Denyse O’Leary quotes Steve Meyer’s question:
Why, he [Agassiz] asked, does the fossil record always happen to be incomplete at the nodes connecting major branches of Darwin’s tree of life, but rarely—in the parlance of modern paleontology—at the “terminal branches” representing the major already known groups of organisms?…
Was there any easy answer to Agassiz’s argument? If so, beyond his stated willingness to wait for future fossil discoveries, Darwin didn’t offer one.
and responds:
And no one else has either.
Oh, yes, they have, Denyse. That’s what what punk eek was. But it also falls readily out of any simulation – you see rapid diversification into a new niche at a node, and thus few exemplars, followed by an increasingly gradual approach to a static optimum, and thus lots of exemplars. But I present an even more graphic response: when you chop down a tree, and saw it up into logs for your fire, what proportion of your logs include a node?
You are arguing entirely from a position of extreme ignorance. “Darwinists” actually believed the entire genome was functional, and were surprised to discover, upon much laborious investigation, that most of the genome was, in fact, junk. You really should read that link I gave you to Larry Moran’s blog.
ID creationists have deluded themselves into this revisionist picure where evil (atheistic, communist, materialistic) darwinists were desperate (or at least all too keen) to finding the genome crappy and nonfunctional, when it was actually the other way around.
But this picture is a fantasy you ID-creationists delude yourselves into. A fiction, a fable, demonstrably in conflict with recorded history and observational reality. Even today there are plenty of “Darwinists” who still hold out hope and think the entirety of the genome will be found to have some kind of function.
Darwinists, that is, adaptationists, people who think natural selection is bordering on omnipotence, thought desperately that everything about biology would turn out to have a purpose and function. But the evidence simply wasn’t there, and in fact on the contrary, it turns out not only was there no evidence of function, there was evidence for non-function.
There’s no reason for me to waste much time educating you on this, go read that link to Larry Moran’s blog.
He didn’t turn out to be wrong in that prediction. In fact it’s pretty much established fact. We have fossil evidece of muticellular life going back into the Cryogenian. Yeah, you won’t find much about this in Meyer’s book.
That’s great, nobody believes it came into existence “by chance”, as if it simply suddenly appeared fully formed in a random soup.
Nobody believes the first cells even had DNA, which means cytochrome C isn’t a requirement by any stretch. Today pretty much all scientists working on the origin of life think proteins are the product of an evolutionary process involving natural selection, there’s noone who believes they just spontaneously self-assembled from a random dilution of amino acids.
The chance-canard is the quintessential creationist strawman, and one that you have been all too keen on gobbling up because it plays on your preconceptions.
Hoyle’s calculation is an irrelevancy at best. It doesn’t accurately reflect how any of the first proteins are thought to have emerged. Let me clue you in again: Not by random, spontaneous chance assembly into a fully functional modern protein. There’s simply no point calculating the odds of that when noone believes that’s how it happened.
So, PaV, seems you have indeed destroyed Darwinism. Only problem is you’ve destroyed something that you invented that bears no resemblance to reality.
I believe the term is Strawman.
For example, for Hoyle’s calculation to be relevant you’d have to find a biologist who makes the claim that proteins form utterly randomly. No IDist has ever managed to produce such a reference.
Hence strawman.
PaV – you might pause to wonder why an astrophysicist would be so impressed by simplistic combinatorial calculations as to declare a non-designed source of modern complex molecules to be an impossibility, while molecular biologists and systematists – people who actually study the molecules and their interrelationships – simply shrug? They can’t all be stoopid atheistic conspirators, surely?
PaV,
I think you’d have to be a little more specific. What is the ‘such a thing’ that would/should have been predicted – commonality? Darwinism predicts common ancestry. Darwin knew nothing of biochemistry or genetics, but he did not require proteins to appear fully formed with no precursors in order for his theories to work. And neither does ‘neo-Darwinism’. Protein sequences are shuffled about by recombinations, brand new proteins do not appear a la Hoyle as if from nowhere. Some homology might be expected to remain between commonly descended sequences. This is what we are seeing. On the front-loading hypothesis, it is not the anemone that was front-loaded with vertebrate-limb proteins, but the common ancestor that was front-loaded with both – a protein originating both the function its descendant sequence performs in the anemone, and that in vertebrates, and possibly taking other roles on the way. Multiply that up by bringing in other phyla that share this common ancestry and possess other homologues performing a different function, and the ‘front-loading’ proposal seems untenable.
No Rumraket. That is the tree of the winners, darwinism predict some winners and many more loosers. You have to fill that tree with all the nodes of the loosers.
And then you will have as many nodes as logs. In the winner´s tree you draw one node and one line for the Cockroaches, but in 400 Mya many isolated population should be subjected to “rapid evolution”. So many failed nodes should be added.
That life started with simple organism and evolving to more complexes when all the biochemistry for all of the life forms were already present in the LUCA and probably a big part in the FUCA.
Blas,
Well, setting aside the facts that he made no claims about biochemistry, nor argued solely for increased complexity, there is simply no support for either the notion that ‘all the biochemistry for all of the life forms were already present in the LUCA’ or the implicit notion that LUCA was at least as complex as any descendant. That LUCA was a viable cell is undoubted, and therefore it would have had all of the biochemistry required of a viable cell, a requirement retained by all viable cells ever since. But if we are talking of LUCA being somehow totipotent – that it had giraffe proteins and wasp proteins and slime mold proteins etc etc etc … nah. These evolved. They evolved by (it is likely) gene duplication and neofunctionalisation, and would therefore have a genetic relation to LUCA’s proteins. That’s a different matter from saying that LUCA was ‘front-loaded’ with the proteins needed to make a giraffeowasp. Simply pointing to the genetic relationship between proteins across the tree of Life is not support for front-loading per se, because the pattern can be explained by evolution alone. Your cohorts in this increasingly overladen ‘front-loading’ bandwagon are completely silent on how the proteins survive degradation as they bide their time awaiting their destiny in giraffe or wasp. It’s a theory that itself can only survive through persistent ignorance of evolutionary mechanism.
All the life have almost the same sequences of histones and many other proteins, all share the same Krebs cicle and all the energy pathways, the DNA duplication, repairing and reading machines, the aminoacil t RNA transferases were HGT before LUCA according to darwinism. What I´m missing LUCA´s biochemistry lacks?
Blas,
I already said this: “That LUCA was a viable cell is undoubted”. Thanks for the reminder of the essentials for viability. I went on to explain why this does not equate to front-loading – unless you are offering an eccentric version that is indistinguishable from evolution. On an evolutionary scenario, LUCA’s descendants would derive their genetic sequence, with modification, from LUCA (and prior). Their core functionality would of course be functionally preserved. What is added by calling this ‘front loading’? Anything neither LUCA nor any of her descendants could live without can hardly be claimed for ‘front-loading’!
I’m still waiting for PaV to explain where the Darwin quote is wrong. And where does the Darwin quote mention multicellularity? We know from other writings that Darwin thought the earliest life was single celled.
It doesn’t matter how many extinct branches we add, the total number of points you can fit close to a node will still be vastly outnumbered by the total number of points that lie on branches.
Transitional periods are short, periods of relative statis are long. It is so simple really.
Uhm, it wasn’t. Plain and simple. Where did you get this info Blas? Please quote where you got this info. I wonder who sold you this lie.
You have simply described a subset of core metabolism which, yes, almost all cellular life has in common (there are a few exceptions). But this is a very far cry from your earlier claim that “all the biochemistry for all of the life forms were already present in the LUCA”.
The vast majority of cellular biochemistry distributed in all known life evolved subsequently to LUCA. We are talking tens of thousands of novel enzymes and metabolic pathways here Blas, none of which was present in the LUCA, but only subsequently evolved from it. Through, yes, as Allan Miller explains, most probably gene duplication and neofunctionalization.
See for example this paper:
Exploring the Evolution of Novel Enzyme Functions within Structurally Defined Protein Superfamilies
A viable cell as complex as all the actual cells and that was not postulated by Darwin.
True, but irrelevant. But then modern cells are not LUCA. Neither you nor anyone else knows how life originated, nor what the first reproducer was like.
No. No matter how long are the period of stasis at each time you will have isolated population subjected to “rapid evolution”. Then nodes should be not rare compared to logs.
“isolated”…..”not rare”.
I was looking around to see what Darwin might have meant by “creatures.” Did he imply multi-celled animals? Modern dictionaries seem to favor this meaning, although they leave room for anything alive.
I assumed he included microorganisms.
I recall the Movie War of the Worlds, which contains the line, “…Earth’s viruses and bacteria. The smallest creatures that “God in His wisdom had put upon this Earth… ‘”
Wells used the word “things” rather than creatures, but the opening of the book, written just a few years after Darwin, contains the passage, “…almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”
PaV, are you arguing that no living thing swarmed on the earth before the Silurian?
Sory maybe my English is not corect. To me isolated means separated from the total. Rare means infrequent. Then to me are both different, you can have something isolated but not rare. If I´m wrong please explaing.
Thanks.
From the paper:
“Surprisingly a large proportion (71%) of all known enzyme functions are performed by this relatively small set of 276 superfamilies. This reinforces the hypothesis that relatively few ancient enzymatic domain superfamilies were progenitors for most of the chemistry required for life.”
If this is not an evidence that all the biochemistry were ready at UCLA . Isn´t it?
If you think it is not I can´t explain it better.
Blas,
Doesn’t address the post it was appended to at all, but hey ho.
LUCA was NOT as complex as all the actual (current) cells. Maybe some of them.
Blas,
UCLA? Must … not … tease … gnnnnghhh. 😉 Saying that modern proteins derive from a smaller set of ancestral proteins is not the same as saying that all of biochemistry was present in that early cell. That would be like saying that the first “ah” sound uttered by a caveman means that all usage of the ‘ah’ sound in all future words was thereby front-loaded. LUCA’s ancestors had already throroughly explored functional space and uncovered most of the central motifs. There are only about half a dozen different enzyme-catalysed biochemical reactions. Everything is a variation on that theme, plus substrate specificity and fine control.
But I still don’t see how early discovery of the fundamentals of enzyme catalysis represents ‘front-loading’
The point is not how many nodes there are compared to branches, but how many points(as in fossils) you can fit on the branches vs nodes. Because the transitional periods are so short, chances are you wont get fossilization. But because the branches are so long (long periods of relative stasis), chances for fossilization is much better.
Stop pretending you don’t get this, just deal with it and move on.
I’ve been debating Darwinists for nine years. So, I’m not new to this. Are you?
So, is being snarky your form of cleverness? How impressive.
That’s because you literally do not understand it. It argues diametrically opposite to what you’re claiming. The proteins are related through common descent, that doesn’t mean they were present in LUCA, only that they had ancestral folds from which they all diverged.
Tens of thousands of proteins diverged from a small set of about 276 superfamilies, which are defined as such only from a structural similarity perspective according to SCOP.
276 proteins evolved into tens of thousands different proteins with unique and novel functions that weren’t present to begin with. There was “only” those 276 proteins with their separate functions, then they started diverging through duplication and all the other common mechanisms, until now today, tens of thousands of enzyme functions exist. It weren’t “front loaded”, it evolved.
I never cell as complex of ALL actual cells. Darwin´s never immagines that life started with a cell as complex as some of the actual cells. If he would probably ToE would be different.
Amen.
Yes? Are you sure? Why then they start with “surprisingly”?
They need a surprise to publish the paper?
Just an observation that most of us have learned stuff while debating, whereas creationists an IDists seem to learn nothing.
Has darwinists something different of his biased view of reality to teach ?
I’m familiar with Larry Moran, and with his blog, and with the particular post you’ve linked to. While Larry is technically correct about Darwinists thinking the entire genome was functional, they did so out of ignorance, thinking that NS kept the genome fine-tuned to function. But all of that collapsed as science progressed. Neutral theory came, then, onto the scene. So the failure of Darwinism led not to people questioning it, save, perhaps for Kimura, but to fights pitting Darwinists against those on the side of neutral drift. And now, mystery of all mysteries, Darwinists invoke neutral drift as the answer for how Darwinism actually works.
Rumraket, be sure of this, there is very little you can school me on, so don’t feel pressured.
Ouch. Nine years and still struggling with the basics.
Ad hominem gets thrown around a lot. You might find this helpful:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/lousycanuck/2011/09/15/what-is-an-ad-hominem-what-isnt/
Later we can look at why “Darwin got some thing wrong so evolution must be wrong” is crappy thinking, if you’d like.
The entire genome provides potential fuel for evolution, so it is in one sense all functional.
Tell you what, PaV. Get into one of your many super-secret ID labs and tell us why the onion genome is so very very big.
You’re of the school of Rumraket, apparently. He says that no one believes that cytochrome C came about by chance. I see. So what individual scientists “believe” is important? So Darwinism is a “belief system”? Is that what you’re telling me?
But, of course, this is exactly what it is. Look through the OofSpecies and you’ll find Darwin saying stuff like: “No one can doubt . . . “, which is a backhand way of saying, “It is easy to believe that . . . . ” In fact Darwin looks forward to the younger generation who will be full of “imagination.” I can imagine lots of stuff, and then delude myself into believing it. That isn’t what true science ought to be about.
I believe 1+1=2, PaV.
Have the mathemagicians got to me?
Wow. One big, long ad hominem. You’re quite adept at it. Congratulations.
But, now, what about reasoned thought? Can you handle that?
Let’s see . . . . .
You say:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t John Sanford teach genetics at Cornell? And doesn’t Granville Sewell teach thermodynamics? And, yet, you write: “as if he even knows what that means.” All passion; little thought.
PaV:
No, and thank God (so to speak) for that. Sewell is a math professor.
This is such foolishness on your part. Science arose from the midst of a Christian belief system that said the world was ‘ordered’ by a rational God, and so it was susceptible to rational anaylysis. Copernicus was a religious, IIRC. Galileo had two daughters who were religious sisters. He believed in God. So did Newton. Just think of this the next time you go to a college graduation commencement, all those caps and gowns come from the traditions of religious communities who ran universities. Where did unversities come from? Did they come from China, or Africa, or India, of Japan, or from outer space? No, from the Christian West.
Since you must know so much about evolution, then please tell us all just how hippos became whales. You can tell us how many millions of years it took, what exact changes took place, which came first, what the genetic mechanism of the changes were, and so forth. Come on, Thorton, please allow us to benefit from your learning.
Looks like you wasted nine years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy
Also:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=forgotten-history-muslim-scientists
And:
http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/
Are you denying an evolutionary history for whales, or just being snarky?
Hoyle was not blinded by the religion of Darwin. Isn’t that obvious. He didn’t drink the Kool-Aid.
A little bit more substantially: when you write, “while molecular biologists and systematists – people who actually study the molecules and their interrelationships – simply shrug,” you’ve simply substituted “shrug” for “don’t believe so.” It’s a belief system. You believe evolution to be true; you believe it came about via natural mechanisms alone; and, so, you “believe” that there is some mechanism that accounts for the improbability. But what is the basis for this “belief”? Is it philosophical? Is it religious (or, more properly, anti-religious)?
I don’t think you are in a position to throw such accusatinos about, person who thinks that “proteins arose at random” is actually a legitimate position held by biologists.
See above. And I actually believe you as if, after nine years of debate, you still use “proteins arose at random” as a tactic then you literally have learnt nothing from that decade of “debate”.
Please provide evidence that Hoyle’s calculation has any relevance to “Darwinism” at all or stop using it. If you don’t provide such evidence and don’t stop using it then you are being dishonest.
Odd then how it took so many years after Christianity happened to get to computers. How do you explain that?
Oh, that’s right….
Nobody does. The last universal common ancestor is not thought to be the first organism to emerge at the origin of life, by anyone.
Anyone except you it seems.