Why We Believe in Gods

[Guest]

But evolution by natural selection was the original claim. Yes, selection exists, whether natural or artificial. Nobody has denied that. I just took exception with the notion that all diverse lifeforms can be explained accordingly. It isn't enough for me to be shown how a beetle is a certain color due to NS, and then to be expected to buy into the claim that this same process explains the diversity of features in millions of other lifeforms.

You're really attacking a strawman here, though. No one, not even JSM, thinks that natural selection accounts for all biodiversity. Natural selection, however, is an important evolutionary process and you are much more skeptical of its capacity to account for traits than evolutionary biology is. The idea of common ancestry caused by descent with modification shaped by processes like natural selection is extremely well-grounded. Further, you seem to be setting up a dichotomy with "guided processes" on one side and "natural selection and mutation" on the other. Evolutionary biology doesn't explain anything in terms of guided processes. It's just that there's more to it than simply NS + RM. The petition you have referenced, incidentally, comes from people who have the same errors in thinking.

It is the same result, however you want to word it. But Natural selection adds nothing, it subtracts.

I gathered that's what you were going for, but your wording really wasn't ideal. It's quite accurate to say that natural selection causes certain traits to increase in prevalence through time. What it's doing is shaping the ratio of traits found in populations. Biological novelty derives from mutation (specifically duplication and divergence/recombination). Yep.

Oh really? Then what's the point of the petition, which says essentially what I just said: "We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life." Didn't these idiots pay attention in 7th grade biology?

No, those idiots at the Discovery Institute did not pay attention to 7th grade biology, as has been pointed out by many people. That petition was a PR move put together by a ID/creationist organization to inflate a sense of growing doubt of evolutionary biology. It has serious problems. I already pointed this out.

JSM only mentioned Natural Selection. I said Natural Selection alone can't explain everything. You're essentially agreeing with me here. Don't you get that yet? JSM doesn't seem to understand what natural selection really entails, if he thinks it could have played a role in abiogenesis.

First, natural selection could've played a role in abiogenesis. If you think otherwise, I think you don't understand what it entails. You don't need life to have natural selection. You need a population of replicating things that have traits that affect their likelihood of propagating through time that can be inherited. I also don't think you understand what JSM was attempting to say.

Well, you still haven't answered the concern.

? Did you read my post?

If mutations are truly random then we'd expect them to appear randomly on humans as they do in other lifeforms, so why don't they? That was my question. It doesn't have to be arms, it could be hair, teeth, etc.

Oh my god! Eyes did not evolve after humans did. Nor did teeth or hair for that matter. When the various features that make humans human-like came on the seen, eyes were already well-evolved. Hominids just kept up that preexisting feature.

Well they have to be mindless, right?

Is genetic drift mindless? Yes, yes it is. Is it natural selection? No, no it isn't. Is it an important evolutionary process? Yes, yes it is.

I'm skeptical of it as I am of most things. Didn't you just say you were also skeptical, or was that just a ploy to dismiss the significance of the petition?

Wow. I said I'd agree with the petition because it states something trivial that no one sufficiently informed would disagree with. That's because of its terrible wording. I'm not skeptical of evolution in the normative sense it is used in science, nor are almost all biologists.

But the same model doesn't seem to work as well for more complex creatures such as chameleons. Or at least, you don't see step by step diagrams explaining the evolutionary processes by which genes communicate with the outside environment and then as if by magic, endowing the creature with the ability to completely alter its outside color for survival purposes. Or how the genes in primitive sea creatures communicated with the outside environment (water) and endowed these creatures with sonar capabilities. Would you like to take a stab at it?

I don't know much about chameleon evolution specifically. Of course, I'm not a chameleon biologist. I'm not sure how well the evolution of that type of camouflage is understood, but I wouldn't be shocked if the answer is "pretty well." I haven't come across it much in the lit I read to my recollection. Of course, of the two of us, I'm the one not using my personal incredulity as an argument against it. I do know how complex traits can and have been produced via natural selection and know how to see evidence in past and present species that this has occurred, if that's what you are asking.

Body plans? Where did these body plans come from? Genetic information doesn't pops out of nowhere, right? Natural selection actually reduces genetic information through time, so why do species get more and more complex through time?

Natural selection doesn't "reduce genetic information through time." That statement is simply false. I've only ever seen it asserted in creationist circles, but since you're totally not a creationist and have no familiarity with their writings, we'll just presume that you came up with this false assertion on your own. Your bad.

The origin bauplan diversity is its own subject. I thought you were asking why arms evolved in pairs rather than randomly all over the place. The answer is because of certain genes control a cascade of others such that things develop according to a "body plan" that has symmetrical features. So you have some changes in the genome that result in single instruction that naturally is duplicated on both sides of the body. I think that answers your question. You might want to continually push the question back and ask "Ok, but why did that evolve that way" until you are able to hit an area of uncertainty whenever you get an answer, but don't ignore the answer.

What wrote these instructions, and why?

This is an improperly loaded question. There's no logical need for their to be an author of those instructions, much less have a reason for doing it. At this point, you appear to be asking about the origin of cell signaling for differentiation of function in early multicellular organisms, as that's what those "instructions" really are. After all, cell signals are just proteins being produced by one cell, taken in by another, and affecting how their genes are expressed. There doesn't need to be an author of that.

Then why don't you explain it in a scientific manner?

I kind of did. What are you reading?

[_EAllusion]

Here's a better link to the article I linked above:

http://springerlink.com/content/p522451 ... ltext.html

Not as airtight as, "God did it," I know.

[_Kevin Graham]

I think you don't really understand what "random mutation" entails. A mutation is just a chance change in traits of an organism. We're really interested in mutations to the genetic information as that's most of what's heritable.

OK.

(The study of epigenetic heritability is relatively new). A variety of kinds of mutation can occur to our chromosomes. If you ever took biology, you might remember having to memorize the basic types of mutations (substitutions, transitions, frameshifts, duplications, translocations, etc).

I never took biology in college, and it has been a while since 7th grade.

It's worth noting that some kinds of mutations are more likely to occur than others. Even certain point mutations are just more likely to occur than others because of the underlying physical chemistry. Random doesn't mean "equiprobable" here. It just is a reflection of it happening by chance. And "chance" is just a reflection of uncertainty. Remember, this is all just biochemistry in the end.

I like that word equiprobable. But certainly you can understand the ambiguity while using "randomness" to describe gene mutations. Randomness in any other context refers precisely to equiprobability. If I roll two dice the chances of rolling anything between two and twelve are equiprobable.

A random mutation at this level doesn't translate to a random mutation in the sense of a complex trait showing up anywhere on a body equiprobably. That's really just an equivocation that rests on some real fundamental misunderstandings of biology. Your expectation is just weird.

OK. So what does determine where eyes would appear?

The reason you see eyes appearing on heads (that is, with certain other head-like features) is primarily due to homology. If you designed an organism from scratch, you probably could get away with placing eyes in various areas far from the brain, mouth, and so forth, but the rudiments of eye formation in the body go way back and species that share common ancestry are going to inherit those basic instructions.

OK, but let's bypass the hereditary factors and assume we're dealing with the first species that developed light sensitive cells.

Remember, form in evolution is just a some modified version of previous form. Asking why they aren't on ever the "back" of heads has an incorrect assumption.

Well let's assume we're dealing with teh first sepecies to develop light sensitive cells.

But when it comes to the species you are thinking of, the location of the eyes clearly is mediated by what makes the most sense in their ecological niche, which is why rodents have eyes more towards the sides of their head and ours look forward. You do see a rainbow of eye placements when it comes those subtle shifts. Hopefully it's obvious why some are more advantageous than others in different contexts.

It is. But anti-creationists have argued that the eye is really inefficient and if designed, then designed poorly. I've heard arguments that we'd be better suited with one eye in the center of our face instead of two eyes separated by a nose. So if that is true, then why isn't that what evolution gave us?

The reason you aren't digging up fossils of hominids that are just as likely to be found with eye sockets on their knees and elbows is because eye development is much, much more ancient than that.

Well, I thought you were saying we wouldn't find them on knees anyway, since that would be too far from the brain?

The reason it needs to be pointed out that eyes just didn't *poof* here and there is because that's what one would expect if one wondered why eyes weren't all over the place in the fossil record. They are to the extent they have independently evolved and as efficiency of placement in a body plan will allow.

OK, so where did the body plan come from? You say from the previous version of teh species, but eventually we have to go back far enough to ask the question, where did the plan come from. How does digital information organize itself to become more and more complex? It sounds like magic.

Did you look up Pax6 and ectopic eyes? What did you learn?

Yes, the gene discovered that's responsible for eye development. But a gene is just an instruction made up of information. Identifying them is nice, but doesn't answer the big question. Where does it come from?

I'm not sure what you are claiming here. Speciation is well-established. So is the fact that species are shaped by ecological pressures. This would be the heart of modern evolutionary theory that was kicked off by Darwin and Wallace oh so long ago. And this is why one would say you are skeptical of modern evolutionary theory.

So what is a species then? Yes, I'm skeptical of just about everything it seems. I'm very skeptical of creationists too. You'd be surprised how many times I've argued with them when they try to throw genesis in my face and insist the world is a few thousand years old.

You really need to get off your Dawkins fixation. Dawkins here is just representative of biology departments of universities across the world.

Well, exactly. So why wouldn't I reference him?

How genes interact with the environment to produce traits of course is complex and it is understood to greater and lesser extents depending on the traits you are talking about.

Any traits. What is the communicative pathway between a gene and the outside world? Calling it complex doesn't answer the question. In a naturalistic paradigm, one would expect such communicative routes to be discovered, verified and examined. Isn't it possible that genes are pre-programmed to respond or react a certain way, according to outside environments? From what I'm hearing from the evolution crowd, it sounds like the argument is slightly different in that genes receive newer programming from the outside environment. Am I understanding that right?

If you are looking for those explanations, that's what having an education in the related sub disciplines of biology is all about. If you are wondering specifically about how natural selection mediates a stepwise transition of form A into form B (to the extent it does) that again is understood to greater and lesser extents depending on the traits we are talking about. Eye evolution specifically is fairly well understood at this point.

I have no problems with the eye's evolution. I did at the beginning, but I don't now.

Heh. Directed panspermia is an example intelligent design. You know when, um, intelligent design proponents go on about aliens possibly being the designer in question because all they are doing is detecting design? Yeah, directed panspermia would be an example of that. Saying Dawkins is Ok with DP but not ID, suggests that that by "ID" you really just mean "God." Which, of course, is what the vast majority of IDists do mean when they say "designer". It's a codeword; we get that. Still, DP technically is supposed to count. When pressed to come up with an example of ID that he thought was possibly detectable, he brought up panspermia. Of course, he's highly skeptical of that because he considers it a type of theory that he is highly skeptical of. Any suggestion that Dawkins isn't highly skeptical of directed panspermia as a viable explanation for anything fundamentally misunderstands him. The reason he doesn't spend his time attacking it is because virtually no one is advocating it and there isn't a massive social movement to insinuate it into our public institutions and culture.

Huh? Richard Dawkins was asked how Intelligent Design could work as an explanation. He admitted that a "signature" of a designer might be discovered in microbiology, but he first had to jump to panspermia to get out of the whole God version of ID. He's being interviewed by Ben Stein, I think he knew the subject was God and not aliens planting cells on earth. And I don't understand how this could be considered intelligent design anyway, since ET bringing over living cells and dropping them off in a pool of organic mud, doesn't make him a "designer" anymore than I become an artist after donating a Monet painting to a museum.

You're really attacking a strawman here, though. No one, not even JSM, thinks that natural selection accounts for all biodiversity.

Well he said evolution by natural selection. That's just one mechanism of evolution. The petition at least referred to two mechanisms (Mutation and NS).

Natural selection, however, is an important evolutionary process and you are much more skeptical of its capacity to account for traits than evolutionary biology is.

Ya think? lol

The idea of common ancestry caused by descent with modification shaped by processes like natural selection is extremely well-grounded. Further, you seem to be setting up a dichotomy with "guided processes" on one side and "natural selection and mutation" on the other.

What else is there? It is either guided or not.

Evolutionary biology doesn't explain anything in terms of guided processes.

Of course it doesn't. It operates on the assumption that nothing is guided. Hell, even the information isn't pre-programmed. It just programs itself as it goes.

It's just that there's more to it than simply NS + RM. The petition you have referenced, incidentally, comes from people who have the same errors in thinking.

I doubt that. Didn't you say you would have signed it too? What's wrong with being skeptical about mutatons and NS accounting for all diversity in life?

I gathered that's what you were going for, but your wording really wasn't ideal.

I have a habit of constructing English sentences in my head as we do in Portuguese. I think it accounts for some of the ambiguity.

No, those idiots at the Discovery Institute did not pay attention to 7th grade biology, as has been pointed out by many people. That petition was a PR move put together by a ID/creationist organization to inflate a sense of growing doubt of evolutionary biology. It has serious problems. I already pointed this out.

Come on. Don't you think you're being a tad hyperbolic? Hundreds of people signed that thing, and they read what it entailed. You can't blame that on DI. They didn't make them sign it. Try to be more objective and less conspiratorial.

First, natural selection could've played a role in abiogenesis. If you think otherwise, I think you don't understand what it entails. You don't need life to have natural selection

WTF? Is this really science? Seriously?

You need a population of replicating things that have traits that affect their likelihood of propagating through time that can be inherited.

Don't tell me, on the backs of crystals?

Did you read my post?

Well you have a habit of dividing up your responses in multiple posts, I didn't catch this one until after I had posted my last response.

Is genetic drift mindless? Yes, yes it is. Is it natural selection? No, no it isn't. Is it an important evolutionary process? Yes, yes it is.

But are mutations mindless? If mutations respond according to the information received from the outside environment, directly to the genes, it is hard to imagine this as mindless.

I don't know much about chameleon evolution specifically. Of course, I'm not a chameleon biologist. I'm not sure how well the evolution of that type of camouflage is understood, but I wouldn't be shocked if the answer is "pretty well."

So you don't really know, you just assume? How is this not a leap of faith?

I haven't come across it much in the lit I read to my recollection. Of course, of the two of us, I'm the one not using my personal incredulity as an argument against it.

Hey, I'm just more critical. If someone wans to throw something at me and then tells me it explains all life, then don't be mad at me if I expect the science to provide explanations for more than just beetles and eyeballs.

How the heck does NS and "nonequiprobable" mutations explain how sea creatures can receive and transmit sonar, or how birds become sensitive to electromagnetism, etc. I've got all kinds of questions that would probably drive evolutionary biologists nuts.

Natural selection doesn't "reduce genetic information through time." That statement is simply false. I've only ever seen it asserted in creationist circles, but since you're totally not a creationist and have no familiarity with their writings, we'll just presume that you came up with this false assertion on your own. Your bad.

So if a group within a certain species produces a feature that is detrimental to its survival, and NS takes place and this group is killed off, then you're telling me that is not a textbook example of reducing information in a species? More features = more genetic information. Natural selection doesn't add, it only subtracts.

How the heck can you say it doesn't effectively reduce information?

The origin bauplan diversity is its own subject. I thought you were asking why arms evolved in pairs rather than randomly all over the place. The answer is because of certain genes control a cascade of others such that things develop according to a "body plan" that has symmetrical features.

Yes, obviously certain genese control this. I'm not saying "God did it." I fully accept that my eyes are blue because my father's are as well. I fully accept that my daughter is an exceptional child because her mother was as well. But where did the body plan come from originally?

So you have some changes in the genome that result in single instruction that naturally is duplicated on both sides of the body. I think that answers your question. You might want to continually push the question back and ask "Ok, but why did that evolve that way" until you are able to hit an area of uncertainty whenever you get an answer, but don't ignore the answer.

I'm not ignoring it. I just realize I should have asked it differently.

This is an improperly loaded question. There's no logical need for their to be an author of those instructions, much less have a reason for doing it.

Why not? Especially when everything we have experienced with information tells us there is an author. Genetic information is digital, just like that which runs our computers. Computers don't just program themselves either, so why must we assume life did?

At this point, you appear to be asking about the origin of cell signaling for differentiation of function in early multicellular organisms, as that's what those "instructions" really are. After all, cell signals are just proteins being produced by one cell, taken in by another, and affecting how their genes are expressed. There doesn't need to be an author of that.

There does when the cell is shown to be a nano-factory working overtime to serve a particular agenda, to meet certain ends (teleology). Why is it trying to replicate at all? "Because that's what the instructions tell it to do" really isn't the answer I'm looking for. It isn't an incorrect answer, it is just a short-sighted one.

[_Mad Viking]

The listing of Descartes was odd. Important mathematician? Yes. Scientist? Not so much.

No, it's not odd; mathematicians are scientists.

On an aside, Rene Descartes thought logic was contingent on God's will so God could do things like make square circles.

Not quite. Once God willed the eternal truths they were set.

So your God is not omnipotent?

[_JohnStuartMill]

For whatever insane reasons you have for believing that the Crusades were justified. Oh, they occupied the land 300 years ago, or some stupid s***..

The Crusades were justified because they essentially saved Christianity from destruction. Muslim raids had burned down one city after another with no unified effort to retaliate. Without the Crusades, we'd probably all be Muslims.

Yes, without an offensive war, we'd probably all be Muslims. You voted for Bush, didn't you?

What planet are you living on? All you had to do in the Inquisition to force a Jew to convert to Christianity was to splash some water on one.

But the Church didn't do any of that during the inquisitions. The only time Jews were compelled to convert was during a brief stint in 722 when a Byzantine King was being an idiot. There may have been another exaple or two, but the Church has overwhelmingly rejected the idea of forced conversions.

They don't call them forced conversions, sure, but anyone with half a brain knows that forcing a "Christian" (who's actually just a Jew sprinkled with holy water) to follow Christian dogma.

Oh, really? Why don't you tell me what my point actually was?

I guess your point was that you knew how to mimick the usual stock responses as found in PC textbooks and taught by idiot UCLA professors like Khalid El Fadl. I say this because it certainly didn't address my point about the Christian influence on modern science. If I had a nickel every time someone told me how the Muslims salvaged Aristotle for us, I'd be a millionare. That you immediately said it, as if you had some kind of point, was pretty funny if not predictable.

Uh, no. My point was that Muslims have contributed to Western civilization in much the same way that Christians have. Also, that you're stupid.

There were Christians who took this view of iconography as well.

Sigh... get it in your head already. Medieval medical books published by Muslims did not contain any depictions of the human body. Those printed by Christians did.

Sure. But a) this is not because of a wide theological divide between Muslims and Christians, given that there are Muslims physicians today, and given some Christians' distaste for iconography, and b) you're cherry-picking evidence: why is the depiction of the human body all of a sudden the standard by which civilizations are judged?

There are Muslims in medical schools today, Kevin. Medical schools that use diagrams of human anatomy.

Again, a non sequitur. Sure, modern Muslims are educated in medical science, but today there is no such a thing as an Islamic state, let alone one responsible for producing medical books. You're hopping all over the historical landscape to avoif a valid point. We were talking about medieval Islam and its contributions to medical science. I made the point that Islam prohibited any diagrams of the human body, therefore medical science was hindered because of the religion.

I'd agree with that. What I'm contesting is the double-standard you employ for Christianity.

No, dissection was prohibited by the Church at the time. That's why the drawings produced from da Vinci's dissections weren't published until after his death.

And yet nobody managed to imprison him despite his numerous dissections. That kinda throws cold water on your argument.

No, it doesn't. You are dumb.

What are you even responding to?

Your "Call for references" that Islam puts atheists to death and always had.

When did I CFR that?

One would think that as an atheist, you'd be more sensitive to the mistreatment of this particular minority, but you're too busy trying to argue how Islam was akin to classical liberalism, and are now spreading this nonsense about how it tolerated all minorities.

No, that is not my position. Again, you are dumb.

Again, the only minorities that could expect tolerance from Muslims were the Jews and Christians, and this is a very moot point.

This is not true. Non-dhimmis didn't have the same rights as People of the Book, but this does not show that medieval Muslims were less liberal than medieval Christians.

And if you define Christian to include "Jews who were baptized against their will", then what do you have, Kevin? f***'s sake.

The Spanish Inquisition didn't force Jews to convert. You keep asserting this without backing it up. I don't know what kind of education you think you received on this subject, but you might want to think about getting your money back.

It wasn't the Church who was baptizing people against their will. You don't need to have to be a priest to baptize people, so any idiot with faucet could sprinkle a Jew with magic water. At that point, the Church would consider the Jew to be "Christian", and the Inquisition could work its magic. Pope Innocent III said that anyone who was tortured into conversion nevertheless

..does receive the impress of Christianity and may be forced to observe the Christian Faith as one who expressed a conditional willingness though, absolutely speaking, he was unwilling. ... [For] the grace of Baptism had been received, and they had been anointed with the sacred oil, and had participated in the body of the Lord, they might properly be forced to hold to the faith which they had accepted perforce, lest the name of the Lord be blasphemed, and lest they hold in contempt and consider vile the faith they had joined.

CFR.

You're serious? I thought you said you received a University education on this subject? Oh wait, I guess that explains it.

The famous Jewish historian Cecil Roth once gve a speech in which he said:

"Only in Rome has the colony of Jews continued its existence since before the beginning of the Christian era, because of all the dynasties of Europe, the Papacy not only refused to persecute the Jews of Rome and Italy, but throughout the ages popes were protectors of the Jews." (Feb. 25th, 1927).

If all that you intend to prove by this is that Rome has the only continuous colony of Jews that dates back that far, then I accept your reference. But this has very little to do with the relative liberalism of Islam during the Middle Ages.

In 1272 Pope Gregory X made the following declaration:

Even as it is not allowed to the Jews in their assemblies presumptuously to undertake for themselves more than that which is permitted them by law

--in other words, Jews were restricted under Christianity, too...

, even so they ought not to suffer any disadvantage in those [privileges] which have been granted them. [This sentence, first written by Gregory I in 598, embodies the attitude of the Church to the Jew.] Although they prefer to persist in their stubbornness rather than to recognize the words of their prophets and the mysteries of the Scriptures [which, according to the Church, foretold the coming of Jesus], and thus to arrive at a knowledge of Christian faith and salvation; nevertheless, inasmuch as they have made an appeal for our protection and help, we therefore admit their petition and offer them the shield of our protection through the clemency of Christian piety. In so doing we follow in the footsteps of our predecessors of blessed memory, the popes of Rome-Calixtus, Eugene, Alexander, Clement, Innocent, and Honorius.

Alright, cool. This is about the level of protection that the Hadith guarantees for Jews.

We decree moreover that no Christian shall compel them or any one of their group to come to baptism unwillingly. But if any one of them shall take refuge of his own accord with Christians, because of conviction, then, after his intention will have been manifest, he shall be made a Christian without any intrigue. For, indeed, that person who is known to have come to Christian baptism not freely, but unwillingly, is not believed to posses the Christian faith.

This was obviously not followed out if they were baptizing babies at the time, which they were.

In addition, no one shall disturb them in any way during the celebration of their festivals, whether by day or by night, with clubs or stones or anything else. Also no one shall exact any compulsory service of them unless it be that which they have been accustomed to render in previous times.

lol

Again, this was never granted to Jews under Islamic rule.

Don't be stupid.

That the Pope participated in power struggles does not show that persecution of Jews was not permitted by the Church.

True, but their explicit statements declaring rights to Jews never to be had within Islamic societies, pretty much makes my case.

Again, the definition of "Jew" has not been static in this discussion.

Err, if the rationale for the first prohibition was good, then presumably the second prohibition would be good, too.

But in Islam, Jews and Christians could not testify against Muslims. Hell, even Muslim women couldn't testify unless they had four other witnesses to support them. The same hold true today in Sharia law. The point is that Jews were granted rights never to be seen within Islamic societies.

I'll give you another try at this. Try to stay on-point this time.

As are the Druze today. But they're not very numerous.

Their numbers were significant enough to make the emperor declare it the state religion.

Constantine didn't make Christianity the state religion. Before Constantine, though, Christians composed less than 10% of the Empire's population.

Oh, so the Christian Europeans never appropriated the Americas for their own civilization? I guess that explains why we're speaking Navajo right now.

"Christians" did all kinds of bad things, such as instituting slavery in the Americas. But the Christian Church fought tooth and nail against these things, every step of the way.

That's not true. Clergy in the New World often had slaves at their disposal.

I'm done talking with you about this stuff, Kevin. It's not worth it to deal with your appalling ignorance anymore.

[_EAllusion]

I'm going to address a few points post by post.

First, you seem to think that natural selection and random mutation constitutes known mindless processes in evolution. So it's either them or "guided." I've pointed out examples of different processes besides those, but the simple names doesn't seem to be enough.

So let's imagine a population of organisms. Say there is 1000 of them. 950 have a genotype ZZ. 40 have Zz. 10 have zz. So by %, we are looking at 95% ZZ, 4% Zz and 1% zz. Unfortunately for our organisms a calamity happens and all but 20 are killed. By pure happenstance, of those that survive, 8 are zz, 6 are Zz and 6 are ZZ. So now our population breakdown is 30% ZZ, 30% Zz and 40% zz. This is a massive shift in the relative frequency of genotypes in the population. The population evolved. We call this process "bottlenecking." This is an evolutionary process that is not necessarily guided. It also isn't natural selection or mutation. It does play a role in the diversity of traits we see. So an assertion that it's all NS + RM would be wrong without admitting in guided processes.

See how that works? This isn't the only process. It's just an easy one to illustrate.

[_EAllusion]

Hey, I'm just more critical. If someone wans to throw something at me and then tells me it explains all life, then don't be mad at me if I expect the science to provide explanations for more than just beetles and eyeballs.

It's not that you are just more critical. And it's not, as you say in the same post, that I'm taking things on a sort of blind faith. I think this misunderstands how confidence in scientific theories is rationally warranted.

I was a chem minor. In chemistry it's common to present students with stoichiometry problems where they are given a narrative description of some chemical reaction that has occurred, and it is their job to figure out the reactants and products and their relationship. I used to have a pretty good knack for it. In one test, were were given 50 such problems to complete. I got 48. (High score!) Yet two still baffled me. I can tell you with the upmost confidence that electron cloud theory accounts for what happened there just the same as it does the ones I was able to figure out even though I personally could not explain them. Of course, it is always possible that in the unexplained cases the natural processes we use to explain the known cases no longer apply. Yet, I don't think that in this case because electron cloud theory is well-established on the existing cases as an explanation for what should be going on in the unexplained cases. It's predictive. This really isn't a leap of faith. It's an induction from a very well-supported theory about how reality is and how it behaves. No different than countless other cases of scientific theory informing specific unknown cases. That I don't know everything about everything doesn't mean I can't have reasonable ideas about what kind of explanations likely are filling in certain gaps of knowledge.

The same thing really is happening with evolutionary mechanisms and working out what happened in common ancestry. In some cases, we have worked out plenty concerning what did happen. In others, we've worked out other plausible paths of what could've happened without having evidence one way or the other to establish that's how it actually happened. In still others, we really don't quite know what happened. But as time has progressed, our increasingly nuanced and detailed theoretical grounding has invariably be successful in accounting for what we observe and it remains hypothetically reasonable in the as of yet unexplained cases. Of course, it's always possible it will hit a dead end, but we don't know what those dead ends are beforehand. There's a difference between unexplained and unexplainable.

A lot more is understood than just beetles and eyeballs.

[_EAllusion]

Come on. Don't you think you're being a tad hyperbolic? Hundreds of people signed that thing, and they read what it entailed. You can't blame that on DI. They didn't make them sign it. Try to be more objective and less conspiratorial.

I am being objective. And it really isn't a conspiracy in the sense you are implying. That's the purpose of the DI's petition. It's pretty obvious when you read their press releases on it they continually rerelease every so often. They are trying to suggest a growing level of doubt in the basics of evolutionary theory in the scientific community, even though there is no such thing. "Darwinism" is sort of a confused strawman for evolution by natural means. A very large % of the signatories are just creationists of one stripe or another. A decent % are even young earth creationists. They're joined by a few others here and there. The list is treated by almost all its signatories as a classic evolution skeptic statement. It's just that when you read the content of the statement, it states something trivial that basic evolutionary biology wouldn't dispute. Lots of biologists who have no problem with what they call "darwinism" would agree because they'd deny the universality of natural selection and mutation to account for life's complexity. Charles Darwin himself believed in more evolutionary mechanisms than that. It stems from the same error in thinking you appear to have, where one thinks "natural selection and mutation" is all there is to evolutionary theory or, more accurately, natural evolution. And on an aside, the DI's people have a history of making the "two models" argument where if it's not that, then it must be design.

[_EAllusion]

And I don't understand how this could be considered intelligent design anyway, since ET bringing over living cells and dropping them off in a pool of organic mud, doesn't make him a "designer" anymore than I become an artist after donating a Monet painting to a museum.

He was referring to directed panspermia where aliens build life and seed it on another planet. We're getting awfully close to being able to artificially build our own bacteriums. Suppose we did that and "seeded" another planet with them. The initial existence of life on that planet would then rightfully be called designed.

[Guest]

Any traits. What is the communicative pathway between a gene and the outside world? Calling it complex doesn't answer the question. In a naturalistic paradigm, one would expect such communicative routes to be discovered, verified and examined. Isn't it possible that genes are pre-programmed to respond or react a certain way, according to outside environments? From what I'm hearing from the evolution crowd, it sounds like the argument is slightly different in that genes receive newer programming from the outside environment. Am I understanding that right?

See, I think this is illustrative of why you need to have more education on the subject than you do to be asserting the kind of claims you are. The quick and dirty of it is this: Genes do their "work" by being translated and transcribed into proteins. How the genetic material causes a cell to react to its environs is by changing what and how much proteins are being produced. The environment either has chemicals taken into the cell or triggers one or more steps where chemicals are made by the cell itself that make their way to the nucleus. Those chemicals either turn on or off certain genes or affect their rate of production of their various proteins. What is happening at the biochemical level is there are biopolymer complexes responsible for transcribing DNA and forcing protein production that have their shape oh so subtly shifted when they bond to certain chemicals. That change in shape affects how they are able to bond to certain DNA sequences, which in turn affects whether they will transcribe a gene and at what rate. That's how communication happens between genes and the outside world. Now, it's a lot more complex than this when the details are filled in. This is just a quick and simplified answer. I've had 3 college level classes dedicated to covering just different aspects of this. We still learn more each day.

But it wasn't that long ago that this question wouldn't be answerable. We didn't even know what the heritable material in the cell was until the middle part of the last century. But the mere lack of explanation didn't mean that it couldn't be explained or was impossible. We had no reason to think that. Just because we can't think of how it is done, that does not mean a theory that treats it as a black box is wrong. For instance, in order for natural selection to work, traits have to be heritable. But you don't have to have to know exactly how inheritance works to know enough for it not to be a problem for natural selection. Something isn't possible or even unlikely merely because it is yet to be explained. Yet, that's precisely what arguments you make continually suggest. Further lack of a known natural explanation does not mean all unknown ones are wrong, and it doesn't make answers that amount to "it's magic" automatically good.