Rachel Bronwyn wrote:Everyone here is wasting their time.

Wortfish wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:

So much wrong in so few words.

Let's see.

Sensitivity to light alone is not enough? No one would ever suggest that is all there is. Organisms already had flight responses when they detected they were being attacked, whether that be from pressure on their cell wall, or from perturbations in the medium around them - the solitary light sensitive cell simply gave them another way to detect the approach of a threat and to then employ existing behaviors in response to that detection.

Sensitivity to light is not a trivial development. It requires light-sensitive proteins and phototransduction circuits, the combination of which require more than just a couple of mutations.

No 'slight twitch' - a concerted effort to move away. Detect sudden loss of light - move. It doesn't need to guarantee successful evasion of a predator; it only needs to offer a statistically greater chance of surviving long enough to reproduce, or longer to reproduce more to ensure that the gene producing that photosensitive spot would be preferentially retained.

You don't seem to understand that a rudimentary system would not produce that kind of response. The robust response which you envisage would only happen once further changes and improvements had been made.

The thing is, this is such basic stuff, and the eye... I mean, seriously? Why do Creationists invariably rattle on about the eye when it's been studied from the context of evolutionary biology for the better part of a century? Just how outdated you folks are!

Maybe because Darwin wrote the following:

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

Charles Darwin wrote: To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.

campermon wrote:The eye? Bacterial flagellum?

Have we gone back in time by 10 years?

Rumraket wrote:
Ahh the "specific / peculiar compotent" as opposed to the "generic" one. What the hell does that mean? Either two components work together or they do not. Some times they do, and when they do, natural selection can favor that association.

Yeah some of them do this just by themselves. Some proteins will naturally oligomerize into structures like pentamers, hexamers, octamers or what have you. Naturally oligomerizing structures, created by a single protein all by itself. A single protein coding gene is expressed continously, and as the number of proteins build up they self-assemble into larger structures. Good examples are evolution of beta-propeller structures. A bona fide molecular machine that evolved.

The_Metatron wrote:
Read that part in bold red font. Read it again. Read it until you understand it, and forever forget about that quote mine of yours as any sort of support for whatever you believe.

Reason tells me, that IF numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; IF further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and IF such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then [b][color=#FF0000]the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.

Wortfish wrote:[snip]

Wortfish wrote:

The_Metatron wrote:
Read that part in bold red font. Read it again. Read it until you understand it, and forever forget about that quote mine of yours as any sort of support for whatever you believe.

Reason tells me, that IF numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; IF further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and IF such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then [b][color=#FF0000]the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.

A lot of "IFs"....just speculation rather than substance. But, as Mivart pointed out, the slight gradations required may not confer sufficient utility to the organism to be conserved and so would be liable to be lost.

Wortfish wrote:

The_Metatron wrote:
Read that part in bold red font. Read it again. Read it until you understand it, and forever forget about that quote mine of yours as any sort of support for whatever you believe.

Reason tells me, that IF numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; IF further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and IF such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then [b][color=#FF0000]the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.

A lot of "IFs"....just speculation rather than substance. But, as Mivart pointed out, the slight gradations required may not confer sufficient utility to the organism to be conserved and so would be liable to be lost.

Wortfish wrote:

Rumraket wrote:
Ahh the "specific / peculiar compotent" as opposed to the "generic" one. What the hell does that mean? Either two components work together or they do not. Some times they do, and when they do, natural selection can favor that association.

By specific/peculiar, I mean a component that is new, not something recruited from an existing inventory.

Wortfish wrote:

Yeah some of them do this just by themselves. Some proteins will naturally oligomerize into structures like pentamers, hexamers, octamers or what have you. Naturally oligomerizing structures, created by a single protein all by itself. A single protein coding gene is expressed continously, and as the number of proteins build up they self-assemble into larger structures. Good examples are evolution of beta-propeller structures. A bona fide molecular machine that evolved.

You can't seriously claim that the bacterial flagellum, or eukaryotic cilium, are just a bunch of proteins thrown together. Rather, both represent a "purposeful arrangement of parts" that produce a specific function...i.e. design rather than random assemblage.

The_Metatron wrote:
Do you use a hammer or simply put your head in a vise to come up with shit like this?

Every one if those conditional statements are true. "...as is certainly the case." It doesn't matter a toss what you believe to be true, cannot, or will not understand. Reality shows us otherwise.

Come back when your arguments are worthy. Or when you actually have one.

The most obvious limit to natural selection is that suitable variation may not be available. This may be because certain phenotypes cannot be built, being ruled out either by physical law or by the properties of biological materials.

Wortfish wrote:<snip bollocks>

Wortfish wrote:

The_Metatron wrote:
Do you use a hammer or simply put your head in a vise to come up with shit like this?

Every one if those conditional statements are true. "...as is certainly the case." It doesn't matter a toss what you believe to be true, cannot, or will not understand. Reality shows us otherwise.

Come back when your arguments are worthy. Or when you actually have one.

Let me ask you this.

1. Can we evolve eyes on the backs of our heads if it was useful to our survival?
2. Could we grow feathered wings like angels if flight was useful to our survival?

I would hope you would say NO to both questions. Here's why: http://www.ufscar.br/~evolucao/popgen/ref12-5.pdf

Wortfish wrote:
It isn't just that natural selection cannot promote traits that are not of immediate and sufficient benefit, the variations responsible for the traits may just not occur.

Wortfish wrote:Imagination and speculation have hard physical limits to overcome.

Wortfish wrote:

Let me ask you this.

1. Can we evolve eyes on the backs of our heads if it was useful to our survival?
2. Could we grow feathered wings like angels if flight was useful to our survival?

I would hope you would say NO to both questions. Here's why: http://www.ufscar.br/~evolucao/popgen/ref12-5.pdf

campermon wrote:It's throwback sunday

Spearthrower wrote:
What a nasty little liar you are. It doesn't matter how many fucking IFs there are in Darwin's account from 150 years ago, because you were the liar trying to pretend that Darwin had said something else by cutting out 75% of the paragraph.

As for relevant knowledge, try modern scientific journals - not a Victorian naturalist writing prior to the advent of knowledge about genes, ffs.