How did the Bombardier Beetle Evolve?

Those are just assertions, and they are plainly wrong. Quoting from the article that @T.j_Runyon posted:

Therefore, the system is not dependent on the presence of the catalysts present in the bombardier beetle. There is function with fewer parts. This is yet another example of how you incorrectly assume the present system could not work without all of the parts.

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You need to the math and evidence to back this up instead of empty assertions.

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48 posts were merged into an existing topic: Origin of Proteins

Doesn’t that depend on what the Bombardier beetle evolved from? What did the ancestor have in place of this shooting mechanism? What functions did it serve?

The many solutions claim is without support.

No it isn’t. Other beetles exist that survive and avoid predators by countless other methods and strategies. So it is from another beetle with whatever structures and mechanisms it had in place from which the Bombardier beetle evolved. I’m going to guess most insects have glands from which they can secrete various chemicals. Sex pheromones, predator repellants or what have you. Actually it’s not a guess, we know this is the case.

In my ignorance of insect anatomy, I’m going to guess these multiple different fluid secretion systems are probably all homologous in different aspects. It is interesting to consider that all insects have some sort of system by which they secrete things out of some rear-end opening. The venom glands and stingers in bees, wasps, and ants, are probably all homologous, and probably all distantly related to the secretion systems we see it beetles, including the Bombardier beetle.

It is also my understanding that all insects have their rectum in that location, and that in the end all these venom, pheromone, and I suspect whatever secretion glands are ultimately all derived from some secretion glands in the common ancestor of all insects that might have served some role in digestion, maybe by covering the intestinal lining in mucus for the easier flow of waste products through the digestive tract etc. etc.

Its a paradigm that is mission critical for evolution yet it has no basis of reality of how irreducibly complex structures are built starting with code. ALL the different sequences depend on each other. Looking at a sequence that produces a high level function and concluding that it was not the product of trial and error is not the Texas sharp shooter fallacy. It is a rational conclusion. Just like looking at a bla bla bla bla…

I have no idea what any of that is supposed to mean it’s your usual “sequence space” “mission critical” word salad.

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This is question begging. How do we know it evolved?

The case you and T are making is evidence of preexisting parts is other beetles. That does not explain how evolutionary mechanisms can make the modifications. It also does not explain the origin of the mechanisms.

Consilience
of
Independent
Phylogenies.

There is nesting hiearchical structure in the data.

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Because of the huge quantity and quality of the evidence we have for evolution. Same as the last fifty times you asked and were answered.

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You are assuming this evidence is adequate to explain what you are observing. You are using universal common descent by selection and drift as a working hypothesis yet selection and drift are not mentioned.

Whats not been established is selection and drift as innovative mechanisms.

No, you forgot what you just asked. You asked how I know this beetle evolved, and that is the evidence that shows it. I’m not saying I have with that explained how the Bombardier beetle’s defense mechanisms evolved.

But we do know the beetle itself shares common descent with all other beetles, and all other insects, and so on. And the nesting hiearchies are how we know that.

So with that in mind, we can look at what the ancestors of the Bombardier beetle were like in order to analyze the evolutionary history of it’s defense mechanisms.

You are using universal common descent by selection and drift as a working hypothesis yet selection and drift are not mentioned.

Whats not been established is selection and drift as innovative mechanisms.

More irrelevant word salad.

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we know that a tipical gene has about 1000 bp. so the sequence space is about 4^1000. the question is how many sequences can be functional. so even if we assume that there are more functional sequences than the number of sand grains on earth- its still a tiny number. so what make you think that there are so many functional sequences out there?

So what’s the answer?

i think that we may get a good estimation. maybe by looking at language. how many possible sentences we can write in 1000 letters? a huge number. but how much it compare with the whole space for 1000 letters?

106 posts were split to a new topic: Origin of Cytochrome C

I remember that 1983 PBS program on creationism—and Gish’s amazing frog proteins claim. Thanks for the flashback! Yes, Gish could come up with some amazing claims.

That reminds me of what I think was one of the last public interviews that Duane Gish did, not long before he died. Gish was the guest on Hugh Ross’ radio program. I can’t remember exactly what Gish said which obviously shocked Dr. Ross—but Gish was addressing Ross’ field of expertise in astrophysics and Ross said, “That is not supported by the evidence.” When Gish held his ground, Ross said something like, “I would be happy to organize a room full of astrophysicists at one of our academic conferences and you can explain what you just said. I guarantee that the scientists will unanimously disagree.” Ross said it politely but clearly. Gish also held his ground but I don’t think he agreed to the challenge.

That is one of my personal favorites because I remember it so well from John Whitcomb Jr.'s lectures. Of course, he got it from his hydrologist-engineer associate and co-author, Henry Morris. It was a great young earth argument with most audiences because people had no idea that there are natural process which remove salts from the oceans. They only know of how evaporation in bodies of water like the Dead Sea only get saltier over time. Investigating the salt-in-the-ocean argument was one of my routes out of that creation science world.

Indeed. That math also needs to include the numbers on beetle populations and the number of generations over which mutations and other evolutionary processes can make changes in allele frequencies over time. Otherwise one is prone to “The chance of that poker hand being drawn is so tiny that it might just as well be declared impossible.”

Bingo.

And yet international agrobusiness has been dependent on these mechanisms for a very long time.

(I won’t even launch a polyploidy subthread.)

That sounds like a lot of “ID theory” arguments I’ve heard over the years.

Dude, these are some amazing beetles

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One more example of “intelligent” design. :slightly_smiling_face:

It did remind me of the experiment with frogs which were trained to jump on verbal command. ID researchers determined when the frogs had all their legs cut off, the frogs went deaf. :wink:

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I think we can’t, because grammar and spelling aren’t equivalent to chemical bonding.

But language does expose the flaw in you and your compatriot’s claims - no matter how much variation is possible by changing the letters and words in English sentences to form new ones, you’ll never see that there is an unknown and unreachable hill elsewhere in the fitness landscape where German sentences are found. And another for Russian, another for Greek and even more remote ones for Chinese, Arabic and Sanskrit. So no matter how well you estimate the number of English sentences in the search space, your estimate will always be woefully short of the actual answer - just like your estimate of the number of protein that can perform a given function may also be woefully short of the actual answer.

Anyone who checks the reference (Goldberg) finds immediately that the numbers given aren’t accumulation times but residence times,* that using aluminium rather than sodium would give an age of the Earth of less than 300 years, and that anyone using that argument is either ignorant or lying.

*How long a particle of a given element spends in the ocean between being carried there and being deposited or extracted elsewhere

The feather discussion, although interesting, should be in a separate thread. Please keep the discussion on the OP.

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