Some Microorganisms Can Bend Rules of Evolution

The notion that gene transfer does not lead to an increase in genetic information is odd, because it does to the organism receiving the new genetic material from another organism, and therefore to its offspring. I know it’s a creationist commonplace, but complexity arising from recombining a relatively small set of elements can result in a very large and complex genome.

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As far as I’m aware, this has never been observed. It’s fantasy.

So then why doesn’t the scientific community explain that to the public?

Basically scientists are taking arguments from design (fossil record, DNA comparison, and trees), applying them to “1” and inferring common descent and deep evolutionary history.

Creationists are saying - we’ve proved that this inference is shown to be impossible through simulations and observation of mutation rates.

And then the general public says that they’re liars.

It’s really disgusting and weird.

Well, HE does it, that’s why he is confused.

Problems: first, those aren’t arguments from design. Second, you seem to use “inferring” as if it’s the same as “guess I pulled from my ass”; all science is inference.

But their “proofs” are faulty, as has been shown here on many occasions. If you refuse to learn, you will learn nothing. But don’t blame the people who are trying to teach you for that.

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They do. I just did, others here have done so many times. There are entire books, tv programs, and websites devoted to explaining technical concepts related to evolution to the general public. Here’s such a website: Understanding Evolution - Your one-stop source for information on evolution

No. Simply not true. And I’m sorry to say but your statement there doesn’t even make any coherent sense. Scientists are not taking “arguments from design” (whatever you mean by that), and neither the fossil record, nor DNA comparisons, nor phylogenetic trees constitute “arguments from design”. Furthermore, none of these are “applied to (1)”.

The inferences of common descent and deep evolutionary history is from the fossil record, and from the DNA comparisons(like it is done in this link).

Yes creationists say a lot of things which are wrong. You can also find people who say that they’ve proved the Earth is flat.

Having interacted with creationists on the internet now for over 10 years, I have to say that it becomes increasingly difficult to entertain the idea that some of the more egregious cases are just mere examples of sincere misguidance. I don’t think all, nor even the majority of creationists are liars or dishonest, but I do think some of them are. Repeat offenders who continue to repeat the same falsehoods over and over again really do deserve the charge of dishonesty in my opinion.

Your immune system relies on recombination to generate new antibodies to fight off invading pathogens, so not only has this been observed, it is happening inside your body as we speak. Over the course of your life you will encounter and evolve resistance to an increasing number of pathogens, gaining novel antibody genes partly through a process known as VDJ recombination throughout your entire life.

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Who is “we”?

On that question there are only hints, but that’s an addition to @Toni_Torppa’s problem, which was bacteria to humans. Now as for phylogeny, there’s the fossil record and there are genomes. (There’s other evidence, but that’s the main thing.) You have been exposed to quite a bit of that, but you have rejected it because it doesn’t fit your idea of Genesis. Is there any point in exposing you to more of it? You may, for example, recall the tree of primates I posted recently. It came from here.

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And for that reason, @Toni_Torppa is correct to raise the flag and cry foul. To try and get a creationist on board with your definition of evolution is to get them to prematurely admit to 1) something they do not fully understand or 2) something you are not giving full disclose of.

Evolution has no place in the belief system of a creationist, I don’t care how much you massage or change the definition.

Never played with Lego?

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No he is not, because nobody did what he complained about anywhere. If you disagree, please point out by quoting the passage you think was intended to present evidence for (2) but actually presented evidence for (1). No such statement can be found in this thread.

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Where’d the Lego blocks come from? Do the lego blocks build themselves into a castle?

Yes, if you had evidence, you’d be giving it to me.

They’re looking at designed organisms in the present, and comparing them. I was watching a debate between Venema and Jeanson last night and this morning. I haven’t finished it, but all I see so far is that we have one computer programmer who is running one program. He decides to turn off and on certain parts of the program. I have a brother who is a computer programmer. He’s taken months to learn a new program. It would be rather arbitrary of God to create several programs. None of us would do so if we were the original designer. Studying cosmology, it seemed to me that the right answers scientists have been getting the last 150 years were not complex and beautiful but simple and beautiful.

Not denying that - is it creating a very large and complex genome though?

So you say, and obviously I disagree about whether the organisms are designed. In fact I think the results of the comparisons they do, the patterns that emerge when doing the comparisons, constitutes evidence against the assertion that these organisms were designed. Such as the link I gave you earlier that shows that the differences in DNA sequences between humans and our primate cousins are really best explained as the product of biochemical mutations in DNA. A link you clearly have yet to click on and read.

But it seems to me this is besides the point. I corrected you on what was a totally wrong statement to make.

Then I have to say that I don’t think that what you’ve “seen so far” is all that much. For example you’ve apparently seen none of the contents of any of the links I’ve supplied in this thread.

I have to say I consider your speculations on what God would do(or what you would do in God’s place as a designer) as incredibly doubtful at best, if not totally irrelevant to what we have been discussing in this thread so far.
I don’t think there’s any good reason why God, if different species were independently created, would nevertheless design them to fit into a nested hierarchy, or exhibit consilience of independent phylogenies, or with DNA sequence differences that look like they’re the result of biochemical mutations. But I’m sure you’ll have no problem convincing yourself of that if that’s what you feel you need to do to reject evolution.

Irrelevant, but fascinating I’m sure.

Recombination is one among several (though not the only or solely responsible) mechanisms that can be shown to contribute to an increase in genome size, by resulting in novel, functional genetic elements. In some sense that is what has happened with your immune system throughout your life. VDJ recombination has contributed to creating novel antibody-encoding genes carried by your immune cells, thus technically increasing the amount of functional information encoded by cells in your immune system.

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The Lego analogy was quite specifically about combining already existing genes to create genetic novelty.

It was never intended as an analogy for every process in ‘microbes to man’. Check the context: I was specifically responding to the claim that horizontal gene transfer cannot lead to genetic novelty, which is plainly wrong.

A good-faith approach to origins discussion - which I understand to be the raisson d’etre of this forum - involves seeking to understand more than seeking to dismiss.

If my analogy is fatally flawed in explaining its specific target concept then I hope to be corrected. But seeking to dismiss it in terms of something some distance from what it was seeking to explain is not especially productive.

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Read the link I gave you.

Why would I do anything so futile, since you ignore all evidence presented to you? But all right. Such evidence must necessarily come in pieces, because the road from bacteria (an oversimplification) to humans is quite long. I’ve already given the evidence for the later steps in this thread, but here it is again. As for the earliest bits, try this. You will of course reject it out of hand.

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Looks like professionals have also rejected it

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09482

Although his attempt is the first step towards establishing the UCA theory with a solid statistical basis, we think that the test of Theobald2 is not sufficient enough to reject the alternative hypothesis of the separate origins of life,

However, we point out that there is a fundamental flaw in Theobald’s method which used aligned sequences. We show that the alignment gives a strong bias for the common ancestor hypothesis,

Thus, homology (common origin) of the compared proteins remains an inference from sequence similarity rather than an independent property demonstrated by the likelihood analysis.

Well, actually someone did. It’s just that… it was him.

When I read YEC comments such as those in these current trend, I remain glad I dropped that belief system years ago. The brainwashing is deep and it doesn’t allow them clearly look at the evidence presented that contradicts their claims. You correct some misconception, they never take it, but keep on reciting it over and over, wishing that falsehood would become truth. When I read this comment from @toni-torppa, saying:

Bacterial antibiotic resistance indicates that evolution is going in the wrong direction from the point of view of evolutionary theory. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is based on disruption of an already existing function and therefore cannot be used as a basis for evolution from microbes to humans, which would be the most important point of view for evolutionary theory.

You get a classic demonstration of my claim of them not listening to correction. There is no wrong direction when it comes to evolution. If a given direction (say antibiotic resistance) improves the fitness of an organism, evolutionary forces push that organism in that direction. Evolution has no specific goal or direction.

@John_Harshman, @Rumraket, @CrisprCAS9, @cwhenderson, it’s not easy trying to help these guys. I can read remember reading evolutionary biology literature and going back to creationist websites to look for “refutations” on whatever topic was been discussed. They don’t really understand the evidence against their position. Keep sharing those links though, the papers are cool to read. I am seriously enjoying my time here thanks to you guys and others.

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