lost your mind. https://evolutionnews.org/2015/11/it_really_isnt/

* 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':

What Does It Mean to Say That Science & Religion Conflict? - M. Anthony Mills - April 16, 2018 Excerpt: Barr rightly observes that scientific atheists often unwittingly assume not just metaphysical naturalism but an even more controversial philosophical position: reductive materialism, which says all that exists is or is reducible to the material constituents postulated by our most fundamental physical theories. As Barr points out, this implies not only that God does not exist — because God is not material — but that you do not exist. For you are not a material constituent postulated by any of our most fundamental physical theories; at best, you are an aggregate of those constituents, arranged in a particular way. Not just you, but tables, chairs, countries, countrymen, symphonies, jokes, legal contracts, moral judgments, and acts of courage or cowardice — all of these must be fully explicable in terms of those more fundamental, material constituents. In fact, more problematic for the materialist than the non-existence of persons is the existence of mathematics. Why? Although a committed materialist might be perfectly willing to accept that you do not really exist, he will have a harder time accepting that numbers do not exist. The trouble is that numbers — along with other mathematical entities such as classes, sets, and functions — are indispensable for modern science. And yet — here’s the rub — these “abstract objects” are not material. Thus, one cannot take science as the only sure guide to reality and at the same time discount disbelief in all immaterial realities. https://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2018/04/16/what_does_it_mean_to_say_that_science_and_religion_conflict.html

bornagain77

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 O'H

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... Nonlin.org

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. PaV

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. ET

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.

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:

The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution: Break or blunt any gene whose loss would increase the number of offspring.

So it's about how fitness increases, by degradation of function. Bob O'H

Mutations provide the raw material for evolution but can also decrease the fitness of an organism. Therefore, mutation rates have, presumably, been finely tuned, apparently through second-order selection.

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? PaV