I find that saying the word “information” around creationists has much the same effect as saying “mattress” to Mr. Lambert.
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Ook?
And I mean that in the most Prachettian sense of the word.
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Regarding the Sal Cordova interview: I don’t think the first slide actually has any extant species on it except for H. sapiens. I think they’re almost all real fossil species, chosen as reasonable intermediates (though I would hope not ancestors). The few I can read the names of are real, at least. The blastula and gastrula are weird, though.
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Regarding Sal’s phylogenetic tree of Topoisomerase. 1) He used MEGA, which is strictly speaking not a phylogenetic analysis program. It’s an alignment program with some quick and dirty phylogenetic algorithms included. 2) It looks to me as if he used neighbor joining with midpoint rooting, if you’re interested. 3) A number of short internodes are incorrectly resolved, as one might expect.
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@dsterncardinale, I don’t know if any of this is useful to you, but I’ve been looking at your discussion with Sal and commenting here and there. Your guess is right, and UPGMA is deterministic, as are all clustering methods. The sole exception is with how ties are handled (two additions to the tree equally appealing to the algorithm). Most often, ties are resolved randomly. Neighbor joining is a descendant of UPGMA. UPGMA effectively assumes an absolutely perfect molecular clock with zero multiple hits.
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@dsterncardinale, you have misunderstood midpoint rooting. All it does is place the root exactly halfway along the longest path between any two terminal taxa. A midpoint-rooted tree can have any topology, depending on the distances among taxa. Could be entirely ladder-like. Could be symmetrical. It all depends on the two species that “stick out” the most.
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Thanks for all this, appreciate the info, especially the correction on midpoint rooting.
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That depends on what new means here.
If it means complex molecular innovations, then the claim is warranted.
Yes, but I don’t see what is your point here.
This is incorrect. Other options exist. For example, you can imagine that the information for building the placenta was already in place. The appearance of placentas in lizards you are referring to would then be a case of design actualisation rather than a case of ongoing design.
By virtue of what? You didn’t provide a basis for your claim, you simply repeated it.
Then it should be in other lizards too. Is it? How would you know if it was or wasn’t?
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This is too vague to be meaningful. It’s not clear how you distinguish between evolution occurring by slight modifications of already existing things, and “design actualization”. If some thing evolved by duplications and point mutations in those duplicates, maybe a few substitutions in regulatory proteins and/or their DNA binding spots leading to changes in regulation, those could all be said to be mere modifications of already existing information and then someone like you could just declare it “design actualization”, yet all of that would be textbook examples of molecular evolution having morphological and phenotypic effects.
This “design actualization” or “the information was already there” kind of argument is a completely ad-hoc rationalization.
Where does this “design actualization” thing stop? Imagine twenty million consecutive small changes to something that (at least initially) already existed. At any given moment, at the molecular level, the change from two consecutive ancestral-to-immediately-descendant state is tiny(maybe on the level of a single substitution, or a gene duplication) and so someone like you would posit it looks like “all the information was already there”. But over much larger timescales it’s clear the molecular changes accumulate into much larger things. What is really the dividing line between new and not new?
And just as importantly, if radically different morphological structures can evolve by tiny modifications of already existing things, what has the design argument against evolution really become?
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What we end up with there is just ID proponents having a different - to them emotionally tolerable set of labels - for ordinary evolutionary mechanisms and processes. It’s ridiculous.
What occurs are mutations, HGT, recombination, drift, selection, and population mechanics. But ID proponents describe this as “design actualizations”, “design interventions”, “design tinkering”, “front-loading” etc. How many times haven’t we heard the “it’s not evolution by natural selection it’s just a built-in capacity to adapt”?
Can ID proponents be clear on what evolution would even look like in a way that is distinguishable from how they think of design?
If the changes are small of scale at the molecular level, then it’s not evolution it’s just the designer tinkering, fine-tuning, and “actualizing” his designs. If the changes are large-scale, they’re beyond the edge of evolution and therefore design interventions. Heads I win, tails you lose!
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This is silly. We’re suggesting the possibility perhaps placentas aren’t all the complex relative to laying eggs (uh, no, but I would love for someone to try to quantify the requirements and show how the differences compared to the ancestral state are trivial), or that all the genetic components required for placentas were actually present in the common ancestor of extant mammals and reptiles (which is not a serious suggestion, especially considering we know a important component of that system was acquired via horizontal gene transfer).
These are not serious ideas worth taking seriously, at least not without serious efforts to quantify the requirements in question.
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This points to the confusion in ID terminology. Design is one thing and creation is another, yet ID conflates the two. One could suppose that every existing species and all their organs could have been designed in God’s head billions of years ago and yet only became instantiated gradually and at various times throughout earth history, and the creation process could easily have involved no poofing at all. Design would be a one-time thing, but creation would in fact be ongoing. But what did you mean by it?
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Hi Dan
Are there any papers you are aware of the show the molecular details of the difference between egg laying reptiles and the placenta lizards in question?
I have a question regarding the lizards you are referring to. Do we know how long it took for them to develop a placenta?
Not sure to understand what you mean by creation here.
I disagree. Behe never stated this explicitly. He argued that any such information was likely not new (as in new irreducibly complex structures, multiple simultaneous protein-protein binding sites, or perhaps other events required concerted occurrence). This is why he speculated about a hypothetical lizard species acquiring placenta by “reversion” of as few as one gene that in its evolutionary past had caused the loss of placenta. Later, he mentions other possible mechanisms that together amount to re-wiring of existing information in ways that are apart from the hurdles he lays out in EoE. In so doing, he grants that this impressive morphological feature could evolve in ways he would deem simple or unremarkable, and thus could easily lie within the edge of evolution.
This is not the only instance where he grants that seemingly remarkable feats of evolution would involve what he would consider as simple molecular changes. The discussion about maggot flies is instructive in this regard.
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I mean whatever process actually builds the organisms and their various physical features. An architect designs a building, but the builders create it, i.e. cause it to exist. Design is thought, creation is action.
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First google hit for “egg laying and live laying lizards”
I have a question regarding the lizards you are referring to. Do we know how long it took for them to develop a placenta?
When does blue turn into red? When does Latin turn into Italian?
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I agree, Behe’s arguments for ID seem to present a moving target.
He asks for examples of changes at the molecular that lead to evolution, and says that the evolutionary process allowing malaria to evolve resistance to chloroquine is acceptable because it only requires 2 mutations, so that is not too complicated to be at the edge of evolution.
You give an example of a more complicated molecular change in HIV, but that doesn’t count because its not two proteins interacting within the same cell (I’m not sure why that disqualifies the HIV example, seems rather arbitrary, although he states something about viruses having a faster rate of mutation, which is not clear to me how that is the case or why the mutation rate disqualifies the example)
You give a couple other more complicated examples including, 1) animals now acquiring the ability to do photosynthesis via endosymbiosis, with a gene that can be pointed to and 2) lizards with placenta, but those examples do not count because you did not explain how the gene that was transferred originally evolved.
So is Behe saying that we need to accept ID instead of evolution if we cannot provide an example in which we can track every single mutation that happened throughout the history of the evolution of the organism? So for the examples that would be more complicated, falling under his definition of “edge of evolution” (e.g might include nonDarwinian mechanisms such as gene transfer), that history of molecular changes would need to have been traced back for millions of years?
I am very unclear on Behe’s thinking. Am I interpreting Behe correctly that he accepts that nonDarwinian mechanisms would also classify as evolution, but that they do not disprove ID? Or does Behe’s definition of evolution only allow Darwinian mechanisms?
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