By Szostak’s and Hazens definition of functional information you have not changed the information content until you have increased function. Now we have to define function. Some call it an increase in fitness or the ability to reproduce. It would be hard to argue that changing from blue eyes to brown eyes adds functional information. I have not followed this closely so I hope this helps.
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We’ve seen time and time again that this changes function by changing gene expression.
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I think you are saying something… and people are hearing something else.
When we talk about phenotypes , there is a lot of fossil evidence for rapid morphological changes after years of relative stability. Many fossil species turn up fully formed.
However in genetics, there is evidence of a lot of neutral mutations happening at a reasonably steady state over time. I am not clear how these changes add up to give a totally new phenotype/working system. I don’t think biologists are either.
However very few seem willing to admit it.
That’s about all I know about this subject.
Neutral Mutations are changes that don’t demonstrate any advantages … yet. Simply by continuing to be present other changes occur which come to RELY on the continued existence of the neutral change.
Then the environment changes… and what was neutral suddenly becomes crucial to surviving. And anything not hooked up to the neutral configuration may get wiped out.
I am sure this happens. However we don’t know if it happens on a large enough scale and produces things like photosynthesis.
There is as of now, no evidence based way of knowing.
Do you still think you are at BioLogos?
Or do you just crave disputation?
If every Christian here believes God has the power to guide evolution… then what would prevent the evolution of photosynthesis?
Of God guided the evolution of photosynthesis. It can happen two ways -
- God was necessary for photosynthesis to evolve and so any explanation not involving God (I.e all scientific explanations) would be insufficient. Having to resort to unknown variables to explain the phenomenon.
- The evolution of photosynthesis can be explained completely by science without invoking God or any agency… However we believe God intervened in some mysterious totally unknown way because we believe in God.
I hold to version 1. Most people at biologist hold to 2. The entire discussion about ID is actually between position 1 vs 2 in my opinion.
It’s a theologically significant issue.
There is a third position…we could call it One.Prime.
The position is that SOME FORM of photosynthesis might have evolved on its own, but without God’s guidance the odds are it would have been the wrong kind at the wrong time.
I think it is impossible to tell the difference between One and One.Prime.
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This is not a third position. It break downs into position 1 or 2 based on how you view Gods guidance happened.
If God guided the environment and all other variables in such a way that a extremely improbable event happened,Its 1… its basically finetuning on steroids.
If the emphasis is on how photosynthesis could have evolved on its own… and the timing is just a matter of Gods will (i.e a subjective choice by God which is not necessary to the process)… we are at 2.
@Ashwin_s, if you are willing to change the word “insufficient” I might AGREE that you only need 2 descriptions!
what do you propose replacing it with?
That gets us to the first problem. Shuffling of genes can produce morphological change. It would appear that you don’t need novel information, as you define it, in order to get macroevolution.
Since there is mountains of evidence demonstrating that all living species share a common ancestor I don’t know why it is such a stretch to conclude that fossil species would be the same. In fact, DNA has been extracted from younger fossils (e.g. neanderthal DNA) and they also carry the same evidence for shared ancestry.
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I would fully agree that cranium size is just one measure, but if we can’t come to some agreement on this graph I don’t know if it is useful to pursue other anatomical features. Just in the skull alone we could measure the size of the lower jaw, how far the jaw juts forward (i.e. prognathus), the position of the foramen magnum, the width of the upper palate, the size of the teeth, and so on.
There is also the fact that the human brain is larger than the brains of other apes, as a ratio of cranium size to body weight. Therefore, there should have been species that were transitional between modern humans and a common ancestor shared with other apes, and that is exactly what we find.
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Almost everything that happens in nature is a highly, highly improbable event. Each human is born with between 50 to 100 substitution mutations and a handful of indel mutations. The chances of each human being born with the mutations they are born with is 1 in 6 billion to the 50th power. However, the very act of biological reproduction guarantees that a highly improbable event will occur, just as shuffling a deck guarantees that you will produce an order of cards so unique and improbable that it won’t be repeated in the entire future of the universe.
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Shuffling a deck of cards will not do that.
As to extremely improbable events happening regularly in nature… it means something is missing in the calculations.probably something that reduces the improbable nature of the event.
Can you share a reference? Sounds interesting.
Wrong. There is no limit to the number of alleles that a gene can have in a population. For example, there are thousands of alleles for some of the HLA genes with 4,300 HLA-A alleles alone.
http://hla.alleles.org/nomenclature/stats.html
We can also look at some basic genetics. Each human is born with 50 to 100 mutations in a 3 billion base haploid genome. There are 3 possible substitution mutations at each position which gives us 9 billion possible substitution mutations. If we go with 50 mutations per person we would need 180 million births to get all possible mutations (on average). Since there are 7 billion humans in the world this would mean that every non-lethal substitution mutation exists somewhere in the human population.
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It most certainly will. The total possible number of shuffled decks is 52!. Therefore, when you shuffle a deck you produce a sequence of cards with an odds of 1 in 8 x 10^67. That’s an 8 with 67 zeros after it. That is really, really improbable, but all it takes to produce this nearly impossible feat is to shuffle a deck of cards.
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No, the chance with of each human being born with the mutations they are born with is 100%. The chance of getting the poker hand you have been dealt is 100%.
This is not an accurate way to look at probability. Probability is used to understand that cause of the event. The cause of someone being born is well understood and certainly falsifies the null (random occurrence) as being a random event.
Where evolutionists get in trouble with probability is when they assign random chance to an outcome just like you are trying to do with your steps to the evolution of the eye.
If you are claiming that the path between steps leading to the eye is random this is problematic if the number of simultaneous mutations required is not feasibly obtained.
@T_aquaticus is correct on the math here and also in how it applies to biology.