How did the Bombardier Beetle Evolve?

[Timothy_Horton]

@colewd

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

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.

[colewd (Bill Cole)]

@Rumraket

Consilience
of
Independent
Phylogenies.

There is nesting hiearchical structure in the data.

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.

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@colewd

You are assuming this evidence is adequate to explain what you are observing.

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.

[scd]

@T_aquaticus

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

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?

[T_aquaticus]

@scd

the question is how many sequences can be functional.

So what’s the answer?

[scd]

@T_aquaticus

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?

[AllenWitmerMiller (Retired Professor & Minister.)]

@T_aquaticus

Of course, Gish was never able to back up this claim, but never admitted his error even under pressure from his colleagues.

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.

@Timothy_Horton

Even Sal Cordova here trotted out the “not enough salt in the ocean” hoary old canard.

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.

@T_aquaticus

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

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.”

@Rumraket

Consilience
of
Independent
Phylogenies.

Bingo.

@colewd

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

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

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

@colewd

So your claim is that if someone cannot prove your solution is false than it is true by default?

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

[T.j_Runyon]

Dude, these are some amazing beetles

When tiger beetles chase prey at high speeds they go blind temporarily,...

[Timothy_Horton]

@T.j_Runyon

Dude, these are some amazing beetles

One more example of “intelligent” design.

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.

[Roy (30-year veteran)]

@scd

@T_aquaticus

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?

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.

[Roy (30-year veteran)]

@AllenWitmerMiller

@Timothy_Horton

Even Sal Cordova here trotted out the “not enough salt in the ocean” hoary old canard.

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.

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

[cwhenderson (Curtis Henderson)]

@T_aquaticus

Bombardier beetles don’t have feathers. You need to get back on topic.

@colewd

In the video he claimed to have complex adaptions like the eye covered simply by showing morphological steps. The problem is not visually believable morphological steps it is showing mechanistic feasibility of the genetic change. This is what he was trying to do with Weasel.

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

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

This thread is going wildly off topic. @moderators may split out this thread out into different threads or add a comments thread.

Please stay on the topic of the thread’s original post. Staying on topic makes conversations more informative, and prevents repetitive arguments. Instead of going off topic, link to relevant threads (use search function to find them) or start a new one.

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

This thread is going wildly off topic. @moderators may split out this thread out into different threads or add a comments thread.

Please stay on the topic of the thread’s original post. Staying on topic makes conversations more informative, and prevents repetitive arguments. Instead of going off topic, link to relevant threads (use search function to find them) or start a new one.

[Jordan (Jordan Mantha)]

I tried my best to get more manageable threads:

• Most of the general ID discussion went to: Origin of Proteins
• The Cytochrome C discussion got it’s own thread: Origin of Cytochrome C

Leaving this thread to continue the discussion of the Bombardier Beetle, one of the anti-evolution examples arguments I encountered a lot when I was young.