Viruses Devolve

_{March 11, 2019

Intelligent Design}

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The main thesis of Behe’s new book, Darwin Devolves, surrounds what Behe calls “poison-pill” mutations, which gives an organism a quick fix, but which can run the risk of being rendered incapable of utilizing future needed adaptations. IOW, breaking and blunting genes to adapt to new environments become changes that get locked in due to NS’ tendency to root out anything but what is the ‘fittest’ in any environment–and this can include even beneficial mutations being rooted out due to beneficial mutations being so rare and showing up way too late to modify the adapted organism.

So, today at Phys.Org there is a PR (press release) about a study involving viruses. It turns out that even at the level of viruses, the First Rule of Adaptative Evolution applies: a broken gene ends up being beneficial to the virus, allowing it to replicate itself when it has been rendered almost unable to do so by the host’s immune system.

From the PR:

But the researchers continued to culture the B1-free strain for multiple generations in the lab, then sequenced its entire genetic code to gauge how it evolved. They found that, over just a few days, the B1-free strain responded by deleting a single base pair – a fundamental component of DNA – while leaving nearly 200,000 others untouched. The seemingly miniscule loss corresponded with a 10-fold increase in the strain’s otherwise stunted replication.

As usual, the experimenters are “surprised”:

“We were expecting that the virus may adapt another gene to compensate,” said Wiebe, associate professor of veterinary medicine and biomedical sciences. “What we found instead is that the virus adapted by inactivating another gene. It was as if, upon cutting one wire, the best way to fix the problem was to cut another wire.

Just think, if they had read Behe’s new book, they would not have been surprised at all.

Update:

In his book, Behe uses evidence showing that “devolution” occurs in bacteria and in eukaryotes. Now we can add viruses to the lot. I think this only adds to and strengthens his argument for his First Rule.

Comments

The evidence for a Godly world is much spottier and less convincing.
Where does intelligence come from? What is consciousness--that is, if you're having a conversation with a two-year-old boy or girl, then are they "conscious" of what is going on? [No, intelligence allows such a conversation, but "consciousness" is layerd upon reason and intelligence. Where does it come from?] What about beauty? What about love? [Does love exist? Are you willing to deny it exists? Well, then is "love" a "material" substance? Where do you stand on all of this?] And is 'love' greater, or less than, a coconut, e.g.? When I was five, I experienced my 'existence.' I understood that I existed, independent of all else. Is this experience "material"? It was more 'real' to me than everything external to me.
So face the facts, we’re all believers, but the material world has tons of evidence for it while the evidence for a Godly world is both sparse and highly suspicious.
Why don't you study documented miracles? Your position is that it's far easier to believe in a 'material' world than it is to believe in a 'spiritual' world. To which I would say, the only thing easier than believing in a 'material' world is denying evidences of the supernatural. It's very easy. Lots of people do it. But the question is not really do you believe in the material world, but whether or not you believe there is no God, because evolutionist's argument is that the only acceptable hypthesis is that some incarnated intelligence can act---a position that can only be maintained by denying God's existence. So, if you deny the existence of God, what is your evidence [if we're going to talk about evidence]?
. . . please tell me what it is so I can correct my errors!
I've been at this blogsite for over fourteen years. Discussion with most, if not almost all, evolutionary biologists is like trying to get a religious fundamentalist to convert---a big waste of time. Their minds and hearts are closed. I'm not going to waste time pointing out errors. I've tired of all that. Perhaps others are not tired of it. But they know what I'm talking about. That's sufficient.
I’m surprised the enforcers of evolutionary orthodoxy haven’t forced you to read it yet.
Dear MatSpirit: Tiktaalik was discussed right here thirteen years ago when the discovery was made. Nothing new since. Same problems persist.
If you found a watch on the moon (or on a heath, for that matter), you would be entirely correct to assume it was fabricated since watches don’t reproduce. This, you will remember, is necessary for evolution to occur.
However, building a watch that 'reproduces' itself requires more intelligence than simply making a watch that works. So, biological forms bespeak a much greater intelligence behind them than a mere watch would. This is just basic common sense.
P.S. For a very interesting article written by Sean B. Carroll that answers your questions on which way Tiktaalik was evolving and how its discoverer, Neal Shubin decided where to look and what age rocks to look in from other fossils, . . .
As I mentioned, this was discussed here years ago; I was part of that discussion. At the time I said something along these lines: evolutionary biologists always find what they're looking for! Hoaxes have ensued because of this, though I wouldn't put Tiktaalik in that category. But I would refer you to Henry Gee's book, In Search of Deep Time. By the way, the article you linked to ends this way:
“When people call Tiktaalik ‘the missing link,’ it implies there is a single fossil that tells us about the transition from water to land. Tiktaalik gains meaning when it’s compared with other fossils in the series. So it’s not ‘the’ missing link. I would probably call it ‘a’ missing link. It’s also no longer missing—it’s a found link. The missing links are the ones I want to find this summer.”
My point is exactly the one that Neil Shubin is making: if you have a 'series,' then we know which direction 'evolution' took; but, without it, it's still a bit of a guess. Again, how can we rule out the possibility of a reptile returning to the sea as an explanation?PaV_{March 17, 2019
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MatSpirit:
Here’s a link to a 55 million year old rabbit. Note the long tail and short ears.
It may be a lagomorph or it may be a hybrid. But my point remains- we do not even know what makes a rabbit a rabbitET_{March 17, 2019
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MatSpirit claims that
"If you kept tracing your rabbit’s ancestors, you would see the reproducers look less and less like rabbits until they finally looked like whatever animal rabbits are descended from. And if you followed those animals back far enough, you would eventually get to some single-celled something."
And yet the first mammals appear in the fossil record with quote unquote a “spark” of rapid diversification reminiscent of the Cambrian explosion.
What Sparked the Mammal Explosion? - September 3, 2015 - David F. Coppedge If you think tiny shrew-like mammals scurried afoot below dinosaurs right before they went extinct, you’ve got the wrong picture. A paper in Current Biology has a curious headline: “Mammalian evolution: A Jurassic spark.” Despite the pun, the title implies something dramatic happened when the first mammals appear in the fossil record—a “spark” of rapid diversification reminiscent of the Cambrian explosion. "Mammals first appear in the fossil record at about the same time as the earliest dinosaurs (?220 million years ago), and so the first two-thirds of mammalian evolutionary history thus occurred during the Mesozoic ‘Age of Dinosaurs’. Mesozoic mammals were long portrayed as tiny, shrew-like creatures, unable to diversify due to severe competition and predation from dinosaurs and other reptiles. However, discoveries in the past two decades have greatly expanded the known diversity of Mesozoic mammals, revealing the existence of specialised gliders, climbers and burrowers, semi-aquatic forms and even badger-sized carnivores that ate small dinosaurs. Evidence of extensive ecological differences has been found even between closely-related species, and quantitative analyses of the skulls and skeletons of Mesozoic mammals suggest a diverse range of diets and locomotor modes. Although the ecological and functional diversity of Mesozoic mammals has received increasing attention, the tempo of their adaptive radiation has seldom been quantified. In a new paper in Current Biology, Close and colleagues now show that, during the Mesozoic, mammals evolved very rapidly during the early and middle Jurassic (?201–164 million years ago), with the average rate of change during this period being twice as fast compared to the remainder of the Mesozoic." "This period of rapid evolution also broadly coincides with peaks in morphological disparity (as measured by the average morphological difference between contemporaneous species) and lineage diversity (as measured by the number of contemporaneous branches on the evolutionary tree). Together with previous studies which have highlighted the ecomorphological diversity of Jurassic mammals, these results demonstrate that mammals underwent a sustained and extensive adaptive radiation during the Jurassic, when dinosaurs also underwent a major increase in diversity and disparity." Why is this not portrayed in museum dioramas of dinosaur habitats? Lee and Beck describe how the old (incorrect) picture of Jurassic mammals proceeded from biased sampling of morphological characters and phylogenetic techniques that incorrectly portrayed temporal modes of evolution. In short: mammals appeared abruptly and rapidly inhabited all kinds of habitats. True, the largest weighed about a kilogram in the Jurassic (up to 10 kilos in the Cretaceous), but the variety of adaptations calls for excessive amounts of mutation and selection for the time available. And you know evolutionists are in trouble when they pull out their magic wand, convergent evolution — "The Jurassic radiation of small mammals also underscores the prevalence of convergent evolution. Phylogenetic analyses of modern mammals have highlighted how similar ecomorphs (e.g. ant-eating forms, gliders, specialised burrowers and carnivores) evolved multiple times during the Cenozoic. Ongoing studies of their fossil relatives are revealing that many of these ecomorphs also evolved repeatedly, and relatively rapidly, during the Age of Dinosaurs. Early mammals, despite living in the shadows of the dinosaurs, were diverse and successful." Close et al. describe the mammal radiation as an “intense burst” of evolution. They use the word “rapid” three times. "Contrary to the traditional view that Mesozoic mammals were exclusively small, generalized insectivores, discoveries in the last two decades, especially from China, have demonstrated that they were adapted for diverse feeding and locomotor ecologies. These finds extend the early mammal repertoire to include digging, climbing, gliding, and swimming and show that some non-therian lineages achieved surprisingly large body sizes (up to approximately 1 kg" Given these revelations, what else about the fossil record are they not telling us? https://crev.info/2015/09/what-sparked-the-mammal-explosion/
There was no mention of a common ancestor to all these diverse mammals, much less a link with any reptile, the supposed progenitor of all mammals. Much, much, less was there any mention of the 'single-celled something' that MatSpirit alluded to.
Earliest-known arboreal and subterranean ancestral mammals discovered - February 12, 2015 Excerpt: The fossils of two interrelated ancestral mammals, newly discovered in China, suggest that the wide-ranging ecological diversity of modern mammals had a precedent more than 160 million years ago.,,, “We consistently find with every new fossil that the earliest mammals were just as diverse in both feeding and locomotor adaptations as modern mammals,” Agilodocodon, which lived roughly 165 million years ago, had hands and feet with curved horny claws and limb proportions that are typical for mammals that live in trees or bushes. It is adapted for feeding on the gum or sap of trees, with spade-like front teeth to gnaw into bark. This adaptation is similar to the teeth of some modern New World monkeys.,,, Agilodocodon also had well-developed, flexible elbows and wrist and ankle joints that allowed for much greater mobility, all characteristics of climbing mammals. "The finger and limb bone dimensions of Agilodocodon match up with those of modern tree-dwellers,,, Docofossor, which lived around 160 million years ago, had a skeletal structure and body proportions strikingly similar to the modern day African golden mole. It had shovel-like fingers for digging, short and wide upper molars typical of mammals that forage underground, and a sprawling posture indicative of subterranean movement.,,, Early mammals were once thought to have limited ecological opportunities to diversify during the dinosaur-dominated Mesozoic era. However, Agilodocodon, Docofossor and numerous other fossils — including Castorocauda, a swimming, fish-eating mammaliaform described by Luo and colleagues in 2006 — provide strong evidence that ancestral mammals adapted to wide-ranging environments despite competition from dinosaurs. Luo said. “These new fossils help demonstrate that early mammals did indeed have a wide range of ecological diversity. It appears dinosaurs did not dominate the Mesozoic landscape as much as previously thought.” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150212141447.htm
Moreover, this sudden and 'explosive', i.e. non-Darwinian, pattern seen for mammals is ubiquitous throughout the fossil record. In fact, "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.",,,
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
Basically MarSpirit, in his desire to find any substantiating evidence whatsoever in the fossil record for his atheistic Darwinian worldview, has, whether he is even aware of it or not, substituted imaginary story telling for hard science. No less than the editor of 'Nature', Henry Gee, agrees that "to take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.”
“No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way... To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.” - Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life, 1999, pg. 113 & 117
In fact, no less that Stephen Jay Gould also admitted that when Darwinists "try to explain form and behaviour by reconstructing history and assessing current utility, they also tell just so stories – and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance."
Sociobiology: The Art of Story Telling – Stephen Jay Gould – 1978 – New Scientist Excerpt: Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers “Just So stories”. When evolutionists study individual adaptations, when they try to explain form and behaviour by reconstructing history and assessing current utility, they also tell just so stories – and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance. https://books.google.com/books?id=tRj7EyRFVqYC&pg=PA530
Let that last line sink in "Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance." As ET stated, “That is the untestable propaganda, anyway. We are more concerned with science than propaganda, though.” And when it comes to hard, i.e. "testable". science, it is found that Darwinian evolution does not even qualify as a hard science in the first place but is more realistically classified as a unfalsifiable pseudoscientific religion for atheists,
“On the other hand, I disagree that Darwin’s theory is as `solid as any explanation in science.; Disagree? I regard the claim as preposterous. Quantum electrodynamics is accurate to thirteen or so decimal places; so, too, general relativity. A leaf trembling in the wrong way would suffice to shatter either theory. What can Darwinian theory offer in comparison?” - David Berlinski, “A Scientific Scandal?: David Berlinski & Critics,” Commentary, July 8, 2003 Darwin’s Theory vs Falsification – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rzw0JkuKuQ
Perhaps MatSpirit simply prefers imagination to hard science? As was mentioned in post 21,
although the Darwinian Atheist firmly believes he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for methodological naturalism), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to. It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/viruses-devolve/#comment-674387
Verse:
2 Corinthians 10:5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;
bornagain77_{March 17, 2019
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MS And here I was thinking over these many years that I was the only one who bought “ Tour of The Calculus “ it was from a bookstore in Coronado CA. My kids thought I was crazy LOL. Since we share reading interests and discusing the power of RMNS you should read Charle Mackays “ Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds” Vividvividbleau_{March 16, 2019
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Vividbleau: Mutations are errors in the copying process and natural selection is a trial. Darwinian evolution is nothing but a trial and error process." Natural selection is much more powerful than trial and error. If a mutation is beneficial, Natural Selection will make it increase in numbers and it may even replace the original DNA. It can also be joined by other mutations, such as one of Behe's CC events. That means that two mutations don't have to happen at the same time. V: "The copier is doing the selecting." No, they're just copying and making errors. There's not a word in there about testing. It's as if Berlinski didn't think testing was important. Vivid: "No offense but Berlinski would mop the floor with you, just saying." He might. I certainly can't hold a candle to him for literary allusions. However, I'm fairly familiar with Berlinski, going back to his book, "A Tour of the Calculus" twenty years ago. I think that was before the Discovery Institute. Since then I've read a fair amount of his ID work, seen him in a few videos and read what may be the worse detective novel ever written, "A Clean Sweep: An Aaron Asherfeld Mystery". In short, I'm pretty familiar with his work and frankly, when it comes to evolution, I don't think he knows what he's talking about. Your Library of Babel story just confirms it.MatSpirit_{March 16, 2019
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Me: "If you kept tracing your rabbit’s ancestors, you would see the reproducers look less and less like rabbits until they finally looked like whatever animal rabbits are descended from. And if you followed those animals back far enough, you would eventually get to some single-celled something. ET: "That is the untestable propaganda, anyway. We are more concerned with science than propaganda, though." So are we. Here's a link to a 55 million year old rabbit. Note the long tail and short ears. https://www.amnh.org/our-research/science-news/2006/earliest-rabbit-fossil-found-suggests-modern-mammal-group-emerged-as-dinosaurs-faced-extinctionMatSpirit_{March 16, 2019
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MS “Is it possible that everybody at the Discovery Institute is this ignorant of the most important part of the theory they’re fighting?” No offense but Berlinski would mop the floor with you, just saying. Vividvividbleau_{March 16, 2019
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MatSpirit “As an ID supporter, what’s your view on Natural Selection?” Mutations are errors in the copying process and natural selection is a trial. Darwinian evolution is nothing but a trial and error process. “Is it hidden somewhere in Berlinski’s story and I just missed it?” The copier is doing the selecting. Vividvividbleau_{March 16, 2019
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Vivid, Good to see you again! Berlinski is an interesting example of an ID Professional. He's a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, though I'm not sure if he's paid for his services. Paid or not, his beliefs should be in the mainstream of ID thought. So how does Berlinski believe evolution is claimed to work? Well, in the example you've so kindly provided, he apparently believes that if you take a single copy of "the Quixote" (I assume he means what we usually call "Don Quixote) and copy it repeatedly, making occasional errors to the copies, you will eventually produce every book ever written in every language they were written in. Wow! What happened to the natural selection I mentioned in Msg 14? It's important, you know. "Variation and Natural Selection" was Darwin's terse description of how evolution works. Berlinski remembered the Variation - his scribes are making errors, but where's the Natural Selection? Every copy should somehow be checked to make sure it's a viable book and thrown away if it isn't. Berlinski doesn't even mention the very heart of evolution! And he's a senior fellow of an organization who's main activity is denying evolution and convincing the world that it's impossible! Is it possible that everybody at the Discovery Institute is this ignorant of the most important part of the theory they're fighting? Well, if so it would explain a lot of the really weird theories that ID produces. As an ID supporter, what's your view on Natural Selection? Is it hidden somewhere in Berlinski's story and I just missed it? Do you think it's so unimportant you can just leave it out of the evolutionary process?MatSpirit_{March 16, 2019
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MatSpirit:
If you kept tracing your rabbit’s ancestors, you would see the reproducers look less and less like rabbits until they finally looked like whatever animal rabbits are descended from. And if you followed those animals back far enough, you would eventually get to some single-celled something.
That is the untestable propaganda, anyway. We are more concerned with science than propaganda, though. What makes a rabbit a rabbit? That is still an unanswerable question. And until we know that answer we have no way to test the claim a rabbit was ever something else.ET_{March 16, 2019
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When someone who goes by the handle of MatSpirit cites René Descartes in order to try to support his materialistic view of reality, you know it is not going to end well for him. Rene Descartes' main argument was to point out that immaterial mind must necessarily be primary and that the material world must necessarily be secondary. Everything we can possibly know and/or say about the material world first starts with the fact that we have conscious immaterial minds. The fact that we have immaterial minds is the foundational prerequisite of all possible prerequisites for science to even be possible for us in the first place. As Planck, Schrodinger and Wigner stated,
“No, I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Max Planck (1858–1947), the main founder of quantum theory, The Observer, London, January 25, 1931 “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” Schroedinger, Erwin. 1984. “General Scientific and Popular Papers,” in Collected Papers, Vol. 4. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences. Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig/Wiesbaden. p. 334. “The principal argument against materialism is not that illustrated in the last two sections: that it is incompatible with quantum theory. The principal argument is that thought processes and consciousness are the primary concepts, that our knowledge of the external world is the content of our consciousness and that the consciousness, therefore, cannot be denied. On the contrary, logically, the external world could be denied—though it is not very practical to do so. In the words of Niels Bohr, “The word consciousness, applied to ourselves as well as to others, is indispensable when dealing with the human situation.” In view of all this, one may well wonder how materialism, the doctrine that “life could be explained by sophisticated combinations of physical and chemical laws,” could so long be accepted by the majority of scientists." – Eugene Wigner, Remarks on the Mind-Body Question, pp 167-177.
And indeed MatSpirit even conceded Descartes' primary point of "That ol’ demon can’t fool us about the existence of our minds", but in the very next breath MatSpirit states that "For everything else, we can only rely on evidence and hope for the best. There happens to be quite a lot of evidence for a material world." Huh?? What?? The direct contradiction in MatSpirit's logic is breathtaking! First off, materialism denies the very existence of our immaterial minds. Indeed, instead of holding that the material world is potentially illusory, as Descartes's held in his argument, materialism holds, in direct contradiction to Descartes's argument, that our immaterial minds are illusory.
Ross Douthat Is On Another Erroneous Rampage Against Secularism – Jerry Coyne – December 26, 2013 Excerpt: “many (but not all) of us accept the notion that our sense of self is a neuronal illusion.” Jerry Coyne – Professor of Evolutionary Biology – Atheist per new republic At the 23:33 minute mark of the following video, Richard Dawkins agrees with materialistic philosophers who say that: “consciousness is an illusion” A few minutes later Rowan Williams asks Dawkins ”If consciousness is an illusion…what isn’t?”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWN4cfh1Fac&t=22m57s “There is no self in, around, or as part of anyone’s body. There can’t be. So there really isn’t any enduring self that ever could wake up morning after morning worrying about why it should bother getting out of bed. The self is just another illusion, like the illusion that thought is about stuff or that we carry around plans and purposes that give meaning to what our body does. Every morning’s introspectively fantasized self is a new one, remarkably similar to the one that consciousness ceased fantasizing when we fell sleep sometime the night before. Whatever purpose yesterday’s self thought it contrived to set the alarm last night, today’s newly fictionalized self is not identical to yesterday’s. It’s on its own, having to deal with the whole problem of why to bother getting out of bed all over again.” – A.Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, ch.10 The Consciousness Deniers – Galen Strawson – March 13, 2018 Excerpt: What is the silliest claim ever made? The competition is fierce, but I think the answer is easy. Some people have denied the existence of consciousness: conscious experience, the subjective character of experience, the “what-it-is-like” of experience.,,, Who are the Deniers?,,, Few have been fully explicit in their denial, but among those who have been, we find Brian Farrell, Paul Feyerabend, Richard Rorty, and the generally admirable Daniel Dennett.,,, http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/ “that “You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today that it can truly be called astonishing.” Francis Crick – “The Astonishing Hypothesis” 1994 The Brain: The Mystery of Consciousness By STEVEN PINKER - Monday, Jan. 29, 2007 Part II THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL Another startling conclusion from the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there's an executive "I" that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. http://www.academia.edu/2794859/The_Brain_The_Mystery_of_Consciousness “(Daniel) Dennett concludes, ‘nobody is conscious … we are all zombies’.” J.W. SCHOOLER & C.A. SCHREIBER – Experience, Meta-consciousness, and the Paradox of Introspection – 2004 “We have so much confidence in our materialist assumptions (which are assumptions, not facts) that something like free will is denied in principle. Maybe it doesn’t exist, but I don’t really know that. Either way, it doesn’t matter because if free will and consciousness are just an illusion, they are the most seamless illusions ever created. Film maker James Cameron wishes he had special effects that good.” Matthew D. Lieberman – neuroscientist – materialist – UCLA professor
Thus, even though MatSpirit concedes that "That ol’ demon can’t fool us about the existence of our minds", none-the-less MatSpirit apparently fully embraces the demon of philosophical materialism which directly denies the existence of his mind. So which is it? Does Matspirit agree with Descartes that mind must be primary or does he agree with materialism that denies the existence of his mind? Mat Spirit also holds that "There happens to be quite a lot of evidence for a material world." Yet MatSpirit has less than zero evidence that conscious mind is somehow 'emergent' from some material basis:
"Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for the philosophy of consciousness." - Jerry Fodor - Rutgers University philosopher [2] Fodor, J. A., Can there be a science of mind? Times Literary Supplement. July 3, 1992, pp5-7. "Those centermost processes of the brain with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are so far beyond our comprehension at present that no one I know of has been able even to imagine their nature." Roger Wolcott Sperry - Nobel neurophysiologist As quoted in Genius Talk : Conversations with Nobel Scientists and Other Luminaries (1995) by Denis Brian "We have at present not even the vaguest idea how to connect the physio-chemical processes with the state of mind." - Eugene Wigner - Nobel prize-winner – Quantum Symmetries "Science's biggest mystery is the nature of consciousness. It is not that we possess bad or imperfect theories of human awareness; we simply have no such theories at all. About all we know about consciousness is that it has something to do with the head, rather than the foot." Nick Herbert - Contemporary physicist "No experiment has ever demonstrated the genesis of consciousness from matter. One might as well believe that rabbits emerge from magicians' hats. Yet this vaporous possibility, this neuro-mythology, has enchanted generations of gullible scientists, in spite of the fact that there is not a shred of direct evidence to support it." - Larry Dossey - Physician and author
In fact, not only does MatSpirit not have any evidence that consciousness can somehow be emergent from a material basis, Donald Hoffman has demonstrated, through numerous computer simulations, that if Darwinian evolution, and the materialistic presuppositions therein, were actually true, then, sans Descartes, ALL of our perceptions of reality would be illusory.
The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality - April 2016 The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman uses evolutionary game theory to show that our perceptions of an independent reality must be illusions. Excerpt: “The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions — mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/ Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is? – Video – 9:59 minute mark Quote: “Fitness is not the same thing as reality as it is, and it is fitness, and not reality as it is, that figures centrally in the equations of evolution. So, in my lab, we have run hundreds of thousands of evolutionary game simulations with lots of different randomly chosen worlds and organisms that compete for resources in those worlds. Some of the organisms see all of the reality. Others see just part of the reality. And some see none of the reality. Only fitness. Who wins? Well I hate to break it to you but perception of reality goes extinct. In almost every simulation, organisms that see none of reality, but are just tuned to fitness, drive to extinction that perceive reality as it is. So the bottom line is, evolution does not favor veridical, or accurate perceptions. Those (accurate) perceptions of reality go extinct. Now this is a bit stunning. How can it be that not seeing the world accurately gives us a survival advantage?” https://youtu.be/oYp5XuGYqqY?t=601
Apparently Descartes's demon that is fooling our minds about what we are actually seeing is none other than Darwinian evolution itself! :) Moreover, contrary to what the atheistic materialist is forced to believe because of the mathematics of population genetics, reliable observation is a necessary cornerstone of the scientific method.
Steps of the Scientific Method Observation/Research Hypothesis Prediction Experimentation Conclusion http://www.sciencemadesimple.com/scientific_method.html
Thus, since the reductive materialism of Darwinian evolution denies 'reliable observation', which is a necessary cornerstone of the scientific method itself, then clearly Darwinian evolution can never be based upon the scientific method itself and is therefore falsified once again in its claim to be a scientific theory. Moreover, completely contrary to what Hoffman found for Darwinian theory, it turns out that accurate perception, i.e. conscious observation, far from being unreliable and illusory, is experimentally found to be far more integral to reality, i.e. far more reliable of reality, than the mathematics of population genetics predicted. In the following experiment, it was found that "reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,”.
New Mind-blowing Experiment Confirms That Reality Doesn’t Exist If You Are Not Looking at It – June 3, 2015 Excerpt: The results of the Australian scientists’ experiment, which were published in the journal Nature Physics, show that this choice is determined by the way the object is measured, which is in accordance with what quantum theory predicts. “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,” said lead researcher Dr. Andrew Truscott in a press release.,,, “The atoms did not travel from A to B. It was only when they were measured at the end of the journey that their wave-like or particle-like behavior was brought into existence,” he said. Thus, this experiment adds to the validity of the quantum theory and provides new evidence to the idea that reality doesn’t exist without an observer. http://themindunleashed.org/2015/06/new-mind-blowing-experiment-confirms-that-reality-doesnt-exist-if-you-are-not-looking-at-it.html
Apparently science itself could care less if atheistic materialists are forced to believe, because of the mathematics of population genetics, that their observations of reality are illusory! As Richard Feynman stated: “If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is… If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
The Scientific Method - Richard Feynman - video Quote: “If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is… If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL6-x0modwY
I think that Descartes would be very pleased to see his argument for the primacy of mind confirmed in over the top fashion by quantum mechanics. Besides out immaterial minds and conscious observation becoming illusory and unreliable if materialism and/or Darwinian evolution were actually true, many other things become illusory too. Things that normal people resolutely hold to be concrete and real.
Basically, because of reductive materialism (and/or methodological naturalism), the atheistic materialist is forced to claim that he is merely a ‘neuronal illusion’ (Coyne, Dennett, etc..), who has the illusion of free will (Harris), who has unreliable beliefs about reality (Plantinga), who has illusory perceptions of reality (Hoffman), who, since he has no real time empirical evidence substantiating his grandiose claims, must make up illusory “just so stories” with the illusory, and impotent, ‘designer substitute’ of natural selection (Behe, Gould, Sternberg), so as to ‘explain away’ the appearance (i.e. illusion) of design (Crick, Dawkins), and who must make up illusory meanings and purposes for his life since the reality of the nihilism inherent in his atheistic worldview is too much for him to bear (Weikart), and who must also hold morality to be subjective and illusory since he has rejected God (Craig, Kreeft). Bottom line, nothing is real in the atheist’s worldview, least of all, morality, meaning and purposes for life.,,, - Darwin’s Theory vs Falsification – 39:45 minute mark https://youtu.be/8rzw0JkuKuQ?t=2387
Thus, although the Darwinian Atheist firmly believes he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for methodological naturalism), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to. It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.
2 Corinthians 10:5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;
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MatSpirit Forgive me but all I could think of while reading your post at 14 was this classic by Berlinski. Every time I read it I can’t stop laughing. I imagine this story being told to me by Jorge Luis Borges one evening in a Buenos Aires cafe. His voice dry and infinitely ironic, the aging, nearly blind literary master observes that "the Ulysses," mistakenly attributed to the Irishman James Joyce, is in fact derived from "the Quixote." I raise my eyebrows. Borges pauses to sip discreetly at the bitter coffee our waiter has placed in front of him, guiding his hands to the saucer. "The details of the remarkable series of events in question may be found at the University of Leiden," he says. "They were conveyed to me by the Freemason Alejandro Ferri in Montevideo." Borges wipes his thin lips with a linen handkerchief that he has withdrawn from his breast pocket. "As you know," he continues, "the original handwritten text of the Quixote was given to an order of French Cistercians in the autumn of 1576." I hold up my hand to signify to our waiter that no further service is needed. "Curiously enough, for none of the brothers could read Spanish, the Order was charged by the Papal Nuncio, Hoyo dos Monterrey (a man of great refinement and implacable will), with the responsibility for copying the Quixote, the printing press having then gained no currency in the wilderness of what is now known as the department of Auvergne. Unable to speak or read Spanish, a language they not unreasonably detested, the brothers copied the Quixote over and over again, re-creating the text but, of course, compromising it as well, and so inadvertently discovering the true nature of authorship. Thus they created Fernando Lor's Los Hombres d'Estado in 1585 by means of a singular series of copying errors, and then in 1654 Juan Luis Samorza's remarkable epistolary novel Por Favor by the same means, and then in 1685, the errors having accumulated sufficiently to change Spanish into French, Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, their copying continuous and indefatigable, the work handed down from generation to generation as a sacred but secret trust, so that in time the brothers of the monastery, known only to members of the Bourbon house and, rumor has it, the Englishman and psychic Conan Doyle, copied into creation Stendhal's The Red and the Black and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and then as a result of a particularly significant series of errors, in which French changed into Russian, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina. Late in the last decade of the 19th century there suddenly emerged, in English, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and then the brothers, their numbers reduced by an infectious disease of mysterious origin, finally copied the Ulysses into creation in 1902, the manuscript lying neglected for almost thirteen years and then mysteriously making its way to Paris in 1915, just months before the British attack on the Somme, a circumstance whose significance remains to be determined." I sit there, amazed at what Borges has recounted. "Is it your understanding, then," I ask, "that every novel in the West was created in this way?" "Of course," replies Borges imperturbably. Then he adds: "Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote." Vividvividbleau_{March 16, 2019
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PaV, As René Descartes showed back in the seventeenth century, the only things anybody can really know is that they exist and maybe some elementary logical and mathematical relationships. After all, we might all be asleep while an evil demon toys with our minds. In fact, he could be fooling us about logic and math too. But, "cogito, ergo sum", "je pense, donc je suis" and "I think, therefore I am". That ol' demon can't fool us about the existence of our minds. For everything else, we can only rely on evidence and hope for the best. There happens to be quite a lot of evidence for a material world. The evidence for a Godly world is much spottier and less convincing. Significantly, the most convincing evidence is supposed to be unavailable until you're dead, which sounds pretty suspicious to me. So face the facts, we're all believers, but the material world has tons of evidence for it while the evidence for a Godly world is both sparse and highly suspicious. (Would you sell your house to someone who promises to pay you for it as soon as you die? What if he offers you a really great price?) You're still calling secular beliefs religion. Philosophies and world views also guide you through your life and you don't have to die to benefit from them. PaV: "As to your responses, you’re missing the mark. I’ll leave it to readers to figure that out." Oh please don't leave me in the dark! If I'm missing something important, please tell me what it is so I can correct my errors! Tiktaalik is one of hundreds of thousands of fossils whose ages, skeletons and locations are found to accord with evolutionary theory. In Tiktaalik's case, people found fossils of fish whose fins were much stronger and leg-like than other fish's. To quote Wikipedia, "Unearthed in Arctic Canada, Tiktaalik is technically a fish, complete with scales and gills - but it has the flattened head of a crocodile and unusual fins. Its fins have thin ray bones for paddling like most fishes', but they also have sturdy interior bones that would have allowed Tiktaalik to prop itself up in shallow water and use its limbs for support as most four-legged animals do." There's lots more information that you might find interesting in that article. I'm surprised the enforcers of evolutionary orthodoxy haven't forced you to read it yet. If you found a watch on the moon (or on a heath, for that matter), you would be entirely correct to assume it was fabricated since watches don't reproduce. This, you will remember, is necessary for evolution to occur. However, if you find a rabbit on a heath, you would observe that it was manufactured by another rabbit, one who wasn't intelligent enough to design anything more complex than a hole in the ground. That rabbit in turn was manufactured by another rabbit and another and another -- until you suddenly realize that the rabbits doing the reproducing aren't quite exactly like the original rabbit on the heath. If you kept tracing your rabbit's ancestors, you would see the reproducers look less and less like rabbits until they finally looked like whatever animal rabbits are descended from. And if you followed those animals back far enough, you would eventually get to some single-celled something. I know you might not believe this, but before you deny it out of hand, why don't you ask Behe about it. I think he would agree with me because Behe is on record as believing in Darwinian evolution and common descent. He just maintains that an Intelligent Designer atarted the whole evolution ball rolling by loading the original CSI and also guided the transition from ape to human. P.S. For a very interesting article written by Sean B. Carroll that answers your questions on which way Tiktaalik was evolving and how its discoverer, Neal Shubin decided where to look and what age rocks to look in from other fossils, look at http://m.nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/its-a-fishapodMatSpirit_{March 15, 2019
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MatSpirit: You "believe" in materialism--that is, you "believe" that there is no "cosmic intelligence." However wrong that may be, it is a belief. It functions as a religion since it guides your thinking in the normal course of life and surely affects your understanding of what is morally good and morally wrong. So, face the facts: you're a believer. The opposite of religion is not "no-religion," it is "anti-religion": the choice to believe in a different set of first principles. As to your responses, you're missing the mark. I'll leave it to readers to figure that out. As to Tiktaalik, how do you know which direction life was taking at that moment? That is, how do you know that Tiktaalik is not a land reptile becoming aquatic---a la land mammals becoming aquatic, rather than a fish on its way to becoming a land reptile? But, you 'believe' that Tiktaalik cements in place the Darwinian view of things. OTOH, if I find a watch mechanism on the moon, it is a reasonable assumption that it was fabricated. Reason tells me this; not religion. The only true religion at work when it comes to evolution is that of Darwinism, and orthodoxy that is ruthlessly enforced---lest it be exposed as a fraud.PaV_{March 15, 2019
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MatSpirit "I do think that every thing in this universe is material" Translated: "I *believe* that everything in this universe is material." Do you believe that for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows? :) Andrewasauber_{March 15, 2019
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PaV: "I suppose “MatSpirit” translates to “material spirit,” making you a materialist. If so, then we know your starting point on all of this." I do think that every thing in this universe is material, but I don't claim omniscience. A few years ago we thought there were four forces, then we discovered evidence of a fifth. I'm pretty sure there's plenty more to learn, but I think the odds of finding a cosmic intelligence are vanishly minute. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some kind of other universe or universes outside of ours, if only because this universe apparently came from somewhere, but I don't expect to find any cosmic intelligences out there. Maybe some material intellects, like ours (or better), using whatever kind of material they have in a different universe, but nothing close to a god. PaV: " With that said, let me address something: In other words, whatever B12 “did”, B1 did the same thing. This is why B12 could be knocked out with no observable consequences for the virus. Then the virus deleted a single base-pair in B12 and the new B12 increased reproduction ten fold. You seem to know more than the experimenters. They don’t mention this correlation." It's all in the original article linked to in the OP: "Almost as surprising: The loss occurred in a gene, B12, whose purpose is largely unknown. In fact, when other researchers previously deactivated just the B12 gene, leaving B1 and all others intact, they found no effect on the vaccinia virus. Wiebe and Olson said the findings indicate that when B1 is absent—but only then—B12 actually helps inhibit replication by alerting the host's immune system. "That's sparked a lot of confused looks in people," Wiebe said." I'll bet it did. We have a gene, B12 that doesn't seem to do anything in an intact virus. People have deleted it with no observable change to the virus. In fact, if B1 is deleted, B12 helps to kill the cell. Yet when a virus missing the B1 gene deletes one particular base-pair in B12, "The seemingly miniscule loss corresponded with a 10-fold increase in the strain's otherwise stunted replication." Evolution in action. PaV: " Darwinism is a religion. In your case, it’s probably ‘materialism.’ This is what you believe." Well, I do believe that the universe exists and I'm a part of it, but that's more a philosophy than a religion. It's interesting how religeous people often diss something by calling it a religion. PaV: " The deletion of one base pair had significant impact. Can you get from one species to another one base pair at a time?" What do you have in mind? To have single base pair resolution, we'd need lots of sequenced genomes, probably thousands of them, and many of the organisms are extinct. If you'll accept a much coarser resolution, we can look for intermediate fossils like tiktaalik. We can also look at the genomic data we already have and see if the DNA follows a heredivtary pattern. I'm sure there are lots of other ways of checking. Who's paying and how much have they got to spend? PaV: " When we see organisms in a struggle for existence, their “solution” is usually one base pair change or two. And these base pair changes “damage” the genes–at the biochemical level, though this “damage” is tolerable because it provides relief from a less tolerable situation. How can such a mechanism lead to ever greater complexity and organization?" But the B12 gene was IMPROVED! Read the PhysOrg article again. The experimenters knocked out the B1 gene. This almost stopped reproduction. The B12 gene was a c tually alerting the host cell to the presence of an invader. Then the virus deleted a single base-pair in B12 and reproduction increased ten times! That's a giant improvement! The mutant B12 stopped trying to kill the virus and made it reproduce ten times faster. That's a big win!MatSpirit_{March 14, 2019
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MatSpirit: I suppose "MatSpirit" translates to "material spirit," making you a materialist. If so, then we know your starting point on all of this. With that said, let me address something:
In other words, whatever B12 “did”, B1 did the same thing. This is why B12 could be knocked out with no observable consequences for the virus. Then the virus deleted a single base-pair in B12 and the new B12 increased reproduction ten fold.
You seem to know more than the experimenters. They don't mention this correlation.
People have been predicting the Fall of Evolution since Darwin was still alive. Any day now…
I remember hearing of "Darwin's Bulldog." Now we have the NCSE. We have an imposed orthodoxy, something that religion could only hope for. Darwinism is a religion. In your case, it's probably 'materialism.' This is what you believe.
If they fail to accurately copy their DNA, then their offspring will try to operate with the new code and how well they operate will tell us if they are in a new part of the target zone or out of it.
The deletion of one base pair had significant impact. Can you get from one species to another one base pair at a time? When we see organisms in a struggle for existence, their "solution" is usually one base pair change or two. And these base pair changes "damage" the genes--at the biochemical level, though this "damage" is tolerable because it provides relief from a less tolerable situation. How can such a mechanism lead to ever greater complexity and organization? Have any idea?PaV_{March 14, 2019
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Tjguy: "The problem Mat, is that if evolution only breaks things, where did they come from to begin with? Call it fine tuning if you want, but where did the stuff come from that is now being fine tuned? " The stuff came from mutations - duplicating sections of DNA, moving sections of DNA around the genome (including copying them right into existing genes), deleting individual base pairs, inserting new base pairs, invasion by endoviruses, hybridization, and many other processes. Of course, ID followers don't generally believe that mutations can do that, probably because of what they're told by other ID thinkers. I'll try to explain more clearly. Think of it this way: You have some organism that is functional. Let's say a bacteria. It eats, it grows and most importantly it reproduces faster than the world destroys it. It uses its DNA to direct its activities which is how we know the DNA is functional. It goes to some lengths to accurately copy this known good DNA when it reproduces. If it passes on an accurate copy of its known functional DNA to its offspring, then that offspring has about the same chances of successfully reproducing as the original. And there are now two of them. And in another half hour or so, there are four of them, then eight, then sixteen, etc. It's a characteristic of life that it will tend to increase its numbers exponentially until something stops it, like running out of food. This exponential increase in numbers is the engine that powers evolution. So, you start out with one functional organism and pretty soon you've got millions of then. But what happens if the DNA is copied inaccurately? Now you have a new organism whose DNA is NOT known to be good. Will it work? You just don't know because the DNA is not identical to the known good parental DNA, it was changed during copying. How do you find out if the new DNA pattern will make the mutant cell operate as well as its parent? Well, there's any automatic way to test it: You let the new cell try to run itself with its mutant DNA! You let the cell try to eat, grow and reproduce using its brand new DNA. If it's successful and copies itself as well as its parent, then the numbers of new cells will increase and its lineage will become established. If it multiplies faster than its parent, its descendants will tend to crowd its parents out and it may drive them to extinction. If it multiplies slower than its parents, they will crowd the new line of cells out and they will eventually become extinct. The parental cell line will continue, as before. This process is commonly referred to as "natural selection". Note a few things: First, its all automatic. Natural selection happens automatically and requires no extra effort beyond the parents mistake in copying its DNA. Second, only small changes to the DNA are likely to be improvements. The exact pattern of the DNA is fairly important if you want it to function. Change one or two base pairs and it might work, blast out 30 or 40 base pairs and you'll probably adversely affect some function. There are a lot more ways to do something badly than well. Third: Failed mutations are free. If the single mutant cell doesn't survive, the millions of parental cells, with their known good DNA, continue the line. Fourth: [Special to Doctor Dembski] Making small changes to DNA solves the search problem that has bedeviled you. The virus we've been discussing has about 200,000 base pairs. We're changing one. That means the other 199,999 base pairs are known to be good! The only question is if the single new base-pair will gum up the works. It's like if you had one gene that affects your eyes and one gene that affects your heart and one gene that affects your liver and you change one gene that affects your nose. You may wind up with a deformed nose, but your eyes, heart and liver are going to be controlled by known good genes. On the other hand, if you change them all, your eyes, heart, liver and nose are all at risk. I might also point out that Doctor Dembski seems to think that evolution is always searching for a target. This target is a DNA string that will operate a cell so that it can eat, grow and reproduce. Well, if the parental cell is producing healthy offspring, THEN IT IS ALREADY IN THE TARGET ZONE. In other words, life is not searching for anything. It is already in the target zone, it has DNA that is working, and it goes to considerable effort to copy this DNA accurately to its offspring so that they too will be in the target zone. If they fail to accurately copy their DNA, then their offspring will try to operate with the new code and how well they operate will tell us if they are in a new part of the target zone or out of it. I hope this makes evolution a little clearer than the ID picture.MatSpirit_{March 13, 2019
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PaV, How does one gene "mask" another? By doing it's job. In other words, whatever B12 "did", B1 did the same thing. This is why B12 could be knocked out with no observable consequences for the virus. Then the virus deleted a single base-pair in B12 and the new B12 increased reproduction ten fold. PaV: " let me ask you this question: how many examples must Behe provide in order to convince you? Five, ten, a hundred, a thousand ……" Hmmm, what to do if Behe continues to present gene breakages discovered in the last few decades and use them as proof that all or most evolution proceeds by breaking genes while ignoring the many ways genes are slowly built? I guess I'll continue to believe that Behe has gotten himself into a corner and is grasping at straws. He can't even come up with any new ideas. The ICR and like groups were saying evolution proceeds from breaking genes back in the '80s. PaV: "Meanwhile, it doesn’t look good for Darwinism/neo-Darwinism right now. Everywhere scientists look, more complexity is found. And the answer is: random mutation and natural selection? I don’t think so." People have been predicting the Fall of Evolution since Darwin was still alive. Any day now...MatSpirit_{March 13, 2019
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“When one starts to treat Darwinism as a hypothesis about the biochemical level of life rather than an assumption, it takes about 10 minutes to conclude it’s radically inadequate.” Michael Behe - podcast https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/intelligentdesign/episodes/2019-03-13T15_56_13-07_00
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PaV @ 10: "it doesn’t look good for Darwinism/neo-Darwinism right now. Everywhere scientists look, more complexity is found." exactly!PeterA_{March 13, 2019
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MatSpirit: As to the B12 gene, the PR also has the authors of the paper saying this:
But by showing that B1 is masking at least one and probably several of B12's potential functions, the new study reinforces just how much remains unknown about why, when and how genes regulate one another, Wiebe said. Untangling the connections among those networks could require researchers to continue adapting, as well.
It's not that the B12 gene has no function, but that it's "masked" by the B1 gene. As to "adaptation" of the B12 gene, it was done by 'deletion': that is, no information was added, but subtracted. The gene was "blunted," let us say. As to the examples that Behe provides---which includes Lenski's LTEE and others, let me ask you this question: how many examples must Behe provide in order to convince you? Five, ten, a hundred, a thousand ...... For actual examples, besides his new book, the best place to look would be the Quarterly Review of Biology (?) article he wrote several years back. Yes, putative "evolution" of a new gene would take a long time; however, given all of the different species that exist in our world right now, certainly it should be observed somewhere. With new, efficient and inexpensive sequencing techniques, the answer to the question I pose will be answered over the next ten or twenty years. Meanwhile, it doesn't look good for Darwinism/neo-Darwinism right now. Everywhere scientists look, more complexity is found. And the answer is: random mutation and natural selection? I don't think so.PaV_{March 13, 2019
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I'm about half through reading Behe's new book. Behe is simply brilliant, following the data where it leads. He makes a major point that breaking a certain gene can most definitely make an organism more fit and natural selection will do its part. But there's a rub. As the organism becomes better and better adapted to it's environment, it also becomes less able to adapt should the environment eventually change. Once the formerly functional gene is broken, there's no going back. Over the long term, better adaptation results in reduced capacity for further adaptation and the organism more easily goes extinct. My example would be that after a cave fish loses its sight, it will never gain it back no matter how many random mutations it goes through. Behe's arguments depend a lot on bacteria studies due to their massively high reproductive rate and their highly optimized (and small) genome. He believes that "devolution" is effective for evolutionary fine tuning an organism down to the family level (genus and species), but no lower than that. It's a good read and he knows his stuff. -Q Edit by PaV: Nice post, Q!Querius_{March 12, 2019
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PaV, Sorry for the botched identification. Who says the B12 gene was deactivated? The press release says, "The loss occurred in a gene, B12, whose purpose is largely unknown. In fact, when other researchers previously deactivated just the B12 gene, leaving B1 and all others intact, they found no effect on the vaccinia virus." In other words, the B12 gene doesn't seem to have a function, but deleting one base pair in B12 increased reproduction ten times. That is fine tuning! I guess you could also say that the virus "adapt[ed] another gene to compensate" where the "other gene" was good ol' B12. The old version of B12 had no observable effect on reproduction, the newly mutated version increases reproduction ten fold. I must confess that when I heard what Behe's new book was about, I thought he'd authored a real clanger this time. Behe's main point seems to be that all or most of evolution proceeds by breaking existing genes. (And he even invented a brand new "Law" stating this, a Dembski - sized bit of hubris.) I haven't read his book yet, and having spent good money on "Darwin's Black Box" and "The Edge of Evolution", I'm not biting a third time, but perhaps you can tell us what evidence he provides to support this new "Law". Tjguy says, "... when we look at what is really happening, we don’t see stuff being created." This is partially true. We do occasionally see base pairs or even whole strings of pre-existing base pairs inserted, but a lot of mutations delete base pairs, and these deletions often incapacitate a gene. And strangely enough, this often greatly improves the organism! By ten times in this case. But when you look at how this happens, it usually turns out that the modified gene throttled some natural action, such as pumping fluids out of a bacteria, and removing this throttling pumps out enough of the antibiotic or whatever was killing the bacteria so the poor thing can start reproducing again. It may not reproduce as fast as the old bacteria did in an antibiotic free environment, but this new environment does have antibiotics in it and slow reproduction beats dead every time. The reason I though Behe has authored a clanger is because it's well known that it is millions of times easier to break a piece of DNA than it is to engineer a new piece and that means that all you're likely to see in the lab over a human life time is an occasional addition of a base pair or extra copying of a piece of existing DNA. Converting a gene to a new use or making a new gene from a stray chunk of DNA has to be done a tiny piece at a time and that takes a lot longer. You aren't likely to ever see it live. You have to compare DNA amongst many organisms, especially ancestral organisms, to "see" it happen. Behe should know this. Does he say anything about it in the book?MatSpirit_{March 12, 2019
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Dr. Behe takes down Jerry Coyne over on ENV- Bullet Points for Jerry Coyne Jerry may not have read the book...ET_{March 12, 2019
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Tjguy, Exactly.PeterA_{March 12, 2019
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@1 Matspirit The problem Mat, is that if evolution only breaks things, where did they come from to begin with? Call it fine tuning if you want, but where did the stuff come from that is now being fine tuned? For sure, it didn't come from the fine tuning process itself. Darwinism claims to be the process that creates stuff, but when we look at what is really happening, we don't see stuff being created. Mostly we see things being broken. And you can't get from the original cell of the first life to humans by "fine tuning" things and breaking things.tjguy_{March 11, 2019
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The bottom line is that at the end of the day bacteria remain bacteria and birds remain birdsPeterA_{March 11, 2019
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MatSpirit: Thanks for the heads up on that sentence. I've made a fix. As to the one base pair deletion, the authors suggest that was all that was needed to incapacatate the gene. A base pair deletion can result in a frame-shift and render the gene indecipherable. That said, you seem to miss the point that indeed, "incapacitating" a gene is definitely rendering a gene "broken": however, that doesn't mean there can't be "beneficial" effects. You'll just have to read Behe's Darwin Devolves to understand the argument. Behe says that if you are desparate to improve gas mileage, you might take out the seats, take out the windows, and do whatever else you can do to cut down on weight and drag. While your car may have a higher "fitness" value when it comes to mileage, you have undoubtedly "damaged" the car. N.B. (Edit by PaV) Behe explains this is this response to Lenski that came out today.PaV_{March 11, 2019
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"In what universe is a ten-fold increase “breaking”?" Perhaps Matspirit needs to read, "“We were expecting that the virus may adapt another gene to compensate,” said Wiebe, associate professor of veterinary medicine and biomedical sciences. “What we found instead is that the virus adapted by inactivating another gene. It was as if, upon cutting one wire, the best way to fix the problem was to cut another wire." But then again that was right in the OP. Can't blame him for missing it. :) “The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution”: Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain http://behe.uncommondescent.com/2010/12/the-first-rule-of-adaptive-evolution/bornagain77_{March 11, 2019
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