falsifying Natural Selection

[spinoza99]

I didn't know it was hard for you to come up with proof.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I didn't know it was hard for you to come up with proof.

Where's yours, God boy?

[Clinton Huxley]

I didn't know it was hard for you to come up with proof.

Where's yours, God boy?

Good luck with that 'Zilla.

[GenesForLife]

I wrote my opening post wrong. We both believe that Turkeys and Peacocks come from the same ancestor, how do you falsify that this is done through Natural Selection.

Again several mistakes here, I'll go over them one by one.

Speciation doesn't occur because of natural selection, did you forget to notice the difference between speciation by divergence and natural selection?
Reproductive isolation is the cause for speciation, and again what we are talking about is the postulate of immediate common ancestry.
Natural selection would be falsified if there were no advantageous or deleterious mutations that introduced differential survival in environments.

Again, the inference from Universal Common Ancestry is that all organisms share a common ancestor with other organisms, the very closely related ones have more recent common ancestors than those that are more distantly related, and so on and so forth.

Look at the diagram that follows and try to note this.



Vertebrates, by virtue of being more closely related to Urochordates, share a more recent common ancestor with them than vertebrates do with Cephalochordates, which is more recent than the ancestor with extant Echinodermata and so on.


The hypothesis being that "how would you falsify the idea that turkeys and peacocks are the closest relatives of each other, and therefore share a most recent common ancestor, the idea is simple, run a phylogenetic test on orthologous markers, also make a comparison with the fossil record.

1) Peacocks and Turkeys should be the most closely related by molecular phylogeny.
2) See if Turkey and Peacock and the postulated ancestral fossils are extremely out of place (you shouldn't have peacock fossils cropping up before you find fossils of the postulated common ancestor that gave rise to both peacocks and Turkeys, firstly) , of course the first is a more rigorous and easier to perform. Phylogeny itself has been verified by double blind testing.

Falsifiability clauses for both selection (no differential selection) and sharing their MRCA (through phylogeny, with an extra check available using the fossil record) have been shown.

I will come back to your assertion about mutations in my next post.

[JimC]

Good detailed reply, GFL!

[GenesForLife]

I'm not sure either ID or NS can be falsified. I think both of them are not science questions. For instance, you can't falsify the theory that Stonehenge was designed, but we know it's designed through the law of horrendous odds.

See above for NS, where direct tests are possible for both postulates.
Re:Stonehenge - we know said entities are designed because we have evidence of humans building similar structures, and we have evidence for humans having lived in Britain when Stonehenge was built, we also have found the necessary tools. Looks improbable, therefore design is not a valid argument.



Is the natural equivalent of that designed? I mean, the intricateness, the ornateness, it is too improbable to come about without a skilled craftsman chipping away, innit?

But apparently, this is what happens...



http://www.gi.alaska.edu/alison/ALISON_ ... _Snow.html

Chemistry much?

Design by odds is a nonsensical argument, since one cannot arrive at a conclusion like that without establishing the idenity and the existence of said designer first, now while ID is unfalsifiable and Evolution is falsifiable, the ToE also has one other thing going for it , parsimony wrt known natural processes wherein there are no implicit assumptions to make, not least one where you need to shoehorn an omnipotent entity to do your bidding.

I will address the claim about mutations next.

[Svartalf]

I know it seems odds but I didn't choose Spinoza because I like him, originally I was going to pose in this forum as an atheist but I decided not to. The other method for changing species is Intelligent Design. An immaterial intelligence manipulates DNA to form new creatures, just as your mind manipulates the neurons in your brain to form actions, unless you believe that the brain is a computer and for every input there is one output.

So, you think Zeus designed you?

That's claptrap, everybody knows that Borr, Odin Vili and Vé killed Ymir and made the world from his remains.

[Svartalf]

I can't wait to learn how intelligent design is falsified

By faith in a different religion, most of the time.

[Svartalf]

Good detailed reply, GFL!

But did the pseudo Baruch even understand it?
I have to admit I found it difficult to follow.

[GenesForLife]

I know it seems odds but I didn't choose Spinoza because I like him, originally I was going to pose in this forum as an atheist but I decided not to. The other method for changing species is Intelligent Design. An immaterial intelligence manipulates DNA to form new creatures, just as your mind manipulates the neurons in your brain to form actions, unless you believe that the brain is a computer and for every input there is one output.

1) Parsimony fail.

2) If an immaterial "intelligence" manipulated DNA to form new creatures, we wouldn't expect to see natural processes interfere with that deed, would we? Hint - mutagenesis using Nitrosoguanidine or UV is something we use to induce mutations. We also wouldn't expect to see low fidelity enzymes or transposons or Mutator DNA since they would tend to compromise the integrity of a genome, I mean, if I wanted to build an airplane I wouldn't want it to alter its parameters randomly, doesn't even make sense from an ID POV.

3) If we assume the design hypothesis, the nonsensical clutter of genomes, explicable as evolutionary baggage comes to mind, we also have genomes with the propensity to break down, and we have several funny cases like a broken Vitamin C pathway in humans, in other words, bad design...intelligent much?

4) It also happens that we observe randomness being involved in which mutations happen, for instance, take the following example...

Progeny Of Blind Cavefish Can 'Regain' Their Sight

ScienceDaily (Jan. 8, 2008) — Blind cavefish whose eyes have withered while living in complete darkness over the course of evolutionary time can be made to see again. In some cases, the offspring of mated pairs originating from distinct cave populations regain vision, researchers found. The result shows that mutations in different genes are responsible for eye loss in separate cavefish lineages that may not have been exposed to light for the last one million years.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 120911.htm

All the hallmarks of random mutations, none of a consistent design plan.

As a final exhibit against the idea that cellular architecture, while being complex, is somehow indicative of intelligent design.



That is just a small example of how shoite the genome is wrt cancer, not all pathways have been depicted, but the few that have in terms of all the reds and greens you see, are just a few of the well known genes whose mutation and malfunction can cause cells to go kaput and become malignant, and continue to do so because cancer is somatically selected for. What kind of designer, after designing genomes that are error prone, goes on to ensure that the mistakes that result therefrom can go on to endanger the life of the carrier of the genome? and in cases of familial cancers such as Retinoblastoma, the lives of offspring?

Of course, along these lines, there is a paper that appeared in PNAS, titled "Footprints of nonsentient design" attempting to make sense of genome architecture in the light of design and in the light of evolution, and everything there points to the latter.

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/suppl.2/8969.full

Intelligent design (ID)—the latest incarnation of religious creationism—posits that complex biological features did not accrue gradually via natural evolutionary forces but, instead, were crafted ex nihilo by a cognitive agent. Yet, many complex biological traits are gratuitously complicated, function poorly, and debilitate their bearers. Furthermore, such dysfunctional traits abound not only in the phenotypes but inside the genomes of eukaryotic species. Here, I highlight several outlandish features of the human genome that defy notions of ID by a caring cognitive agent. These range from de novo mutational glitches that collectively kill or maim countless individuals (including embryos and fetuses) to pervasive architectural flaws (including pseudogenes, parasitic mobile elements, and needlessly baroque regulatory pathways) that are endogenous in every human genome. Gross imperfection at the molecular level presents a conundrum for the traditional paradigms of natural theology as well as for recent assertions of ID, but it is consistent with the notion of nonsentient contrivance by evolutionary forces. In this important philosophical sense, the science of evolutionary genetics should rightly be viewed as an ally (not an adversary) of mainstream religions because it helps the latter to escape the profound theological enigmas posed by notions of ID.

In other words, your arguments fail in terms of parsimony & intelligence, not to mention in terms of evidence for the existence of said designer. Totally worthy of dismissal.

[GenesForLife]

I didn't know it was hard for you to come up with proof.

One more time someone says proof when talking about science (a hypothetico-deductive-falsifiable system) I am *so* going to be peeved, evidential support and evidence are the correct terms when talking about science, proof is only used in axiomatic deductive systems such as mathematics & formal logic.

[spinoza99]

Natural selection would be falsified if there were no advantageous or deleterious mutations that introduced differential survival in environments.

I believe those mutations were done by an intelligence, you believe they were done through randomness. It's as if we saw Stonehenge and you said that it's due to erosion and I say it's due to intelligence

Again, the inference from Universal Common Ancestry is that all organisms share a common ancestor with other organisms, the very closely related ones have more recent common ancestors than those that are more distantly related, and so on and so forth.

We already both agree on this


.

Is the natural equivalent of that designed? I mean, the intricateness, the ornateness, it is too improbable to come about without a skilled craftsman chipping away, innit?

The intricateness of crystals and a protein, for example, are light years apart. In order to get a protein you have to arrange 20 different amino acids into a specific order roughly 120 sequences long. The odds of which are roughly one in 10^130. To give you idea of how large 10^130 are, there are 10^80 atoms in our Universe and 10^26 Nanoseconds in our Universe's history. Crystals simply obey the laws of physics and consist of a large number of identical molecules packed together in a uniform way. Amino acids when they form protein are not obeying any physical laws. They have to know in what order to get into in order to form. Crystals don't have to know anything, they are just blinding following a physical law.

Stonehenge - we know said entities are designed because we have evidence of humans building similar structures, and we have evidence for humans having lived in Britain when Stonehenge was built, we also have found the necessary tools. Looks improbable, therefore design is not a valid argument.

You're using logic and inference to make the above determination, not science. You're saying because humans have done this elsewhere, therefore it's reasonable that they've done that.

A. Humans built the Washington Monument
B. Stonehenge is similar to Stonehenge
C. Therefore, it is reasonable that humans built Stonehenge

You can do the same with the DNA code

A. Intelligence writes code
B. The genome is a code
C. Therefore intelligence wrote the genome.

A. I've never seen even the crudest code spontaneously construct due to physical laws, such as a crystal
B. The genome is a code
C. Therefore the genome is not the result of physical laws.

We have no evidence when Stonehenge was built. It could have been there a million years ago. Humans living in Britain is not evidence. Other animals lived in Britain, why didn't they build it. We know animals didn't build it through the above logical devices outlined.

Design by odds is a nonsensical argument,

Quite the contrary, you use the design by odds argument when you determine that Stonehenge is designed. The odds that it was done by erosion are easily greater than one in a googol, that's why we assume humans did it.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I believe those mutations were done by an intelligence, you believe they were done through randomness. It's as if we saw Stonehenge and you said that it's due to erosion and I say it's due to intelligence

Again with the utter bullshit.

[hackenslash]

I say it's due to intelligence

And how would you falsify this? Please present your null hypothesis, or are you happy to have a different standard of evidence for your hypothesis?

[Feck]

ID is not a theory ,it's not science it's the thin end of the wedge to Creationism propagated disingenuously by The LIARS at the Discovery Institute .