Yes. What have they DONE? Why is it all talk, Ashwin?
James Shapiro has done some work on how these mechanisms work in bacteria.
I donât think he is all talk. Most of the papers he has published (even those on NGE) are well researched (literature wise).
I am getting the impression that you have not read my first comment to which @John_Harshman responded. You are not making any sense at this point.
We could make a similar argument that all Darwin does when he proposed his theory was âtalkâ.
No, he has not. He has done some work on bacterial genetics, but he has never formulated nor tested his Third Way hypothesis. Itâs all marketing and you are gullible.
Thatâs not testing a hypothesis, and you have zero expertise relevant to such a claim.
Iâm a geneticist, and I find them to be shallow, repetitive exercises in relabeling.
Do you understand genetics better than I do?
And if you did, youâd be objectively wrong. Darwin published empirical work in his books. Shapiro has only relabeled the empirical work of others for a very long time.
Have you not even read Darwinâs books, Ashwin?
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How would you go about testing his hypothesis.
How would YOU do it? I donât see much reason to answer your questions when you donât answer mine.
Like you said, iam not an expert on this subject. You are making the claim that Shapiro could test his hypothesis and refuses to do so.
So i am asking you, what a test will look like. How would you go about testing James shapiroâs hypothesis.
Whee! Can I quote you?
Obviously. Yet you claimed:
What was your basis for making that claim?
No, Shapiro doesnât advance a hypothesis; Iâm saying that he avoids doing so. How does one test a relabeling?
Behe, on the other hand, has a testable hypothesis staring him in the face, although he doesnât describe it that way. Doing so would make his inaction even less excusable.
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I think you are wrong here. let me point you to some of his hypothesis -
- The genome is read-write -
he makes specific claims here and in pretty much every paper he writes. I dont know Whether they are true/can be empirically tested. However, the claim taht he does not make an yhypotehsis is ridiculous IMO.
He does make claims. However, claims are not the same as hypotheses. I think you know that and are deliberately engaging in the fallacy of equivocation.
If you canât see how, thereâs almost certainly no hypothesis there. Scientists tend to state hypotheses and their empirical predictions clearly.
If you canât see how, why are you arguing with me?
Youâre being ridiculous. If you truly thought that, you would state Shapiroâs hypothesis and its prediction(s).
Is it ethical for YOU to make such claims when you have nothing but wishful thinking to support them?
I think you are playing word games again.
Can you point to the formal âhypothesisâ of the modern synthesis?
Weâve been over this particular argument many times already. Any particularly long series of mutations will look unfathomably unlikely after it happened. Yet it happened. Pointing out that âthat series of events will be very unlikelyâ basically commits the texas sharpshooter fallacy.
The fact is that there will be some long series of compounding chance events in all extant lineages of reproducing organisms, and out of all these lineages there will be some adaptive evolutionary events among them. Focusing on a specific sequence of events and trying to calculate the odds of it after it has already occurred is meaningless. The number you get out of that calculation doesnât tell you anything that indicates whether it could happen or not.
What is the specific probability of the particular set of mutations you were born with? Itâs something on the order of 1 in ~10^1000. One in ten to the one thousandth power. Go back one generation, compound the probability of your set of mutations, with the probability of one of your parentâs set of mutations. Itâs now 1 in ~10^2000. Now do it ten thousand generations back. You get a sequence of events with a compound probability of 1 in 10^10^7, or 10^-10.000.000
Ten to the negative ten millionth power. Is ten thousand consecutive generations a miracle? I donât think so.
The way you think about this issue is completely wrong. How did history turn out the way it did out of all the other ways we can conceive of it having turned out? It all seems so impossibly unlikely. But you have to realize any historical sequence will look roughly equally unlikely.
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There are several theories and hypotheses. Thatâs why itâs called a âsynthesisâ and not just a single hypothesis or theory.
Do you really not know this?
Saying something happened by chance is similar to saying God did it. All future investigations stop.
But weâre not saying it âhappened by chanceâ, thatâs a misunderstanding.
There is a chemical and physical cause of mutations, and why any particular mutation happened the way it did. Molecule A having been rammed by lots of water molecules with high kinetic energy, bumped into molecule B with enough force at the right angle to make it skip over a few DNA bases etc. etc.
Chance is not the explanation for why mutations happen, or how they turned out. Chance is not a cause that makes things happen.
Chance is a way of describing the fact that there are multiple different possible outcomes of which we cannot predict which will occur a priori, because we donât have the kind of detailed knowledge at the molecular level where it can be deterministically calculated what will happen in the future.
When you flip a coin, âchanceâ isnât causing the coin to land one side up. When we say the coin has some chance of landing heads or tails, we arenât saying chance is causing it to land heads or tails. Thereâs a physical explanation, a physical cause for why the coin landed the way it did, but chance is just a way to speak about events with multiple possible outcomes which are very difficult to predict before they happen, because the influences that determine the outcomes just arenât possible to account for.
In our ignorance and technical inability to truly account for all the influences and local conditions that determine how the coin will land, or how the mutations will take place, we are forced to make predictions in terms of chance, not because we think chance itself is an explanation for anything.
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Couldnt you have summarised this entire paragraph by saying you dont know enough about mutations to tell anyone why these particular chanegs happened the way it did and when it did?
Shouldnt improve knowledge lead to a better ability to predict?
The reason âGod did itâ is bad for science is that Gods actions cannot be predicted.
Edit: If the the same applies to âchance mutationsâ, then how is it useful as a concept?
No, because that would be completely false.
The reason âGod did itâ is bad for science is that Gods actions cannot be predicted.
And because it explains nothing. There are no mechanisms or models of Godâs actions. You canât model God. But you can still make models of evolution that involve mutations, such as models for the evolution of protein coding genes de novo from non-coding DNA. These models make predictions about what patterns should be found in closely related species if in fact a gene evolved by such a process.
Edit: If the the same applies to âchance mutationsâ, then how is it useful as a concept?
Because the chemical and physical causes of many mutations are actually pretty well understood. And it is an observational fact that they happen.
You are confusing explaining how mutations happen (what is causing a mutation to happen), with being able to predict which mutation will happen in the future.
Youâre basically saying the concept of wind is useless because I canât tell you exactly how every molecule will move in the future. Even though we understand pretty well why it is the wind blows, and how the individual molecules push each other around.
Well, if the wind has a history of ârandomlyâ blowing and creating something more complex and awesome than a Ferrari every once in a whileâŚ
I would be really really curious what is going on.
But isnât it both true and relevant? Whatâs wrong with the idea? Those sorts of mutations happen all the time, and sometimes they result in selectable variation.
All those folks have different notions of what needs to be extended, no two the same.
Sure⌠however itâs stretching things to expect the âselectable variationâ to turn up after six consecutive mutations, all of which need to add up and be maintained till the last one turns up and the trait is selected for.
This is not the typical evolution story where selection gives the direction to change and helps the trait to arise. Here the entire trait pops up by accident over at least 6 steps.
Are you aware they are having regular conferences to work things out? (At least some of them).