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Jhud -> RE: How do we identify design? (5/20/2008 10:41:59 AM)
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quote:
But if you want to try again, go ahead. Your assertion is that it’s possible to demonstrate with certainty that there is no possible advantage these mutations could have provided, even considering the huge differences that would have existed between the lifestyles of bats’ ancestors and that of laboratory mice, and the ways in which these differences would have affected which mutations would and wouldn’t have been useful to them. What evidence can you provide to support your assertion about this?
Since you were consistently unable to support this assertion in the previous thread, I don’t expect you to be able to provide anything different this time around. But perhaps you’ll surprise me. Once again, you have the three options that I mentioned before: support your claim that it’s possible to determine for certain that these mutations would have been harmful, stop making this claim, or continue using it while still failing to support it, and demonstrate to everyone that you don’t care whether the arguments you use are false.
Well, I will try one last time, then I will let you have the last word, which we know you desperately desire and will insist upon at any rate because you feel it is the final and decisive word on the subject. I have no such need.
You offer by way of explanation of the evolution of the bat the typical scenario; ‘mutations’, which you don’t particularly describe nor can you measure in any particular way.
‘Selection’ which you don’t particularly describe and vaguely assert was responsible for acting on the vaguely described ‘beneficial mutations’ by way of imagined environments said to occur on the past.
That is pretty much the summary of your discussion on the matter; vague notions of modifications that can’t be measured acted on by environments that can’t be observed. This is the basis of your argument, and your responses to what we are discussing in this thread and others. By way of evidence that such vague things have occurred, you offer a single fossil, which in wholly subjective and interpretive way is said to demonstrate the existence of an organism which has been modified by some vague ‘mutations’ and acted upon by some unobserved environmental conditions.
How you would explore such a notion scientifically in a testable, repeatable way you don’t or can’t say. How someone could falsify this particular vague scenario you don’t say. It is mostly just assumed, and because it fits your vague 19th century notions of ‘the way things are’ you accept it as a tenet of faith. It is your window of interpretation for every fact, and your response to every counter argument, and it works beautifully because it is sufficiently amorphous as to be impossible to ever pin down and definitively defeat. You know this, and that is why you cling to it and refuse to advance your learning by actually looking at more solid sciences like genetics and systems biology.
By contrast, I began with two definitive finds, laboratory work aimed specifically at determining the measurable changes that are entailed in producing the morphology of the bat. One article concerns the ‘forelimb’ of the bat , the other concerns the genetic basis for extended digits of the bat. Both articles speak to the significance of such finds in terms of understand the evolutionary development of the bat, so their finds are wholly applicable in this case.
Another definitive and measurable basis for the tests is the common basis of the mammalian genome. Genetic sequencing, another modern science and technology that you fail to grasp, has revealed to us that contrary to evolutionary expectations, the differences between various organisms, especially true for vertebrates, and certainly true for mammals, is not a matter of incidental modifications to the gene, but expressions of the gene through the regulation of those genes.
We also have some idea about the history of the bat through such sequencing. For example, we know that echolocating bats, previously thought to have evolved from non-echolocating bats were instead probably the ancestral group – this is contrary both to evolutionary expectation and even the fossil find you cited.
We also know, contrary to evolutionary expectation that bats aren’t closely related to flying lemurs or insectivores as previously assumed, but instead were more closely related to the mammalian clade the includes horses and carnivores.
So when we compare various mammals, in this case a mouse and bat, though you could pick any other mammal, we can measure the specific changes to genetic expression that have gone into the production of the different morphologies. Not only that, but one can induce such changes in a living animal model. I only listed two such changes, but it seems certain all the changes can eventually be understood and tested. At that point we will know the full oeuvre of specific genetic modifications that are required to make the typical mammalian genome into the specific morphology we see in the bat, and we can test those changes (as has already begun to be done with the two examples I cited) and determine the necessary interdependencies and sequences such changes would have to occur for a viable organism to result. It’s like reverse engineering an operating system, which we also do with modern 21st century technology.
I am predicting (note that word – it is essential to this discussion – it means that testing current findings, understood through a particular hypothesis – in this case certain tenets of ID –certain measurable results will be found) that the genetic changes discovered, and the modification to the animal model when these changes are implemented, will show us that multiple, essential interdependent yet independent genetic modifications will be necessary to produce the morphology of a bat, and that no single genetic modification of the whole set necessary will be sufficient to either produce a viable organism under any selective process or one which could lead sequentially to the final set of genetic changes.
And since this will be found to be true, it supports the notion that forethought and organization are necessary for such changes to be implemented.
So then, as it stands we do not have your ideas – vague notions of mutation and selection which are presumed and can be neither observed nor tested, and we have my thoughts on the matter – specific measures of genetics changes based on a real animal model which can be observed and tested and allow us to reach agreed upon conclusions.
I would say that there is only one person here who is suggesting robust scientific way to actually explore the issues of the biological development of organisms, and it ain’t you.
Now feel free to have the inevitable last word, and so satisfy your childish proclivities.
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