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And you are missing my point; if you are conceding that evolution is untestable because it relies on unknown imagined entities, then it is a substantively less robust theory than it is made out to be.

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I have to say you would be hard pressed to find an example in prehistory where we didn’t have some idea about what the organism ate; and while environments vary greatly, we have a pretty good idea of what the environments and the type of organisms that were around when bats are thought to have first appeared.
[…]
Well, no modern day scenario is going to give us a definitive answer of how it did happen, but it will give us a pretty good idea of what can and cannot happen in terms of the mechanisms involved; certainly moreso than the imaginary musings currently employed by evolutionists.

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Do you remember the reason why we’re discussing this? I’m asking you to support your assertion that evolution is impossible because of natural selection not favoring the individual mutations necessary to produce these structures. Whether this one aspect of evolution is testable or not is irrelevant here, and I’m a little surprised to hear this from someone who apparently cares as much as you do about staying on topic.

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If you’re willing to consider more than just what’s beneficial to lab mice, then I think it’s possible to make a pretty good case that these mutations would have been useful to the ancestors of bats. I already described this. Longer fingers would have probably been useful for climbing, and skin membranes (without flight muscles) would have been useful for the same thing they’re useful for in flying squirrels

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In order to support your assertion that the evolution of bats’ wings is impossible, you will need to show that these mutations definitely would not have been useful to the ancestors of bats for these functions, or any other functions. Can you?

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ORIGINAL: Jhud
If you mean the bone would lengthen and rip through the skin leaving behind nerve tissue and cartilage, you are right. But it still leaves a mammal with a long forelimb (or digits), and no advantage or support system for having them.

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But that is the problem; every 'plausible pathway' (which incidentally is an extremely low bar in term of evidence for a presumed scientific theory, as it is primarily the product of imagination) requires over-simplification; none actually deal with our observation about organisms actually function.

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Good. I look forward to learning more about it. Now if we could improve your comprehension of evolution, we would really be making progress.

You know, just a guess here, but I was probably an evolutionist long before you cracked a biology text,

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Well, we have plenty of mice. As we identify the individual modifications to the regulation of genes and apply them to the morphology of a test mammal like a mouse, we should get a pretty good idea of how those specific changes affect even ordinary existence. We will probably be able to test a few changes together. And we can can do so repeatedly. Now this isn't easy science like sitting around in one's office imagining how a bat might have evolved from a ground dwelling mammals, but it is substantive science, to which we can make predictions and draw conclusions based on measurable observations; and as we build up a real body of knowledge here, we should have a pretty good idea of what such changes actually entail instead of imagining predators that we will never know the ecology of.

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You do not know that there is no advantage. And you have just conceded that there is a support system of skin, circulation, nerves, etc.

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Of course, speculated plausible pathways are products of the imagination; "just so" stories as Stephen Gould called them. And any deficiencies in how they relate to observations of how organisms function must be dealt with. But I think we would both agree that if evolution is true, the organism must be a fully viable functioning organism through the entire trajectory of its history. If it can be shown that there is no possibility of this being the case, you will have finally found an empirical example of ID.

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In the meantime, incredulity is not a sufficient reason to reject the evolutionary thesis.

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Unless you are a grandpa, I doubt that. I was probably an evolutionist before you were born. Note, however, that I am not a scientist. My actual field of professional study is language and literature. And I know more theology than biology. My principal objections to both creationism and ID are theological.

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So, you agree this "real body of knowledge" has not been built up yet and you cannot really come to any definitive conclusions.

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Seems you too are into predictions.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with that. Predictions guide how we test hypotheses.

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I am not an opponent of the concept that intelligence governs evolution. I just think that the intelligence which created this universe knows how to use its capacities without needing to import non-natural mechanisms.

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Well, hey, having dealt pretty decisively with your bacterial examples and your antiviral resistance examples, it’s apparent there isn’t a lot left of the original topic, so if you want to discuss anteaters as well, be my guest. It’s all sort of frosting at this point anyway.

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Well, I am willing to consider comparisons to other extant mammals for comparison, especially genetically. I do know that morphologically the structure of a flying squirrel (or colugo, or sugar glider, etc) is nothing like that of a bats; indeed, the opposite in many respects.

But how might I disprove your imagination?

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

My field of study was biology; I reject evolution on scientific grounds.

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And do you have a time limit for your prediction to be verified? Or shall we ever consider, like The X Files, the evidence to be 'out there'?

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Well, I guess what's separates us then is that I think there is evidence to verify that intelligence governed life's development.

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I don't think you have shown what the scientific grounds are. I think what is coming out of molecular biology is putting a real strain on the description of evolution that came out of the modern synthesis (neo-Darwinism) and that is to be expected.

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That definition came from a synthesis of Mendel's (and subsequent) work on genetics, the early 20th century work on mutations (not yet understood in terms of DNA) and Darwin's original thesis of natural selection. For various reasons, the study of embryological development made no contribution to the synthesis and it is increasingly evident that this is an area that must be included in any study of how evolution works. And, of course, cracking the structure and coding of DNA, together with the all the subsequent research that has followed, and is revamping our whole understanding of genes and how they work. So, I think we are very much in need of some collaboration that organizes all this new information in a coherent way.

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Yet through all this, the basic concept of species change driven by selection, seems to be holding up pretty well. Just as with Darwin's original work, it is not natural selection that seems to be the problem, but determining the origin of what is selected.
Darwin said variation was selected. But he proposed no substantive theory on the origin of variation.
Mendel's work answered another strong objection to Darwin--namely, how novel variations could be preserved, but although Mendel initiated study into how genes interacted, he never thought to address where they came from.
So we get to mutations as the origin of genetic variation.
And now we are digging into exactly what that entails and finding levels of complexity we never dreamed of.

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Not to mention the abiogenesis question of the origin of DNA and its information carrying capacity. That's a side issue for evolution per se, but it's a valid question.

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The mechanisms and processes that provide something to select need to be understood. But not understanding them is not a scientific objection to evolution.

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Will we always have the spectre of the god-of-the-gaps out there? Yes, probably, for since every discovery provokes new questions, I doubt that we will ever have a completely seamless understanding of nature.

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I think the universe as a whole is evidence of intelligence. I don't think any bits and pieces of it have special evidentiary power in comparison to others.

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Well, it’s obviously not a support to evolution either. But more than that, I think it allows us to say it is reasonable to put all the options on the table – including that of intelligent causation.

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I don’t seriously have a problem with considering intelligent causation as a possible explanation for life’s complexity, meaning that if we encounter things that definitely can’t be explained by anything other than intelligent design, we shouldn’t ignore them. What I have a problem with is people claiming that we’re already in a situation where this is the case. As I pointed out in my previous post here, there’s no reason to assume that skin membranes without flight muscles on the ancestors of bats wouldn’t have been useful for gliding. The most that can be said in this case is that until we have more information in this area, we won’t have proof of what process was responsible for this aspect of bats’ anatomy—evolution and intelligent design are both possible explanations.

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So while we can certainly “consider” intelligent design as a possible explanation for this, there are several other things that should be considered also. The main one is that the evolutionary explanation for this involves only processes that have been observed happening in the present—novel functions arising as a result of mutations, as in the nylonase example, and then multiple beneficial coding mutations accumulating in a single organism, as in the HIV example. Intelligent design, on the other hand, explains this using a mechanism that has never been observed. It would be reasonable to speculate that an unknown and unobserved mechanism was responsible for something if that thing couldn’t be explained by any known mechanism, but in a situation like this one where known mechanisms are sufficient, this unobserved mechanism that isn’t required in order to explain anything becomes a superfluous entity ruled out by Occam’s Razor.

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There is no evidence that multiple interdependent modifications to the disparate regulatory mechanisms that produce the morphology of a bat can arise both independently and interdependently through gradual incidental modifications of the genome. Indeed, there are lots of problems with this happening, the least of which is that every independent change poses a number of potential problems for the survivability of the organism to which they are occurring. The second of which is that there is no means by which we can both coordinate between the disparate specific changes that are necessary; they are independent genetically, and they are dependent on order of development, and on kinds of development.

So there are good reasons to assert the need for coordination and forethought in this case, and others.

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A quick indicator of this is that one can induce through selective pressures the changes in bacteria and viruses, repeatedly – and when those pressures are removed, so to goes the change. One cannot however induce through selective pressures these changes in the morphology of a mammal and get more ‘battiness’ – and once those changes are induced through intelligent means, there is no indication they simply revert. So the processes appear to be quite different, regardless of Occam’s.

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See, this is what I was trying to discuss with you in post #180, and you didn’t reply to it. When we get into the actual changes that are involved, the argument you’re using—“every independent change poses a number of potential problems for the survivability of the organism to which they are occurring”—doesn’t hold up. You keep saying this, and then when I point out how these changes could have actually been useful, you don’t have anything to say in response. Are you going to support your assertion that we can know for certain that these changes would have posed problems to the organisms’ survivability, or attempt to address my point about why we can’t know this?

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You’re completely making up this idea that changes that are the result of intelligence don’t revert—since these types of changes have never been observed, there’s no way to say what happens with them in this respect, if they occur at all.

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In any case, if evolution was responsible for the origin of animals such as bats, the selective pressure responsible for the changes in them wouldn’t have appeared and then suddenly disappeared; it would have been an ongoing process. So this particular objection you’re raising isn’t a problem for evolution either.

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It’s also somewhat off-topic, since what we’ve been discussing is whether natural selection could have favored the individual mutations responsible for flight in bats. I’ve been trying to get you to either support your assertion that we’re able to know for certain that it wouldn’t have, or admit that these mutations could have been favored by natural selection, so the origin of bats is possible via evolution and any design process proposed for them is a superfluous entity.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud
Well, again, you have posited scenarios where you imagine they can be useful, but as I have pointed out repeatedly, this isn’t a scientific assertion; unless you can demonstrate those useful changes in a model animal, your assertions have no basis in fact.

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There are numerous examples at this point in history where we modify genomes in organisms and see them persist through numerous generations, everything from bacteria that are designed to produce certain necessary pharmaceuticals, to crops that have genetically induced pest resistance, to the modification of fish for aquaculture.

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My point, which you seem not to have understood, was the comparison of certain genetic changes, like those of the ‘nylonase’ organism and the HIV virus, and the required changes to produce bat morphology; are significantly different mechanisms and effects. One doesn't demonstrate the other.

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I think there is no evidence that the numerous and specific changes that are required to induce the bat morphology are individually beneficial, and for those changes which we have induced and observed (like forearm and digit lengthening, two separate changes) no benefit was in evidence. The assertion that they can happen then is really a fantastic claim, one that would require evidence, the burden of which is on the person making the claim (that would be you).

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Of course ongoing research may change this;

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You have posited scenarios where you imagine that they can not be useful. Where is your support?

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I have actually done this work in E. coli. For my expression plasmids I have to incorporate antibiotic resistance in the plasmid to keep strong selective pressure on the E. coli to keep the plasmid. Once that selective pressure is removed the E. coli start to get rid of the plasmid.

Other systems may differ, but that has been my experience with a select subset of genetically modified organisms.

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Then perhaps you should complain about those who use the bacterial flagellum to discount vertebrate evolution.

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The assertion that they can happen is the hypothesis which is being tested further. The ID claim, however, is a dogmatic statement. It states that no such changes can or have existed, and it states this without any evidence. I fully understand that a universal negative is impossible to prove, but then why does ID rely on it?

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But how can it if no possible mutations exist as ID states? The scientists should just pack their bags and call it a day, right?

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I have actually done this work in E. coli. For my expression plasmids I have to incorporate antibiotic resistance in the plasmid to keep strong selective pressure on the E. coli to keep the plasmid. Once that selective pressure is removed the E. coli start to get rid of the plasmid.

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ORIGINAL: drmark

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I have actually done this work in E. coli. For my expression plasmids I have to incorporate antibiotic resistance in the plasmid to keep strong selective pressure on the E. coli to keep the plasmid. Once that selective pressure is removed the E. coli start to get rid of the plasmid.

Method, is this because the plasmids conferring resistance are actually harmful to the "wild-type" organism living without exposure to antibiotic?

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ORIGINAL: drmark
Method, is this because the plasmids conferring resistance are actually harmful to the "wild-type" organism living without exposure to antibiotic?

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ORIGINAL: DanJames
I was going to ask the same thing. Methods to allow bacteria to exist in the presence of antibiotics are either very costly or damaging to bacteria. I always have to roll my eyes when I hear about these "superbugs" on TV. As if by using antibacterial drugs is creating a race of bacteria that are going to wipe us out because they're resistant to everything.

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If the plasmids were harmfull then I wouldn't be able to induce expression of the protein.

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ORIGINAL: drmark

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If the plasmids were harmfull then I wouldn't be able to induce expression of the protein.

Are you sure about that? The sickle cell protein can be readily induced to express in a population exposed to endemic malaria, even though one-fourth of the offspring of heterozygous parents will die prematurely. Do you not consider premature death harmful?

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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I don't think you have shown what the scientific grounds are. I think what is coming out of molecular biology is putting a real strain on the description of evolution that came out of the modern synthesis (neo-Darwinism) and that is to be expected.

I agree with you here.

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That definition came from a synthesis of Mendel's (and subsequent) work on genetics, the early 20th century work on mutations (not yet understood in terms of DNA) and Darwin's original thesis of natural selection. For various reasons, the study of embryological development made no contribution to the synthesis and it is increasingly evident that this is an area that must be included in any study of how evolution works. And, of course, cracking the structure and coding of DNA, together with the all the subsequent research that has followed, and is revamping our whole understanding of genes and how they work. So, I think we are very much in need of some collaboration that organizes all this new information in a coherent way.

I agree with you here, but I would go farther; I think we need to apply the current principles of the development of information systems and micro-machine engineering as well.

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Yet through all this, the basic concept of species change driven by selection, seems to be holding up pretty well. Just as with Darwin's original work, it is not natural selection that seems to be the problem, but determining the origin of what is selected.
Darwin said variation was selected. But he proposed no substantive theory on the origin of variation.
Mendel's work answered another strong objection to Darwin--namely, how novel variations could be preserved, but although Mendel initiated study into how genes interacted, he never thought to address where they came from.
So we get to mutations as the origin of genetic variation.
And now we are digging into exactly what that entails and finding levels of complexity we never dreamed of.

Again, I generally agree; and not only are we, “finding levels of complexity we never dreamed of”, we are finding the complexity is far more ancient than we ever dreamed of.

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Not to mention the abiogenesis question of the origin of DNA and its information carrying capacity. That's a side issue for evolution per se, but it's a valid question.

I am not so sure it is a ‘side-issue’, as I think that the capabilities of the genome are proving to be quite ancient, and it’s capabilities get pushed back further and further in time, we are realizing that it began with such capabilities, and so we are not simply talking about the origin of the cell, but the origin of the capability of life to develop and sustain itself. And this may very well give us insights that evolution has failed to.

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The mechanisms and processes that provide something to select need to be understood. But not understanding them is not a scientific objection to evolution.

Well, it’s obviously not a support to evolution either. But more than that, I think it allows us to say it is reasonable to put all the options on the table – including that of intelligent causation.

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I think the universe as a whole is evidence of intelligence. I don't think any bits and pieces of it have special evidentiary power in comparison to others.

This is perhaps where we differ; I see the evidence all the way through from top to bottom.

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Hemoglobin S is expressed regardless of the presence of malaria. It is constituitively expressed. Expression plasmids used in molecular biology are inducible.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud
See, this is where evolution really fails; in neither case, either the nylonase example, nor the HIV example, can those kinds of changes be translated to the necessary changes required to modify the morphology of a mammal to be more bat-like. In fact, we have done this experimentally, and they are different processes. A quick indicator of this is that one can induce through selective pressures the changes in bacteria and viruses, repeatedly – and when those pressures are removed, so to goes the change. One cannot however induce through selective pressures these changes in the morphology of a mammal and get more ‘battiness’ – and once those changes are induced through intelligent means, there is no indication they simply revert. So the processes appear to be quite different, regardless of Occam’s.

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You will not get more "battiness" in an elephant unless you can take the elephant backward through its history to the point of its common ancestry with the bat.

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ORIGINAL: drmark

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If the plasmids were harmfull then I wouldn't be able to induce expression of the protein.

Are you sure about that? The sickle cell protein can be readily induced to express in a population exposed to endemic malaria, even though one-fourth of the offspring of heterozygous parents will die prematurely. Do you not consider premature death harmful?

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ORIGINAL: drmark

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You will not get more "battiness" in an elephant unless you can take the elephant backward through its history to the point of its common ancestry with the bat.

drmark falls off his chair while choking on the "batty" circular reasoning of such ridiculous logic. Only a religious fanatic would have the audacity to post such nonsense!