Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Darwin Was Wrong…
…and Lamarck was right.
Well, maybe. Of the two major theories of human evolution developed in the 19th century, Darwin believed in natural selection — that human traits are passed along through DNA and not through environmental factors — and Lamarck believed that parents can transmit environmentally acquired traits.
Darwin won the sweepstakes, but Lamarck may not have been entirely wrong. From ArsTechnica:
…scientists exposed male mice to six weeks of alternating stressors like 36 hours of constant light, a 15-minute exposure to fox odor, exposure to a novel object (marbles) overnight, 15 minutes of restraint in a 50 mL conical tube, multiple cage changes, white noise all night long, or saturated bedding.
Poor little guys.
Then the scientists allowed the mice to breed. Adult offspring of these chronically stressed dads had reduced hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal stress axis reactivity; when they themselves were restrained for 15 minutes, they did not make as much corticosterone as mice sired by relaxed dads. This is relevant, and problematic, because blunted stress responses in humans are associated with neuropsychiatric disorders like depression, schizophrenia, and autism.
In other words, dads better learn to relax a bit:
The researchers found that stressed dads have increased levels of nine microRNAs in their sperm. The scientists obviously hypothesized that these miRNAs were responsible for the reduced corticosterone response in the kids, and they set out to test it by injecting a similar cocktail of RNA into single-cell mouse zygotes. After these zygotes divided into two cells, one of the cells was allowed to develop into a full-grown mouse and the other was taken for genetic analysis. The mice that got these miRNAs looked exactly the same as those born to the stressed dads; as adults, they had the same blunted stress response and transcriptional changes in their brains. So the miRNAs are responsible for transmitting this effect.
On the other hand, let me ask the dads out there: seeing the world the way it is these days, isn’t being totally stressed out the most rational way to be?
Published in Science & Technology
Preemptive surrender never leads to victory.
I suggest you go read Vox Day’s SJW’s Always Lie (linked in another thread), to understand what we’re up against.
They count on people taking your attitude, so they can win.
Historical science is not testable in the same method as a chemical reaction or a gene regulatory network. Evolution, plate tectonics, and other theories seek to explain past events based on causes currently in operation. The only process that we see that has the ability to produce large amounts of new specified information is action by an intelligent agent. It is an inference to the best explanation.
ID also uses a considerable amount of hard numbers, such as the universal probability bound. The Design Inference is a detailed treatment of how we can apprehend design via a sufficiently low probability event combined with an independent specification. Michael Behe’s Edge of Evolution moves in a similar direction, and uses studies of natural mutations and selection to determine the level that is a bridge too far for natural selection. (He also makes some bold predictions there – in theory, you could design an antibiotic for which bacteria could not develop resistance.)
Now, if you are curious about the role of faith in ID, it’s no more than any scientific theory. Some scientists are certainly not shy about claiming that they are loyal to evolution out of a prior commitment to materialism / naturalism. It does not change the status of the theory.
In theory, you can exceed the speed of light. Practice is somewhat more difficult.
You keep mistaking my insistence on care and caution with surrender.
I’m not sure what I can do about that.
Again, from the article:
But at no point does he go on to say “If you apply this same calculation to the TTSS, you get an origination probability of 10^-69, which is well below Dembski’s claimed threshold.” It may be that the flagellum as a whole is not irreducibly complex, but he has in no way demonstrated that the TTSS system is not.
He goes on to argue about whether or not an unknown process exists which may alter the calculation by providing yet more intermediate functions. Which is fine; I’m willing to re-evaluate the argument once such functions are described. While it’s certainly begging the question to assume no such functions exist, it’s also begging the question to assume they certainly do.
I just want to say that I am enjoying this whole exchange, as someone interested in the whole topic but without strong opinions or knowledge about it or desire to comment (much).
Thanks, ladies and gentlemen.
If I wasn’t clear in that last comment, I’d be willing to discard the argument if he, or anyone, could demonstrate that the TTSS and the rest of the flagellum fall below Dembski’s 10^-150 threshold, or that there are more than two steps, all of which fall below that threshold.
I’d be willing to discard the argument if someone could demonstrate a series of intermediary structures or other uses for the proteins such that there are enough steps for slow, successive variation to produce a flagellum.
I’d be willing to discard the argument if someone were able to prove to me that the concept of irreducible complexity in and of itself is a useless measure, or that Dembski’s calculations are categorically wrong. This has to be about the methods, independent of the conclusions they’re driving at.
Because I think it amounts to the same thing, in practice. It’s one thing to not say something factually wrong that might come back to bite you, it’s quite another to tailor your conversations to your opponent’s anticipated reaction.
They’re the thought police, Tommy. If they can control your thoughts before you publish them, all’s the better. Controlling the conversation is what they’re after. No ThoughtCrime.
There are so many examples that this is their intent that I find it remarkable that you’re not aware that this is their goal.
It is an inference to an explanation. To be considered the best explanation shouldn’t it first adequately disprove the other explanations? And isn’t the onus is on the proponents of intelligent agency to explain how the new specified information came to be dispersed, employed or used?
The inference doesn’t seem to explain much…only relying the incessant complaints that certain aspects of evolutionary theory are flawed and therefore cannot explain the rapid rise in new, more complex species over a “brief” 25 million year period or that the fossil record is incomplete or that common ancestral evidence is missing and therefore some intelligent agent is the next best explanation without feeling compelled to offer any explanation of how this intelligent agent pulled off this feat. This is the brick wall that is encountered time and time again. Meyer espouses in the video: Great infusion of information…information tends to derive from intelligence…therefore an intelligent agent was the cause of the informational infusion. But no one in the audience bothered to ask what the process was that the intelligent agent used. Until that happens it seems to me that ID is simply special pleading for some sort of intelligent agent because they’re too lazy to take the next step and consider what the possible processes could have been to do what they’re claiming.
BTW, I’d like to add that I had the exact same response to epigenetics when I first heard about it that Rob did: “Wow, so Lamarck was on to something!”
You want to ignore real world conditions. Sorry General but I won’t recklessly take the hill with you from the front, so you can claim glory in my death.
Sometimes, like it or not, the enemy needs to be out-flanked.
I self-censor a lot because I work in a regulated industry, and there are a lot of topics I just can’t discuss here on Ricochet. It’s important to understand that the SJWs run things in industry and government. Gaming, social media and the web are a mopping-up operation for them.
I’m willing to learn. What’s your plan to out-flank them?
Well, you can’t have a fossil record of a gene. The idea that the components of the shell which is keratin (if I recall) could have developed long before animals were producing hard shells easily preserved through fossilization. What we see in the Cambrian explosion is the emergence of a new more expansive use of this gene to produce the shells that get preserved. Well, actually the shells aren’t preserved the impression of the shells in sediment is preserved.
Forgive me, I’m way out of my area of expertise (beer) but from a distance this looks like two sides basically saying the same thing slightly differently.
OK, random chance I get. But the first part jostles me.
First, it assumes there is such a thing as benefit in an undesigned world. What is benefit?
Second, it assumes there is such a thing as selective in an undesigned world. What is selecting?
It seems to me we are overlaying the world with our concepts and then doing the science within the framework of those concepts.
Reproductive success. Period.
See above.
Yeah, the language doesn’t really support discussion of some of these concepts. When you say an organ is “designed” to do something, when you really mean “selected”, you’re imputing assumptions.
Why is that a benefit?
Because then the next generation gets the chance to reproduce and survive.
Well, it’s arguable. See: The Kardashians. The Clintons. Honey Boo-boo. Miley Cyrus. Ed Schultz. Anthony Weiner…
But why does a creature benefit from there being a next generation?
Would you mind if I don’t see Weiner?
The creature doesn’t. It helps a lot if you think of the “creature” as the line of ancestors and descendents. Sort of like fungus and mushrooms: the mushrooms come and go, but the fungus remains.
All the creatures die—we’ll not get into basically immortal creatures like bacteria—but the line continues.
Actually that doesn’t help at all. That just makes it seem crazier to me.
So the mushroom doesn’t benefit but mushroomness benefits?
And then mushrooms are selectively moving ever toward mushroomness?
Well, things can really get bizarre when mushrooms are involved. Go ask Alice.
To be serious just for a moment, the benefit is a benefit to the species in general to survive, not the individual member of the species, though the individual within the species can benefit with adaptations in some or many ways, as with some mammals’ ability to hide from predators, resist certain diseases, hunt and gather food at night based on changes in the size olfactory lobes, etc. giving it a better sense of smell to find food sources, avoid paparazzi, avoid jury duty, avoid high school reunions…develop a sense of humor as a defense and survival mechanism…where was I? Thus micro- and macro-evolutionary changes, genetic mutations, or in the example cited by Rob of some discernible traits that may be passed to successive generations can have a beneficial effect. Keep in mind some mutations or changes in genetic code can have harmful or deleterious effects causing malformed organs, physical deformities, mental deformities…Democrats.
But what is the benefit of survival itself?
It seems if survival is a benefit then a creature wouldn’t direct energy toward survival of the species but toward survival of the self. Indeed, there wouldn’t even be a species. A thing would exist for as long as it could then it would go away.
Now we’re leaving the physical and entering the metaphysical. I’ll go with—as I understand it—the Jewish view: that we cannot know God’s motives. We attempt to survive because we’re commanded to, driven to.
Well, that’s why they call it the sex drive. In large part it’s outside our conscious control. For an animal without conscious control, forget it.
Just the prolongation of the species. Does it need to be more?
Correct. Most animals have a strong self-preservation instinct and mothers tend to have an even stronger urge to protect their offspring even if it means sacrificing themselves so that offspring will survive. The individual survival instinct when acted upon and successful helps to prolong the species. Clearly most animals aren’t consciously aware that their actions are resulting in the prolongation of their species. But they seem to be genetically programmed for survival and at least long enough to reproduce and replicate. Humans, because we have more advanced brains, of course…well some humans…are more fully appreciative that survival of the species is dependent at times on more conscious and deliberative decision making…as in whether to take Mike Bloomberg seriously, subsist only on bacon or gin or both, vote Democrat, spend hard-earned money on Jackie Collins novels…
OK, so when we bring God into it then we are dealing with design, no?
Maybe it is the design argument I’m not getting? This all sounds like two sides of the same coin to me. Where exactly is the split?
Maybe. If we can’t know God’s motives then how can we know what his design is? Maybe we’re just an experiment where God set up a bunch of rules, and said “Surprise me!”
I’m not sure what question you’re asking here.
Selection is done through reproduction. If a mutation helps ensure more offspring it is selected for. All the genomes in a species are all being replicated. Any genome which has an alteration that enhances the rate of replication will be selected for. The benefit is increased reproduction, this also happens to be the method of selection. Now increased reproduction can take two forms, from having more offspring or a higher survival rate of offspring. Recall, that living organisms grow and expand, until they reach the limits of their resources. Anything that allows you to expand faster will be selected for.
That was the genius of Darwin’s conception that the method for selection is built into the system of reproduction.