Evolution of the Eye

[Faizal_Ali]

@Dan_Eastwood

It’s not you. There are a lot of similar examples in the ID literature essentially asking scientists to “prove evolution using shades of the color blue.” Nonsense questions like this generate a lots of heated discussion, but accomplish little. It’s important to ask the right question in the right context.

As specific example: One of the ID movement’s chief proponents, James Tour, was rightly criticized by biologist Larry Moran for asking similarly disingenuous questions: (The first quote is from Tour, with Moran’s response following):

. Furthermore, when I, a non-conformist, ask proponents for clarification, they get flustered in public and confessional in private wherein they sheepishly confess that they really don’t understand either. Well, that is all I am saying: I do not understand. But I am saying it publicly as opposed to privately. Does anyone understand the chemical details behind macroevolution? If so, I would like to sit with that person and be taught, so I invite them to meet with me. Lunch will be my treat. Until then, I will maintain that no chemist understands, hence we are collectively bewildered.

Does he really mean to imply that all chemists are “bewildered” about evolution? Does he really think that evolutionary biologists are obliged to supply “chemical details” proving that whales evolved from land animals or that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor? Are all chemists this stupid?

I wonder if he is equally skeptical about whether the Earth goes around the sun given that we can’t supply chemical details? I wonder what he thinks about plate tectonics?

Sandwalk: A chemist who doesn’t understand evolution

[Gisteron]

Just to be transparent, I am not a biologist by training nor by trade, but…

There is, I believe a meaningful distinction between high energy radiation like (visible) light and low energy heat radiation. Sure, in terms of just pure electrodynamics, at least while in transit, both are EM radiation described by the same equations, differing only in arbitrary free parameters. But in chemical terms, these are not the same.

High energy radiation has a significant chance of exciting electrons in atoms, ions, and molecules. Its rate of absorption and transmission varies wildly between seemingly neighboring wavelengths, for various materials. Low energy (thermal) radiation has more or less no chance to excite electrons out of the ground state, unless we are talking about ions far too strongly charged to be common, or elements so high up the periodic table that we have yet to even name them.

By contrast, thermal radiation excites kinetic states of molecules, modes of rotation, or oscillation of inter-nuclear distances and inter-link angles and the like. The quantum mechanical description is ultimately similar – there is a ground state and excited states, ladder (creation and annihilation) operators between them all, etc., but the underlying mechanisms I would personally feel still warrant the distinction. Moreover, because systems that have any chance of being interesting for biochemical considerations typically have a temperature of several hundred Kelvin, the sheer density of phononic states in that region is so high, that there is basically no thermal wavelength that isn’t absorbed by one bulk of material or another. There is a reason, if you will, that metals are black, red, yellor, or white, but never green or blue.

A response to temperature gradients can be accomplished, then, by a mechanical system, in that heat and kinetics so readily interchange, and pretty much anything can do that, even more or less inert matter (I’m thinking some basic experimental setup with thermotactically moving colloids or the like). To respond to light, however, more specific molecular structures or materials are needed.

[VladtheDestroyer]

@Dan_Eastwood

You are essentially asking for a determination in terms that don’t make any sense for the material task. Suppose you are a skilled engineer, capable of designing and building any object possible from the appropriate materials. I give you the instructions, “Build me a 3D scale replica of the Eiffel Tower constructed from shades of the color blue.” Your engineering skill do not apply to this task because “color” is a concept, not a construction material. It is in essence asking a nonsense question.

You would not have a design to build anything without a scheme that says “let this thing equal a different thing” That is why shades of blue cannot be a building plan with out a scheme that says “let this thing equal a different thing”

[Dan_Eastwood]

@Gisteron

There is, I believe a meaningful distinction between high energy radiation like (visible) light and low energy heat radiation.

I’m sure you are correct. I’m not sure that it matters if the result is the same.

@VladtheDestroyer

You would not have a design to build anything without a scheme that says “let this thing equal a different thing” That is why shades of blue cannot be a building plan with out a scheme that says “let this thing equal a different thing”

I’m pretty sure that made sense to you, but it doesn’t make any sense to me. We need to understand each other before we can argue about it.

Edit to add: I think @Gisteron nailed it (just below). The nonsense task is not coding the instructions, it is the actual construction. It doesn’t make sense to do this with “Information”, but it is fairly easy to do it with chemistry. When it comes to biological systems, the only meaningful way to encode instructions in chemistry. “Information” does not convey anything about the meaning of those instructions, except for the length. This is like the number of pages in a book telling you nothing about the contents of the book.

[Gisteron]

No, that’s incorrect. You could encode a building plan with shades of blue, or, really, any set of two or more distinguishable symbols. You couldn’t print that plan without blue dye or whatever, but the plan is not the same as a printout of the plan, just like blueness is not the same as any object to which we can assign it.

The issue is that a shade of blue is not a physical item. It is not a material object whence a different material object like an Eiffel Tower replica can be formed. Just like information isn’t some magical substance one can pour into a physical system that would otherwise both not have it and also be physically the same. The point is, your challenge is a category error. You are (or seem to be) stipulating a proprietary understanding of information specifically so crafted as to not make any sense to speak of in physical terms, and then demand of your interlocutors that they do.

[Gisteron]

@Dan_Eastwood

I’m sure you are correct. I’m not sure that it matters if the result is the same.

Well yeah. I guess one could argue that the vast difference in complexity it takes between a system that can only react to heat and one that can also react to visible light (or even higher energy radiation) is ultimately a difference in scale, and that ultimately we are talking about physical interactions, how ever few or many it takes between the firstmost input and the ultimate response. But I’m saying there is some subtlety/nuance here, and understating it like that may take charity to overlook (or even to call an understatement), and hence may invite criticism or dismissal from those who wish not give as much of it.

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@VladtheDestroyer

1. a person who believes in the theories of evolution and natural selection. -Oxford dictionary

There’s no belief involved.

[Faizal_Ali]

@Mercer

There’s no belief involved.

That depends on what one, well, believes. According to some, all knowledge is a subtype of belief. i.e knowledge is defined as justified true belief.

So, if we know evolution to be true because the evidence supports that conclusion, then we also believe evolution to be true.

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@Faizal_Ali

So, if we know evolution to be true because the evidence supports that conclusion, then we also believe evolution to be true.

But as a scientific conclusion, it remains tentative. If an evolutionary hypothesis is falsified, that alters my conclusion.

I know that the evidence supports evolutionary theory, including some of the evidence that I myself have produced. I don’t “know evolution to be true” except when defined as “changes in allele frequency over time,” directly observable only over short time intervals. That being said, I don’t see any reason why it does not extrapolate to billions of years.

You’re also mixing up evolution the phenomenon with evolutionary theory, to which I’m guessing Vlad is referring, along with a steaming load of other IDcreationist redefinitions.

And let’s not forget that the primary reason the silly term “evolutionist” is used is to try and portray any understanding or acceptance of evolutionary theory as something similar to the attacker’s religious belief.

[Faizal_Ali]

@Gisteron

Well yeah. I guess one could argue that the vast difference in complexity it takes between a system that can only react to heat and one that can also react to visible light (or even higher energy radiation) is ultimately a difference in scale, and that ultimately we are talking about physical interactions, how ever few or many it takes between the firstmost input and the ultimate response.

If I correctly understand the point @VladtheDestroyer is trying to make ( a big if), the distinction is between a response that involves intentionality (thoughts that refer to or are about something) and responses that don’t. An micro-organism may respond to light by moving towards or away from it, and that response might well involve some quite complex chemistry. But it is not an intentional response.

Similarly, we can respond to thermal stimuli by thinking something like “That soup is not ready to eat yet.” So the nature of the stimulus does not appear to be the distinguishing feature.

Or, maybe he’s talking about something else entirely.

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@Faizal_Ali

Or, maybe he’s talking about something else entirely.

Or, once he realizes that he doesn’t really have a point, we’ll see flouncing or a Gish Gallop.

[Faizal_Ali]

@Mercer

But as a scientific conclusion, it remains tentative. If an evolutionary hypothesis is falsified, that alters my conclusion.

I probably misunderstood what you meant by “There’s no belief involved.”

[sfmatheson (Stephen Matheson)]

@Mercer

And let’s not forget that the primary reason the silly term “evolutionist” is used is to try and portray any understanding or acceptance of evolutionary theory as something similar to the attacker’s religious belief.

[sfmatheson (Stephen Matheson)]

@Rumraket

@VladtheDestroyer

But the eye itself, can never be a visual system.

This is becoming semantic. At what point does the eye stop and the visual system begin?

It’s annoying, but understandable, that “the eye” seems to mean “an eye like the ones I have” when we know that just within the category of things we can/should call “eyes,” there is a wonderful continuum of structures. The notion that an eye can’t be a visual system is either a tedious semantic bloviation, or just another falsehood arising from the ability to type without reading or thinking.

Cyanobacteria use micro-optics to sense light direction

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@colewd

Hi John
Is your extrapolation based on your MYH7 argument?

No. I don’t have an “MYH7 argument,” Bill. I simply point to the MYH7 evidence and ask whether your ID hypothesis explains it. You haven’t done this.

You see, a viable scientific hypothesis not only has to make empirical predictions, it must be consistent with all of the extant data. You don’t really have any ID hypothesis, do you?

@sfmatheson: this is an example of the context of my objections to the indiscriminate use of “argument” in real science.

@colewd

This does not invalidate Behe’s paper which shows very long timeframes for fixation…

What does it have to do with it, exactly? The hundreds of alleles are not fixed! The polymorphism of MYH7 shows why Behe has shown nothing but simplistic twaddle intelligently designed to fool YOU.

@colewd

…as the data you have shown is consistent with 30% of amino acid substitutions being neutral.

How so, exactly? Be sure to make extensive use of the term “epistasis” in your explanation.

[sfmatheson (Stephen Matheson)]

@Mercer

@sfmatheson: this is an example of the context of my objections to the indiscriminate use of “argument.”

Granted, but Bill Cole (as a PS contributor, hopefully not as a person) is the antithesis of the use of English words of any kind. How’s that for an argument?