A step in the right direction is to use a very simple definition for Evolution - - namely:
“Any change in the genetic composition (percentage wise) of a living population is Evolution. There is no devolution.”
Would this definition work for you?
Changes in complexity are not relevant because nobody knows how to define complexity.
99% of the scientific jargon is irrelevant to the public. It is important, however, to have the ability to translate that 1% of core ideas into a layman’s english in a way that is insigtful, and not deceitful, and does not leave out anything important (hence the need for disclaimers in science)
That has already been done. You could ready books like Why Evolution Is True by Jerry Coyne, Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin, Endless forms Most Beatiful by Sean Caroll, The Vital Question by Nick Lane, and so on ad infinitum. There is lots of literature for laymen on evolutionary biology and it’s findings, the problem is you don’t like what this literature says.
Rather, you want to criticize evolutionary biology and try to poke holes in it, but to have even the tiniest hope to do that competently you’re going to have to learn the vocabulary employed by scientists because necessarily the kind of language used to write popular press books has to be simplified and will leave things out or it becomes too technical and people don’t want to read it anymore.
Sorry, to criticize it you have to actually study it.
Do’h!
Good call.
You could say that. I’m also open to criticize ID. Actually there is not nouch to critisize there since they don’t have a formal theory. There are groups of people out there, and all of them, including scientists engage in some form of intellectual dishonesty. Honestly, I find that fascinating.
I don’t think any of these books did a good job if their goal was not explicitly to be honest about the limitations of their science. I still think it’s a fifty-fifty when it comes to evolution. Let’s take the example of antibiotic resistance. Well good you found that bacteria can evolve antibiotic resistance in 10 hours by means of four consecutive point mutations.
Please note that I did not reject this example, but simply pointed of its limitations. Gave it a framework so that we can assess how mouch it can or cannot teach us about evolution. The books you mentioned are mostly just more examples, not better examples. And they certainly don’t do the kind of expository work that I just did. I plan on exploring the possibility of evolution instead of denying it.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/ipdf/10.1021/jacs.8b13298
I thikn this article is a good example of trying to develop the right set of tools to conceptualize the actual possibility of evolution. We need more of this.
" Understanding evolution requires knowing the structure of the fitness landscape and identifying the viable evolutionary pathways through the landscape."
Conversely, if there are no viable evolutionary pathways through the landscape, then evolution is impossible.
Have you read them to see what they say the limitations are? Do you know the science? If not, then how can you claim they didn’t do a good job?
Then I can say without reservation that you have absolutely zero idea what you’re talking about.
Let’s take the example of antibiotic resistance. Well good you found that bacteria can evolve antibiotic resistance in 10 hours by means of four consecutive point mutations.
- It was a case of strong sustained evolutionary pressure which is rarely the case.
Except antibiotics are ubiquitous in nature, so it’s constantly the case.
- The best thing four point mutations can achieve is either damage a gene or turn off the expression of a gene or something similar
No, there is no one “best” thing point mutations can do. But depending on where they happen and the surrounding gentic context, they can have almost any molecular or phenotypic effect. Turn a junk sequence into a de novo promoter, up or down regulate expression of already existing genes, increase or decrease the activity of enzymes, increase or decrease the binding affinity between proteins, or proteins and DNA or RNA. And the phenotypic effects that can result from this would be extremely laborious to fully summarize. So much so that probably it could not be done by a person in a single human lifetime.
and once the evolutionary pressure is off the genome of the bacteria would in all likelyhood regress back to the mean
So what? You’ll notice you don’t have fins or gills anymore. Once selective pressures are removed or changes, the adaptations they originally shaped change or degrade. This isn’t suprising, or somehow problematic for the fact that evolution happens, or life’s evolutionary history.
so at best it’s a semi-permanent change.
There probably is no such thing as permanent evolutionary change, not that this was ever a requirement for evolution to happen, or to be made sense of and understood, or that we and every known species of organism to be a product of evolution.
Your issues are plainly nonsensical. They don’t seem to be issues as all.
They did not actually push the bacteria from one peak in the fitness landscape to a distinct new peak or else regressing back would not be possible.
This makes zero logical sense. It’s not clear you really understand what the fitness landscape metaphor describes. It’s really just an abstract concept, and it’s dimensions can be understood to be many different measures, whether organismal fitness and and phenotypes, sequences and molecular activity, or what have you. It’s not actually real, just a way to visualize the concepts of adaptations and the fitness or phenotypic effects of mutations.
Please note that I did not reject this example, but simply pointed of its limitations. Gave it a framework so that we can assess how mouch it can or cannot teach us about evolution.
No single thing can teach us everything there is to undestand about evolution.
The books you mentioned are mostly just more examples, not better examples. And they certainly don’t do the kind of expository work that I just did.
Yes they do. Now I know you didn’t read them.
I plan on exploring the possibility of evolution instead of denying it.
That remains to be seen. What would demonstrate the “possibility of evolution” to you, and do you apply that same standard to something like, say, plate tectonics, or astronomy?
Thank God while you were still typing I found a clear example of what a fitness landscape looks in practice, and by chance I also happened to have already answered you question before you even raised it. This kind of synchronicity is a hallmark of how God interacts with us. You had a legit question, and He had a legit answer.
I had the pleasure to debate people who disbelieve plate tektonics or have some weird contrived notion of it like YECs do. In their case the issue was deep time. They simply can’t get over it. The best, and visually most compelling way to demonstrate deep time is to go on google maps, and look for the Hawaii islands. Not just the present version of them, but All past iterations. These are underwater mounds that form a clear line that stretches for thousands of miles, takes a sharp right turn in the middle of the pacific, and goes to roughly where Kamchatka is today. The distanses between the mounds give us an estimate for the past speeds of the seafloor, and we can cross-chack that estimate with the rate of degradation we see on these mounds.
Young earthers don’t deny the mechanism, but they have an issue with deep time. In the case of evolution the rough pattern of change over deep time has basically been figured out. The mechanism of evolution not so mouch, or not to a level where I can be satisfied with the answer.
There is something similar to Yound Earth Creationism in astronomy. They’re just as bonkers in my opinion, but they do fun experiments from time to time. It’s called the Electric Universe.
It’s fun to watch how they still think that there are no such things as black holes. They have their own creation story, and here I have to give them some credence. The image you see in their logo is how a special kind of plasma arc looks from the side. So it turns out that ancient rock art is not just some random squiggles on a rock, nor do they all represent scenes from nature. The strange stick-figure with the two dots or circles on th side is also an example of one of the many hard to interpret worldwide archetypes found in ancient rock art. So there could be something there, but all their other ideas are usually just wrong. I couldn’t really engage with their members, because they exhibit cultish levels of closed-off-ness. So yeah, black holes are real. We heard them, we saw them we measured them in binary pairs nd we also seen the in gravitational microlensing. This is off topic, so I won’t go any further, but since you asked about plate tektonics and astronomy I thought it was worth mentioning.
And you are chiding others for being dishonest in discussing science? Sheesh.
And don’t forget Dawkins “The Selfish Gene”