Mount Everest and Evolution

Evolution is not a purely materialistic worldview, and we are talking about evolution.

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That has nothing to do with the evolution of the metazoan body plan.

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Again trying to “damage control” the conversation by refusing to address the larger issue of a reasonable pathway for abiogenesis, which you say you’re clueless about, is hardly being resposive to my overall question. I have researched and appreciate a number of the various proposals, but none of them even attempt to claim explanatory adequacy. “I don’t know” is a perfectly reasonable answer, but “I do know that no ‘god’ was necessary” is not. I’m sure you see my point. The science has not progressed that far, and is not even likely to.

Your overall question is irrelevant to the topic which is the evolution of the metazoan body plan or other adaptations.

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Your response is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. You are entitled to ignore the issue I’ve raised, but not to pretend you haven’t heard my objections because they’re not to your tastes, because they’re not off -topic. Look at the title for the topic, which might as well be “Climbing Mount Improbable,” to use Dawkin’s phrase.
My perspective is, in fact, at least in part, in light of the evidence that science keeps trying to elucidate, the explanation for which has so far eluded its grasp, because of the improbabilities involved.

So I have a question…

@Guy_Coe, are you trying to make any point in addition to what I am making here? Would God's Guidance Be DNA-Detectable? If so, what?

Everyone else, can you clarify why @Guy_Coe’s angle is difficult for you, but the same challenges did not arise when I made some of the same points here: Would God's Guidance Be DNA-Detectable?

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Yes, that would be helpful in an apparent impasse of logic. That’s the only thing I can offer in response to a question involving a 102 post entry topic, on a moment’s notice. Thanks for engaging, @swamidass .

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So what is the probability?

Reminder that in order to calculate the probability of some entity, you must know what that entity is. Are you claiming to know what the first form of life to originate was? I would be amazed to see a calculation or the probability of the emergence of an unknown entity.

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Going offline for awhile, but are you familiar with the proposals for the putatively most simple hypothetical protocell or other biological entity that can be hypothesized as possessing some kind of marginal definition of “life?” See you all in a few hours.

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The base of “Mt. Improbable” is already existing life. We don’t have to elucidate the the cause of the Big Bang in order to figure out how to climb a mountain or how mountains are built. In the same way, we don’t have to know how life started in order to figure out if specific adaptations can evolve in already existing life.

Any improbability calculations for the emergence of life from non-life are entirely irrelevant to the probabilities of complex adaptations evolving in already existing populations. The title of the thread is not “Mount Everest and Abiogenesis”. The thread is talking about evolution which is a separate process.

Accepting evolution does not mean you must also accept abiogenesis. In the same way, accepting the materialistic and natural process of infectious diseases by means of microorganisms does not mean that you must also accept a materialistic and wholly natural origin of germs. They are two separate processes.

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I have seen many different proposals yes. Ranging from fatty acid vesicles containing inorganic minerals that catalyze the acetyl‐CoA pathway, or the reductive TCA cycle, to things like amyloid as the origin of self-replication, or self-replicating RNA.

Are you claiming to know that any of these (or something different) is how life originated?

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That said, there is in fact evidence (not unassailable proof, but evidence nonetheless) that the origin of life was a process governed by the laws of physics and chemistry, as opposed to some sort of intelligent design. The inferred amino acid frequencies in the ancestors of the oldest known proteins correlate increasingly with the distribution of amino acids produced in abiotic chemical reactions, and predicted to result from them by thermodynamics, as we go further and further back in time to infer ancestral sequences. The closer we get to life’s origin, the more the protein sequences contain the kinds of amino acids that would have been produced non-biologically in abiotic chemistry, and therefore contain fewer and fewer instances of the “modern” amino acids such as Tryptophane.

This is what one would expect if life originated by a blind, unguided physical and chemical process whereby the first proteins were synthesized by polymerization of the sorts of amino acids that existed in the prebiotic environment, instead of being somehow intelligently designed and manufactured by an intelligent chemist that had access to a greater repertoire of amino acids than mere geochemistry can produce and could cause particular chemical reactions to occur at will.

See for example:
Higgs PG, Pudritz RE. A thermodynamic basis for prebiotic amino acid synthesis and the nature of the first genetic code. Astrobiology. 2009 Jun;9(5):483-90. [DOI: 10.1089/ast.2008.0280]

Trifonov EN. Consensus temporal order of amino acids and evolution of the triplet code. Gene. 2000 Dec 30;261(1):139-51. [PMID: 11164045]

Brooks DJ, Fresco JR, Lesk AM, Singh M. Evolution of amino acid frequencies in proteins over deep time: inferred order of introduction of amino acids into the genetic code. Mol Biol Evol. 2002 Oct;19(10):1645-55. [PMID: 12270892]

This is evidence for a physics/chemistry-based origin of life, and evidence against rational intelligent design, because an intelligent designer could simply have designed a modern bacterium with the complete biochemical pathways for making all 20 extant amino acids, ensuring it’s capacity to adapt to future environmental challenges.

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I haven’t been following the “God’s Guidance” thread, but I’ll scan it later.

Briefly, probability arguments against evolution or abiogenesis are almost always presented as incredulity - no calculations at all. Where there are calculations, there are generally unstated assumptions which misrepresent evolution. For abiogenesis, there is a presumption they know how such a probability can be calculated.

These probability statements are often interpreted in the exact same manner as Bayes Factors. If we attempt to rewrite them as Bayes Factors, we end up with a prior probability of 1.0 for Design or God. That’s no sort of statistical inference, it’s merely restating one’s original faith in mathematical form, then concluding the assumption.

If someone really has faith, then they should not need to justify that faith with bad math.

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This is just my overall impression.

I think @Guy_Coe is trying to say something that does not cause me any concerns and that would be a normal view for a theist. But somehow he is finding very argumentative ways of saying it, and he is rejecting attempts to get him to reword it in a less provocative way.

At least that is my take on the dispute.

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That matches what I am sensing. What do you think @Guy_Coe?

@Rumraket I feel like this recent post by Axe May run into the problems posed by your Everest analogy. He’s even using rocks to make his point:
Why the Conclusion that Life Is Designed Really Is Inescapable | Evolution News

Well, if it doesn’t cause any concerns, and is, in fact, a normal view, how can it be labeled “provocative?” It’s true I don’t dance around uncomfortable truths, and I agree that I can be argumentative (since simple assertions lack the potential to persuade), especially in the light of so much intractible avoidance of my logic, or outright minimizing. I also can have a sense of humor about it.
Did you hear the one about the evolutionist and the theist who walk into a bar, and both wake up a bit later, rubbing their heads? : )
What am I missing, @swamidass ?

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Axe says:

Crude math is perfectly adequate here. The hundreds or thousands of small fractions representing the individual probabilities *inevitably* multiply to a probability so small as to constitute an outright impossibility.

How many small cracks make up the surface of the Mt Everest? Probabilities greater than zero can never add up to an impossibility. Case closed.

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Axe says:

Crude math is perfectly adequate here. The hundreds or thousands of small fractions representing the individual probabilities inevitably multiply to a probability so small as to constitute an outright impossibility.

Dear Dr. Axe,
Crude math tells us that if we take any sufficiently long sequence of events and call them random (equivalent to ~500 coin flips), that sequence constitutes an “outright impossibility”. Given that you have easily experienced thousands of events in your life prior to this moment, it is an outright impossibility that you are reading this message now.

Sincerely,
Mathematics

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i think that actually we do. we can think about this analogy: say that a designer want to add a gps system to his bike. he cant do that by mixing parts in his bike or by a stepwise way. the same is true with the flagellum. the same isnt true for mt everest since we a mountain doesnt have ic systems. by the way english isnt my native so i dont understand some words here and there in general.