What if the Theory of Evolution is Right? (Part I)

Pope Francis is either not up to speed with the notion of chemical evolution unless, implausibly, he would count naturally occurring molecules of RNA as "beings" or (less likely, but more valid) he is unconvinced that this is adequate (this is tenable, even if being convinced chemical evolution is inadequate is untenable).

As for where those evolving molecules came from, the naturalistic explanation  - that starts with light elements forming in the Big Bang, heavier elements forming later in population II stars and being scattered by supernova explosions, and gravity and friction sufficing to put them where they can form molecules - suffices perfectly.

There was a time when it seemed necessary for humans to have been created, because no-one understood how humans could come from non-humans, it seemed necessary for the Earth to have been created, because no-one could imagine how it came from anything else, and so on for the Sun, the (other) stars - not that any ancient religion recognised stars as other Suns - and so on.

What people can imagine (and then hypothesise and test those hypotheses) has pushed back that which requires a creator so far that it is reasonable to say it no longer necessarily exists.

To elaborate on that, the notion I like best is that naturally true mathematics is the origin of existence, with physicality being how we perceive certain patterns in what is best thought of as a kind of natural information. With this viewpoint, even physical laws do not require a creator, nor does the Big Bang (presuming it is some sort of pattern like, say a singularity of the Riemann zeta function - a very loose analogy with an element of substance).

   Very good technical analysis, Elroch.

   Though, the thing is, most people "need" a creator even if you could prove through science (but you "can't prove a negative") that there isn't one.

   Then, even if you could prove that there wasn't intelligent design (which, again, you can't), we would still have a big dilemma. What was the cause of the big bang? How was the first of the simplest atoms (hydrogen) manufactured?

   These would be just a few of the questions. But it becomes a moot point in that most people need (and must have) a creator who loves them. 

In a corpse you will still find a concentration of RNA, DNA and the proteins they generate. But that corpse remains dead.

In deep space you will find sugars, nucleotides and amino acids. But you do not find them in concentrations that could likely become RNA supermolecules.

If you do find RNA in deep space you will not find them in concentrations that would constitute life.

It is interesting to see the similarities between this nonsense and some of the characteristically pathological patterns of behaviour of evolution deniers.

The main one is that they place excessive weight on ancient opinions. This is because they think in a people-centric way as opposed to a fact-centric way. In truth none of the opinions they echo has any substance these days. They are of a similar character to Einstein's perfectly understandable disinclination to accept quantum mechanics. This reluctance to accept the overturning of previous assumptions plays a valuable role in the early stages of a new scientific theory: there is nothing better to test a theory than a highly competent scientist who is desperate to find a way to prove the theory false (which led in Einstein's case to the EPR "paradox", Bell's experiment, and better understanding of the crucial phenomenon of quantum entanglement).

But the truth is that the skepticism of Mach, Michelson, Milikan, Essen, Ives, Tesla proved to be misplaced. It is misleading to even include Rutherford in the list: he did not deny relativity, he just admitted that that part of the New Physics was something he ignored as he wasn't comfortable with it.

He was able to do this, because his work was in an area where he could get away with doing so (his collisions were of low enough energy for it not to be important). If he had worked at a modern collider, he could not have done so (at the very least he would have had to trust those who used relativity to make sure the accelerator worked, and if he had ever had the opportunity to compare results of collisions with stationary targets and moving ones, there would have been no room to ignore relativity).

Another thing that unifies these scientists is that they worked in areas which, though important, allowed them to ignore some aspects of the new physics. Millikan's famous experiment in done in high school science classes (I did a version of it) and can be understood with no 20th century physics. Most of the others are known for things that are similar. Tesla was an engineer rather than a physicist. And so on.

The thing that makes their skepticism irrelevant is how well tested relativity is. General relativistic time dilation can be measured by dropping a photon one meter these days! No kidding. Special relativity can be checked by loading an atomic clock on a plane and flying it around for a while at 0.000001 times the speed of light (which slows clocks by a factor of 0.9999999999995).

All strikingly similar in character to people misguidedly doubting the Theory of Evolution in the 21st century.

The contributions by the science denialists in the anti-evolution thread reveals that they remain clueless about how evolution works.

tunaluvvver's post at least recognises that natural selection is the mechanism that generates fitness in evolution. But it also reveals that s/he doesn't understand why it automatically does so. Presumably s/he has never seen a quantitative example that proves the point. Such ignorance is hardly a surprise.

mbh1999 confirms that his understanding is that of an uneducated 11-year old on the subject. Presumably he doesn't even know that proteins do not spontaneously form, but that they are formed by transcription of RNA, which itself is formed by translated DNA in modern life. Complete ignorance of this crucial fact leaves him with no way to understand that protein structure is a direct consequence of DNA structure which is generated by random mutation plus natural selection, which means he can't even begin to discuss the point that proteins can only arise if there is an evolutionary path that progresses in steps that can occur by mutation.

[Having said that, there are explicit examples in life of where a frame shift mutation generates what is effectively a completely random protein with no precursor, and that this protein happens to have a useful biological function. This fact makes a total mockery of the science denialist claim that working proteins are stupendously unlikely.]

Then there is Lola, whose contribution is characteristically empty of any sign of knowledge or understanding. Lola has no interest in the truth, just in whatever makes gossipping more enjoyable.

Good points, again Elroch. Seems to me that you may miss (ever so slightly...lol) all the ignorant contention on that thread.

OK...this thread is now officially dead.

Elroch: A+

e99: D-

Saying that, I hereby unblock the few, the troublemakers, so that they may make (politely?) their last will and testament on this dead thread.

Good post.

What is necessary is an environment in which some sort of information is embedded (in molecules) and some of that information gets replicated (and that that replication is not perfect - i.e. there is some sort of mutation). That provides all that is necessary for chemical evolution to start. It doesn't guarantee it continues: just as for life, extinction is possible, if the environment becomes sufficiently inhospitable at some point. But if you have that replicating information, evolution happens. The fitness of the information increases unless the mutation rate is too high for the replication rate (this itself favours combinations of molecules that tend to be mutated at a rate that is not excessive).

This happens for small RNA molecules in water, in a non-oxidising environment, as long as there is an adequate supply of simple chemicals that are known to have existed in the early solar system and, in all likelihood on the early Earth (or even somewhere else, if that produced some sort of life that could hitch a ride on a meteorite to Earth later.

The simplest way to look at it is that evolution is about information replicating imperfectly in an environment, and what information it produces. It doesn't matter if the information is in free molecules (like short strands of RNA) or in genomes.

If I may just add........It doesn't matter the overwhelming weight of evidence for evolution, including some gaps at the moment, to those who want to believe in a god or supernatural being/entity. They won't be convinced as they don't want to be convinced by logical argument or discussion. They're happy to believe (which is ok by me btw) what they want to believe.

bobyyyy wrote:

"They're happy to believe (which is ok by me btw) what they want to believe."

It doesn't matter to me if uneducated idiots want to stay uneducated. The problem is these idiots brainwash children. They all do it. And there's thousands of idiots who have made brainwashing children their career.

Teaching children to hate and fear science, which is what all these anti-science idiots do, is the worst possible kind of child abuse because the brain-damage they cause is usually incurable. For example does anyone here think the brain damaged idiots of chess.com are ever going to be able to grow up? Of course not. Their brain damage is incurable. Their pathetic lives are wasted.

Creationism is a disease and it must be completely eradicated just like any other disease. We won't get there with these idiots making children stupid.

Even worse these child abusers want to make everyone else's children stupid. Just like the Islamic State idiots, American idiots are constantly trying to dumb down or suppress the teaching of evolution. Their war against science education will never end until the idiots understand their abuse of children will not be tolerated.

ref: 345257T367 (Post Comment #755)

bobyyyy wrote:

The professional child abusers make their victims (American children) think the 4.5 Billion year old Earth is only 6,000 years old, which is equivalent to New York City being 28 feet from Los Angeles (somebody did the math).

This burning stupid is out of control in Idiot America.

DEEP TIME: http://deeptime.info/

ref: 345257T368 (Post Comment #756)

bobyyyy wrote:

I have a blog about the religious war against science, scientists, and science education. This is one of the many things I wrote there:

According to Florida's public school state science standards adopted in 2008 "Evolution is the fundamental concept underlying all of biology and is supported by multiple forms of scientific evidence." Evolution does not need defending because it's a basic scientific fact. The religious alternative, magical intelligent design creationism, is the most ridiculously stupid idea in the history of the human race. Creationism is more than an idiotic fantasy, it's a disease, a severe mental illness. Why do Christians deny the established truth of evolution, despite massive, powerful, and still growing evidence that's been accumulating for more than 150 years? There can be only one possible explanation. Christians (and their Muslim terrorist friends) are uneducated morons.

ref: 345257T369 (Post Comment #757)

I want to take issue with one of Elroch's views. (EDIT: I realized as I wrote this that I was going against my usual scientific realism, and also that I was not sure that I was really saying anything more than that we have to be careful to define our physics terms by reference to the observational results of certain experimental set-ups--but I'm leaving this here in case he has any comments to make on it.)

In fact, I think we have to start with the intuitive knowledge we have--tigers are striped, refrigerators keep food cold, and so on--and as we move on to knowledge of magnetic fields, atoms, spacetime, and so on, we develop a language of theoretical entities *which is less reliable than our ordinary, everyday language*. I know perfectly well that there are tigers. I've seen them. The only way I could doubt their existence would be to doubt that my senses gave me reasonably reliable information about an objectively existing reality, or to doubt that my basic thought processes were reasonably reliable. But magnetic fields? Maybe there are no such things. When I sprinkle iron filings on top of a sheet of paper spread over a magnet, I see a nice pattern, yes--but that pattern of iron filings is what I can see and touch. It's what I definitely know is real, subject to assumptions like the ones mentioned. A magnetic field? It might be useful for me to talk as though there were such things, but as far as I can tell, what there are are iron filings arranging themselves in certain patterns.

It's the same for all of our other theoretical entities that we can't see or touch. We can set dials and read off pointer readings, but it takes a theoretical structure before we can translate those pointer readings into information about theoretical entities. It's certainly very useful to us to talk as though those theoretical entities really existed, and I certainly do, normally--but the more removed from ordinary, everyday see-and-touch reality they become, the less reliable they seem *as statements about what is real rather than merely useful*.

So, we come up with a term like "mass," and it's perfectly sensible for big objects; but when we start applying it to theoretical entities at the quantum scale, perhaps we are making a mistake. And perhaps it is the fact that we are making a mistake that accounts for quantum weirdness: we are trying to apply the wrong types of thought to that level of reality. If we define an electron's mass strictly in terms of certain readings of certain pointers on certain dials under certain experimental set-ups, then OK, we're fine--but if we think of it as mass in the same sense in which we think of a tiger's mass, perhaps we're in trouble. As long as we really are careful to define terms by reference to observational results of certain experimental set-ups, we're fine--even if the theoretical entities we speak of don't really exist, we can still reasonably speak as though they did; but if we try to think of them by reference to their application in ordinary, everyday ways, we may very well be led to a degree of scientific realism going beyond what we really know.

As  I have mentioned before, you are a little fixated on a naive concept of existence.

What exists is behaviour: patterns of observations which are not entirely random. Our notions of objects are a description of parts of this behaviour. But they are not in isolation: the notion of a tiger incorporates all interactions of that tiger with other things.  

One type of behaviour you can be very sure exists is the interaction of charges with the electromagnetic field. This includes all phenomena associated with magnetism.  A magnetic field is an aspect of the electromagnetic field. Indeed the relationship is very similar to that of space and space-time. You can be just as sure that this aspect of electromagnetic behaviour exists. In the physics, this is described by a single gauge field A with 4 components. It corresponds to the scalar and vector potentials of classical electromagnetic theory. This is a way of describing the behaviour and exists only as such.

When you say you are more sure that a tiger exists this is a statement that you are more confortable with naive intuition than scientific knowledge. But in truth what you are basing your opinion on is the interpretation by your brain of a large number of interactions of photons with cones and rods in your eye, i.e. a large number of interactions of the electromagnetic field. So if you don't believe in electromagnetism, you don't believe you have ever seen a tiger. It's no good forgetting that seeing is of this nature and then ascribing it some existence independent of its nature: it remains a set of observations of electromagnetic interactions even if you ignore this.

So, while you may be more sure of the existence of tigers than the existence of the EM field, this is an error of intuition, not an epistemiological fact.

When it comes to the mass of the tiger, your intuition is based on medium scale physics. There is no question that this physics derives from small scale physics: a tiger is made of cells, made of molecules, made of atoms, made of electrons and nuclei. It's mass is a bulk interaction, based on the masses of these particles corrected by the interaction energy (which is essentially all derived from the electromagnetic field). There is no sense in which the mass of a tiger makes sense without it deriving from its constituents.

My main observation here is that you give weight to intuition that derives from the normal interaction of people with the world on a medium scale, but have no reason other than intuition to be confident that this is more reliable than physics experiments.

There is one substantive point: there is less uncertainty at larger scales. But this smaller uncertainty is a statistical consequence, like the law of large numbers, and is no more fundamental than saying that if you toss a million coins, you can be 99.7% sure there are between 498500 and 51500 heads. Does this give more reality to the balanced nature of coin flips when viewed in batches of a million?

So surely there is some way in which you can say that statements about tigers can be extremely reliable compared with those about electrons. But such statements remain statements about the interactions of a large ensemble of electrons and nuclei and not fundamentally more solid or reliable except statistically.

[Incidentally, you never got round to saying which of my views you took issue with ].

I am beginning to wonder if Elroch is the anonymous screen name of Richard Dawkins himself. Could be. 

But, true or false, I am guessing that he does know this: 

Well, one out of two ain't bad, pawnwhacker. 

If I ask myself what I know, I do not *begin* with a quantum mechanical theory involving all sorts of theoretical constructs. Rather, I *begin* with my own mental life. I *begin* with things like...my mental images of tigers.

I do, in fact, assume that there is an objectively existing reality of which my senses give me reasonably reliable information. On that basis, I start saying things like, "Tigers are striped," instead of just, "When I mentally imagize tigerishly, I also imagize stripe-ishly." I can now make statements about a world corresponding to my sensations.

Under that assumption, I have some reason to think of other-people-ish objects-in-the-world as also being mental experiencers who gain information about the world via their senses. And once I make certain assumptions about the veridicality of memory, I have some reason to think of other-people-ish objects-in-the-world as having existed in the past, too, and as having made observations, and as having noted patterns and regularities, and as having developed theories on the basis of those observations and noted patterns and regularities, and as having run a great deal of experiments and tests of hypothetical explanations of patterns and regularities. I then accept, that is, that the intersubjective enterprise of science has been going on for a while.

I therefore accept more and more theoretical entities in my description of the world, including many that seem not to be correlates of anything in my mental life. The acceptance of these theoretical entities might tell me that I should think of the world around me not as a world of solid, existent objects, but instead as a world of processes, of ever-changing field states, some of which give rise to the appearance of there being solid objects in the world. But, of course, it doesn't matter to me, when I speak of a tiger's existence, whether what that means is that a solid object exists or instead that various fields are interacting to produce the features that I think of as tiger-ish. It doesn't matter to me what the tiger's fundamental metaphysical structure is. The fact remains, the tiger exists.

If I then want to go further and say that the tiger doesn't really exist--well, OK, but then I'll have to go back and amend those fundamental assumptions on the basis of which I trusted science in the first place. Those assumptions came first, after all, when I asked myself what I knew. How would you suggest I amend those assumptions?

All true about the damage religion has done, or will do, but nothing will convince them to change their opinions, the blanket they feel is comforting. 

MindWalk, you can surely see what I mean. As a child you could see a tiger and be sure there is a tiger. But now you can look at a tiger and rationally realise that this means that there is light coming from the Sun interacting with the tiger and re-emitted light that interacts with molecules in your eyes in a way what leads to a pattern in the neurons in your brain that you associate with the concept of a tiger.

You rightly know this mechanism of detection and identification works from experience (it has served you well, even if perhaps you have not run into many tigers?), but you can also see that you are relying on a system that is looking for patterns in an electromagnetic signal. Moreover, you have nothing but this sort of information on which to base your knowledge (I am including second hand information of a similar sort).

You also know that tigers are made of matter and what you see is interactions with that matter.

So while once you knew you saw a tiger without concern about the mechanism, you now know enough to realise what you are really relying on. Obviously, most of the time you can ignore this, but it matters to this discussion.

Well, I see that hapless is back on this site. I wonder if he has had a chance to read some (or all) of The Selfish Gene and offer a critique?