Some Microorganisms Can Bend Rules of Evolution

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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Ultimately we aren’t helping the ones we’re talking to, but the ones we’re not lurking in the background. The YECs that you see actively arguing are not going to be convinced by any amount of evidence, because they weren’t convinced of YEC on the basis of evidence in the first place. Rather, they need some other switch to flip, and I’m not equipped to help them there. But what I can do is make sure the others see immediate corrections to the YEC nonsense, so the ones who are interested in evidence fall out on the right side of things.

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Did you read Theobald’s responses?

Here.

I’m reading. Hopefully I can get through the papers linked on this thread tomorrow.

Actually, the creationist scientists do understand, they took courses with people telling them the same thing.

You don’t understand that we have to figure out your position and our own science while you consider us the brainwashed ones.

We just live in parallel universes - yours is that random chance with no direction leads to beautiful diversity. Ours is that design plus entropy leads to beauty and diversity but yet organisms die because we can only adapt so far. Evil in the world means that even bacteria can evolve bending the rules, so that we can’t get ahead of it.

Only one of these parallel universes is actually real.

I was just thinking about this - the problem is that there is no fitness here. That’s precisely why the rules were bent, if I’m understanding it right. This research just made bacterial evolution in deep time less plausible. Don’t you think so @CrisprCAS9?

Why do you make that conclusion?

This is similar to neutral theory that was introduced in the 1970s, but on the level of HGT rather than point mutations. The concept that evolution can occur without direct and immediate selection has been known for about 50 years.

Evolution isn’t just natural selection, High levels of allele change, be it through mutation, migration, or HGT will maintain alleles that aren’t at selective optima. This isn’t ‘bending’ evolution, at least not as evolution has been understood for the past 50+ years.

No, I don’t see any reason to think it’s less plausible given this data. Why do you think it does?

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I agree with you here. When I was a creationist (first YEC, later OEC), I simply refused to be open-minded with regards to the claims of evolutionary biology. Of course, consuming creationist literature (not AIG or CMI surprisingly) kept me “convinced” of my creationist stance. All it took for me to consider that evolution may be the right answer was to learn that humans can’t make 10 amino acids out of the 20 naturally occurring amino acids. I kept on asking why God didn’t give us the capacity to do so. That’s when creationism stopped making complete sense to me. It got worse when I learnt that we can’t make vitamin C, not because we lack the biosynthetic pathway, but due to the pathway being broken. I checked the creationist literature at the the time and the most common response was that genetic entropy made us lose the vitamin C biosynthetic pathway, but I was still left unsatisfied with this answer. The question that kept tugging at me was why the GULO gene pseudogenized in a way that confirms shared ancestry with other great apes?

Needless to say, I accept the claims of evolutionary biology now. The writings of Ken Miller, Don Prothero, Larry Moran and Jerry Coyne (and a bit of Dawkins) were instrumental to gaining a somewhat good understanding of the theory. Now I have got PeacefulScience too. Sweet😁

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Sure some “creationist scientists” have degrees in relevant fields, but their deep-seated ideology prevents them from looking at the evidence unbiased. I have friends who took the same basic science classes with me on the evidence for a globe earth, yet they refuse to believe the earth is a globe. They resort to crackpot conspiracy theories like faked moon landings to explain away inconvenient data.

What do you mean by “our own science”? Are you suggesting that the scientific method works differently for creationists? If you are, that’s plain ridiculous. Creationists are the ones who live in a parallel universe, where an ancient book written by people who had basically no clues on how the world works somehow supersedes the scientific method.

Quick correction again. Evolution is not entirely random. Natural selection is a non-random evolutionary force that equips organisms with adaptations needed to survive and reproduce within a given environment. Natural selection and other relevant forces can (and have) generated the beauty we see in nature today.

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You know, now is a good time to finally confront all evolutionists with a contradiction in their philosophy that has bothered me from the beginning. Look at the phrase above, “needed to survive”. Thus, “survival” is a goal. Goals speak of direction.

Why should an organism want to “survive”? And since the evolutionist keeps insisting that organisms want to “survive”, then you are conceding that evolution is goal-oriented. It has direction - namely, survival.

Please explain this mysterious evolutionary “force” that is “pushing” in a certain “direction”? Then please explain how your next phrase, “Evolution has no specific goal or direction” does not undo and contradict everything you just said?

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Not really. Not interested that much. A huge claim like “UCA has been proven, or confirmed” needs huge confirmation and I already know evolutionists do not possess that kind of confirmation. When I read the rebuttals that the computer simulations were pre-biased toward UCA, it brought everything into focus.

But it is more than that. Computer simulations really do not, nor can they, prove anything. Evolutionists jump to conclusions not warranted by the data, and certainly not warranted by the means and methods used to arrive at those data.

So when do you suppose evolution is going to fix this problem in humans?

So when do you suppose evolution is going to fix this problem in humans?

That question tugs at me in a completely different manner. If God created humans and the great apes as separate kinds in the beginning but based their creation on the same or similar genetic template, then Creation science actually predicts exactly the outcome we see in GULO genes.

Advice. Don’t label me “brainwashed” until you investigate what belief system you have washed your own brains with.

Do you believe that (2) the main argument of Darwin’s theory, or “evolution” → theory, “that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source” is true or at least the most scientific explanation of the evidence?

Do you also consider changes in allele frequency in a population to be evolutionary (1)?

Two different definitions that can be called by the same “word” and I guess you also believe in both. This confirms my point.

In addition, Wikipedia confirms my point. There (2) evidence is provided by, among other things, bacterial antibiotic resistance, changes in allele frequency, etc. (so-called microevolution / modification). In other words, wikipedia works exactly as I presented and wikipedia is one of the most common use of human sources. Evidence of common descent - Wikipedia

from your paper:

“How can a peptide with a short transmembrane-helix cause an increase in resistance to a whole class of antibiotics? It is known that aminoglycoside uptake relies on the membrane potential and that resistance can be conferred by reducing the membrane potential, and conceivably these peptides could act in a similar way”

so basically this is some kind of function loss.

are we talking about new binding sites, or variations of existing binding sites or something else?

Please explain how a compulsion for survival constitutes a contradiction in the philosophy of evolution.

Life sorta selects for those organisms and populations that strive for survival. What do you think would happen to an individual organism or a population of organisms that no longer did anything necessary for survival?

The obvious meaning is that the pathway for survival is not pre-selected. Any mechanism that increases survival rate is favored in the long term. This is not a difficult concept.

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It amazes me how you continually refuse to read any of the scientific evidence presented here yet still claim no such evidence exists. Must be a Creationist thing.

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