Thanks in advance!
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Iâm trying to understand this, and Iâm not sure if Iâm missing something. Deterministic QM or otherwise, replication and mutation happens on a scale where quantum effects are to be expected. Mutation can be from radiation interactions, but also an outcome of quantum randomness related to chemical bonding. From where do you think the stochastic characteristic nature of mutation arises if quantum effects are eliminated? Also, what do you intend by âspecific biological mutationsâ as opposed to non-specific?
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I would hope that instead of assuming it you could actually demonstrate it.
If God already knows what we are going to do before we think we choose to do it, would that be hard Determinism?
Then it would seem that the observation of random mutations would disprove your doctrine of creation.
Thatâs how random mutations have been defined for the last 50 years, before the structure of DNA was understood. From the beginning, randomness did not mean every base had the same chance of being mutated because they didnât even know that DNA was a sequence of bases.
In addition, not all bases have the same chance of being mutated. For example, a CpG has a much higher chance of mutating than other two base combinations. Transitions occur more often than transversions.
No, itâs still the definition that is used today.
Yes, and it does nothing to support your claims. First, it only looks for lactamase activity instead of function. There are more functions than just lactamase activity. Second, it only looks at limited mutations in a single starting sequence. Axe claims that the chances of getting lactamase is 1 in 10^77, but other researchers were able to get lactamase activity in just 10^9 attempts in a library of antibodies:
This means Axeâs estimate was off by 68 orders of magnitude.
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Iâm not sure what a threshold would be here, but the interactions of particles do depend on quantum effects, for chemical events as well as high-energy collisions. Theyâre predictable only statistically, so any single event should in fact be influenced by quantum randomness. And this would apply to the action of DNA polymerase and the length of time an incorrect base remains in the pocket. So I think youâre wrong there.
Mind and will? What are those? And what do they have to do with quantum events?
Itâs certainly meaningless for your God. But what does it mean for God to create/decide everything? If youâre talking about setting up the initial conditions, it would seem that quantum effects would indeed be important, and the uncertainty principle would prevent the initial conditions from being exactly determined, even by God. Or does God actually control every event rather than just having set the clockworks running?
Iâve thought about that, and I donât see it.
Ionizing radiation breaks the chemical bonds in DNA which leads to mutations. It is my understanding that quantum mechanics describes the probability of that particle striking a specific base in a DNA molecule. The same would apply for the interactions between polymerases and the incoming bases which occurs at the sub-angstrom level.
Itâs hardly necessary to demonstrate it when I can just round up to the next order of magnitude without it making any difference.
Youâre making the argument for theological fatalism. Iâve already outline a scenario showing how that argument fails. The argument doesnât work if God knows the future by direct observation being outside of time, and I can show that quite clearly. Also, Iâm not sure itâs relevant to the point Iâm making here since Craig rejects that argument for the same reasons I do, though I donât agree that Molinism ultimately works the way he thinks it does. Ironically, I found a pretty obvious inconsistency stemming from his rebuttal to theological fatalism here. Craigâs argument there against theological fatalism requires that Godâs creative decree precede his Middle Knowledge. Molinism however is explicitly structured as Godâs Middle Knowledge preceding His creative decree. Craig doesnât appear to realize his argument here pretty clearly requires the Calvinist ontology rather than the Molinist. I bet thatâs more than you bargained for though, lol.
Um, Iâm a YEC. That means I think God created everything the way He wanted initially and random mutations degraded it thereafter. YECs do not have a problem here. Iâm working within alternative views like TE/EC and progressive creation for the purposes of this conversation. If it doesnât work in those scenarios, then weâre in agreement.
The structure of DNA was discovered in 1953. Iâm not sure what youâre getting at here. That was almost 70 years ago. Weâve known the physical basis for mutations since then. If your description of mutations doesnât include that knowledge then itâs woefully out of date.
Itâs not wrong. Itâs just not sufficient to describe what we know mutations are today. Today we know that mutations are random with respect to their position on the genome in addition to being random with respect to usefulness to the organism. The position of bases and residues in the sequence are absolutely crucial as to their function and design. Why is Crispr/CAS9 such a big deal? Because itâs a way to specify mutations with respect to their position on the genome. Random mutations, even in the epistemic sense, are not specified in that way.
Funny you should mention this. Thereâs a YEC named Robert Carter who recently argued exactly the same thing. He even titled it âMutations are not as random as you think.â. He references a paper there where the largest degree of difference in the mutation rate is 5X. For one thing thatâs not a huge difference. For another, that still fits within my definition of random as meaning âwith respect to its position on the genome.â The rate increasing or decreasing in various places only changes the probabilistic resources applicable to those small areas of the genome. It doesnât change the fact that point mutations still occur randomly in the sense I describe. I actually disagree with some of the YECs here who are trying to argue that God pre-programmed time delayed mutational changes into populations from the beginning in almost exactly the same way some IDers used to argue, which they called âfrontloading.â I personally donât see a lot of evidence for that and I donât really understand why some YECs have become enamored with it. Randy Guliuzza, who just took over ICR, is another example. The evidence he gives for what is essentially frontloading includes the fact that alligator eggs have temperature sensitive sex determination. I mean, if thatâs all youâve got⌠To me, as I stated above, YEC is uniquely positioned to argue the most scientific position available, namely that God implemented His intended design from the very beginning and never intervened, at least on a broad scale, thereafter. This scenario introduces none of the epistemic issues entailed by either evolutionary theory or something like progressive creation.
If you have a legitimate critique of his paper, feel free to publish it. Iâm sure many people here would thank you.
I feel confident answering questions 1 and 6.
Axe started with a mutant that was at the edge of stability because that represents the base of the fitness peak, which would be the key step in an actual evolutionary scenario. He designed the screens to explore the base of the fitness peak, not the peak itself, because there should be far more weakly functional variants than highly functional ones. Thatâs both reasonable and generous.
Axeâs work has been generalized, though not by him. Brian Miller explains here. Turns out Axe was almost exactly correct, and we can probably have confidence the generalization (1/3)^n where n is the length of the folding domain is accurate because his work arrived at that number in an experimental context without using the same reasoning.
I understand the point, and I agree that if the goal is only something broad and general, such as âprofitâ, the casino does not have to decide which individual gamblers will win or lose. But what if the goal is something specific? What if the casino manager wants his family members, or his friends, or James Bond, to win, and wants certain other people to lose?
The parallel with evolution would be: what if God wanted the world to contain elephants, Indian fox-bats, aye-ayes, moose, orangutans, Gila monsters, and other specific things?
On BioLogos, one of the regular commenters was âbeagleladyâ, who idolized Ken Miller (the guy famous for his suggestion that if evolution had produced intelligent mollusks instead of man that might have been sufficient for God), was once asked what specific results God wanted out of evolution. Did he want, for example, elephants? She refused to comment on whether God wanted elephants, and answered vaguely and elusively, to the effect that God wanted a world with lots of diversity of life. In other words, God had only a general goal, not a set of fixed outcomes that he wanted. So if the accidents of random mutation had produced unicorns instead of horses, or if elephants had never come into being, or if no winged mammals had evolved, that would have been fine. God put enough âjuiceâ into evolution that it would produce a lot of variety, but exactly what variety, he didnât predetermine, and didnât particularly care about. That was her view, as far as one could make it out from her inexact and evasive language.
Her view that is it only the overall output of evolution, rather than the specific list of its products, that God cared about, reminds me of your casino analogy. Her God is somewhat like your casino manager in his indifference to who wins or who loses (i.e., which species emerge and which donât). And itâs possible that the universe is ruled by a God like that. The difficulty is that this is not how the vast majority of Christians, and of Christian theologians, have conceived of Godâs will, plans, intentions, etc. The idea that God said to the world, âI gave you the potential to explore evolutionary search space randomly; so come up with something interesting and surprise me!â is simply not the usual conception of what creation, omnipotence, sovereignty, the divine will, etc. have meant in the Christian tradition. Maybe the Christian tradition is wrong, but for those who hold to it, such a laissez-faire conception of Godâs relationship to evolution can never be acceptable.
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@RonSewell, I think both you and @nwrickert are over-interpreting my use of âspecificâ. All I meant was that (in the scenario of ionising radiation mutation) mutation X arose from quantum event Y.
But the stochastic nature of mutations (granted its dependence on quantum events) cuts through to the core question on ontological randomness. Stochastic distributions are a consequence of ordered systems, classic examples being the coin toss which produces the statistical distribution by the shape of the coin and the various deterministic, but humanly uncertain actions of tossing the coin; and the statistical gas laws, which depend on the dynamics of Brownian motion in gas molecules and so on. Statistical distributions determine nothing - they are themselves determined by the characteristics of systems.
The statistical predictability of quantum events, then, suggests that even without local variables, their behaviour is in some (unknown) way ordered. That is so unless a proposed ontological randomness (in the view of @John_Harshman independent even of God) tends naturally to producing order, which was the belief of Epicurus and Co., but which remains, as I originally suggested, a mere belief in need of demonstration.
Equally valid would be Maxwellâs suggestion that individual events reflect Godâs decisions, which aggregate to result in stochastic, and therefore predictable, outcomes.
There is a question to be answered on the degree to which mutations leading, ultimately, to evolutionary outcomes âbuckâ the stochastic nature of quantum events in aggregate: is evolution overall a product of the statistical distribution of coin tosses, or a lucky sequence of heads within that random distribution? In the end, that question only affects the theological discussion if quantum events are independent of Godâs will, which depends on oneâs metaphysical opinion on ontological randomness.
In relation to theology that, in turn, is dependant on whether one accepts @John_Harshman 's deistic picture of God âsetting things up,â apparently himself subject to ontological randomness, or whether one adopts Theism, in which God is the First Cause of every event, and therefore also of any kind of ârandomnessâ one might consider exists.
I do not understand your point here. Nor do I apparently understand your other point, which seems to be that any random events that have a predictable distribution are not truly random. But that would appear to make no sense.
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Beaglelady sounds like an intelligent fellow, and that is of course nor what Ken Miller is famous for, and heâs of course entirely correct that a God might be interested in something that does not exactly square with your particular theology.
Nobody here has suggested this deliberate caricature youâve concocted, and I doubt the person youâre pharaphrasing used those words.
How about God gave the potential to explore evolutionary search space through blind physical forces, still knowing with his omniscience what would result, and that somewhere in this vast universe something like embodied moral agents(which could be what really matters, not that those moral agents happen to be primates as opposed to molluscs) would eventually evolve.
Just out of curiosity, if you can imagine yourself as a mollusc, but with the same emotions, desires, and sense of ethics and meaning of the world, the same mind, friendships, memories and so on, why should you be somehow worth less, more uninteresting, or more undesirable to God, than if youâre a bipedal furry mammal? Does your physical body really matter? Arenât people of all shapes and sizes saved? Why should there be any limit to this? What exactly counts as sufficiently Homo sapiens in overall bodily morphology and physiology to God? How literal is this âin Godâs imageâ to be taken, if literal at all?
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Thatâs not how real science works. If youâre going to be scientific, you donât just pick the papers that you like, ignore all the others, and try to shift the evidentiary burden onto someone who points out that you are ignoring the vast majority of the data.
Have you ever published in the primary scientific literature, Ben?
I donât see any empirical basis for your confidence, and wonder why you lack the confidence to answer the other questions.
Thatâs objectively and empirically false, as stability neither correlates with fitness, nor with activity.
Would you like to see a very blatant falsification of this from one of my papers, in which unlike Axe, we measured both stability and activity?
I donât see any empirical basis for using stability as a proxy for fitness. Do you?
Axe made no measurements of fitness nor activity, so that could not possibly have been the design.
IMO he designed the screen (there was only one) to get the most ridiculous number possible.
Does Miller have any relevant experience or expertise? Does Miller address my questions that you lack the confidence to address?
You have no empirical basis for claiming that. Is it a good idea to generalize from an N of one in any field?
It did no such thing. The number is an extrapolation from a single poorly conceived and poorly executed experiment.
Whatever made you believe, other than empty rhetoric, that stability correlates with activity or fitness?
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You ârounding upâ to another number, equally empirically unsupported, is no more a demonstration of anything than Axeâs provenly false one.
This is actually straightforwardly false. Stability is not the only factor affecting protein fitness, and using an artificially selected unstable protein enzyme synthetically inflates itâs sensitivity to mutation.
Ahh see, there we have it, youâve performed the switch Axe was hoping for. Youâve jumped from temperature sensitivity to âfunctionalityâ, but functionality is also contributed to by activity, and you can have highly stable yet weakly active enzymes, just like you can have unstable but highly active enzymes:
Axe was NOT measuring what you think he was. And by the way, the base of the hill is fitness, not âfunctionalityâ. Thus Axe should have measured the fitness-effect of enzymes in organisms under conditions of competitive growth at the lowest antibiotic level that measurably affects fitness, not their ability to form visible colonies on plates containing the MIC.
Another thing, the things that matters is the function, not the particular fold that employs that function. There multiple different, completely unrelated enzymes known capable of catalyzing the hydrolysis of beta-lactam antibiotics, thus extrapolating how rare functional variants of a particular fold is, says nothing about how many other folds capable of performing the same function, exist in protein sequence space.
Why have creationists not realized this themselves? Why is it necessary to have someone like me explain this to them?
No it has not, I have debunked that nonsense in this post here.
Brian Miller is straightforwardly misrepresenting the articles he is citing by completely neglecting the effect of purifying selection when mutations accumulate in proteins over time.
But thanks for bringing that presentation to my attention. I see I wrote that rebuttal to Brian Miller in February of 2019, and he has done NOTHING to correct his misapprehensions - despite previously having directly received correction here on this forum - when he did that talk on 30 of May 2019. He since posted that video on October of 2019, still with zero indication of having received correction.
This is why I consider ID-creationist âscientistsâ dishonest charlatans and pseudo-scientists.
Oh by the way, that entire presentation by Brian Miller is bad. Holy hell Batman that presentation is bad. SUPER bad. One could spend a month unpacking every misleading statement made there.
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Yes. Itâs just not clear to me why God couldnât rely on chance rather than âdesignâ in the same way God can know your future despite your free will.
Those are not mutually exclusive properties. I may go into a casino fully intending to win, but win by chance. Thus the result was both by chance, and intended. A God creating a chance process to give him what he intends seems to be still to be God creating what he intends, even moreso than me going into a casino intending to win by chance. I did not create the casino or itâs rules, I just play by them. God having created the casino knowing what it will produce, even if he does not directly steer or guide the games played within it, it can still be created to and thus be carrying out his plan.
Nope.
If youâre trying to say thereâs a scientific issue with the idea that God is controlling evolution then I agree, but thatâs not relevant to your statement that you personally have theological problems with the idea that God is guiding life.
I will just note here that Iâm not the one advocating that God is guiding lifeâs evolution. I see no reason to believe that. But I do think lifeâs evolution being a blind physical process that involves chance which God does not intervene in to guide and steer around (as if a kid nudging ants around to start a colony-war), is actually not logically incompatible with the idea that evolution as a chance process occurring in a God-created universe, has produced something God intended through that chance process.
For the same reasons you think some people can carry out the will of God with their free will. God is not making them do it, theyâre doing it themselves(otherwise in what sense is it free?), and this can be their own free choice and God can know that they would do it. Right?
If you think Godâs will and omniscience is compatible with free will, I donât see how it can be not also be compatible with chance.
Completely agree. I donât think God-guided evolution is a scientific hypothesis. Itâs a theological one, but itâs not the only possible way to square evolution with a God knowing the future and using blind physical (or âchanceâ) processes to carry out his will.
Fine with me.
Sure, thatâs one way to do that. Another is that God knows all possible worlds and their futures in His mind, and how to instantiate them, and then elected to start the one that would end up the way he wants despite involving a chance process. A process that, to us at least, appears fundamentally unpredictable for all intents and purposes.
God knows that in world W1, Bob would take certain actions that go against Godâs will, and Bob will succeed if not prevented. But God knows that in world W352, W1260110023, and infinitely many other worlds Wn, Bobâs actions donât come to fruition, so God picked the one wherein history unfolds in a way God wants.
Or God could just elect to create a world where random event B has a different outcome that God approves of. It seems to me He doesnât have to stick his fingers into the terrarium and fiddle things around. His acts can lie at picking among possible words to create. It is not logically necessary to assume he intervenes at all.
From Szostak and Hazen 2007
. In each case we observe evidence for several distinct solutions with different maximum degrees of function, features that lead to steps in plots of information versus degree of function
I fully agree with that. There are several distinct solutions even within that relatively small pool of explored sequences.
The issue is not what is taught in my theology, but in orthodox Christian theology as understood for nearly two millennia, until the Enlightenment. I already granted that God might be as Miller and beaglelady imagine; the point is that if God is that way, then orthodox Christian theology has been holding some misconceptions for a long time. And I donât mind if someone says that out loud, as, e.g., Polkinghorne does. I donât like it when itâs flirted with in an unclear way, as used to be the case at BioLogos. If you want to revolutionize Christian theology, then call for a revolution â donât pussyfoot around out of fear of evangelical reaction. I admire a good frank heretic, but not one with a guilty conscience and the practice of speaking ambiguously.
No, the person Iâm paraphrasing deliberately wrote as unclearly as possible, so that she could not be pinned down very precisely. So Iâve tried to restate what she was driving at without the guarded obfuscations. If Iâve overstated to make the point, itâs her fault for not being as precise and clear as she could have been.
Ask a Christian theologian if that scenario is compatible with Godâs sovereignty over creation. Thatâs as if God went into the casino intending to create a biological population capable of bearing His image, got one by chance and said, âWow! Lucky me!â This is not the doctrine of creation according to pretty much anybody, even the people youâre defending. So thank you for making clear their error.
What does that mean âhow to instantiate themâ? This is precisely the problem with Molinism. If God took action to instantiate them then the features of that universe which are instantiated are not left to chance. He chose that universe to have certain features, and if those features could not help but exist in that universe, then it was not by chance that they existed. And if they could have not existed, then it was only by chance that they did and not by God constraining the system to ensure they existed.
Well ofc you are arguing that, because the accommodationist atheists have won the day against the militants, as any fool could have predicted from the beginning based on politics. Obviously, those who viciously exclude a large, powerful group will lose politically to those who donât. That doesnât mean the argument works and it certainly doesnât mean itâs consistent with an orthodox doctrine of creation.
Right, but knowing is not causing. The doctrine of creation requires God cause the existence of man. Honestly I think the Thomists have a better anti-ID argument than the Molinists do. At least the Thomist scenario is logically consistent within their own system. I just wish they would be more forthcoming about what their system does to the foundations of modern science. Sometimes it seems like evolutionary theory is the only thing from science they wish to defend.
This whole conversation reminds me of a really great illustration from tabletop RPG gaming. This genre of games is almost entirely dominated by d20 systems (based on a twenty-sided die). The distribution of rolls from a d20 is completely flat. That means in order to ensure at least an average roll you need modifiers added to your roll of at least +10. Modifiers get piled on modifiers until at later levels the roll doesnât even matter anymore unless you roll a natural 1 (always fails if you roll a 1 not matter the modifiers, called a critical failure).
Opposed to the d20 system is the GURPS system which uses 3d6 (three, six-sided die) which has a Gaussian distribution. With this system you donât need a lot of modifiers to usually get an average roll and thus the GURPS system is much simplerâŚby design.
So if youâre designing a tabletop RPG, you can choose your basic roll to be a d20 or a 3d6 and that is a design choice which will lead to different sorts of games with different modifier systems and a different kind of gameplay. However, that does not mean the game designer is specifying each individual die roll that players make. The individual die rolls are still random with respect to what number comes up.
Applying this to biology, that means that mutations are still random with respect to their position on the sequence. The God who creates as you suggest cannot be specifying specific mutations. As our scientific knowledge has increased, it turns out that specific mutations, biochemically, genotypically defined rather than biologically, phenotypically defined, are required in order to traverse the sequence space from peak to peak because the probabilistic resources of the system (in the analogy this is the type of die rolls used) are not enough to specify the intended outcome.
That is why you argue so hard that Axe is wrong. You know that if heâs right, then this line of reasoning follows. Axe has to be wrong or intelligent design theory is correct.
My problem with people like Craig is that theyâve accepted the probabilistic argument of ID but donât accept the conclusion Iâve drawn here and instead are playing word games with the definition of ârandom.â
He used fitness, defined in terms of beta-lactamase activity, as a proxy for the stability of the fold, not the other way around. Perhaps youâre right that I shouldnât so blithely correlate fitness and thermodynamic stability of protein folds. The latter is important and the former is increasingly irrelevant and part of a dying paradigm.
Dear me, I try to write as clearly as I can, but one canât always win. The problem is in your phrase âtruly random,â which assumes the existence of some absolute quality of ârandomnessâ which is revealed in probability models. However, that is not how things work in the real world, where ârandom distributionâ has to do with our ignorance, in a particular circumstance, of the true causes of a particular event.
Take a typical biological situation with a near-gaussian distribution, such as adult human height:
The charts represent our knowledge about one characteristic of 511 men and 246 women. My (or your) position on that graph is entirely determined by particular causes, of which many are known to science, and some not: but very many of which are not easily amenable to investigation in individuals, though purely determined by laws and conditions. If we assume an individual is represented by the charted population, we can make a better estimate of his/her height than we could without the chart.
But more knowledge of the individual would change that prediction. For example, on the centile charts used for children in medicine, there is often a handy calculator to predict adult age from the heights of parents, with a margin of error presumably representing the other variables such as nutrition, childhood illness and so on.
Knowledge of parental height, therefore, changes the probability distribution from that illustrated for unselected males and females, though the individual has not changed: so probability curves illustrate degrees of [lack of] knowledge of individual cases compared to knowledge of populations, and nothing more.
Not knowing anything about me, and assuming I was a US male, from the chart you would predict my most probable height at 71 inches, apparently. If you gained extra knowledge from a centile record in my childhood, you would modify that prediction to between, say, 66 and 70 inches. That is because of new information: nothing would have changed in the real world.
But in fact in the real world I have a 100% probability of being 68.5 inches, because of all the causes determined by my genes and life experience, which are in no way random. Likewise they are in no way random for any other human being measured for that chart - IF we knew all those causes we could predict the height exactly, not probabilistically. And so it is the particular physical properties of the system (in this case human growth) that determine the mathematical distribution, and not ârandomnessâ that determines how tall individuals are likely to be.
In fact, if one takes away knowledge of an individualâs sex, the combined probability looks less gaussian, even though the data is from the same phenomenon:
And that takes me back to your first inability to understand: if randomness represents our ignorance of precise causation, but God has full knowledge of that causation at every stage because he is the cause of all things, then he is the âcauseâ of that ârandomnessâ - meaning only that we donât know every cause that he creates, but he does.
That differs from a deistic view in which God only sets up the game, and could conceivably be ignorant of how it plays out in detail, especially if there is some more mysterious kind of ârandomnessâ that makes events unknowable to God. But I canât see how how probability theory in any way reveals the existence of that latter kind of randomness.