Wortfish wrote:

laklak wrote:In terms of trustworthiness, Behe ranks somewhere between a three-card Monte dealer and a Subic Bay hooker.

I would offer a more nuanced response. Natural selection can do the following in molecular biology:

1. Keep things as they are: a conserving force that rejects changes which degrade functionality.
2. Destroy a functional system if it provides a reproductive benefit in an extreme situation: as with antibiotic resistance.
3. Tweak an existing feature to optimize its effectiveness: as with the novel coronavirus' protein coat.

What natural selection cannot do, as Darwin envisaged, is cumulatively build up a complex system from scratch.

Wortfish wrote:

Rachel Bronwyn wrote:The complex molecular machine develops step by step with most "versions" at every step being selected against or ignored. Natural selection doesn't need to plan it. The bits that work hang around and the bits that don't, don't. It's social. Over time the complexity of the machine increases. Sometimes those complex machines play different roles at particular steps. Sometimes a single mutation results in a molecular machine performing a different function that is selected for.

If foresight were involved it would happen much faster than it does via natural selection, which is gradual, and probably wouldn't fulfill intermediate roles. There would be a distinct endpoint goal to work towards. Nevertheless, natural selection worked for a long time. Now we regularly avoid being selected against because we research and plan and experiment. Natural selection has happened up until now without us exerting any influence though.

You need to have something functional and useful already in place for which to "select". That is the fundamental flaw in the Darwinian argument.

newolder wrote:
Your problems with evolutionary molecular biology are clear and you've even labelled them. There was a time before eyes, there was a time before the first light sensitive cell and indeed, there was a time before cells. That you fail to grasp the ideas of evolution through natural selection remains a sad reflection on your education.

Spearthrower wrote:

Wortfish wrote:

Rachel Bronwyn wrote:The complex molecular machine develops step by step with most "versions" at every step being selected against or ignored. Natural selection doesn't need to plan it. The bits that work hang around and the bits that don't, don't. It's social. Over time the complexity of the machine increases. Sometimes those complex machines play different roles at particular steps. Sometimes a single mutation results in a molecular machine performing a different function that is selected for.

If foresight were involved it would happen much faster than it does via natural selection, which is gradual, and probably wouldn't fulfill intermediate roles. There would be a distinct endpoint goal to work towards. Nevertheless, natural selection worked for a long time. Now we regularly avoid being selected against because we research and plan and experiment. Natural selection has happened up until now without us exerting any influence though.

You need to have something functional and useful already in place for which to "select". That is the fundamental flaw in the Darwinian argument.

You're talking nonsense as usual Wortfish.

You don't need something 'functional and useful' in place to select, and you don't know what select means.

Here's the problem - you refuse to educate yourself, so you're just blathering nonsense. Educating yourself to a point where you could hold a meaningful conversation would take you an afternoon or two, but here you are still blathering after years of blathering. Creationism does that to you - it makes you feel like you know what you're talking about when you factually don't have a clue.

Wortfish wrote:

Let's read the Origin of Species:

Wortfish wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:

Wortfish wrote:

Rachel Bronwyn wrote:The complex molecular machine develops step by step with most "versions" at every step being selected against or ignored. Natural selection doesn't need to plan it. The bits that work hang around and the bits that don't, don't. It's social. Over time the complexity of the machine increases. Sometimes those complex machines play different roles at particular steps. Sometimes a single mutation results in a molecular machine performing a different function that is selected for.

If foresight were involved it would happen much faster than it does via natural selection, which is gradual, and probably wouldn't fulfill intermediate roles. There would be a distinct endpoint goal to work towards. Nevertheless, natural selection worked for a long time. Now we regularly avoid being selected against because we research and plan and experiment. Natural selection has happened up until now without us exerting any influence though.

You need to have something functional and useful already in place for which to "select". That is the fundamental flaw in the Darwinian argument.

You're talking nonsense as usual Wortfish.

You don't need something 'functional and useful' in place to select, and you don't know what select means.

Here's the problem - you refuse to educate yourself, so you're just blathering nonsense. Educating yourself to a point where you could hold a meaningful conversation would take you an afternoon or two, but here you are still blathering after years of blathering. Creationism does that to you - it makes you feel like you know what you're talking about when you factually don't have a clue.

True. It doesn't have to be functional, but it does have to be useful. Why else would it be "selected for"?

Wortfish wrote:...

I would appreciate it if you would actually engage with my three points rather than just talk about a time before this and that.

Wortfish wrote:
In the case of 1) a gradual approach won't do since each step must confer some improvement on the previous one. Selection won't select anything which does not make the nerve cell more sensitive. Mivart heavily criticized Darwin's theory, claiming that the incipient and intermediate stages in the hypothetical evolution of a new feature probably conferred no biological utility or could even be harmful.

In the case of 2) and 3) sensitivity to light alone is not useful, however functional, if it does not trigger a response that improves the survival of the organism. If all it does is cause the animal to twitch ever so slightly, then it won't be selected for, and therefore, lost.

newolder wrote:

Wortfish wrote:...

I would appreciate it if you would actually engage with my three points rather than just talk about a time before this and that.

I would appreciate you understanding evolution by means of natural selection but that ain't gonna happen either.

Natural Selection, simply and by itself, is potent to explain the maintenance or the further extension and development of favourable variations, which are at once sufficiently considerable to be useful from the first to the individual possessing them. But Natural Selection utterly fails to account for the conservation and development of the minute and rudimentary beginnings, the slight and infinitesimal commencements of structures, however useful those structures may afterwards become.

Wortfish wrote:
I am referring to Darwin because he came up with the idea that biological structures, like the eye, could be built up gradually over successive and related steps through the selection of random variations.

Wortfish wrote: It is an interesting idea, but it doesn't really have any supporting evidence,..

Wortfish wrote:... and there are serious theoretical problems in supposing that the hypothetical incipient stages in the evolution of a new structure would be sufficiently useful to be preserved by natural selection.

Wortfish wrote: I refer you again to St. George Mivart's devastating critique of the theory of natural selection: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Genesis_of_Species/II

Wortfish wrote:

Natural Selection, simply and by itself, is potent to explain the maintenance or the further extension and development of favourable variations, which are at once sufficiently considerable to be useful from the first to the individual possessing them. But Natural Selection utterly fails to account for the conservation and development of the minute and rudimentary beginnings, the slight and infinitesimal commencements of structures, however useful those structures may afterwards become.

This is true of the vertebrate eye, the tetrapod limb, the avian feather, the cetacean fluke etc...

Behe's flawed argument

Behe claims that irreducibly complex systems cannot be produced directly by gradual evolution3. But why not? Behe's reckoning goes like this:

(P1) Direct, gradual evolution proceeds only by stepwise addition of parts.
(P2) By definition, an irreducibly complex system lacking a part is nonfunctional.
(C) Therefore, all possible direct gradual evolutionary precursors to an irreducibly complex system must be nonfunctional.

Of course, Behe's argument is invalid since the first premise is false: gradual evolution can do much more than just add parts. For instance, evolution can also change or remove parts (pretty simple, eh?). In contrast, Behe's irreducible complexity is restricted to only reversing the addition of parts. This is why irreducible complexity cannot tell us anything useful about how a structure did or did not evolve.

The Mullerian two-step

With Behe's error now in hand, we immediately have the following embarrassingly facile solution to Behe's "irreducible" conundrum. Only two basic steps are needed to gradually evolve an irreducibly complex system from a functioning precursor:

Add a part.
Make it necessary.

It's that simple. After these two steps, removing the part will kill the function, yet the system was produced directly and gradually from a simpler, functional precursor. And this is exactly what Behe alleges is impossible.

Spearthrower wrote:

So much wrong in so few words.

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.

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.

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!

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.

theropod_V_2.0 wrote:http://www.rationalskepticism.org/earth-sciences/birds-are-theropod-dinosaurs-t25365.html

Read the thread linked above, which can be found in the “Earth Sciences” sub forum right here on RatSkep, about how we KNOW for a fact that modern birds are the direct descendants of maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs. There is enough hard evidence presented therein to shoot your stupid fucking assertion fest through the roof of the mouth with a hollow point .44 magnum. Of course, being the contrary for the sake of being contrary, you won’t bother. If on the off chance you do bother to look you will refuse to accept anything and everything therein, even though the empirical physical evidence is well in hand. You have absolutely nothing but an argument, and it is very poorly formed.

RS

Along with unique adaptations for an arboreal lifestyle, Scansoriopteryx fulfills predictions from the early twentieth century that the ancestors of birds did not evolve from dinosaurs, and instead were derived from earlier arboreal archosaurs which originated flight according to the traditional trees-down scenario

laklak wrote:More nuanced? OK. Behe's trustworthiness lies somewhere between a three-card Monte dealer on the corner of Main and 3rd in Omaha and a Subic Bay one-legged hooker on a Friday night.