Brian Miller: Co-option and Irreducible Complexity

[Greg]

@Timothy_Horton

bet you’re not aware there are known natural processes which locally decrease entropy (i.e. produce more complex components from simpler components and energy) as long as the overall system entropy still increases? They’re called endothermic chemical reactions. Photosynthesis is probably the most well known of these type of reactions.

I agree that general laws of entropy is not a perfect argument against neo darwinian evolutionism. It still is interesting to wonder if theres pattern in the cosmos created by a great Cause that translates in a parallel way in our solar system. God created the cosmos…bodies of mass energy in stars and planets and it is running down. Could the same be said of creation on earth where bodies called “kinds” are also running down?

The nature of the average mutation however that supposedly become accumulated and selected does not at all paint a picture of evolution to complexity but rather devolution from complexity to simplicity towards extinction. The second principle that i find interesting is that generic selection we call breeding in the dog species results in genetic loss. This means that the breeding that mimics selection, in time makes that dog lessor capable of survival. Isnt this the big picture that Behe engages more detailed scientific principle to confirm?

These are two big evolutionary deal breakers…and they happen to match the very principles found in the cosmos where mass energy becomes disorganized. To me, i becomed pretty humbled with this. I think, “So i believe in God, and now it seems that i can actually see His very fingerprints in the natural world.”

[Timothy_Horton]

@Greg

The nature of the average mutation however that supposedly become accumulated and selected does not at all paint a picture of evolution to complexity but rather devolution from complexity to simplicity towards extinction.

No Greg, it doesn’t. That’s your scientific ignorance talking again. Evolution works by modifying existing structures. Sometimes that means becoming more complex, sometimes that means less complex. It depends on the selection pressure of the particular environment which is usually always changing. Behe’s claim everything "devolves"or “breaks” is just idiotic word smithing.

[Greg]

@Timothy_Horton

No Greg, it doesn’t. That’s your scientific ignorance talking again. Evolution works by modifying existing structures.

Well then, you are starting to prove that the theory of evolution true to me sir. there was a seed of thought planted called darwinian evolution that rode in the back of natural selection. But this was not quite right. So this thinking evolved to neo darwinian evolution that supposes that genetic mutations were the key ingredients that natural selection chose from. But the rational ones out there thought to themselves,"eyes, eye muscles, eye sockets, nerves and brains could not possibly have been built from damaged construction materials called mutated genes… So now science has fully evolved as Tim Horton has given us the ultimate truth we might call the neo neo darwinian theory of evolution:“Evolution works by modifying existing structures.”
You have proven evolution to be true and thankyou for the illumination.
Please dont interpret my satire as unlovingness. I care for you Tim Horton. God cares for you more You are on my prayer list.

[Greg]

@Timothy_Horton

You just don’t have any idea how dumb your scientifically ignorant snark makes you look, do you?

I have grown to observe that this debate is far more philosophical and far less scientific than you and many others here would want to acknowledge.

[Timothy_Horton]

@Greg

I have grown to observe that this debate is far more philosophical and far less scientific than you and many others here would want to acknowledge.

Only from your end, and that’s because you are completely clueless on the science.

[DMath]

@Timothy_Horton

Ah, the good old 2LoT argument.

I agree the second law gets abused more often than it should…but it also gets dismissed more often than it should. It is possible that this will be review for most, but the current thread makes me think not for all.

The basis of the second law is the concept of multiplicity. Let’s think about a warm cup of coffee cup sitting on the counter away from any heat source. Since the air in the room is cooler (meaning less energetic on average) than the coffee, each random interaction has a much better chance of pairing a less energetic air molecule with a more energetic coffee molecule that it does of pairing a more energetic air molecule with a less energetic coffee molecule…so the coffee cools.

In most cases, there is enough energy in the room to heat the coffee, so it is not impossible that the coffee could warm randomly…there is no physical law that prevents it. However, if we had a way to examine every possible interaction in the system we would find there are MANY more interactions that would cool the coffee than there are interactions that would heat it. The law of large numbers acting on the imbalance in the probabilities almost guarantees that if the interactions are left to chance the coffee will cool.

In the case if hair and fingernails, the physiology of a living human body actually reverses the inherent probabilities between growth and decay. If the body is working correctly, the chances of hair and fingernail growth is a near certainty, but that does not mean that the second law is suspended…it just means there is work being done to overcome the normal probability imbalance that greatly favors disorder. Photosynthesis is similar…cell has information and hardware that is capable of doing the work necessary to keep the probabilities balanced in the plant’s favor.

Eventually the systems ability to do that work will cease (due do a lack of energy input or some decay in the system itself) and the balance will return to favor decay. We can be assured it will happen just because there are always more ways for random interactions to introduce disorder into a a system than there for random interactions to introduce more order.

The most common dismissal of the second law is the compensation argument…that the loss of order in the sun more than offsets the gains seen throughout evolutionary history…is too often uncritically accepted. The disorder increasing in the sun is essential as an energy source…but the raw energy and heat it provides to the system is not sufficient in itself to balance the probabilities involved in evolutionary scenarios. For order to win, something has to do the real work of bringing the probabilities involved more into balance.

Since there is positive evidence in many scientific disciplines that evolution has occurred, we have scientific reasons to think that the whole of the evolutionary process is capable of balancing the probabilities. At the same time I think it is fair to say that people who believe that evolution has occurred usually are convinced more by that positive evidence than they are by a thorough analysis of the multiplicity involved in how the various probabilities balance.

Personally, I don’t believe selection alone working on truly random (meaning unguided in some way…natural or supernatural) is enough to overcome the probability imbalance that most everyone admits exists…even if they argue endlessly about the degree of the imbalance. I come from a background in physics and information systems design, so I understand the complexity involved in building information processing systems (or any physical systems for that matter) that function well…and I have very little fear that an evolutionary software design system will someday take my job.

Random changes can and will move the system toward order some percentage of the time, but if any significant imbalance exists between the probability of advance and the probability of decline, the multiplicity of the system will result in a net decrease in order over time.

If evolution works…and like I already said…there is a large amount of positive scientific evidence that it does (so be kind :-))…it is because SOMETHING is causing the individual mutation events to move toward order (in the form of fitness for the environment) at least slightly more often than they move toward disorder…or the process would be powerless to resist the law of large numbers acting on the fact that each truly random unguided change has a MUCH better chance of breaking something than it does of building something.

[T_aquaticus]

@Greg

The natural direction im running in is that im dying. The natural direction that the universe is running is that it is also dying.

And yet you can still produce offspring.

The natural direction that systems run towards is an increase in order when there is energy dumped into them. Have you ever heard of this gigantic fireball that is pumping energy into Earth’s systems? Yeah, it increases order on Earth. For example, our oceans are very ordered with a strong temperature gradient between the poles and the equator. According to you, this shouldn’t exist.

[T_aquaticus]

@DMath

Since there is positive evidence in many scientific disciplines that evolution has occurred, we have scientific reasons to think that the whole of the evolutionary process is capable of balancing the probabilities. At the same time I think it is fair to say that people who believe that evolution has occurred usually are convinced more by that positive evidence than they are by a thorough analysis of the multiplicity involved in how the various probabilities balance.

Once you have imperfect replicators competing for limited resources, evolution is all but assured. Thermodynamics is already taken care of at the level of the organism, specifically in the biochemical pathways that drive thermodynamically unfavorable reactions.

[Timothy_Horton]

@DMath

If evolution works…and like I already said…there is a large amount of positive scientific evidence that it does (so be kind :-))…it is because SOMETHING is causing the individual mutation events to move toward order (in the form of fitness for the environment) at least slightly more often than they move toward disorder…

It’s called natural selection, part of the overall process of evolution. Because of the feedback provided by selection beneficial mutations tend to accumulate, deleterious ones tend to get weeded out. That feedback loop moves populations towards reproductive fitness local maxima i.e. more ordered with greater chance to reproduce.

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@Greg

“So i believe in God, and now it seems that i can actually see His very fingerprints in the natural world.”

What makes you think that God would want to create a universe “running down” in the first place? Why is that what one would expect of a God?

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@DMath

If evolution works…and like I already said…there is a large amount of positive scientific evidence that it does (so be kind :-))…it is because SOMETHING is causing the individual mutation events to move toward order (in the form of fitness for the environment) at least slightly more often than they move toward disorder…

Yes, but you have supplied the solution here yourself implicitly, and it has nothing to do with God. It’s “fitness for the environment”. Lots of mutations happen, most but not all of them are deleterious. Those organisms with bad mutations produce less offspring than those with beneficial mutations. That means that basically every generation, the organisms with beneficial mutations will have left more offspring than the organisms with deleterious mutations. As generation after generation pass, more and more of the population will be those with beneficial mutations.

The problem has solved itself.

[Mung]

@Greg

The natural direction that the universe is running is that it is also dying.

Never knew it was alive in the first place. Learn something new every day. Thanks!

[colewd (Bill Cole)]

@T.j_Runyon

If multiple proteins can perform the same function (which they clearly can) that increases the amount of “targets” that evolution can hit. So finding a function in search space isnt as improbable as it’s made out to be.

If you do the math here you will see this is not accurate. 2 targets in almost infinite search space does not help with the probability problem. 2 million targets in almost infinite search space also does not help with the probability problem. If the sequence length is greater than 200 AA’s 2 billion targets do not help with the probability problem.

[colewd (Bill Cole)]

@DMath

If evolution works…and like I already said…there is a large amount of positive scientific evidence that it does (so be kind :-))…it is because SOMETHING is causing the individual mutation events to move toward order (in the form of fitness for the environment) at least slightly more often than they move toward disorder…or the process would be powerless to resist the law of large numbers acting on the fact that each truly random unguided change has a MUCH better chance of breaking something than it does of building something.

Very well stated.

[Mung]

@Rumraket

The problem has solved itself.

By definition!

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@DMath

If evolution works…and like I already said…there is a large amount of positive scientific evidence that it does (so be kind :-))…it is because SOMETHING is causing the individual mutation events to move toward order (in the form of fitness for the environment) at least slightly more often than they move toward disorder…or the process would be powerless to resist the law of large numbers acting on the fact that each truly random unguided change has a MUCH better chance of breaking something than it does of building something.

@DMath, why do you think this to be the case? The point of natural selection is that rare beneficial mutations are amplified. You only have to be right one time for it to spread through the population. You can be wrong a million times while before you hit on that one right mutation. Natural selection erases the mistakes, and amplifies the beneficial mutations. Mutations, on average, might be negative, but in a reproducing population their effect is net positive.

[colewd (Bill Cole)]

@Rumraket

Yes, but you have supplied the solution here yourself implicitly, and it has nothing to do with God. It’s “fitness for the environment”. Lots of mutations happen, most but not all of them are deleterious. Those organisms with bad mutations produce less offspring than those with beneficial mutations by definitin. That means that basically every generation, the organisms with beneficial mutations will have left more offspring than the organisms with deleterious mutations. As generation after generation pass, more and more of the population will be those with beneficial mutations.

Rum this is little more then a story unless you can model how this would work.

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@colewd

If you do the math here you will see this is not accurate

Do what math? He didn’t do any math, you didn’t do any math.

@colewd

2 targets in almost infinite search space does not help with the probability problem. 2 million targets in almost infinite search space also does not help with the probability problem. If the sequence length is greater than 200 AA’s 2 billion targets do not help with the probability problem.

What probability problem?

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@colewd

Rum this is little more then a story unless you can model how this would work.

That’s trivial. Here’s Joe Felsenstein’s simple teaching program showing that very thing:
PopG genetic simulation program

It works in models. It also works in the laboratory. Fitness is continually increasing in the Long-term evolution experiment with E coli despite the fact that most mutations are deleterious.

Case closed.

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@colewd

If you do the math here you will see this is not accurate.

Why haven’t you done the math?

@colewd

2 targets in almost infinite search space does not help with the probability problem.

You’d need to be more quantitative than “almost infinite.”

@colewd

If the sequence length is greater than 200 AA’s 2 billion targets do not help with the probability problem.

I don’t see any problem. Bill, your immune system searches only 100 million sequences to find multiple antibodies against the last virus that infected you. We can find 2 beta-lactamases in that search space.

I think that you don’t understand the numbers involved. Can you calculate how long it would take for a population of E. coli to search 2 billion sequences?