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

I have nothing more to say to you.

There is nothing random about evolution.  I agree with this. Although mutation is random, natural selection is not, and natural selection is what makes evolution work. Cell membranes respond instantaneously to changes to environment which tells the DNA to change its structure to adapt to the changes. <Scratching head> Now, perhaps you are right about this--I'm not a biologist, and maybe what you say here is true for, say, unicellular life (I am not aware that it is, but perhaps it is)--but it's really not my understanding of how evolution works. Certainly, the phrasing seems misleading. There's nothing about natural selection here, as there would have to be in order to say how evolution works and how evolution is not random.

Better question is why create the virtually infinite universes in the first place and how to create it from nothing.

I have a high level view of this and makes sense to me.

@ Mindwalk:

A lot to answer there, so I guess I'll just sum up... I probably should've taken your original statement more literally, which would mean I agree; Religiosity doesn't mean above reproach. 6000 year earth stuff for example or taking Noah's ark literally. It just depends how far one stretches the lack of respect and when it should become simple disagreement.

I guess I was slightly blinded by ridiculous Richard Dawkins type characters and read too much into what you said.

MW doesn't know what a genome is, but it didn't stop him from page after page of cut-and-paste from the sacred texts of talkorigins.

kstevens67 "I think we can all agree that "Love thy neighbor", with 'neighbor' meaning anyone, is the right path."

   Say, what, dude? How can you say "we can all agree"? You don't speak for 7 billion people, do you? Well, first, he's taking part in a discussion forum in which considerably fewer than seven billion people are participating. Five or ten, maybe? Is it so unrealistic to think that if five or ten people clearly imagined what it would be like for everyone to put into practice the maxim "Love thy neighbor," they would all visualize it as a good thing? Second, nobody would ever use the phrase "we can all agree" if it were thought to mean literally *everyone*, since given any statement whatsoever you can find someone, somewhere, who will disagree with it. It surely means something more like "the overwhelming majority of us" or "all reasonable people," or some such. And surely if we all imagined what it would be like for everyone to put into practice the maxim "Love thy neighbor," overwhelmingly most people would visualize it as a good thing.

   And I would qualify that "anyone". There are some truly nasty neighborhoods where you wouldn't want to walk down the street, particularly at nightfall. Yes, there are. The question is not whether or not your own exercising "Love thy neighbor" would be a good thing no matter what neighborhood you were in. The question is whether your exercising it *and their exercising it, too* would be a good thing.

   So, no. I will choose whom I will love, be neutral to most others and be very, very defensive against the few. Very pragmatic. Also a misunderstanding of what "love" means in the statement "Love thy neighbor." The idea is not that you give up being defensive against ISIS. The idea is that you love the members of ISIS *even while being defensive against them*. So, you do the members of ISIS harm *only when necessary* and do not needlessly torture them. You recognize the members of ISIS as fellow human beings even while recognizing that sadly, defending yourself and your friends and your family might mean doing them harm or even killing them in individual instances where necessary. And it means hoping that individual members will change their views and become the sorts of human beings whom you can welcome with open arms into civil community. And it means helping them do that, if you can.

   This fits in with freethinking existentialism very nicely, thank you. And so does loving thy neighbor, not in the sense of hugging and kissing your neighbors but in the sense of recognizing them as fellow human beings having thoughts and feelings of their own and in the sense of joining them in looking out for the welfare of those members of the community who need the help.

These are my thoughts exactly Mindwalk. Thank you for a thoughtful post. 

Elroch, unlike most of the other atheist posters here, is a thoughtful and knowledgeable guy. I agree: he is. I'm not aware of any factual dispute on anything scientific here, although, as I've pointed out, one can take rock-solid facts and reach different conclusions. Yes. It is tougher to take rock-solid facts and *reasonably* reach different conclusions, especially *radically different, conflicting* conclusions. And when the community of life scientists is virtually 100% united in its conclusion that evolution occurred and in its conclusion that the theory of evolution, in its broad outlines, accounts for how evolution occurred, I'm inclined to think there's not a lot of room for radical disagreement. My daughter has studied the scientific method in secondary school, and she probably understands this better than Elroch. OK, this is the part that really caught my eye. How can you possibly think this is true?

Sorry about your flu. My nephew just had it. Not pleasant, but at least it was mild. I hope yours is, too.

Here is what I hope will be my final attempt at trying to bring about a sensible conclusion to this debate.

A laudable aim, although it seems optimistic to me!

First, I might be a well educated, highly intelligent master of universal knowledge or I might be the village idiot simply babbling things I have heard at church or at the local bar. My education doesn’t matter when you actually get down to the substance of the argument. I will give you this clue. I am neither of those.

Fair enough. 

Let us begin with what we seem to be able to agree on: The traditional religious view of the age of the human race, the age of the Earth and the universe vastly understates the true lapse of time involved in past, present and future creation events. There is substantial genomic and fossil evidence to indicate that at the level species, genus and beyond there were ancestral forms that predated the modern equivalents. For the purpose of teaching the relationships between past and extant species the Darwinian model is well suited to the needs of the classroom. It tells us that primates are more closely related to bats than they are to rodents. Rodents are more closely related to lizards than they are to fish. Fish are more closely related to mushrooms than they are to plants. And so on. It also tells us that much of the aforementioned diversity is the result of adaptation to environmental changes and competitive advantages and that DNA is the mechanism by which a successful adaptation is preserved.

It would indeed be nice if all that was agreed.

Okay, so we agree on a lot. Where do we start to disagree? It begins with the assertion that ALL adaptation is the result of completely random changes and that this is supported by enough evidence to make this undeniable. Well, there are gaps. Not just some small gaps resulting from cosmic bombardment or bad copying but huge gaps in some places.

This is a non-scientific viewpoint, which it is worth demolishing. 

"Gaps" are facts that are not observed. Science is fundamentally concerned with general laws, which are inferred from some tiny subset of all facts. It is possible to be extremely confident about the general conclusions even if only a tiny fraction of the facts are observed. This is the case for all of the great theories of all of the sciences.

For example, consider the fundamental laws of physics. These are based on the experiments that have been performed and on the observations that have been made. It is not necessary to observe every interaction since the Big Bang to arrive at high confidence in the law of conservation of energy. Rather it is necessary to have diverse support for this in experiments in as wide a range of circumstances as possible,  for all observations to be consistent with the law and for there to be a satisfying theoretical basis for the idea which is consistent with other theoretical and empirical knowledge. In addition, it is very useful to have indirect arguments based on consequences of the failure of a theory which are not observed.

There are good reasons why this approach has been successful for the entire history of science. The worst it has ever led to are approximations accurate to the level of all known data at the time (like Newton's gravity) and theories whose domain is limited (like immutability of elements - the alchemists were right in a way in not believing this!).

It is NEVER going to be the case that every individual organism back to the first life on Earth be observed in sufficient detail to know what its genome was, how it relates to its antecedents and to provide the full statistics of mutation and reproduction over all time. So there are your "gaps", by the quadrillion.

It is possible to hypothesise that in one such case, a genome occurred due to intervention that would not have occurred by naturalistic mechanisms. Possible, but unjustified. Science is not about making wild hypotheses that are not demanded by the facts: these cost one cent per sextillion. Good hypotheses, by contrast, are often limited to exactly one by the facts that are known.

Let’s start with one of the smaller gaps the human/chimpanzee genome. I will give some numbers but provide no bibliography. If you don’t trust me, substitute numbers that you think are more reliable. Experts disagree on exactly how similar the two genomes are. They range from 98.5% to 95% similarity.

The similarity depends entirely on the definition. These numbers are calculated by computer using rather accurate whole genome data these days.

There are approximately 20,500 genes in the human genome. This means around 310 genes have changed using the percentage of greatest similarity.

No! Regretably, you completely misunderstand this in multiple ways. The figures you give are certainly related to the totality of DNA, not the small fraction that is coding DNA. The similarity statistics are based on the number of changes, not the number of genes that are the same. The average coding gene has, if I recall, 2 codons different between humans and chimpanzees (about 0.5% of the codons in an average gene representing about 450 amino acids). The majority of genes differ by at least one SNP (but there is a sizeable minority with no differences at all - including some very crucial highly optimised proteins).

In almost all cases, these are proteins that play a similar role in the two primate species, but the difference in sequence has some effect on their behaviour, which may be anything from nearly insignificant (most common) to very major (very rare).

I would need one of you experts to confirm or deny this but that means in approximately 3 million years from when humans and chimps diverged from their common ancestor around 10 million or so AT or CG pairings were changed. I guess this could fall within the range of believability using the greater similarity numbers but becomes less believable at 95% similarity. I’ll keep an open mind and say this does not confirm or deny the possibility of design.

Every generation, each human child has as the result of mutation about 80 differences in their DNA  by comparison with their parents. Do the math. (Biologists have, and they find that the rate of mutation matches rather well with the timeline of evolution observed in the fossil record).

So let’s look at some of the large gaps. Has anyone observed any mixture of inorganic or organic compounds, in a sterile environment, assembling into a molecule such as RNA or DNA?

This is NOT a gap in the Theory of Evolution , any more than the origin of heavy elements is a gap in the science of chemistry. It falls OUTSIDE of the scope of the subject, which is about the evolution of life on Earth, not the chemical evolution that preceded the first living organism.

The Theory of Evolution is able to convincingly show that there is a common ancestor of life on Earth, with high statistical probability: the nature of the commonality between all life is a smoking gun for the existence of a common ancestor. It extends no further back in time.

Given a mixture of RNA or DNA in a suitable media within a sterile environment, has anyone observed a living organism being produced in or out of the laboratory?

Ditto.

Well, except that viruses can be manufactured from the simplest chemicals and so can the DNA of simple bacteria, then that DNA implanted in an inert husk of a cell and spring to life, able to produce offspring. Although entire genomes for complex organisms have not been produced yet, there is no serious doubt that if all of the appropriate molecules are assembled in the right way, life arises, including human life.

Any ideas about how a molecule of chlorophyll was first synthesized and incorporated into the DNA of plants? 

Actually, yes, there are interesting and reasonable hypotheses for how chlorophll evolved from earlier metabolic function, despite the extreme age of this event. Basically, in organisms using  chemical energy, capturing photons was an accidental benefit that was (of course) optimised by evolution (to the extent that it aided fitness).

What were the characteristics of the common ancestor in the case of the Bilaterians?

Interesting question within the science of evolutionary biology, like a million others of varying importance. 

Let me explain. I want to include those who never knew or have forgotten just what we are talking about. A bilaterian is a superphylum of animals that have three layers of dermal (skin) tissue. They are further subdivided into two other groups, the protostomes (insects, mollusks, segmented worms and lots of other stuff) and the deuterostomes (star fish, vertebrates and other stuff). They are thought to have a common ancestor. They all start out as a hollow ball of embryonic cells called a blastula. The blastula begins to fold in on itself. The point where it folds in is called a blastopore. In the case of protostomes the blastopore pinches off in the middle. The slit that remains becomes the mouth and the opposite end becomes the anus. In the case of deuterostomes the blastopore becomes the anus and the mouth requires a separate opening. I hope I’m not boring you. This is pretty exciting, hey? So how do we envision a common ancestor or ancestors? This all happened with small incremental stages? Or was it a sudden design change? Natural selection made up its mind that one way was better than the other? No, wait. Natural selection doesn’t have a mind.

Of course it doesn't, but it does have a purpose. Variation occurs and natural selection ensures that successful variations become common and unsuccessful ones don't. Quadrillions of times. It is useful to look at simulations to understand how effective this is.

Well, it’s going to be hard to say because this all happened a real long time ago, Precambrian era 500 – 600 million years ago. I can give other examples but I would be wasting time. Let’s hear a respectful and intelligent reply. i.e. no ranting or character assassination.