falsifying Natural Selection

[Calilasseia]

Ok, next question. What canards have been erected here? I've only just arrived, and it's going to take me time to wade through this dreck, so I'd appreciate it if someone provides a precis of this.

Canards

1) Mutations are controlled by an intelligent entity who pokes his nose into everything.
2) False dichotomy between randomness and intelligence when dealing with protein synthesis.
3) The idea that to have a functional protein, one must expect randomness to arrange amino acids together. Without intelligence, apparently, amino acids cannot "know" which ones to bind to.
4) Randomness cannot form the components of the translational machinery.
5) Genes couldn't have evolved without proteins, which had to be put together by random chance, the odds of which are so high that they had to require intelligent design, despite being shown that riboZYmes don't need proteins for replication or for peptide bond synthesis, and the argument is the consistently persistent "ribosome has 22 proteins, random chance cannot put together a ribosome"
6) Specious probability assertions, therefore design.
7) Assertion that evolutionary fitness doesn't exist, i.e. protein function is binary.
8) Assertion that all the components involved in protein synthesis require the components to be transported to a "precise 3 dimensional location, ergo design",
9) The idea that odds should indicate if something is designed or not, including the premise that if something appears to be unlikely by random chance, design has to take place, false dichotomy there.
10) Conflation of modern cells with abiogenetic and primitive replicator systems.
11) God of the gaps.
12) One True Sequence assertion for protein sequence.
13) The DNA is a code, ergo intelligence involved assertion.

Just a few off the top of my head.

Bloody hell, he's been busy. And, it would seem, regurgitating a lot of ignorant guff peddled by idiots like Hovind, or outright liars for doctrine like Stephen Meyer. This might take some time, and I have other demands currently, so this might end up pretty low in the priority queue. But I'll see what I can do at some point once other demands have been attended to ... apart from anything else, I have the Entomology Society minutes to write, and that's usually a 5 to 6 hour operation.

[GenesForLife]

The thread is not going to disappear anywhere for the foreseeable future, I think

[Ronja]

Gotta bookmark this - that list of canards will likely be a good reference ALD.

[SevenOfNine]

@Spinosa99-

Try to think of natural selection as a filter...A FILTER THAT NO ONE DESIGNED. Around us are all types of rocks and soils and sands. Now, get a bucket, and mix up some muddy water. Take some clean beach sand, and put it into a cylinder. Now pour your muddy water into the sand column at the top. What happens? [Relatively] clean water comes out the bottom. That is a natural filter, if though you made it. So any muddy water, flowing downhill into a sandy soil would see cleaner water coming out the other side.

Now suppose a string of letters, quite random. BEOHGQ. Now replicate those letters, but make mistakes when you copy them. Mistakes in the order they appear in the chain.
EOHGQB
HGQOEB
AND SO ON.

Imagine next, that a particular order to the letters makes "sense" to you. I am not much good at anagrams, but I don't think you can make a sense word out of all the letters.

Now imagine that BEOHGQ are amino acids. Six of them. In only one order, do those acids combine to give a chemical effect called a catalyst, where the particular physical shape of the molecule lowers the activation energy for a reaction to occur. Imagine gazillions of these molecules combining and falling apart. But if the reaction to join the molecules together in a particular order is easier energetically, you will end up with more molecules of that particular combination. A natural selection, or filtering process is going on. Nobody is directing it.

And those letter combinations are not the only ones that can act as enzymes [biological catalysts]. There are thousands, even millions of them. order and complexity arise from this simple replication and filtering process. And that's it! The basic process. The molecules become genes. NO intelligent force is required. It is just physics and chemistry.

[Calilasseia]

Waits for the One True Sequence and Serial Trials fallacies to be erected in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

[Svartalf]

Remind us what those are prtty plzse (lnks fine)

[JimC]

Waits for the One True Sequence and Serial Trials fallacies to be erected in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

I think spinoza99 has already given up.

Not much staying power, anti-evolutionists these days... Back in days of yore, they'd keep getting back off the floor even after a right good smack down...

[Svartalf]

a lot more staying power than that driveby timonen, though

[hackenslash]

Remind us what those are prtty plzse (lnks fine)

http://forum.richarddawkins.net/viewtop ... 28#p965628

[JOZeldenrust]

This is what you don't understand. The fact that objects have properties is just like a language. According to the American Chemical Society there are some 52 million substances, 50 thousand being added each week, all of them having different properties. In a random universe without intelligence you cannot expect objects to coordinate their properties, no more that you can expect randomness to coordinate a set of 26 letters to form words.

Whoa! Wait a minute! Even in a random sequence of letters, some actual words will show up. They'll be short, but they will be words. And if you extend the metaphor, they are fitter then all the non-words, so they're preserved. Let's look at a random string of letters, courtesy of random.org:

xsjlkokoiigytnqrepiqrqdxxnsethazfwwuywkvnyvynedqyaixnpcxhpdeyowcxtoszwtqwuopqlfrmxshbbrapvrfxtibzprm

That's two real English words in a string of 100 random letters. Let's generate some more strings, and let's say that 1 = "set" and 2 = "to".

vvmc3o64h2zkiod8u8z3cijk63ljcuwpjxsqj8b9xmwyge6mzq9xreil06tf3fdugse4qekx9tl49itp23blbc2xi17cnxezo0qt (unprocessed)
vvmc3o64htozkiod8u8z3cijk63ljcuwpjxsqj8b9xmwyge6mzq9xreil06tf3fdugse4qekx9tl49itpto3blbctoxiset7cnxezo0qt (processed, now 1 = "set", 2 = "to" and 3 = "dug")

yy0bgr8fu4r0q55et35ozz2dg228kiz3zg232f30iamqpz83ve9c0u5rdzcrxjquqlz19xje9cln4s8jos80um4npjt8ns130b0b (unprocessed)
yy0bgr8fu4r0q55etdug5ozztodgtoto8kizdugzgtodugtofdug0iamqpz8dugve9c0u5rdzcrxjquqlzset9xje9cln4s8jos80um4npjt8nssetdug0b0b (processed, now 1 = "set", 2 = "to", 3 = "dug", 4 = "tod" and 5 = "am")

1w1z8x2tm1abag60bdp3y89emyps4medb4q7ml5zyv3hrysoe62jxt9ojk76vb41iajni7pj2mqrdszclxki566rp5x7iqakit3p (unprocessed)
setwsetz8xtotmsetabag60bdpdugy89emypstodmedbtodq7mlamzyvdughrysoe6tojxt9ojk76vbtodsetiajni7pjtomqrdszclxkiam66rpamx7iqakitdugp (processed)

See how words are quickly taking over?

mRNA, U, tRNA and ribosomes as well as the other General Transcription Factors they all have to be present at a specific point in a specific time. Basically what it comes down to is

if
mRNA and TRNA and U and Ribosomes
then
cell replication

albeit it is much more complicated than that.

Just to give you an idea of how hard it is for randomness to coordinate between even very small finite sets, let's imagine that there were only 120 substances in our universe and at one point in time in order to solve a problem only two substance were needed but they needed to be in the right order, even though this series is only two long. That's 120^120, which comes to 10^258 possibilities. To put that in perspective, there are 10^80 atoms, 10^26 nanoseconds in our universe and if we lived in a multiverse where there are as many universes as there are stars in our Universe that would be 10^22, which brings that to a sum total of 10^128. So even if every atom in our universe tried to utter the correct two word combination every nanosecond in every universe in our hypothetical multiverse, the odds of them hitting on the right combination would still one in 10^130.

(My bold) No it isn't. It's 120 * 120. "120 possible values for the first position" times "120 possible values for the second position". You're also ignoring the fact that there isn't some prescribed location for this problem to be solved. It can be solved wherever the problem exists, and it might exist in many places simultaneously. Third, you're applying teleological reasoning without justification. Abiogenesis isn't some process that set out to create life, it's physical properties of a complex of objects . That the result was the particular brand of self-replicating chemical machines we know as life is pretty much a coincidence.

[Coito ergo sum]

[Coito ergo sum]

Let's say you believe Peacocks evolved from Turkeys. How would you falsify that?

If you examine the fossil record you will find that modern turkeys are birds that evolved on the American continent. Peafowl on the other hand evolved in Africa and Asia. So, that's one way to falsify the belief. Both species existed independently and in isolated populations over the course of millions of years. Turkeys don't appear at all until about 23 million years ago at the earliest.

Now, other ways to falsify would be to look at the genetic information.

But, in any case, the theory of evolution itself falsifies the belief that peafowl evolved from turkeys, since evolution proves that no modern species evolved from any other modern species, ever. If that happened, current evolutionary theory itself would be incorrect. The theory of evolution says peafowl and turkeys share a common ancestor at some point in the past which was neither a turkey nor a peafowl.

[Iratus Ranunculus]

The reality is, however, that all the vast amount of evidence from the fossil record with its great age meticulously dated by beautiful physics, all the discoveries of the intracies of DNA, all the details of comparative anatomy, the current distribution of animals and plants across the drifting continents and the huge range of other experimental data are perfectly consistent with a broad model of evolution, accepted by all practioners.

All of that is evidence that would confirm descent from a common ancestor which theists who have their head screwed on straight believe in, but how would you find evidence that would falsify Natural Selection?

It is very simple. Generate a hypothesis based on natural selection, run an experiment. Done.

If for example, you were culturing microbes in a petri dish under hostile conditions, say, low concentrations of tetracycline. You would expect those microbes, if natural selection was true, to evolve resistance after a while. If they never did, then you have succeeded in falsifying natural selection.

This is what you don't understand. The fact that objects have properties is just like a language. According to the American Chemical Society there are some 52 million substances, 50 thousand being added each week, all of them having different properties. In a random universe without intelligence you cannot expect objects to coordinate their properties, no more that you can expect randomness to coordinate a set of 26 letters to form words.

Gee Wiz! It sure is a good thing that the laws of physics and chemistry are such that chemical reactions are non-random! Who would have thought?!



In seriousness though. Lets say that I want to generate a character that means "Crocoduck". I can take different sets of letters from different languages, and come to a word that means "crocoduck" in that language. Not a big deal, because I am starting from a fixed meaning. But lets say we are talking about metabolic machinery. First of all, I only need some sort of self-replicating nucleotide monomer to start. Lets say I have two things that are commonly occurring. A fatty acid vesicle, and a series of nucleotides. The fatty acid vesicles are permeable to free nucleotides. They go in, they increase pressure on the inside of the vesicle eats other fatty acids and grows larger. The nucleotides polymerize on their own and form more stable double strands, but the connection is still weak. Turbulence shakes the vesicles, breaks the double strand, free nucleotides re-anneal. Get big enough, it forces the vesicles to split, forming two new ones, each with half the original starting strands. Oh look, you have a very primitive proto-life form. All from naturally occurring things that now, just get eaten by other things. These little prot-cells compete with eachother for free fatty acids and free nucleotides. Those that have ways to replicate faster, say the double strand folds in such a way so as to catalyze the addition of free fatty acids to the vesicle faster. There are a crap ton of combination that can happen it, it only need happen once. Natural selection goes from there. I could go on from there. The point is, the genetic code we have is not the ONLY possible genetic code. There were a lot of ways it could have been different. What you are doing is like claiming that, because you drew a full house in a game of poker, god is guiding your card-draws. Well, the reality is, any particular combination of draws is exactly as likely as any other possible combination.

The most primitive forms of life we have on this planet right now, are literally millions of times more complex and derived (in an evolutionary sense) from the earliest forms of life. Millions of times more complex. Trying to use them for probability estimates is asinine.