Neoteny wrote:1)ā¦.Anyhow, I have already discussed thermodynamics sufficiently and your probability hypothesis is too painful for me to want to explain, though I suppose I could if anyone actually wants me to.
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I must have missed it but I do not remember seeing you write anything on thermodynamics or probability. But in brief I still don't understand the argument.
Could you please explain how the issues below are NOT in violation of the laws of thermodynamics?.
- Beginning with the āBig Bangā and the self-formation and expansion of space and matter, the evolutionist scenario declares that every structure, system, and relationshipādown to every atom, molecule, and beyondāis the result of a loosely-defined, spontaneous self-assembly process of increasing organization and complexity, and a direct contradiction (i.e., theorized violation) of the second law.
This hypothesis is applied with the greatest fervor to the evolutionistsā speculations concerning biological life and its origin. The story goes thatāagain, in violation of the second lawāwithin the midst of a certain population of spontaneously self-assembled molecules, a particularly vast and complex (but random) act of self-assembly took place, producing the first self-replicating molecule.
Continuing to ignore the second law, this molecular phenomenon is said to have undergone multiple further random increases in complexity and organization, producing a unique combination of highly specialized and suitably matched molecular ācommunity membersā which formed what we now know as the incredibly efficient, organized self-sustaining complex of integrated machinery called the cell.
Now, onto your probability argument. Why is it too painful? And what do you mean by that? I have already posted some of the issues in the TL:DR post. Could you please show me numbers and evidence that supports a favorable condition that these complex things (Protein, DNA, enzymes, etc) would arise and the probability is NOT inconceivably small?
Neoteny wrote:2) On to the genetics, my favorite:
The fat cat ate the wee bat.
The fat rat ate the wee bat.
Oopzors⦠where did that information come from?
āThe fat ate the wee rat,ā is also a complete sentence. It is only illogical because we associate fat with an inactive object. It is still conveying applicable information. Maybe in a world of sentences, shorter sentences that make sense would win out. So your āfat ate the wee ratā would be successful and multiply and pass on its genes to the next generation. Thus, your mutation types argument is thus useless.
First let's look at information. Information is only good if there is a system to decode it. For instance I can randomly draw lines in the sand with a stick or make shapes on a piece of paper but it has no meaning to anyone else unless there is a frame of reference to understand it or decode it.
Since evolution requires that information randomly came into being, it also requires that information randomly was understandable by the very random pieces that made it up. And since information is not dependent on the medium in which it is written (The message: I like pizza has just as much meaning if it is written on paper, typed on a computer, sewn into a shirt, printed in binary, molded in clayā¦..) evolution must come up with where the methods of understanding the information evolved from.
Let's look at it another way. If DNA randomly formed, for it to be useful it would have, at the same time needed to randomly form in a manner in which it understood itself and could use those instructions (that randomly formed) to duplicate itself. Basically DNA had to randomly form into an information system and then decoder of the language at the same time.
Information is a message that conveys meaning, such as a book of instructions.ā¦Information is not matter.
Here is an example of a scientific study that declare information coems from intelligence.
- Scientists with the SETI institute are using huge radio telescopes to search for messages from intelligent beings out in space. (The letters "SETI" mean Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence.) They correctly state that intelligent messages are created only by intelligent beings. The first step in their search is to separate between static and message. So far all they have found is static, but if they find a message from space, they will have shown that there are intelligent beings out there somewhere. If exceptions existed, and intelligent messages could be sent out without any intelligence involved, their whole search would be meaningless.
Can someone please give an example or explanation as to how information/intelligent messages/decodable data can randomly happen without intelligence when it is clearly stated, by SETI, that intelligence is required.
Now I have a couple issues with your reasoning about the mutations.
Here is the example:
original=The fat cat ate the wee bat.
mutation=The fat rat ate the wee bat.
You state that the mutated sentence is still information but it is just illogical. Well my question to you is what good is illogical information? If I was to write you a letter and I put this sentence down, would you be able to understand it? No you would not. Not only was the initial information lost, but the new information does not make sense.
Two Examples
Here are some other examples. Take a cook book and a blueprint for a house.
Let's assume the cook book has 10 recipes and the blueprint is for a single story ranch home. Each one of these groups of information can be used to construct different things based on the "code" or instructions.
So let's take a look at what would happen if we changed a number or word in a cooking recipe. The amount of a particular ingredient could be changed, maybe the time that the food is cooked would be wrong. Has the recipe actually added any new useful information? No. All it has done is changed the initial information and replaced it with information that lowers the amount of value in the recipe.
Same thing with a house blueprint. If you randomly change the location or size of a board or wire, the house might not lose its function but it did lose information to properly be constructed.
If there were multiple copies of each of these cookbooks and blueprints and "mutations" happened to some of them, what would happen? Well first the mutations might not be enough to affect the outcome of the product based on the instructions. But eventually a cook book or blueprint would lose so much information by randomly changing letters and numbers, the data would not allow the cook or builder to make a proper meal or home. Those blue prints would then be thrown away (natural selection).
Natural selection (survival of the fittest, cooks choosing the best cook book and builders the best blue print) would eliminate the bad copies (harmful mutations) and the recipe/blueprint would be maintains with some level of information loss/change but still information to make a recipe that is useful.
This is how mutations and natural selection work in nature. Mutations happen upon a set of DNA and if the mutations are so bad the DNA produces organisms that cannot live into the environment, they will die and the copy will not be spread to the next generation.
But can these mutations actually add new information to the recipe to make an entirely new dish of food or add information to the blue prints to make a completely new house?
Mutations of the Two Examples
and Natural Selection of the Mutations
Lets take a very simple recipe (much less complex than anything we are talking about from a biological evolutionary perspective) Macaroni and Cheese.
Macaroni and Cheese
1-Boil 5 cups of water
2-Add 2 cups of macaroni
3-Boil for 7 minutes
4-Strain water from macaroni
5-add ½ stick of butter
6-add ½ cup milk
7-add cheese
This is a very simple set of instructions for macaroni and cheese (7 steps)
If we add mutations to these instructions what happens?
- -If we boil more water (10 cups) nothing really changes, we just boil more water and it takes longer.
-If we boil less that 5 cups of water the macaroni might not be able to boil long enough (water boils off) and the macaroni would be tough and not tender. If the rest of the steps followed properly then we would just have tough macaroni.
-What if we added to much or too little macaroni. The more we add, the less cheesy the mac would be compared to the original recipe. And the less mac we add, the cheesier the mac would be. Not really a big deal different some people may like more or less chesse anyway.
-What if we lose the information to strain the water. The recipe would no longer b macaroni and cheese but mac and cheese soup. Yuk.
-And for the last step. What if the recipe mutated and asked the cook to add cheepe. Well there is no such thing as cheepe. So nothing would be added. Now we get soupy hot wet macaroni with no cheese.
As you can see slight mutations into the recipe can provide a wide variety of dishes all based on the basic mac and cheese. Depending on whether or not the recipes was like or disliked by certain people would determine how long it was used. If a certain recipe was not like it would not be copied and eventually be lost. (Again this is natural selection).
But what we see here is that these mutations are not creating any new types of food. The basic ingredients do not change. Only the amount and the order can vary.
This illustration above works for a blue print too. But a blueprint is much more complex. Remember the blue print is not intelligent it is just the source of the information that the builder uses. As dimensions, specs and requirements mutate (change), the plans become less complete. Randomly changing data in a mac and cheese recipe might not produce horrible deadly food, but even a small change in a blue print for a house could cause the whole thing to collapse (wrong nails, smaller boards, and improper connections).
But let's assume the mutations do not destroy the house. The color of the paint, the type of carpet, location of the light switch, maybe the direction the doors swing and various other aspects might change. Again this is not a new type of home but a variety of homes built around the basic same set of instructions.
Do Natural selection and mutations allow for an increase in the number/type/style of recipes or homes?
If we now look at the recipe for macaroni and cheese, what mutations could happen to form a different dish of food? Randomly adding or subtractive letters or numbers from this recipe MAY EVENTUALLY add a new, understandable item to the recipe but it will only be passed on by natural selection (i.e. the cook likes the recipe and keeps it for future use) if the recipe is good.
What if we randomly add 3 letters into the recipe? Or maybe numbers? A new step?
How long would it take to get spaghetti from macaroni and cheese?
-They both boil water-X
-They both use pasta-X
-Different pasta-mutation required
-they both strain the pasta-X
-One recipe calls for milk, butter, and cheese while the other uses tomato based sauce and meat-mutation required
Well one might look at that and say "only two little mutations" that is easy. But in real life these mutations would need to happen in full to be kept by the cook.
If macaroni and cheese mutated recipe called for, inoracam fo spuc 2 (inversion mutation for 2 cups of macaroni) the cook would not understand the recipe and the food would not be good. This mutated recipe would then be through away (natural selection deleting the unusable things) and the mutation would be gone.
If anyone can show me how you could:
- -take a short story, small simple recipe or dog house plans.
-Randomly change numbers, text or words. (Added mutations)
-After each mutation, read the data and use it. If the outcome is desirable (the information still allows for the final product to function or be used), keep the mutated instructions; if not then throw it away. (Natural selection again)
-Increase the final information (remember, Information is a message that conveys meaning, so random letters are not information)
-Produce: novels, textbooks, and magazines that is understandable and cover a variety of topics; a large number of recipes for many dishes varying in style, type and ingredients and blue print for a mansion, condominium, skyscraper and shopping mall.
-The items listed above must be completely new and original. Since the theory of evolution states that there is no guide and no determined outcome, these new items should not be influenced by anything already created. (i.e. Don't show me how William Shakespeare's writings can be "randomly" generated. That type of random generation has a predetermined out come or desired design.
If anyone can do this, I will believe in evolution.
And I am actually given you more to work with than evolution would. We already have a system of information. I am asking for evolution of a new original work within that system from random mutations.
However evolution claims, as I have stated before, the system originated at the same time the information for the system originated.
Neoteny wrote:3) Your mutations are random argument confuses me. You donāt use randomness at all but instead bring up chemical resistance. Anyway, of course the resistance was in the population already. If it wasnāt, all the lice would die. Instead the mutation already happened. Mutations, like you said, are not guided by anything, including chemicals. Lice donāt say, āhey thereās this bad chemical, let me mutate.ā Itās more like, āwhere did all my friends go?ā The mutation occurred beforehand. Your argument doesnāt lead any credibility toward creationism or against evolution.
I agree that the lice do not say āhey thereās this bad chemical, let me mutate.ā but then how are some resistant.
There are two ways of looking at it
1) They always had the resistance.
2) They mutated a resistance to the chemical before the chemical was around.
But if natural selection is used to preserve useful information, why would the lice have kept a mutated set of instructions to protect themselves from chemicals, if those chemicals did not exist yet? One could say that those instructions were passed along with other genes that were favorable and so the (at the time) useless resistance gene, eventually was useful.
So I agree with you, neither way can prove either evolution or creation.
Neoteny wrote:4) You go on to bring up your information hypothesis again, which Iāve already touched on above. The key fault to your argument is that you are assuming that everything is happening by chance. You have mentioned it several times. That is not true. Mutations happen by āchance.ā Evolution does not. If your book were subjected to natural selection, all your mutations that caused any loss of information would die and not reproduce. However, books that had mutations like my fat rat/wee bat mutations would be successful and propagate. These could lead to maintenance of information, or even (gasp) addition of information.
I already touched on this above
Neoteny wrote:5) āEnvironmental exposure does not cause mutations.ā
I like this statement a lot. I donāt see your reasoning for putting it in and it doesnāt make any sense. I myself have caused mutations in yeast by altering environmental conditions. UV light is a known mutagen. Ethidium bromide is a known mutagen. Environmental exposure does cause mutations. What the hell are you talking about? Seriously?
All I have to say here is MY BAD. I know what I meant to say I just did not explain it clearly.
When I wrote that sentence, I was thinking over the previous paragraphs. Those explained how environmental conditions do not determine the type of mutation that occurs. For example a polar bear does not get a mutation for thick hair because it is cold or a giraffe a mutation for a long neck because food is high in a tree.
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrar ... 0_0/evo_32
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrar ... tations_07
This is straight from Berkleyās evolution page.
- Mutations can be beneficial, neutral, or harmful for the organism, but mutations do not "try" to supply what the organism "needs."
So this is what I should have said:
Environmental exposure does determine the direction of mutation and whether a particular mutation happens or not is unrelated to how useful that mutation would be.
Again, I am sorry. I will update the error in my previous post.
Neoteny wrote:6) Moving on, natural selection is not random. You are missing the point. Mutation is random. A bird eating a green beetle is not. You are wrong again in saying natural selection should be adding information. That is mutationās job. Natural selection selects for or against a mutation.
Again I agree. Could you please show me where this was written so I can edit it?
It was never my intention to explain Natural selection this way. Thanks
Neoteny wrote:7) Mutation has never been beneficial? You silly person you. Once again, I have performed experiments to that nature. Take a bunch of E. coli that will not grow on ampicillin and expose them to UV light. Try to grow some colonies on ampicillin agar and voila, if you do it enough, you will grow colonies. I didnāt check any of your sources but they are clearly wrong. Itās really hilarious when people tell me that things that Iāve done are impossible. Also, for a current experiment I am working on, I have isolated several mutated yeast strains that grow brown on an iron medium. Some do grow slower but at least one does not show any signs of weakness and tends to act just like wild-type yeast. So even if the mutations arenāt beneficial, they are not always harmful. The slow growth issue is probably a completely separate mutation from the brown coloring. You are wrong again.
As far as your āeach gene affects everythingā statement goes, most genes have multiple effects, but they definitely donāt affect everything and not all genes have multiple effects.
I can see how you interpreted what I said that way. If you look through what I types you will see that I am referring to the overall state of the organism. When mutations occur the mutation may be beneficial in the short term but the overall aspect of the organism is compromised. As stated above, mutations cause a loss of original information. This is known as genetic load.
Look at sickle cell anemia. It is a mutation that affects the blood hemoglobin and as a result is more resistant to malaria. At first you could say that this is a benefit. But the overall genetic load of the human is higher. If sickle cell anemia is such a good mutation, do you want it? Of course not. Here are some of the side effects of this mutation: acute attacks of abdominal and joint pain, ulcers on the legs, defective red blood cells, and severe anemia -- often leading to death. Do those sound good?
Sickle cell anemia might help out with malaria but not with the overall organism.