I’ve wanted to start this discussion for several weeks, but wasn’t sure how to present Wagner’s argument. Fortunately Piotr has saved me the trouble with a post at UD.
Piotr February 24, 2015 at 1:35 pm
Gpuccio,Do you mind if I begin with a simple illustrative example? Let’s consider all five-letter alphabetic strings (AAAAA, QWERT, HGROF, etc.). By convention, a string will be “functional” if it’s a meaningful English word (BREAD, WATER, GLASS, etc.). Functionality is therefore not a formal property of the string but something dictated by the environment. There are 26^5 = 11881376 (almost 12 million) possible five-letter strings. The number of five-letter words in English (excluding proper nouns and extremely rare, dialectal or archaic words) is about 6000, so the probability that any randomly generated string is functional is about 0.0005.
Any five-letter string S can produce 5×25 = 125 “mutants” differing from S by exactly one letter. If you represent the sequence space as a five-dimensional hypercube (26x26x26x26x26), a mutation can be defined as a translation along any of the five axes.
It would appear that the odds of finding a functional mutant for a given string should be about 125×0.0005 = 1/16 on the average. In fact, however, it depends where you start. If S is functional, the existence of at least one functional mutant is almost guaranteed (close to 90%). For most English words there are more than one functional mutants. For example, from SNARE wer get {SCARE, SHARE, SPARE, STARE, SNORE, SNAKE, SNARK…}. Though some functional sequences are isolated or form small clusters in the sequence space, most of them are members of one huge, quite densely interconnected network. You can get from one to another in just a few steps (often in more than one way), which is of course what Lewis Carroll’s “word ladder” puzzle is about:
FLOUR > FLOOR > FLOOD > BLOOD > BROOD > BROAD > BREAD
You can ponder the example for a moment; I’ll return to it later.
The whole thread is worth a look.
I might add that there is a rather crude GA at http://itatsi.com that does something not entirely unlike a word ladder.
The environment designed the basset hound (population). Humans who controlled the breeding are/were a very significant part of that environment. As others have pointed out, dogs and humans have fallen into a symbiotic relationship that goes back thousands of years.
Taking back the proper use of “design” does not imply I have any sympathy for the aspirations of the ID movement.
ETA The key mutation(s) in basset hounds affect the development of the long bones resulting in a form of “dwarfism” or achondroplasia. Such mutations occur in humans spontaneously quite regularly. It is the change in niche from wild to symbiotic relationship with man that changes the gene(s) into advantageous from deleterious.
Alan Fox,
To be clear, your answer is yes, the Basset Hound is intelligently designed, right?
phoodoo,
Not really Phoodoo. No-one sat around with concept sketches of what the best configuration of a dog to hunt certain things would look like, simply those that excelled were allowed to breed more often. If you think this qualifies as design, that’s your prerogative: you’ve already amply demonstrated your character, understanding of biology and language and I’m delighted you’re not ‘on my side’.
phoodoo,
You could with almost equal justice claim that the peacock’s tail has been “intelligently designed” by the peahens that, for countless generations, have chosen to mate with the male whose feather display they admired the most.
Well, there is one sure way to find out. What is the FSCO/I of the “wild type” dog compared to the “Basset Hound”? If it’s an increase then obviously it was design!
It should be added that even when people “design” a breed of dogs — saying that they want a hindquarters that looks like this and a muzzle that looks like that — this “design” does not extend down to saying which genes will do what. They simply select the dogs that come closest to their goals, and the genomic and molecular details fall where they may.
… which has led to notable disasters such as having the Alsatian (German Shepherd) breed develop frequent hip dislocations, to the extent that the breed had to be re-derived from less “optimal” dogs. Hindquarters the looked “sturdy” turned out not to be sturdy.
Alan Fox attempts to equivocate the difference between selective breeding and natural selection by asserting they are “essentially the same thing”. Fine. So lets say that humans selectively breeding life-forms for thousands of years, and the modern capacity of humans to directly modify DNA sequences, are considered natural evolutionary processes.
Would Alan really not draw any distinction between random mutations and purposeful genetic manipulation by humans? Would Alan not even admit that intelligently selective breeding, and intelligent genetic manipulation, can at least accomplish stable biological variations (stable within framework of humans deliberately keeping the populations in existence) that would take unintelligent forms of evolutionary processes much longer to accomplish, if ever?
Even if we equivocate the meaning of “artificial” and “intelligent” and “design” into being a subset of “natural causes”, so what? The point is still valid that without intelligent interventions of the kind that we already know have occurred for thousands of years when it comes to evolutionary processes (selective breeding, and now direct genetic manipulation), many biological forms we see today would most likely not exist – like the basset hound, modern wheat, rye and corn, many strains of flowering plants, etc., tomatoes with fish genes, etc.
Intelligent design (whether a subset of “natural causes” or not) is required as part of any valid explanation for those biological phenomena; the only question is if there is evidence of such intelligent interventions not known to have been conducted by humans.
Given your failure to present such evidence, the answer to that question is a resounding no – there is no such evidence.
Unless, of course, you know otherwise?
William J. Murray,
Not only that William, what this tells us is that EVEN when we speed up the process of variation in any animal population, we STILL can’t do anything to change the dog from being a dog. As Joe just pointed out, the more extreme the variation, the less healthy the dog becomes.
If we can speed up what is supposed to take millions of years for evolution to occur, and if Dawkins believes this is an example of how variation, extrapolated over time creates new life forms, why can’t we create a new life form?
We have essentially falsified the idea that if an animal gets enough variation in its phenotype, it will become this new form. But it never happens. We have experimented, we tried it, it fails.
And yet, these people believe, well, given more time it will work. When the fact is, more mutations, spread throughout the population creates disaster. I can’t understand why these evolutionists don’t believe their own experiments.
We can’t even change corn.
Sure. Corn would not exist as we know it but for humans?
But so what? Your attempts to show that “intelligent design” exists miss the point. Nobody disputes humans have “designed” biology to some extent.
Do you have evidence for an intelligence other than humans interfering in biology?
And here it is. ID is required for the Basset Hound therefore ID is required for Humans.
Whatever William, whatever. Real progress is made by discovering new things, not re-arranging arguments until you’ve “won”.
Define ID and biology until it’s “obvious” that existing humans were “intelligently designed” if you like. The rebuttal is simple – Dawkins noted it many years ago. Apparent design is indeed design – it’s just design by the environment rather then an “intelligent” entity.
So get existing biology up to the point that it “needs” design via wordplay if you so desire, the rebuttal is simple – yes, design is there and it is real. And it’s source is the environment, not any “intelligent designer”.
No, that’s right, corn has not changed at all
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/selection/corn/
Also William:
You have the answer to your question – there is (according to you) such evidence!
Now what? What will you do now? What’s the next step now that “the only question” has been answered?
Citation please.
OMagain,
See Joe above.
OMagain,
You can’t even understand your own citations. Try it slowly:
“Teosinte doesn’t look much like maize, especially when you compare its kernals to those of corn. But at the DNA level, the two are surprisingly alike. They have the same number of chromosomes and a remarkably similar arrangement of genes. In fact, teosinte can cross-breed with modern maize varieties to form maize-teosinte hybrids that can go on to reproduce naturally”
Do you have a point? That dogs are still dogs after intensive selective breeding? That after such breeding dogs have severe problems?
Nobody has been trying to create “not-dog” via selective breeding of “dog”. Therefore they have not “failed” as they were not trying to do that in the first place.
Feel free to respond to the corn point.
That’s the point. Everything humans do is slow. Compared to evolution which has had millions of years to play out.
Corn is very different from “original” corn. Yet it’s DNA is very similar.
Time. If you want to create a “new life form” from existing ones via breeding you are going to need many more generations then we’ll be able to view in a single human lifetime. Even the time humans have been selectively breeding dogs is trivial compared to the amount of time dog ancestors have existed for.
That dogs are still dogs, well, that’s what you’d expect anyway as a creationist, right?
This is why Lenski’s experiments are so important – they include change visible to us in our human timescales.
The point is that nobody is trying to do the things you are saying they have failed at, therefore they could not have failed at them.
At least I provide them.
phoodoo,
At one level, true, But after that comment you immediately went back to discussing Basset Hounds, largely a product of selection. What’s going on there? What causes the biological change in them? The wild-type wolf contained a certain amount of genetic variety. While there were undoubtedly some new mutations in the lineage leading to Bassets, a substantial amount of the difference between a Basset and another breed is still down to the selective process – to ‘competition’ between variants for representation in the gene pool. In the wild this is not an active competition, nor even necessarily a selective one – finite populations enforce a competition for representation in the future, simply because not everyone can be an ancestor.
Of course, the long-ago origin of the wolf standing variation was itself mutation. But that variation did not lead to dog breeds until people came along and made choices. So I don’t see how you can ignore the gene-pool sifting of differential reproduction as a contributory factor to biological change; it’s right there in your own model.
Nobody pretends, but you can’t just ignore population processes. Call beneficial changes ‘happy accidents’ if you like. That includes beneficial changes that make parasites and disease causing organisms better at their role, of course.
phoodoo,
It is not necessarily the case that you can simply ‘speed up’ the natural process. By intensifying selection, you speed up the reduction in variation. If you are eliminating variation faster than it arises, you are stifling evolution, not speeding it up. Therefore, even without going into the issues with what you would agree as ‘a new life form’, the following is untrue:
If phoodoo were to specify the criteria by which phoodoo would say that “‘a new life form’” has come into existence that at least would be something.
phoodoo, what is the criteria for “a new life form”? How different does it have to be from the “original”? Is inability to intra-breed sufficient? Or are there other criteria also? Does the DNA have to be a specific % different? A combination of factors?
If you can’t be specific, then nobody can really have failed at the thing you can’t be specific about can they?
Allan Miller,
Allan,
Speaking seriously, I don’t know how a person with an open mind can ignore the obvious evidence right there. All of the variation we see in different dog breeds are mutations that basically harm the animal, and that is why in the wild they never last. Do you really think if we keep taking dogs and allow the phenotypes to become more extreme in any direction, that we eventually would make a new animal?
Don’t you find it amazing that dogs, or teosinte, always wants to maintain what it is? Why should corn still be able to hybridize with teosinte? Do you think if we have enough generations of corn it will become something else, maybe like a type of squirrel, with kernels, that can walk to the dinner table? All it needs is more time?
The dogs will always be dogs, they will always maintain their ancestral heritage to wolves. Lenski proved this. Bacteria doesn’t become anything other than bacteria. How many possible generations would you need before you are convinced of this?
Allan Miller,
So you argument now is that dog breeds are an example of stifling evolution??
I think Dawkins would beg to differ.
phoodoo,
Why should I care what Dawkins thinks?
OMagain,
This is the age-old issue of how to name points on a continuum. Residing as we do at the twig-tips of a bifurcating process, we can see clear air between us and other forms, and can justifiably give them separate names. Going back in time, every individual can be the same species as its parent. But ultimately, we get to the node. What should we call it?
On average we are only half as different from it as we are from another twig-tip. We could easily have a situation where we could readily interbreed with the node, but not with the other twig-tip. The Creationist would continue to insist that one form had not ‘turned into’ another, despite the fact that two distinct forms existed as a result of an evolutionary process
OMagain asks:
No, that was the point I was making to Alan Fox, and a rather trivial point that many anti-ID advocates simply cannot bring themselves to agree to – that ID is known to exist, and is already known to have been manipulating biological forms for thousands of years, and is now directly manipulating genes.
Even if one attempts to define such manipulations as part of “natural evolution”, they still produce and maintain different biological outcomes than what would occur without the presence of ID evolutionary processes such as selective breeding and genetic manipulation.
Once we can agree to this fact, we can reasonably ask the question of if there is any evidence of such intelligent manipulations outside of what is known (or at least believed) to have been generated by humans. ID theory has offered several such claims of evidence, including the existence of code and translation (semiotic) systems, irreducibly complex systems, and the existence of highly complex, specified, functional proteins that the causal categories of chance and law cannot account for.
Now, one can argue what the evidence **means**; one can argue how it can be interpreted; one can argue what theory best explains the evidence; one can even deny that the evidence can reasonably be construed to indicate some form of ID involvement – but the existence of that evidence is factual.
Even evolutionary biologists will admit that it gives the appearance of design, and that is at least prima facie evidence of design. It may not have been designed, but design cannot be dismissed out of hand due to fear creationists will claim “god did it”.
Until the debate can move past this rather trivial point, there can be no debate – there are only ideological zealots obstructing what they see as a “divine foot” sneaking into the door of science by theocrats wanting to return civilization to the “dark” ages. There’s no room in that kind of mind for any serious debate on the matter.
And that’s why as we look into the fossil record we see no changes, from the start to the end.
phoodoo,
What do you mean by a ‘new animal’?
Luckily no debate is needed. Only evidence. You claim to have evidence for ID in the Cambrian explosion. What is it?
And this is where you miss the point.
IT WAS DESIGNED!
Designed by the environment!
NOBODY IS DISMISSING IT!
Life is obviously not a randomly thrown together collection of parts. That does not make it designed by an “Intelligent Designer”.
Your game is a transparent one. Conflate the various meanings of “design” until you’ve “won” the debate.
Good luck with that.
On your last point, presumably you have an exhaustive knowledge of what “chance and law” can in fact account for?
Could I have a look at that list? Otherwise I’m not sure how you came to that conclusion.
And in any case, that is not evidence for ID. It might be evidence that currently understood processes are insufficient but that in no way supports ID.
X being unable to do Y does not give support for Z’s ability to perform Y. This is basic stuff!
Allan Miller,
You don’t need to care what Dawkins thinks. But if you position is that dog breeds are an example of stifled evolution, it at least needs to be noted as a novel idea, that doesn’t appear in much mainstream media.
I’d like to see you try, for once.
What theory best fits the evidence? A mysterious designer who does something at some point (either at the start of the universe or all the time right now) but who can’t be seen in action and seems to act perfectly in accordance to how we’d expect unguided evolution to act (i.e. Lenski) or a process which we have identified a mechanism for and which we can observe in real time in the lab?
Yes, let’s have that debate about what “theory” best explains the evidence.
And, for the record William, a theory is described as:
Let’s be honest with ourselves at this point – that does not describe “ID Theory” does it? What aspects of ID have been repeatedly tested and confirmed through observation and experimentation?
I await your letter to Nature.
William J. Murray,
Evolutionary processes can lead to all these things. The translation system has the ‘appearance of evolution’ running right through it. IC needs to be demonstrated not asserted, given rational evolutionary means by which it can arise. Complex functional proteins are well within the reach of evolution.
Your conflation is again noted. Who is denying that humans can influence biological forms either directly or indirectly? Do provide a quote. That humans can do that is a little different to the claim that a designer that (presumably) stands outside of space and time is interacting with reality to tweak DNA.
You can only “win” by bastardising the arguments you claim to be rebutting.
let’s face it Allan, your education and background is in biology. Likewise for Dawkins. So we have two people who have made this there life work to understand, and you come to complete opposite conclusions about what evolution is. To Dawkins, dog breeds are a great example of the power of evolution. To you, they are an example of what happens when we stifle evolution. Amazing.
Now about that scientific consensus.
And you don’t think the problems with the theory of evolution should be taught in schools?
phoodoo,
Are dogs and wolves related?
Are dogs the “same” animal as wolves?
Or are they, as you say, a “new animal” when compared to wolves?
Interested in your answers.
phoodoo,
I should care still less about what the mainstream media thinks! The loss of variation due to selection and drift are very well known, and I could provide equations to support it with which, I am pretty sure, Dawkins will be familiar. Artificial breeding and forced mutation experiments are evolutionary, but that does not make them all-encompassing representations of the capacity of the evolutionary process.
At university, sure. Before that, not so much. Too much to learn, too little time. If you are specialising, then sure.
But would you agree that the problems with ID should be taught in schools too? And how could ID be taught in school anyway, a designer that stands outside of space and time sure sounds religious to me…
phoodoo,
While I’m not over-keen to argue with Dawkins by proxy, since you haven’t provided a quote (better yet, the wider context), these are not mutually contradictory. In order to get to a state where evolution stalls (variation is eliminated), evolution has to happen (the variation must be eliminated). Of course, we are not there yet, it has not been eliminated, but breeding does reduce variation. This is something you might even find in the ‘mainstream media’. 😀
As often happens, in order to deny evolution, you have to deny genetics.
Allan Miller said:
By “evolutionary processes”, I will assume you mean “non-ID Darwinian evolutionary processes”. Reiterating your assertions that Darwinian evolutionary processes are sufficient doesn’t make the case that they are sufficient – it’s simply a repeated assertion in the face of what evolutionary biologists admit is the appearance of design.
Until you have some metric that can show what Darwinistic processes are and are not capable of producing, you have nothing to support your assertions that Darwinistic evolution is capable of producing the things mentioned.
Allan Miller said:
ID doesn’t deny evolution. It questions whether the processes and mechanisms that drive evolution to produce some of what we find in biology are properly characterized as Darwinian (RM&NS) in nature.
William J. Murray,
No, I’m afraid the onus is on your side to provide this metric. You are claiming the ‘Darwinistic’ processes are insufficient, and hence wish to add a mechanism. That requires some work.
OMagain,
I guess dogs and wolves are just examples of what happens when you stifle evolution.
William J. Murray,
Who said anything about ID? I was talking about phoodoo.
Those are the only type that we know of, yes.
Sufficient for what? Care to give a specific example rather than such generic non-specifics?
They don’t ‘admit’ it – it’s simply a fact. Life appears to be designed. That’s why people thought it was and ascribed such to a deity for most of human history.
We now have alternatives to such however.
While that may be true, it is of no concern to you. Even if it was definitively shown that Darwinistic evolution is not capable of producing the things mentioned that would in no way advance the cause of ID.
What would, for example, is the sort of evidence that you claim to have regarding ID’s involvement in the Cambrian explosion. That sort of *positive* evidence for ID is what is required here, to advance the case for ID.
What does or does not happen in the world of ‘Darwinistic evolution’ should be of no concern to ID advocates such as yourself. You know (somehow) that ‘Darwinistic evolution’ is incapable of producing what you observe yet for some reason you seem fixated upon that, as if somehow talking about ‘Darwinistic evolution’ is going to provide evidence for an alternative.
The best way for you to show that Darwinian evolutionary processes are irrelevant is to demonstrate how a given item can be better explained by ID then such processes.
Such as, for example, the Cambrian explosion. How is that better explained by ID?
phoodoo,
Now, that’s not what I said at all, is it phoodoo?
And what answers has it come up with so far?
Are dogs and wolves related?
Are dogs the “same” animal as wolves?
Or are they, as you say, a “new animal” when compared to wolves?
Come now! If they started arguing against your actual points the debate might get somewhere! And that’s the last thing they really want I think….