RE: [asa] (macroevolution) The term Darwinism

I said:
" By the way, Cameron, you never answered my question. Can you definitely REJECT or ACCEPT that fused chromosome 2 and pseudogenes are evidence of macroevolution of humans from apelike creatures?"

Sorry I missed your post where you addressed it- I'll read that now...

-----Original Message-----
From: Dehler, Bernie
Sent: Thursday, July 09, 2009 10:03 AM
To: asa
Subject: RE: [asa] (macroevolution) The term Darwinism

Cameron said:
"Your lining up of different types of eyes is just like piling up a sequence of Ford cars from the Model T to the present, and telling me that because various intermediate stages are represented, therefore the earlier models are the direct organic ancestors of the later ones. Without a mechanism for how a car can produce a baby car, this would be a silly speculation."

Everyone knows that cars are not organic and don't grow from baby to adult; so no one is hypothesizing that. However, there is an evolution with cars so you could study how they have evolved over time. Cars are an expression of the "car design meme."

By the way, Cameron, you never answered my question. Can you definitely REJECT or ACCEPT that fused chromosome 2 and pseudogenes are evidence of macroevolution of humans from apelike creatures?

...Bernie

-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On Behalf Of Cameron Wybrow
Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2009 5:30 PM
To: asa
Subject: Re: [asa] (macroevolution) The term Darwinism

David:

Regarding your options:

> a) I personally want more evidence.
> b) Evolution is wrong because we don't have that evidence.

I never said or implied (b). First of all, I never would have said
"evolution" without qualification, but would have spoken of "Darwinian
evolution", with specifically unguided mechanisms in mind. I have no axe to
grind against "evolution". Second, I would never commit the logical error
of saying that something is false simply because it is unproved.

My position has always been (a). I want more evidence -- not of
transitional forms (don't waste your breath telling me about more
Tiktaaliks), but of mechanisms. I want to know *how* one form changes into
another.

Your lining up of different types of eyes is just like piling up a sequence
of Ford cars from the Model T to the present, and telling me that because
various intermediate stages are represented, therefore the earlier models
are the direct organic ancestors of the later ones. Without a mechanism for
how a car can produce a baby car, this would be a silly speculation.
Similarly, without a mechanism for how that pinhole camera eye becomes a
more sophisticated eye, nothing has been proved. Again, tell me what
changes had to occur in the genome of that mollusc to create that more
sophisticated eye, and tell me the observational and laboratory evidence
which supports the possibility of such changes.

Also, I was not speaking about eyes with slightly dimmer vision than others.
I was speaking about eyes that do not function at all, or that misreport
distances in a way that would lead a rabbit to be eaten by a predator that
is much closer than the rabbit thinks. And in any case, you are still
avoiding the question how the iris, sclera, cornea, etc. got added to the
light-sensitive spot on the bacterium, and how they were all integrated so
nicely. (Always evolutionary biologists duck when it comes to the
historical and engineering details.)

Here is a statement where you disagree with just about every other proponent
of evolution that I have ever read:

> However, in studying evolution we
> are generally not too interested in "how might one get from point A to
> point B" but rather in "exactly how did it happen, including side
> excursions".

This just staggers me. Staggers me. Umpteen times I have seen ID people
and others criticize Darwinists for not being able to provide the actual
historical pathways, and every time the Darwinists have screamed "Unfair!
You can't expect us to produce the actual pathway that was followed! For
one thing, the events happened too long ago, and too much evidence has been
lost. For another thing, there might be many possible pathways. You have
the right to demand only a hypothetical pathway."

And now David Campbell says that evolutionists don't concern themselves with
"how might one get from point A to point B", i.e., hypothetical pathways,
but deal only in "exactly how did it happen"? I'm stunned.

If *that* is what Darwinians conceive their task to be, they can never
succeed, not in a billion years. Too much genetic data is irretrievably
lost. (You must know this!) The *best* that Darwinism can ever hope for is
to reconstruct plausible hypothetical pathways. So I'm setting Darwinism a
lower bar than you are. And given that they can't even jump that lower bar,
I would advise you to join me.

As I said, provide with a hypothetical *detailed* pathway to a major organ
or system. Show me how the new organ or system is built, from the genome
up. If you do, and if it checks out with biologists and biochemists that I
know and trust, I will eat my words. Until then, I maintain that Darwinian
mechanisms are highly speculative, purely qualitative and general, and
mostly unsubstantiated.

Finally, your remarks about ID are not to the point. ID doesn't have to be
correct for Darwinian evolution to be recognized as lacking in confirmation.
It is possible to know that neo-Darwinism is a weak and shaky hypothesis
without adopting any alternative. (Of course, it is likely that the
evidence for neo-Darwinism is weak precisely because life cannot be
explained without reference to design, but that is another matter.)

Cameron.

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Campbell" <pleuronaia@gmail.com>
To: "asa" <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2009 2:10 PM
Subject: Re: [asa] (macroevolution) The term Darwinism

>> You have in essence argued that we cannot give full evolutionary
>> pathways --
>> not even full hypothetical evolutionary pathways -- for major organs and
>> systems, for several reasons, notably (1) we simply do not yet have the
>> understanding of the genome necessary for the task, and (2) we cannot
>> reconstruct the environments accurately enough to be sure how selection
>> would have operated.
>>
>> My point exactly. And the logical follow-up question is: if evolutionary
>> biologists are lacking the above knowledge, how can they be so *certain*
>> that microevolutionary processes can simply be extrapolated to generate
>> macroevolution? It is one thing to say that macroevolution *may* be
>> explicable via roughly Darwinian processes; it is another thing entirely
>> to
>> say that "science" has proved this, or that the extrapolation is so
>> unproblematic it does not even need to be critically analyzed.
>
> Because all that we do know about the systems points that way, with
> the caveat that I presume you are including all sorts of "natural"
> processes under the scaling up from microevolution to macroevolution.
> (I.e., there are factors besides day-to-day population dynamics
> involved in macroevolution, though the relative role is highly
> debated. If these factors are entirely describable by natural laws in
> their physical effects, I assume that falls under your category of
> scaling up from microevolution to macroevolution. For example, the
> asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous is an event that played
> an important role in the course of evolution, clearly outside the
> realm of population genetics, but it was a "natural" event.). Again,
> macroevolution must be precisely defined to meaningfully talk about
> it. There's no magic, hard and fast line, between purportedly "macro"
> and "micro" events.
>
> However, I would note that we may be talking at cross purposes here.
> Your statement could be taken in two ways
> a) I personally want more evidence.
> b) Evolution is wrong because we don't have that evidence.
>
> b is unreasonable because we do not have the means to produce such
> evidence. a reflects individual judgement and as such is not
> necessarily unreasonable, though it can be if either the standards are
> uneven (the usual human approach being to accept things one wants to
> believe on much less evidence) or ridiculous (e.g., some "if God
> exists, why doesn't He do X").
>
>> Yes, a rudimentary version of an eye which actually *works* (however
>> poorly), might be useful (e.g., a crude, light-sensitive spot on a
>> one-celled creature), but an eye which depends on an arrangement of
>> complicated parts (iris, cornea, retina, various fluids, a whole bunch of
>> co-ordinated muscles, etc.), but is missing some of those parts or has
>> some
>> of those parts broken (so that the whole system cannot work) would not be
>> useful.
>
> Not except tautologically. Eyes range throughout the spectrum from
> very simple to very complex. More complex eyes are better at seeing
> particular things (exactly what depends on the type of eye, e.g.,
> compound eyes are rather better for sensing motion than making
> images). On the other hand, they probably have more vulnerabilities
> to different thigns that could go wrong.
>
> Unless I have my glasses, anything more than about a foot away is
> blurry. However, I can still avoid obstacles, detect large organisms,
> tell if it's day or night, etc.; I can also see in detail if things
> are very close.
>
> The nautilus has a good eye built on the pinhole camera pattern. Not
> as effective as the fully developed eye of an octopus or squid, but
> pretty good and definitely useful.
>
> Most mammals are colorblind, yet they manage OK. Compared to many
> birds, we're rather colorblind-they can see many more.
>
> The idea that the eye is an irreducibly complex structure is
> incorrect. Any sort of light/dark detection is useful, so a system
> that doesn't function all that well is still useful. Improvements are
> generally useful (except when they are in directions that are not or
> no longer useful, cf. the loss of sight in many cave-dwelling
> organisms.) Of course if you do something like sever the optic nerve,
> the eye doesn't help much.
>
>> A computer with a keyboard which could only type the letter "e"
>> would be useless for word-processing, for example, even though all the
>> other
>> components of the computer worked just fine.
>
> However, it could be used to produce some symbolic system, cf. my
> professor recalling early computing, making a graph using spaces and
> x's.
>
>> So anyone who believes that macroevolution produced the human camera eye
>> must propose intermediate
>> stages, describing all the organ parts necessary to each of those
>> intermediate stages, and must also propose mutations that would allow one
>> stage to progress to the next one, retaining all or most of the old
>> function
>> while adding new elements that would eventually lead to the new and
>> improved
>> function.
>
> No, this is saying that everyone must adopt your standards. However,
> it should be noted that adding on new function is not particularly
> difficult. The example of going from red/green colorblind to
> three-color vision (what non-colorblind humans have) is a well-studied
> example. The pigments detecting red or green are quite similar and
> diverged rather recently. Most South American monkeys are red/green
> colorblind, but within some species both red and green alleles exist.
> As in humans, this is on the X chromosome, so males are haploid for
> the gene and either seee green or red better but can't especially
> distinguish them. Females, however, have two copies and may have
> color vision if they are heterozygous. Duplication of the gene could
> easily result in making three-color vision standard, as happened in
> the old world monkey-ape-human lineage. (Color isn't so useful at
> night; most mammals are primarily nocturnal and do fine without the
> red/green sensitivity. Finding ripe fruit, as many primates do,
> however, makes color more important.) Thus, a basic description of
> each stage is possible in cases such as this where we know the main
> genes and know the previous stage. However, as far as I know we don't
> have full details about every gene that influences what goes on in the
> brain in the transition from two color to three color vision.
>
> We do know a good deal about the physical changes involved in skeletal
> parts of well-studied groups of organisms, e.g, the changes in jaws
> from fishes through the various groups of land vertebrates.
>
>> Regarding your final analogy, note that the question, "When Sally threw
>> the ball on this particular date, where did it go?", contains a built-in
>> and unproved assumption, i.e., that Sally in fact threw a ball. If we
>> take "Sally" to be an analogue of "macroevolutionary processes", then we
>> see the unstated assumption of macroevolutionary theory, i.e., that there
>> exist entirely natural processes of biological change capable of building
>> radically new organs and body plans.<
>
> Actually, I was thinking more in terms of the ball's trajectory, how
> long she had to stay in her room after it broke something, etc. as
> being the macroevolutionary processes.
>
> We know quite a lot about the physical forces governing the trajectory
> of a ball. Likewise, we know quite a lot about the basic mechanisms
> of genetics, selection, drift, etc. However, in studying evolution we
> are generally not too interested in "how might one get from point A to
> point B" but rather in "exactly how did it happen, including side
> excursions".
>
> Entirely natural processes of biological change capable of building
> radically new organs and body plans do exist, although the description
> "radically new" conceals the fact that in most cases the beginnings
> would not seem all that radical or new; only the long term outcome of
> the change appears so different. ID advocates generally claim that
> those processes are too inefficient to build things within a
> reasonable amount of time, but mutation and selection do exist and
> have the capability of producing something given enough time.
>
>> Yet if all we know is that macroevolution *happened*, but cannot account
>> for *why* it happened, then it is premature to assume that the causes of
>> the process were entirely natural. It is the presumption (without proof)
>> that the causes of the process were wholly natural that ID proponents
>> greet with skepticism. How can we know this, given the huge gaps in our
>> understanding -- gaps just conceded by you -- regarding what genes
>> control the various structures and functions?<
>
> Part of the issue lies in the perceived size of the gaps. Not knowing
> in detail what every single gene was doing doesn't bother me a bit.
> Evolutionary models work. Sure, I'm puzzled as to what's going on in
> Campeloma DNA seqeunces, but I know that a) I have a very patchy
> picture of the genus so far, b) one of the genes is known (by me) to
> often be polyallelic, c) polyploidy could make the picture very messy.
>
>> Wouldn't it be a more accurate -- not to mention scientifically modest --
>> statement of our current knowledge to say that there *may* be a wholly
>> naturalistic explanation for the fossil record, but that we are nowhere
>> near having such an explanation in hand?<
>
> Not entirely, for in fact evolutionary models work very well. It is
> true that we don't have everything figured out, and that is often not
> conveyed well, if at all. However, no glaring problems are evident
> (unless limited workers and funding count) -work is progressing on
> many fronts. Additional considerations related to one's assumptions
> about the likelihood of non-naturalistic events in the course of
> evolution are, of course, relevant. ID would do well to spend more
> time thinking about why one would expect to find non-naturalistic
> events and when and where, instead of simply demanding to find
> "fingerprints" in evolution.
>
> Conversely, ID ought not to claim that the absence of a naturalistic
> explanation is proven, or near at hand. Is it possible that
> conventional evolutionary models will run into an unambiguous brick
> wall? Yes. Of course, there might be some different naturalistic
> explanation instead; that falls short of proof of ID, but probably
> such a discovery would tend to point towards ID. ID has done itself a
> major disservice by making careless claims of having already achieved
> proof, often clearly incorrect claims. It sounds better for marketing
> to the masses but discredits itself.
>
> --
> Dr. David Campbell
> 425 Scientific Collections
> University of Alabama
> "I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
>
>
> To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
> "unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
>

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Thu Jul 9 13:04:56 2009