It doesn't say that they same exact mutations happened. It says that 700 mutated in some way to get back some of the same sort of functionality. We've done many many "knockout" experiments like this before and had similar results: various new solutions to the broken system crop up. Usually they are innovative and surprising new solutions. It's certainly possible that if you delete an A from the DNA, it will randomly mutate and return: that's not surprising either. But by and large it will solve the problem in a different way, and that's exactly what we are seeing here.
What's important to understand is that there are many many functionally identical genetic sequences. Proteins can vary wildly in their amino acid sequence but still fold the same way. There are many many ways to accomplish the same thing.
I think you are missing what random means. Random doesn't mean without any causal connection to anything whatsoever: it doesn't really even mean unpredictable (know all the causal conditions and a random dice throw is predictable).
What is means is that mutations are not directly correlated with anything having to do with functional needs. Chemical bonds like DNA don't "know" anything about the larger functional structure they are a part of, and they don't act like they do. And this experiment doesn't show anything otherwise. MILLIONS of mutations, and only 700 were of the short that improved function, and it sounds like they did so in different ways. That's precisely in line with the idea that mutation is random, not in contradiction to it.
"Miller-Urey only showed that the amion-acids could be produced by "accident". Of course, it proved this by going through a lot of hard work to make them."
Well no, not really. Until them, we didn't know that the basic amino acids will form under some fairly pedestrian chemical conditions. Miller and Urey DIDN'T sit down and build them: they instead set up an environmental condition and they came about by themselves. That's only a tiny piece of the picture in the field of abiogenesis, but it was most definately a fascinating surprise that changed the way we thought about organic molecules.
"What it dosen't accout for it the information."
This has become the latest creationist trope, but it's complete nonsense.
Define "information" any way you like, and evolution produces it. It's mathetically demonstrable, we do it all the time in practice when we use genetic algorithms, and we observe it in nature. Generating new information is a BASIC function of the evolutionary process (depending on how you define information, it's either random mutation ITSELF, or the outcome of natural selection). Heck, the article here describes it happening. It might not phrase it in the language of information, but when the demands of an environmental pressure is imprinted onto a gene pool, that's an information increase in the gene pool (information about the environment).
"Once DNA would be formed out of the acids it has to code for orgenelles and cell walls and whatever else."
Well, eventually, but almost certainly not right away. You're imagining that early life would immediately need to become like life today. Almost certainly, that amount of complex cell structure was not there at the beginning. Single celled life ruled the world far longer than the multicelluar life and complex single-celled structures we have today.
"Even the scientists that support Evolution are having a hard time coming up with an explination with where the information came from, not just the medium it is carried on."
As I said, no. Information is trivial. What you are probably referring to is that we don't know how specifically early life arose, largely because we just don't have much to go on to direct us in one direction or another. But like most things in science, we're working on it, and fascinating discoveries and insights happen almost every other month.
And this exactly what I was talking about in regards to the ambiguity over whether some genetic change is good or bad. Normally this condition is considered a bad thing. But for the members of the tribe that have the condition, they claim its an advantage. Who is right?
"The difference between micro and macro evolution would be significant if random mutation and natural selection cannot explain a natural phenomenon."
???
"If you cannot add up a bunch of small changes into a larger change within that framework, that would be a major challenge for Darwinism."
Well, sure, in that particular case. But we already know that and how this process can and does work in many cases.
"The Intelligent Design concept of irreducible complexity would be how you falsify Darwinism. But that isn't science, so Darwinism must not be either."
First of all, it isn't really an ID concept: as you quoted, Darwin was the first one to state it. If it were shown to be the case, that would be evidence against evolution, but not FOR Intelligent Design. So don't confuse the fact that ID isn't science with whether or not evolution is falsifiable.
One of the reasons evolution is so certain is precisely because it is so potentially falsifiable, and yet all the evidence keeps coming up for it, even though it would theoretically be very very easy for it not to. It just doesn't, in practice. That's very telling.
Well, sort of, but not quite. What took us here was an inference based on evidence that then turned out to be grander and better supported than even the people who first discovered it realized. Just having a neat idea wasn't enough though: it was that the evidence all came together behind it.
Your belief isn't necessarily wrong in any sense, but what it certainly is untestable. Yes, if God wanted to, God could make human beings look exactly like they evolved from apes. But God can by definition do anything, so the same argument could be used to support the idea that God decides the outcome of every baseball game and only makes it LOOK like it's about the choices of the players, or literally anything, down to God creating all reality, complete with our memories, ten seconds ago. The best we can say about such ideas is that there is no evidence against them. But there is certainly no evidence for it, and given that an alternative explanation exists that does have plenty of evidence supporting it, it's entirely unecessary.
The problem is also that humans are a little of X, a little of B, a little or A. They are all 100% ape. Everything that applies to all apes, that set apes apart uniquely from other creatures, also applies to humans. Like all apes, they have their particular additional variations on top of the basal form, but humans beings are built in every way to look exactly like you'd expect of something that _evolved_ from apes, right down to the very particular genetic code in sections of DNA that could vary without any particular effect on function.
"A lot of them ass hats like Bill Maher who seem to think that if you don't accept the current beliefs on evolution that you're some kind of religious throw back."
Again, I think you're simply simplifying these people's views in order to make them easier to attack. Even Bill Maher doesn't JUST think that you must believe in evolution or you're an idiot. He thinks that the particular reasons that people claim evolution is false are idiotic and that you can't just look at a huge body of evidence and go "well, so what, I know better" without offering anything better and expect to be respected. Could all of evolution be completely wrong? Anything is possible. But at this point, you have to have some sort of positive case. And the people who style themselves creationists and id theorists just don't. Furthermore, their conduct and rhetoric is very often dishonest, slimy, and slanderous. I don't fault people who get angry and critical of them and their tactics.
"Have you ever actually read through the evolution threads on this site!? Although my generalization may have been too sweeping as was written, the exact kind of ignorance, blind zeal and arrogance flows through the evolution camp as much as it does the creationist camp."
I don't agree. Those arguing for evolution generally marshall evidence and argument pretty well, for laypeople. That's probably because they've put some time and effort into learning and understanding what they are talking about.
"As far as Behe is concerned, what he says about the flagella is not nearly as interesting as say the human eye. "
Well that's funny, because we know a heck of a lot more about the eye than we do about the evolution of the flagella. Eyes don't fossilize either, but they do have a much more recent and easy to derive history so that we can get a sense of the general
"On top of that, I see no issue with comparing biological creatures to machines. That's what they are from my perspective."
It's stretching an already weak analougy too far, trying to sneak in ideas of interlocking parts that simply are not very applicable to how actual biological structures work. Are machine parts capable of being specified in extremely redundant different ways, most identical? Can they acquire new functions while retaining old ones? Are they set in a soup of chaotic reactions subject to quantum effects and the strange laws of chemistry?
"It's not like the guy has published a single article and he's certainly not alone."
You're right: it's not like the guy has published a single article... substantiating his concept. He wrote a popular book who's peer review, under court review turned out to be laughable. He published one paper that under oath he had to admit demonstrated exactly the opposite of what he claimed it had.
"I get to define what I feel is "real" evidence as much as you do. "
Not when you evidence consists of misunderstanding basic factual concepts.
"Science, like religion, politics and journalism is rife with bias from most scientists. Bias isn't malicious either, it's merely human nature. Everyone picks what they choose to believe. History has shown that many scientists picked wrong. It happens. It doesn't make them less intelligent or even less qualified. Theories (even wrong ones) have to be made and tested to bring us to the truth."
Sure, it happens. But in order to prove something that's well established wrong, you can't just say "I don't believe it!" You have to advance a decent argument as to why it's wrong. You certainly haven't done that here, and the vast majority of biologists feel that Behe has failed to do so either. What he's done is presented a case that is pitched at the misunderstandings of laypeople.
And don't even get me started on hacks and liars like Dembski. His whole shtick is to claim that this or that is true, "prove" it in front of laypeople with math that they can't follow that is only there to impress them. But when actual mathematicians look
You're telling me that dung beetles are the only species on the entire planet that ever developed the behavior of rolling balls of dung around for a living? And that isn't statistically relevant? Seriously? Dung beetles are the chosen ones!
I have to bite on this one though. Why and who would specially create humans and just so happen to make them in every single respect an ape? Why would there be an obvious fossil record showing a gradual progression towards more and more humanlike species from the basal ape form?
I mean, it's one thing to make some random neato being. It's quite another to create them to look EXACTLY as if they fit into the evolutionary chain, right down to a very particular place in that chain, complete with elements unique to apes (like the distinctive shape of our molars)
Remember that movie Unbreakable with Bruce Willis? Me neither. But there is a family on Connecticut with a mutation to their bones that makes them super-dense and basically unbreakable. They are being studied in the hopes of finding a cure to osteoperosis.
Or how about a tribe in africa who all have mutations to the feet to make them basically super-padded with only two major toes, sort of like bird feet. They claim to be able to run faster and climb trees better because of it.
The list goes on and on (and these are just some of the REALLY dramatic mutational changes, which are relatively very rare: by and large "positive" mutations are much less dramatic, accumulating incrementally towards some advantageous direction rather than appearing suddenly). Of course, as with all things, whether something ultimately proves beneficial is contextual.
We don't know. Not to our knowledge, but on the other hand, we haven't been trying very hard. We've successsfully mated some fairly distant species, like camels and llamas, but it took LOTS of artificial effort in a lab. We've never put that much effort into humans and chimps: no effort at all that I know of. So we can't say defintively no. We have different chromosome amounts, but that's not a bar to reproduction elsewhere, like in domestic horses and wild ones.
Problem is, it's never that simple. There are many many other possibilities:
1) you can breed with someone and the offspring are fertile with either parent species 2) you can breed with someone and only some of the offspring are fertile, some are sterile with one parent species, but not with the other 3) you can breed with someone and only some of the offspring are fertile, some are sterile with one species, some are sterile EXCEPT with other hybrids 4) you can breed with someone and some of the offspring are fertile, some are sterile, some self-abort 5) you can breed with someone... and so on. All the way until breeding doesn't work. There's no bright line, and worse, the only way to find out any of these things is to try a lot and see what works. Sometimes animals that have never been able to breed together will unexpectedly do so. Sometimes a supposedly sterile hybrid will turn out to have a rare individual that ISN'T sterile.
And that's not even getting into the distinction of "breeding in the wild vs. breedable in the lab."
We've bred offspring from llamas and camels. And as it happens, we are not even totally sure that we cannot breed with chimps. As an illustration, when a certain chimp displayed odd traits like bipedalism, scientists were actually unsure of whether he migh tbe a chimp human hybrid. He wasn't, just an odd chimp: but the reality is that the differences between us are so small that no one knew for sure that it was impossible.
"In all the papers I have read I have yet to see anyone counter Behe's rather simple "irreducable complexity" issues in way that I could go, "Oh, okay. That makes sense." Instead, most of the counter arguments are as poor and emotionally charged as those of creationists defedning a literal interpretation of Genesis."
Of course, it's easy to characterize them that way, without actually stating any of the problems with them.
"The fascinating machines that biological organisms are just do not compute to me as a product of chaos or random placement."
It sounds like that's because you've bought into the remarkably poor analougy Behe uses in calling them "machines" in the first place.
It's interesting: if you read Behe, it sounds as if the flagella, for instance, is some remarkable single structure which only works in exactly one way: an island of function in a sea. But of course, once you look into the matter more, you find that there are many many different types of flagella with all sorts of variations of structure... and even things which have some of the same structures of flagella, but play different roles.
Once you start finding things like this, Behe's picture of things starts to fall to pieces.
"I also grow tired of the sheer arrogance of the evolution camp who appear to believe as humans that our "science" has moved to the point of infallibility."
Again, this is an accusation that's easy to make, not a fact. I've NEVER met a scientist who believed that their knowledge was complete or infaliable. In fact, scientists are probably better than ANYONE ELSE in the way they are very specific about what the evidence can and cannot tell you about something.
I think what you are mischaracterizing is not them claiming to be infaliable, but them objecting to critics who are plain dishonest about how science works or what the evidence is.
"It's the very questioning of the status quo and accepted theory that continues to allow us to advance our knowledge."
And that's the greatest irony of all. No one is questioning things more rigorously than scientists: any number of vast revisions and innovations within science have happened over just the last few decades.
Creationists and ID proponents on the other hand, are the ones repeating the same darn arguments over and over, completely immune to arguments and evidence contradicting their views. They are the ones who insist that they need not actually learn about what evolution says or what the evidence is before declaring it bunk: and when told that this is ignorant, they scream and whine. But guess what: spouting off about something you haven't bothered to understand IS ignorant.
You asked a question that itself contains any number of begged questions and misunderstandings about how evolution works and what "explaining" things involves. People have tried to explain that to you, and you don't seem to get it. That's not the same thing as not recieving an answer.
And worse, the question has almost nothing to do with whether or not humans and chimps share a common ancestor. If God gave you the power to move things with your mind, something totally unprecedented, would that mean that you are not actually descended from your grandmother? I mean, that's basically the logic you are using, and it's completely bogus.
Sigh, no. The point is that every population has its own particular spectrum of "reasons" for different traits being advantageous: it's conditional and specific. The environment of early hominids had many demands and advantages different from those of other apes living elsewhere. We don't necessarily know what those are, because information about ancient environments is limited. We still don't know why bepedialism became a dominant direction for instance (though there are lots of competing theories), but it certainly has a lot to do with how humans came to use tools so commonly.
"If you look at the traits that are unique to humans, you're hard pressed to make the arguement of how and when these traits developed via evolution, and didn't develop in other primates."
What? Humans are by all and every respect, great apes. The only major morphological difference is the little space in the roof of your mouth. Everything else is just a matter of minor size changes, re-balancings, and of course rapid (but hardly so unprecedented and inexplicable) development of the brain. The morphological differences between human beings and apes are far far smaller than even the variations within even single species elsewhere in the animal kingdom.
The rest of your argument is nigh meaningless, implying nothing at all about evolution, and REALLY saying nothing about whether or not we share a common ancestor with chimps. Yes, humans have any number of unique behaviors and traits. But so does everything else on earth. The fact that YOU are particularly enamoured of culture and art is all well and nice for you, but what is the larger conclusion here? No, we don't know EXACTLY why various cultural things developed, or exactly how. But that doesn't mean it's a complete mystery (your professor aside: professor of what, btw?), nor that there is no possible answer to the question. In fact, if you know anything about the debates over this VERY subject, you'd know that the issue is not "there's no way this could have happened!" but rather "there are too many different ways this could have happened and we all have our pet theories but not enough evidence yet to pick among them!"
Even worse, even if you were right and art and culture were miraculous creations of some other process that evolution could not explain (and there are lots of things evolution doesn't explain nor has to explain), that still wouldn't imply that humans aren't related to other apes. The fact that we are is based not on esoteric musings about culture, but hard evidential fact, from fossil to genetic, to geographic to the way all of those things match up in a very unique and undeniable pattern.
Ok, well, then the answer is simple: they're lying.
First of all, by all respects, positive mutations in practice DO happen, and indeed one can point to any number of recent examples just in humans, just recently. Tetrachromaticism in women is recent. So is the immunity to the negative effects of LDH cholesterol developed in a single man in Italy (creating descendants among whom heart disease and strokes are vanishingly shockingly rare).
Second of all, think about it logically. Mutation is random. That means that anything it can do, it can undo. So if it can have bad effects, then it can also have good effects (for instance, if one mutation breaks something by changing a T to an A, then the next mutation can change the A back to a T, thus having a positive effect).
Thirdly, creationists generally also admit that mutations can cause observeable variations in a species: longer beaks, shorter legs, etc. But any of these can have positive effects, so they've just unknowingly admitted to something they elsewhere deny.
Finally, talking about mutation and function in this way is itself misinformed. Whether or not a mutation is "beneficial" or not depends a great deal on context. A particular mutation can have a negative effect in one context, and a positive effect in another one. There are certainly mutations that very clearly are better or worse than what came before in all contexts, but by and large there is no objective measure of whether a mutation is beneficial, neutral, or positive. It all depends on a lot of other factors and how it plays out.
Re:It should be a lot cheaper than in the 60s.
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No. Again, it's just as possible to do pure research without actually wasting money on pointless goals, and a lot more cost effective. The fact that someone invented Tang doesn't make up for the fact that vast vast amounts of really important science research have been slashed in favor of a shuttle missions whose only real purpose is to bore the heck out of the public and kill astronauts.
You're wrong. Once we deploy Blackberries across Africa, everything will be better. Alternatively, the internet will solve all problems. It's just the answer to the prayers of those dying by famine.
While all DNA is fundamentally the same, it's not true that all combinations of DNA are equally safe to humans. While I sympathize with your feelings about FUD over research and creating new genetic varieties, it's also possible to go too far the other way. For instance, if you create a product via genetic engineering, I think it's fair that you should have to test it at least a little to prove that the new variety is safe and won't have other potential negative impacts: not just assume that it will be safe because it's still "rice" and "rice" is safe.
"Do you really think this corporation will just GIVE away products or the technology itself to 3rd world nations in the name of humanitarian aid? HELL NO!! How do you make money by GIVING the technology away? You can't!"
You obviously haven't read the organizational flowchart:
I don't understand the digression into Islam, but you're right about everything else.
The fact that we cutting out REAL space science exploration just so that the "we have to have a shuttle in order to get the space station!" "we have to have a space station in order for the shuttle to have somewhere to go" clusterfuck can continue is TRAGIC. Lander missions are FAR more valuable for FAR less money.
People whine about how sending humans to Mars would be much more productive than robots. What they forget is that robot missions have a much much much more restricted payload size than human missions. If we could send a robot mission with a payload of the size necessary to transport humans, their food, their air, their waste, their pure empty space for exercise, their beds, and so on, then that robot mission could STILL be way more productive and STILL cost less.
Re:It should be a lot cheaper than in the 60s.
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So? That still doesn't demonstrate that the other.90 wouldn't have been better spent on stuff like.... more research. You don't have to actually send a huge billion dollar rocket the moon to invent teflon. You can just do R&D directly. The idea that the space race created these things and so paid its way is pure fallacy.
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It doesn't say that they same exact mutations happened. It says that 700 mutated in some way to get back some of the same sort of functionality. We've done many many "knockout" experiments like this before and had similar results: various new solutions to the broken system crop up. Usually they are innovative and surprising new solutions. It's certainly possible that if you delete an A from the DNA, it will randomly mutate and return: that's not surprising either. But by and large it will solve the problem in a different way, and that's exactly what we are seeing here.
What's important to understand is that there are many many functionally identical genetic sequences. Proteins can vary wildly in their amino acid sequence but still fold the same way. There are many many ways to accomplish the same thing.
I think you are missing what random means. Random doesn't mean without any causal connection to anything whatsoever: it doesn't really even mean unpredictable (know all the causal conditions and a random dice throw is predictable).
What is means is that mutations are not directly correlated with anything having to do with functional needs. Chemical bonds like DNA don't "know" anything about the larger functional structure they are a part of, and they don't act like they do. And this experiment doesn't show anything otherwise. MILLIONS of mutations, and only 700 were of the short that improved function, and it sounds like they did so in different ways. That's precisely in line with the idea that mutation is random, not in contradiction to it.
"Miller-Urey only showed that the amion-acids could be produced by "accident". Of course, it proved this by going through a lot of hard work to make them."
m ath-dembskis-bad.html
Well no, not really. Until them, we didn't know that the basic amino acids will form under some fairly pedestrian chemical conditions. Miller and Urey DIDN'T sit down and build them: they instead set up an environmental condition and they came about by themselves. That's only a tiny piece of the picture in the field of abiogenesis, but it was most definately a fascinating surprise that changed the way we thought about organic molecules.
"What it dosen't accout for it the information."
This has become the latest creationist trope, but it's complete nonsense.
Define "information" any way you like, and evolution produces it. It's mathetically demonstrable, we do it all the time in practice when we use genetic algorithms, and we observe it in nature. Generating new information is a BASIC function of the evolutionary process (depending on how you define information, it's either random mutation ITSELF, or the outcome of natural selection). Heck, the article here describes it happening. It might not phrase it in the language of information, but when the demands of an environmental pressure is imprinted onto a gene pool, that's an information increase in the gene pool (information about the environment).
The claim that evolution cannot produce information is a garbled version of the arguments of William Dembski, whose arguments have been roundly debunked too many times to count.
http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/03/king-of-bad-
"Once DNA would be formed out of the acids it has to code for orgenelles and cell walls and whatever else."
Well, eventually, but almost certainly not right away. You're imagining that early life would immediately need to become like life today. Almost certainly, that amount of complex cell structure was not there at the beginning. Single celled life ruled the world far longer than the multicelluar life and complex single-celled structures we have today.
"Even the scientists that support Evolution are having a hard time coming up with an explination with where the information came from, not just the medium it is carried on."
As I said, no. Information is trivial. What you are probably referring to is that we don't know how specifically early life arose, largely because we just don't have much to go on to direct us in one direction or another. But like most things in science, we're working on it, and fascinating discoveries and insights happen almost every other month.
Sure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vadoma
And this exactly what I was talking about in regards to the ambiguity over whether some genetic change is good or bad. Normally this condition is considered a bad thing. But for the members of the tribe that have the condition, they claim its an advantage. Who is right?
"The difference between micro and macro evolution would be significant if random mutation and natural selection cannot explain a natural phenomenon."
???
"If you cannot add up a bunch of small changes into a larger change within that framework, that would be a major challenge for Darwinism."
Well, sure, in that particular case. But we already know that and how this process can and does work in many cases.
"The Intelligent Design concept of irreducible complexity would be how you falsify Darwinism. But that isn't science, so Darwinism must not be either."
First of all, it isn't really an ID concept: as you quoted, Darwin was the first one to state it. If it were shown to be the case, that would be evidence against evolution, but not FOR Intelligent Design. So don't confuse the fact that ID isn't science with whether or not evolution is falsifiable.
One of the reasons evolution is so certain is precisely because it is so potentially falsifiable, and yet all the evidence keeps coming up for it, even though it would theoretically be very very easy for it not to. It just doesn't, in practice. That's very telling.
Well, sort of, but not quite. What took us here was an inference based on evidence that then turned out to be grander and better supported than even the people who first discovered it realized. Just having a neat idea wasn't enough though: it was that the evidence all came together behind it.
Your belief isn't necessarily wrong in any sense, but what it certainly is untestable. Yes, if God wanted to, God could make human beings look exactly like they evolved from apes. But God can by definition do anything, so the same argument could be used to support the idea that God decides the outcome of every baseball game and only makes it LOOK like it's about the choices of the players, or literally anything, down to God creating all reality, complete with our memories, ten seconds ago. The best we can say about such ideas is that there is no evidence against them. But there is certainly no evidence for it, and given that an alternative explanation exists that does have plenty of evidence supporting it, it's entirely unecessary.
The problem is also that humans are a little of X, a little of B, a little or A. They are all 100% ape. Everything that applies to all apes, that set apes apart uniquely from other creatures, also applies to humans. Like all apes, they have their particular additional variations on top of the basal form, but humans beings are built in every way to look exactly like you'd expect of something that _evolved_ from apes, right down to the very particular genetic code in sections of DNA that could vary without any particular effect on function.
"A lot of them ass hats like Bill Maher who seem to think that if you don't accept the current beliefs on evolution that you're some kind of religious throw back."
Again, I think you're simply simplifying these people's views in order to make them easier to attack. Even Bill Maher doesn't JUST think that you must believe in evolution or you're an idiot. He thinks that the particular reasons that people claim evolution is false are idiotic and that you can't just look at a huge body of evidence and go "well, so what, I know better" without offering anything better and expect to be respected. Could all of evolution be completely wrong? Anything is possible. But at this point, you have to have some sort of positive case. And the people who style themselves creationists and id theorists just don't. Furthermore, their conduct and rhetoric is very often dishonest, slimy, and slanderous. I don't fault people who get angry and critical of them and their tactics.
"Have you ever actually read through the evolution threads on this site!? Although my generalization may have been too sweeping as was written, the exact kind of ignorance, blind zeal and arrogance flows through the evolution camp as much as it does the creationist camp."
I don't agree. Those arguing for evolution generally marshall evidence and argument pretty well, for laypeople. That's probably because they've put some time and effort into learning and understanding what they are talking about.
"As far as Behe is concerned, what he says about the flagella is not nearly as interesting as say the human eye. "
Well that's funny, because we know a heck of a lot more about the eye than we do about the evolution of the flagella. Eyes don't fossilize either, but they do have a much more recent and easy to derive history so that we can get a sense of the general
"On top of that, I see no issue with comparing biological creatures to machines. That's what they are from my perspective."
It's stretching an already weak analougy too far, trying to sneak in ideas of interlocking parts that simply are not very applicable to how actual biological structures work. Are machine parts capable of being specified in extremely redundant different ways, most identical? Can they acquire new functions while retaining old ones? Are they set in a soup of chaotic reactions subject to quantum effects and the strange laws of chemistry?
"It's not like the guy has published a single article and he's certainly not alone."
You're right: it's not like the guy has published a single article... substantiating his concept. He wrote a popular book who's peer review, under court review turned out to be laughable. He published one paper that under oath he had to admit demonstrated exactly the opposite of what he claimed it had.
"I get to define what I feel is "real" evidence as much as you do. "
Not when you evidence consists of misunderstanding basic factual concepts.
"Science, like religion, politics and journalism is rife with bias from most scientists. Bias isn't malicious either, it's merely human nature. Everyone picks what they choose to believe. History has shown that many scientists picked wrong. It happens. It doesn't make them less intelligent or even less qualified. Theories (even wrong ones) have to be made and tested to bring us to the truth."
Sure, it happens. But in order to prove something that's well established wrong, you can't just say "I don't believe it!" You have to advance a decent argument as to why it's wrong. You certainly haven't done that here, and the vast majority of biologists feel that Behe has failed to do so either. What he's done is presented a case that is pitched at the misunderstandings of laypeople.
And don't even get me started on hacks and liars like Dembski. His whole shtick is to claim that this or that is true, "prove" it in front of laypeople with math that they can't follow that is only there to impress them. But when actual mathematicians look
You're telling me that dung beetles are the only species on the entire planet that ever developed the behavior of rolling balls of dung around for a living? And that isn't statistically relevant? Seriously? Dung beetles are the chosen ones!
I disagree. While we'll never know everything, how life began on earth is in the realm of things that we well could know someday.
So what that we evolved from other primates? So knowledge and a greater appreciation of the world around us and how we fit into it.
I have to bite on this one though. Why and who would specially create humans and just so happen to make them in every single respect an ape? Why would there be an obvious fossil record showing a gradual progression towards more and more humanlike species from the basal ape form?
I mean, it's one thing to make some random neato being. It's quite another to create them to look EXACTLY as if they fit into the evolutionary chain, right down to a very particular place in that chain, complete with elements unique to apes (like the distinctive shape of our molars)
Ah yes, silly me. Thanks for the correction.
Some other interesting mutations:
Remember that movie Unbreakable with Bruce Willis? Me neither. But there is a family on Connecticut with a mutation to their bones that makes them super-dense and basically unbreakable. They are being studied in the hopes of finding a cure to osteoperosis.
Or how about a tribe in africa who all have mutations to the feet to make them basically super-padded with only two major toes, sort of like bird feet. They claim to be able to run faster and climb trees better because of it.
The list goes on and on (and these are just some of the REALLY dramatic mutational changes, which are relatively very rare: by and large "positive" mutations are much less dramatic, accumulating incrementally towards some advantageous direction rather than appearing suddenly). Of course, as with all things, whether something ultimately proves beneficial is contextual.
We don't know. Not to our knowledge, but on the other hand, we haven't been trying very hard. We've successsfully mated some fairly distant species, like camels and llamas, but it took LOTS of artificial effort in a lab. We've never put that much effort into humans and chimps: no effort at all that I know of. So we can't say defintively no. We have different chromosome amounts, but that's not a bar to reproduction elsewhere, like in domestic horses and wild ones.
Problem is, it's never that simple. There are many many other possibilities:
1) you can breed with someone and the offspring are fertile with either parent species
2) you can breed with someone and only some of the offspring are fertile, some are sterile with one parent species, but not with the other
3) you can breed with someone and only some of the offspring are fertile, some are sterile with one species, some are sterile EXCEPT with other hybrids
4) you can breed with someone and some of the offspring are fertile, some are sterile, some self-abort
5) you can breed with someone... and so on. All the way until breeding doesn't work. There's no bright line, and worse, the only way to find out any of these things is to try a lot and see what works. Sometimes animals that have never been able to breed together will unexpectedly do so. Sometimes a supposedly sterile hybrid will turn out to have a rare individual that ISN'T sterile.
And that's not even getting into the distinction of "breeding in the wild vs. breedable in the lab."
We've bred offspring from llamas and camels. And as it happens, we are not even totally sure that we cannot breed with chimps. As an illustration, when a certain chimp displayed odd traits like bipedalism, scientists were actually unsure of whether he migh tbe a chimp human hybrid. He wasn't, just an odd chimp: but the reality is that the differences between us are so small that no one knew for sure that it was impossible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_the_chimp
"In all the papers I have read I have yet to see anyone counter Behe's rather simple "irreducable complexity" issues in way that I could go, "Oh, okay. That makes sense." Instead, most of the counter arguments are as poor and emotionally charged as those of creationists defedning a literal interpretation of Genesis."
Of course, it's easy to characterize them that way, without actually stating any of the problems with them.
"The fascinating machines that biological organisms are just do not compute to me as a product of chaos or random placement."
It sounds like that's because you've bought into the remarkably poor analougy Behe uses in calling them "machines" in the first place.
It's interesting: if you read Behe, it sounds as if the flagella, for instance, is some remarkable single structure which only works in exactly one way: an island of function in a sea. But of course, once you look into the matter more, you find that there are many many different types of flagella with all sorts of variations of structure... and even things which have some of the same structures of flagella, but play different roles.
Once you start finding things like this, Behe's picture of things starts to fall to pieces.
"I also grow tired of the sheer arrogance of the evolution camp who appear to believe as humans that our "science" has moved to the point of infallibility."
Again, this is an accusation that's easy to make, not a fact. I've NEVER met a scientist who believed that their knowledge was complete or infaliable. In fact, scientists are probably better than ANYONE ELSE in the way they are very specific about what the evidence can and cannot tell you about something.
I think what you are mischaracterizing is not them claiming to be infaliable, but them objecting to critics who are plain dishonest about how science works or what the evidence is.
"It's the very questioning of the status quo and accepted theory that continues to allow us to advance our knowledge."
And that's the greatest irony of all. No one is questioning things more rigorously than scientists: any number of vast revisions and innovations within science have happened over just the last few decades.
Creationists and ID proponents on the other hand, are the ones repeating the same darn arguments over and over, completely immune to arguments and evidence contradicting their views. They are the ones who insist that they need not actually learn about what evolution says or what the evidence is before declaring it bunk: and when told that this is ignorant, they scream and whine. But guess what: spouting off about something you haven't bothered to understand IS ignorant.
You asked a question that itself contains any number of begged questions and misunderstandings about how evolution works and what "explaining" things involves. People have tried to explain that to you, and you don't seem to get it. That's not the same thing as not recieving an answer.
And worse, the question has almost nothing to do with whether or not humans and chimps share a common ancestor. If God gave you the power to move things with your mind, something totally unprecedented, would that mean that you are not actually descended from your grandmother? I mean, that's basically the logic you are using, and it's completely bogus.
Sigh, no. The point is that every population has its own particular spectrum of "reasons" for different traits being advantageous: it's conditional and specific. The environment of early hominids had many demands and advantages different from those of other apes living elsewhere. We don't necessarily know what those are, because information about ancient environments is limited. We still don't know why bepedialism became a dominant direction for instance (though there are lots of competing theories), but it certainly has a lot to do with how humans came to use tools so commonly.
That's simply nonsense. You could say the exact same thing about almost any species, you just pick different traits that are unique.
"If you look at the traits that are unique to humans, you're hard pressed to make the arguement of how and when these traits developed via evolution, and didn't develop in other primates."
What? Humans are by all and every respect, great apes. The only major morphological difference is the little space in the roof of your mouth. Everything else is just a matter of minor size changes, re-balancings, and of course rapid (but hardly so unprecedented and inexplicable) development of the brain. The morphological differences between human beings and apes are far far smaller than even the variations within even single species elsewhere in the animal kingdom.
The rest of your argument is nigh meaningless, implying nothing at all about evolution, and REALLY saying nothing about whether or not we share a common ancestor with chimps. Yes, humans have any number of unique behaviors and traits. But so does everything else on earth. The fact that YOU are particularly enamoured of culture and art is all well and nice for you, but what is the larger conclusion here? No, we don't know EXACTLY why various cultural things developed, or exactly how. But that doesn't mean it's a complete mystery (your professor aside: professor of what, btw?), nor that there is no possible answer to the question. In fact, if you know anything about the debates over this VERY subject, you'd know that the issue is not "there's no way this could have happened!" but rather "there are too many different ways this could have happened and we all have our pet theories but not enough evidence yet to pick among them!"
Even worse, even if you were right and art and culture were miraculous creations of some other process that evolution could not explain (and there are lots of things evolution doesn't explain nor has to explain), that still wouldn't imply that humans aren't related to other apes. The fact that we are is based not on esoteric musings about culture, but hard evidential fact, from fossil to genetic, to geographic to the way all of those things match up in a very unique and undeniable pattern.
Ok, well, then the answer is simple: they're lying.
First of all, by all respects, positive mutations in practice DO happen, and indeed one can point to any number of recent examples just in humans, just recently. Tetrachromaticism in women is recent. So is the immunity to the negative effects of LDH cholesterol developed in a single man in Italy (creating descendants among whom heart disease and strokes are vanishingly shockingly rare).
Second of all, think about it logically. Mutation is random. That means that anything it can do, it can undo. So if it can have bad effects, then it can also have good effects (for instance, if one mutation breaks something by changing a T to an A, then the next mutation can change the A back to a T, thus having a positive effect).
Thirdly, creationists generally also admit that mutations can cause observeable variations in a species: longer beaks, shorter legs, etc. But any of these can have positive effects, so they've just unknowingly admitted to something they elsewhere deny.
Finally, talking about mutation and function in this way is itself misinformed. Whether or not a mutation is "beneficial" or not depends a great deal on context. A particular mutation can have a negative effect in one context, and a positive effect in another one. There are certainly mutations that very clearly are better or worse than what came before in all contexts, but by and large there is no objective measure of whether a mutation is beneficial, neutral, or positive. It all depends on a lot of other factors and how it plays out.
No. Again, it's just as possible to do pure research without actually wasting money on pointless goals, and a lot more cost effective. The fact that someone invented Tang doesn't make up for the fact that vast vast amounts of really important science research have been slashed in favor of a shuttle missions whose only real purpose is to bore the heck out of the public and kill astronauts.
You're wrong. Once we deploy Blackberries across Africa, everything will be better. Alternatively, the internet will solve all problems. It's just the answer to the prayers of those dying by famine.
While all DNA is fundamentally the same, it's not true that all combinations of DNA are equally safe to humans. While I sympathize with your feelings about FUD over research and creating new genetic varieties, it's also possible to go too far the other way. For instance, if you create a product via genetic engineering, I think it's fair that you should have to test it at least a little to prove that the new variety is safe and won't have other potential negative impacts: not just assume that it will be safe because it's still "rice" and "rice" is safe.
"Do you really think this corporation will just GIVE away products or the technology itself to 3rd world nations in the name of humanitarian aid? HELL NO!! How do you make money by GIVING the technology away? You can't!"
You obviously haven't read the organizational flowchart:
1. Give money away.
2. ???
3. PROFIT!
I don't understand the digression into Islam, but you're right about everything else.
The fact that we cutting out REAL space science exploration just so that the "we have to have a shuttle in order to get the space station!" "we have to have a space station in order for the shuttle to have somewhere to go" clusterfuck can continue is TRAGIC. Lander missions are FAR more valuable for FAR less money.
People whine about how sending humans to Mars would be much more productive than robots. What they forget is that robot missions have a much much much more restricted payload size than human missions. If we could send a robot mission with a payload of the size necessary to transport humans, their food, their air, their waste, their pure empty space for exercise, their beds, and so on, then that robot mission could STILL be way more productive and STILL cost less.
So? That still doesn't demonstrate that the other .90 wouldn't have been better spent on stuff like.... more research. You don't have to actually send a huge billion dollar rocket the moon to invent teflon. You can just do R&D directly. The idea that the space race created these things and so paid its way is pure fallacy.