-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
My attempt at an Evolution thread! OhgodwhatamIdoing.
- Thread starter Kinitari
- Start date
- Status
mclaren777
Member
Here's a three-part interview that some of you might enjoy. It focuses on Dr. Donald Ewert's career and his stance on the debate about evolution. Later in the program they discuss the Kitzmiller case and whether there is a Darwinian explanation for the origin of the immune system.
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Info about Dr. Ewert
He received his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 1976. As a microbiologist, he operated a research laboratory at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia for almost twenty years. The Wistar Institute is one of the world's leading centers for biomedical research. His research, supported by National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, and Department of Agriculture grants, has involved the immune system, viruses, and cellular biology.
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Info about Dr. Ewert
He received his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 1976. As a microbiologist, he operated a research laboratory at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia for almost twenty years. The Wistar Institute is one of the world's leading centers for biomedical research. His research, supported by National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, and Department of Agriculture grants, has involved the immune system, viruses, and cellular biology.
mclaren777
Member
That seems awfully closed-minded.Raist said:
If you posted something from evolution.podomatic.com and people blindly refused to listen, what conclusion would you draw about their willingness to learn and debate?
Dude Abides
Banned
mclaren777 said:
You may be interested in this rebuttal as well.
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2010/12/the-immune-syst.html#comments-open
mclaren777 said:
Intelligent design is bullshit. It's a scam. It's run by people who have phony PhD titles, liars, nutjobs, and a couple of them have been in jail for fraud. They're driven by religion, which has NO place in science. They don't have a SINGLE scientific evidence for their "theory".
Why on earth would I want to listen to these people?
There is NO legitimate debate between evolution and intelligent design.
mclaren777
Member
Am I supposed to be looking for something meaningful in the comments section or was Nick's opinion piece the rebuttal?Dude Abides said:
distrbnce said:
Dude, that's anthropocentrism at its finest. We're not on top of the evolutionary ladder. Never been, never will. This is a biased view based on what we give importance to. But can you resist as much radiation as a scorpion? Would you survive in water reaching temperatures nearing 100˚C like some bacterias? So how are we superior in that frame of reference?
Raist said:
Yes, it's anthropocentric, and based on my criteria, it's true.
I don't care if a scorpion can resist more radiation... we can create technology to contain it, and eventually create technology to reverse or prevent the damage instantly.
Just because something has an "ism" attached to it doesn't mean it's bad...
tnsply100 said:
Funny you should ask, as tonight's episode of Horizon on BBC2 @9pm (in the UK) is about exactly that:
A short clip from the episode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQuvvLoDTsw
mclaren777
Member
And I believe evolution is bullshit, but that doesn't stop me from keeping an open mind to the possibility that I'm wrong.Raist said:
I'm not asking you to put your name on the Dissent From Darwinism list, but I am asking you to give that interview a listen. It actually has very little to do with ID so I'm sure you can manage it.
mclaren777 said:
That's fine, but neither you (or anyone else) has any proof of this. While there's plenty of evidence that ID is pure crap.
I'm certainly not going to listen to a guy who thinks that RAG genes come from "a bacterial transposon". He has no idea of what he's talking about.
KHarvey16 said:
This:
NullPointer
Member
Forgive me if this is a stupid question but this looks like the place to ask it. I was watching a bunch of Dawkins and Hitchens debates last month and one argument brought up by critics of evolution was never answered.
The gist of it is this: If 99% of mutations are detrimental to an organism if not fatal, shouldnt the fossil record be filled with gazillions of failed transitional forms? Wouldnt the number of failed mutations be astronomical? And if so, do we have evidence of the sheer number of evolutionary blunders?
I wish I could remember the details of the argument in more detail, but the thought was that while religion can attribute positive changes over time to the hand of an intelligent designer, scientists use time and chance to cover their lack of evidence, as in, over such and such billions of years it was only a matter of time until random mutation would create the diversity we see in our world.
I'll see if I can find the YouTube where I first heard this argument, but I'm certain it was Hitchens debating a pretty outspoken Rabbi.
The gist of it is this: If 99% of mutations are detrimental to an organism if not fatal, shouldnt the fossil record be filled with gazillions of failed transitional forms? Wouldnt the number of failed mutations be astronomical? And if so, do we have evidence of the sheer number of evolutionary blunders?
I wish I could remember the details of the argument in more detail, but the thought was that while religion can attribute positive changes over time to the hand of an intelligent designer, scientists use time and chance to cover their lack of evidence, as in, over such and such billions of years it was only a matter of time until random mutation would create the diversity we see in our world.
I'll see if I can find the YouTube where I first heard this argument, but I'm certain it was Hitchens debating a pretty outspoken Rabbi.
a failed mutation wouldn't lead to a population, which would be statistically necessary to have it show up in the fossil record. The odds of a single non-selected for animal/mutation becoming a fossil would be astronomical I would think.
This was the main argument against the initial critics of the sapien/neandertal hybrid, who claimed it was likely not a viable offspring.
This was the main argument against the initial critics of the sapien/neandertal hybrid, who claimed it was likely not a viable offspring.
NullPointer said:
99%? Not anywhere close to this.
But anyways, if a mutation is lethal, then you won't have it carried on, meaning that their would only be a handful of individuals (aAt best. Can be just one, or none if the mutation causes developmental failure) carrying it. Given that it takes a lot of chance for an organism to be fossilized, we probably won't find these (but still, there's hundreds of thousands of fossils around).
mclaren777
Member
Donald Ewert was an editor for the world's leading immunology journal (Developmental & Comparative Immunology). He actively reviewed research papers and manuscripts for publication.Raist said:
Your claim is most certainly false.
mclaren777 said:
No, it's not. And editors don't review shit.
And being on an editorial board doesn't mean you have a good knowledge of a specific topic anyways. Especially when you have an agenda against something that is supported by 99% of the scientific community, supported by a bajillion of evidences, and yet to fail any experimental test.
mclaren777
Member
The informational nature of DNA and its resulting cellular effects are considered by many to be the best evidence.KHarvey16 said:
Dude Abides
Banned
mclaren777 said:
The blog post. Are you objecting to it by calling it an "opinion piece?" That would be odd since the Ewert interview is similarly just his opinion.
There is not a single piece of evidence for ID. It's not a theory, it's a conjecture. It's not even a hypothesis, because it doesn't make any predictions about what would be true if ID was a valid explanation.KHarvey16 said:
1. The vast majority of mutations are neutral, neither good nor bad.NullPointer said:
2. Remember that what defines a species is the group of animals that can successfully mate with each other. A few mutations won't prevent an animal from mating with its parent species, nor will they actually be expressed in most cases as a phenotype.
3. Only phenotypes relating to bone structure will show up in fossils.
4. Typically a mutation is very small, so you won't see "blunders" like an animal that happens to have an extra leg carrying on a legacy. The mutations build up, even if you can't always see them (Neutral theory).
5. Given that religion is created by humans, of course it will be according to human time-scales. Our brains did not develop to think in terms of millions of years, nor in terms of nanoseconds. Science has to use these scales because that is how things actually happened, whether we like it or not. Religion takes the path of what is easiest to understand, and through human ego, tries to pass it off as fact.
Jack Random
Member
Raist said:
See, that's the trick, there is no "evolutionary ladder." Evolution does not (necessarily) mean "advancement," it just means change.
to address the comments about technology, it wont stop evolution, it will simply steer it.
NullPointer
Member
That's a pretty good start, but I think more info may be needed.ianp622 said:
Here is the specific argument in detail (finally found the YouTube). It starts at 48 minutes in and goes on for the next seven minutes or so.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnMYL8sF7bQ#t=48m0s
So where is this argument wrong?
mclaren777
Member
djtortilla
Member
Rapstah said:
We don't understand DNA well enough to make a statement like that
NullPointer
Member
So, no more refutations of that YouTube I posted above? Are the figures he quoted incorrect?
Dude Abides
Banned
mclaren777 said:
Even ID believers realize Meyer is way out of his depth. Well, the honest and knowledgeable ones do anyway.
http://biologos.org/blog/signature-in-the-cell/
NullPointer
Member
That's not much of a refutation there. Whats the actual rate of "Deleterious mutation"?Raist said:
On the contrary, I find DNA to be quite a remarkable thing.Rapstah said:
I'm not advocating ID (I would be one of the last people to), but instead just amazed that such a thing could be produced by the physical laws that govern our universe. It just makes you appreciate how grand our universe really is.
Anyway, sorry if this feels like self-promoting, but I posted an article on my blog (no ads) that some of you might find interesting. Please correct me if you find any errors.
Why do humans need to drink water?
NullPointer said:
Fucks knows what the rate is. You can't have a fixed value for this kind of things.
But to give you a rough idea:
A tiny fraction of the genome are functional genes, not in every single species, but loads of them. The large majority of genes have untranslated regions, that are largely unaffected by mutations.
The genetic code is redundant. Meaning that mutations can be "silent" ie the exact same aminoacid will be derived from that mutated codon.
Mutations can be semi-conserved, meaning that they will lead to the translation to an aminoacid that has extremely close physico-chemical properties thus not likely to affect the protein's function.
Missense mutations that lead to a very different aminoacids are not necessarily going to affect a protein's function. There's a method in molecular biology which is called "Alanine scanning". It's an extremely boring way to find out whether a particular aminoacid is important for a protein's function. People use it even though they perfectly know which parts of the protein are actual functional domains, yet they have to use that annoying method to figure out what is important or not. If nearly every mutation was deleterious, people wouldn't bother going through that shit.
A "bad" mutation is not always lethal. We're talking about biology, not a binary process. A mutated enzyme can still work at 20% (random number) and that's good enough.
Even if a copy of a gene is fucked, most organisms have two of them. See recessive mutations.
And finally, there's a lot of redudance at a functional level. Many proteins have similar functions si even if you completely lack one, the other ones will do the job.
Now, given all this (all of which are facts and can be experimentally proven) do you really think that the frequency of deleterious mutations is 99%?
NullPointer said:
They say that H.J. Muller says:
H.J. Muller said:
Well Creationists like to quote mine, and they do it in this case. You'll note that if you search for this quote, you'll have trouble wading through the creationist websites to actually find the original source.
They leave out this part:
Furthermore, the context of this quote is in response to the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and in particular, the claim that the radiation actually improved the genetics of the population.
You can read some of it here.
Oh look, they do it again! I haven't even got a minute in and I have two mined quotes:
But he leaves out the next part:Ernst Mayr said:
I can't even find anywhere to get The Mystery of Heredity, so I can't respond to that. I can't even find a John J. Fried that is a biologist online.
I can't find the full quote of Huxley to respond to it. But the probability argument is misled. The probability of a particular animal is exceedingly low. So is the probability that all of your atoms are in their particular location out of all the possible locations in the universe. However, if you condition the probability on past events (for example, the probability that you are in your current location given that you were in a nearby location some short time ago), the probability increases dramatically.
The probability argument is making an independence assumption - that the probability of an animal is independent of all the mutations that happened previously. This is a serious error.
He acts as though our new estimates of time are the result of some collusion among scientists to make their theories work. His ignorance is laughable.
People who say we haven't found transitional fossils are looking for the crocoduck. They don't understand what they are asking for. We have found transitional fossils. One of Darwin's doubts came from the flatfish, which has two eyes on one side of its head. He was worried that we didn't find a fish with an eye on the front, and yet recently, we have.
Punctuated equilibrium is a clarification of evolutionary theory. To say that Gould doesn't "believe" in evolution is just a lie.
Again, quote mining Darwin. Darwin is saying that evolutionary theory contradicts common sense thought. However, Boteach doesn't understand that when a scientist says something does not seem common sense, that scientist is not expressing doubt in the validity of the theory.
Evolution of the eye here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stb9pQc9Kq0
Sorry, it's not really an argument that has to be attacked. He just quote mines, and doesn't actually make any statements of his own, aside from appealing to human sense (which is erroneous) and human ego. He attacks the scientific method of gradually improving theories to better explain evidence, and uses these improvements to say, "See! You were wrong before! How do I know you won't be wrong again?"
But Boteach wants us to take any uncertainty and fill it with a god. He in fact seeks to retard scientific progress, saying that we should stop and just say "God did it!" This makes him out to be someone with a small mind that is insecure about not knowing. He doesn't actually have any evidence to support his theory, and so there is no argument.
mclaren777 said:
In your view the best evidence for ID is the "God of the Gaps" theory? Even if there is not currently an adequate scientific explanation (something I'm not necessarily conceding) that does not require a supernatural one. By your logic every currently unexplainable UFO sighting is really an alien space craft. And then each time we explain ONE the others still remain valid alien sightings.
NullPointer
Member
Now that's a much better refutation. And thanks for taking the time to answer my question.
In a nutshell then, would you say that we don't find a trillion failed mutations in the fossil record because most mutations 1.) rarely apply to the bone structure, and 2.) are not overwhelmingly dangerous to the organism, and thus the deleterious mutations we *can* find in the fossil record are representative of predicted rates?
Yep. Which is why I asked here thinking that some of you guys would have the raw facts at your fingertips or at least easier access.ianp622 said:
In a nutshell then, would you say that we don't find a trillion failed mutations in the fossil record because most mutations 1.) rarely apply to the bone structure, and 2.) are not overwhelmingly dangerous to the organism, and thus the deleterious mutations we *can* find in the fossil record are representative of predicted rates?
NullPointer said:
I would add a 3rd point.
Fossils only make up for a small small small fraction of all the creatures that ever lived - I don't mean species, I mean individual creatures.
I'm not even sure what looking for a deleterious mutation in the fossil record would look like, but lets have some examples -
For some reason, animal is born without feet - dies pretty quickly, as an infant.
Mutation in the womb that causes the fetus to die before being birthed.
These would be the only kind of visible deleterious mutations I can think about, what else is there? Random horn growing out of the head? Not necessarily deleterious, it could be neutral or beneficial. When I think phenotypical deleterious mutations, I usually think death at a really young age - thus substantially reducing the chance to come across one of these fossils.
mclaren777 said:
I don't feel like looking through youtube videos. If you can't put your ideas into your own words what's the point of having a discussion.
Can any creationist provide any evidence for creation? I don't think just saying DNA counts. Especially since DNA is a good example of how the original theory of evolution made a prediction that was later proven correct. At the time Darwin presented his theory there was no know mechanism for the transfer of traits to offspring. In order for the theory to be correct there had to be something that could transfer the traits while still leaving room for variation. DNA fits the bill quite nicely.
I see mutation thrown around a lot as some kind of bogyman. If you look at how many different forms of dogs we have been able to breed, who all had one common wolf ancestor, it's pretty obvious that variations in DNA can yield drastic variation in form over a very short period of time when selection criteria are applied. The bad mutation rate does not matter. It could be 99.99% but the fact still remains that the genetic code can result in great variety in a relatively low number of generations. DNA also shows how similar we are to our ancestors. It's a family tree we all carry around with us.
NullPointer
Member
I paraphrased his argument to the best of my memory, by the entire point relies upon multiple named sources that he quoted and I'm not about to transcribe seven minutes of dialogue when I can provide a YouTube clip with a link directly to the argument in question.Zaphod said:
Anyway, its a Hitchens debate versus a Rabbi - I'd think you'd find it interesting.
Shit, sorry I thought your comment was directed at me. Apologies if I was mistaken.
Raist said:
Humanity would only evolve if we found ourselves in a hostile environment in which technology would be unable to solve the problem. Considering we're intelligent enough to have created technology that allows us to survive in the vacuum of space, I find it unlikely that we'll ever find ourselves in a situation where we would need to evolve. This is the end of the road for us. Either we adapt via technology, or we die.
djtortilla
Member
It seems strange to say that technology can and will prevent evolution.
Humans can't cure cancer today and we already think we have enough technology to
prevent biological change?
Humans can't cure cancer today and we already think we have enough technology to
prevent biological change?
Mgoblue201
Won't stop picking the right nation
Plenty of work has been done on the evolution of various systems. This video contains an easy to understand demonstration on the likely origin of the flagellum, which is based on work done by Nick Matzke himself. Another paper focused on the anti-freeze protein in certain fish.mclaren777 said:
The origin of the immunological system itself was the subject of a recent paper published in Science. It's unfortunately locked behind a pay wall, but you can read a brief description of it here:
In a scientific detective story that has played out over the past few decades, researchers have shown how this adaptive immune response arose after innate immunity, and they have teased out the details of the fortuitous event, a random DNA insertion in an opportune spot, that was the key to its birth. The research on this big bang of immunology even played a key role in a 2005 trial pitting scientists and educators against those doubting evolution and seeking to diminish its teaching in school systems in the United States.
This is what Matzke was responding to here.
Never mind that Luskins one immunologist, Donald Ewert, admits that most of his colleagues, even his coauthors, are against him and use homology and comparative evidence everywhere all the time; admits that there is a mountain of literature on the evolution of the immune system; and admits (although he barely stammers it out) that there actually is an evolutionary model for the origin of receptor rearrangement in adaptive immunity and that the researchers themselves interpreted this as confirmation of the basic transposon-origins model (although Ewert somehow thinks this was just a classification of the RAG genes as bacterial transposons, ignoring, (a) how damned odd that is to find in vertebrate immune system genes and (b) how this was suspected ever since the 1970s and was deliberately tested in the 1990s-2000s).
And then there's the just plain odd. Why Would Ewert dismiss non-Darwinian mechanisms for explaining evolution, when they are a vital part of the modern synthesis? I am uncomfortable with the way in which people use the word Darwinian, even to describe evolution through adaptation and natural selection. But IDers and creationists take it to a whole new level by using it almost as a pejorative and a slur. Ewert, at least, uses it in an academic fashion, but the meaning of his point becomes lost in the process, and then when he reaches that statement, I think he's completely confused. He also seems to be confused on other basic points, such as circumstantial evidence, etc.
Luskins himself is an embarrassment. It's peculiar that he would bring up the blood clotting example after he was called out on it here. Make sure to read all three parts.
Fake edit: I found a pdf of the immunological paper here. It mostly just sums up previous experiments and corroborates Matzke's points.
In the late 1970s, in work that would earn him a Nobel Prize, Susumu Tonegawa of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge demonstrated that B cells can produce such a vast array of antibodies thanks to a complicated process called VDJ recombination. A maturing B cell starts with dozens to hundreds of three classes of gene segmentsthe Vs, Ds, and Jsand as it develops, the cell excises all but one of each class. The surviving V, D, and J then get stitched together into a DNA sequence that encodes an antibody unique to each mature B cell. (The other key player in the adaptive system, the T cell, also bypasses the one geneone protein hurdle and similarly recombines gene segments to create distinct cell-surface receptors for pathogens.) The elucidation of VDJ recombination gradually exposed immunologys big bang, recalls David Schatz of the Yale School of Medicine. By 1990, he and other colleagues then working in David Baltimores lab at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge had identified two genes essential to VDJ recombination, RAG1 and RAG2 (for recombination-activating genes). Sharks and all the other jawed vertebrates with adaptive immunity have these genes, but all the evidence at the time indicated that hagfish, lampreys, and invertebrates didnt. So, where did RAG1 and RAG2 come from?
Several clues, including that the two genes are located immediately next to each other, prompted Schatz and his colleagues to wonder whether the pair had once been part of a DNA recombination system in fungi or viruses that got incorporated into vertebrates. As immunologists teased out what the proteins encoded by the two did, they realized the molecules are the scissors and knitting needles that cut out all but one V, D, and J and stitch those remaining three gene segments together.
In 1995, Craig Thompson, then at the University of Chicago in Illinois, formally proposed that the DNA now encoding RAG1 and RAG2 was once a mobile genetic element called a transposon.
Transposons can cut themselves out of one DNA sequence and stick themselves back in another, so immunologists could envision those skills being co-opted to recombine V, D, and J gene segments. In this transposon hypothesis, Thompson suggested that at some point after jawed and jawless vertebrates split into two branches, about 450 million years ago, a transposon invaded the former lineage, perhaps brought in by a virus that infected a germ cell. Boomthe enzymes that would ultimately provide adaptive immunity, by creating diverse antibodies and T cell receptors, were now in place and could mutate into that new role.
Many research teams began trying to verify the transposon hypothesis. In 1998, for example, Schatzs team and one led by Martin Gellert of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, independently showed that the enzymes encoded by RAG1 and RAG2 could, in addition to cutting out DNA sequences, actually insert one stretch of DNA into another. In a commentary in Nature, immunologist Ronald Plasterk of the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam expressed the awe of many at this solid evidence of the transposon hypothesis. We may owe our existence to one transposition event that occurred 450 million years ago, he wrote.
It goes on to say that in 2006 they found genes in sea urchins that resemble RAG1 and RAG2, which might have been lost in most lineages besides jawed vertebrates and then eventually adapted for the immunological function. Crucially, this led researcher Thomas Bosch to suggest that, "There was never a big bang of immunology."
I hope that you can figure out why researchers use comparative molecular evidence so readily. Denying its importance is a huge part of Ewert's point. He's clearly wrong, but I'll wait until later to get into it. I've probably said enough for now.
- Status