We’ll maybe it reindeers the argument invalid, or creates a new venison of it?
Is there anything elk to consider??
Caribou pun TBA
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Once a species like homo erectus has evolved there may not be any need for future pre planned mutations. It could be that once evolution reaches the point that a species like homo erectus has evolved it’s inevitable (or very likely) that brains capable of scientific discovery will evolve.
Maybe some of the pre planned mutations were triggered in other lineages, but they weren’t all triggered. So if for example 20 preplanned mutations had to be triggered over time so as to reach a certain “goal”, maybe in some lineages only the first 10 were triggered, or first 15 in another lineage. It would depend what the criteria was for “triggering” wouldn’t it? It may be very rare that the criteria for triggering is met. If each time it’s a very specific DNA sequence that is the trigger, it may not happen in every lineage, or some might be triggered but not all.
Of course if we take the idea like the ‘zoo hypothesis’ where we’re being studied by these aliens then maybe they’re influencing the mutations themselves. In which case it won’t necessarily happen in other lineages. Or maybe the pre planned mutations are set up to only be triggered once (maybe the information is being sent back to some computer that only allows it to be triggered one time). Does that sound contrived? Yeah, VERY! (I’m laughing even suggesting it). But my point is that it’s no worse than the theistic evolutionist claim, it’s actually more plausible. Both are really speculative. If theists are allowed to speculate then it’s only fair that the unbeliever can too. If the theist wants their idea to be taken seriously then they need to show that this alien hypothesis isn’t also a possible. If “God can work in mysterious ways” then so can the aliens.
I do think it would become problematic if we ended up having to say that the alien must be non physical, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and eternal, as we’d basically be saying the alien was indistinguishable from Yahweh.
I have repeatedly noted that a supernatural actor can guide evolution any way she wants. She need not guide the mutations – she can perhaps more easily fiddle with lineages using asteroids and similarly delicate black arts. This means that “we” are not considering a “theistic evolution model here” since I can’t imagine any “theistic evolution model,” much less one that involves other dimensions, that is falsifiable.
Even when I was regrettably under the spell of Christianity, I would have described machinations like these to be tiny-minded and duplicitous. Now that I know that religion to be false and those gods to be crude human inventions, I am thunderstruck by the human need to pursue a god who hides like a scared child.
This is just an elaborate restatement of a basic question that I have alluded to already in this thread, which is: can we detect intervention such as triggered or “guided” mutation? In principle, yes, and this should be obvious when reflecting on the fact that we ourselves, in the lab, can manipulate genomes and environments with relative ease. Some kinds of manipulation are utterly trivial to detect (think of the insertion of a gene that confers resistance to glyphosate). A sudden cascade of point mutations is detectable, in principle, phylogenetically. Neither the question nor the answer are complicated in principle. In practice, the “detection” process would involve math and lots of data, and the answer would be in the form of a probability.
I honestly don’t understand why this is an interesting question, to anyone. Gods can do what they want, hindered only by their uniform and universal non-existence. They can install fourth-dimensional triggers to generate humans, and of course… they can install fourth-dimensional systems to cover it all up.
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Yeah. That’s precisely where I was coming from.
I’m not claiming all mutations would be planned to occur. 99.9% of evolution could still have no specific goal, but if a few mutations were pre planned then the odds of an intelligent species (wouldn’t have to look exactly like humans) like us evolving would seem to be far more likely. And presumably the “designer” could make sure that the pre planned mutation would be selected for by natural selection. Even if in most lineages the “plan” failed it only had to happen in one lineage to get the intended outcome. So we could imagine a pre planned mutation occurring in the lineage that lead to whales, but for whatever reason the next pre planned mutation further down the line was never triggered, or something else prevented that lineage reaching a level of intelligence capable of doing science.
If the mutation increased intelligence it would seem that natural selection would favour it.
I completely understand it sound like sci-fi. Ultimately my reason for brining this is up is that theists often say that it’s so unlikely that a species like us, with our level of intelligence, capable of doing science etc, would evolve. So evolution must be “guided” in some sense so that a species like us evolved at some point. One response (which I personally don’t accept) is that we’re just lucky. If your happy with that response then that’s fine. But even if we grant the theistic idea that evolution needs to be guided by some “higher intelligence” it doesn’t necessarily lead to the Christian god. If the theists is proposing what amounts to supernatural magic then the naturalist should be able to make a similar claim. Both are obviously not science. At least on naturalism the “magic” conforms with physical laws, but just uses a process or mechanism that we can’t fully comprehend, at least not yet. This seems less of a stretch than invoking the supernatural. For example, kind of like the zoo hypothesis that attempts to answer the Fermi paradox, there could be an alien civilisation that’s evolved to the point that it can do things that we would call “magic”, and they’re watching us and guiding our evolution in some way, or set up a situation like the one I mentioned where certain mutations that are planned to occur when “triggered.” Does this sound like sci-fi? Yeah, sure. But is it more plausible than theism? I think so. Or at least it’s no more implausible. Unless there’s some reason I haven’t thought of why only a omniscient and omnipotent designer could guide evolution, or create mutations that are planned to occur when “triggered.”
(I believe that MrAnderson’s intent was to say “rejoinder”, but there might have been a mistyping followed by autocorrect to “reindeer”).
Of course we have been much afflicted by sealioning.
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Sorry guys, I think I moosetyped. That wasn’t what I meant to sleigh. My bad. I know this is something you really caribou-t.
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In any case, it is Cervidae-ably funny.
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Elliot, selection is not random. My point is that you are throwing “random” around in a very misleading way, as creationists love to do.
People make claims.
I don’t think so, given his testimony at Dover under oath.
Your sloppy usage of “random” doesn’t help. Please stop.
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I gather that this scenario involves aliens (I’ll call them demigods) who are not time-bound, since they can watch a planet over hundreds of millions of years. Perhaps they have even mastered time travel or some other manipulation of time. Such gods would know that the universe had seen the emergence of intelligent life at least twice: here on Earth and on whatever planet/lab that spawned them. They would then know that intelligence on various scales exploded into our biosphere once animals came about (800 million years ago), and they would know that two prominent kinds of intelligence – in cephalopods and in primates/mammals – arose in lineages that diverged 600 million years ago. Being demigods and all, they would likely already know a lot more than we do about the biological structure of intelligence, and that means they would almost certainly not need to tinker with specific genes. Because, to put it bluntly, evolution doesn’t seem to need that kind of help. Keep in mind that by postulating the existence of these demigods, you have already granted the presence of intelligence elsewhere in the universe.
If these demigods wanted my advice, I’d be tremendously flattered and would suggest only that they look for ways to help a planet get more quickly through the major transitions in the history of life on our planet. Maybe they can help metabolism get rolling faster, or tweak the invention of multicellularity, or arrange for some well-timed extinctions and climate transitions to steer lineages toward brain growth. Maybe all they need to do is some solar system engineering to increase the number of exoplanets with water.
If these demigods asked whether they ought to invent genetic triggering systems that no one can currently even picture, I’d mumble something like “hey, you’re the demigod, not me, I still have to go to a library to get PDFs” then tell them that my view is this: our current knowledge of evolution on Earth, and specifically the extent of evolutionary convergence we see, suggests that they need not exert themselves in the fourth dimension in order to see intelligent life emerge on a planet like ours.
They should, in fact, be more concerned about how that intelligent life can be vulnerable to mind parasites that can hasten its self-destruction.
That is what the word “impasse” is for.
As others have pointed out better than I could, the problem is not only embedding some sort of mechanism to trigger specific mutations in the distant future, but preserving that very mechanism against degeneration by random mutation. You must eliminate random process in order to preserve specific process. We would have to be wrong about almost our entire understanding of molecular genetics.
Further, programmed mutations may be redundant. Mutations are happening all the time, and the history of life has had much time. The environment is what is selective, and as Gould pointed out, contingent and fortuitous. Nature offers niches, but the details of how those are filled varies widely, and the interactions are chaotic. Not a situation which permits the exercise of control.
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And, yes, I expect to pay deer-ly for the Cervidae pun.
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It was very Rudolf you to interrupt a serious conversation.
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This collective pungasm is sufficient evidence that the universe is morally unsupervised. It behooves all of us to step into this moral chasm.
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All Cervidae be hooved. And that allows them to step into chasms, moral and otherwise.
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I meant to say behe doesn’t think that random MUTATIONS alone can explain all evolution. I know selection isn’t random
Interestingly, Behe explicitly refers to all the mechanisms of evolution as “Darwinism”. A historically incorrect and misleading way to lump it all together under that term, as to the people in the field of evolutionary biology, Darwinism is usually used to refer to a view of evolution with a strong emphasis on the role of positive selection-driven change. Debates have been raging for many decades about what the “most important” or “dominant” or “primary” mechanism of evolution are. With neither camp spending much timed defining rules or methods for measuring “importance”, “dominance”, or “primacy”. Yes, seriously, it’s that stupid.
Anyway, the Discovery Institute some times deliberately exploits criticisms of the more narrow understanding of “Darwinism” as if applying to all of modern evolutionary theory. They will find articles and debates among evolutionary biologists where Darwinism is being criticized (and additions and modifications proposed) and portray them as if the entire field is wrong or facing imminent collapse.
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Still ridiculous. Mutations, random or not, do not explain all evolution. Behe doesn’t think that. I don’t think that (I don’t care much about what Behe allegedly thinks).
That’s the point! There’s selection. There’s drift. Those are absolutely required to explain evolution.
Your inexplicable fixation on both randomness and mutations is misleading and helpful to creationists. What do you think is the ratio of existing variation to new mutations in a mammalian population?
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If I had super powers and wanted to guide evolution, I would not be trying to tweak the mutations. Instead, I would trying to control when and where earthquakes occur, when and where there are volcanic eruption, when and where there are meteor strikes, and other phenomena that can alter the environment.
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In that he isn’t alone. Nobody at all thinks that random mutations alone can explain all evolution. Did you mean to say something else than what you meant to say?
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I didn’t say mutations explain ALL evolution. I know there’s selection, I know there’s genetic drift. In that comment though I was specifically talking about mutations. I’m talking about if some mutations could be caused by some intelligence as opposed to ALL being random. The reason I didn’t mention selection is because it wasn’t relevant to that specific point.
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