Evolution courtesy of Darwin ... no longer works for me ... here's why !

Originally posted by uva3021
You don't understand fundamental genetics. Most sequences are degenerative, that is, CAT translates the same as CTT. Therefore it is more than likely, in fact almost guaranteed, that most mutations would be neutral, having no affect whatsoever.

edit on 26-1-2011 by uva3021 because: (no reason given)

edit on 26-1-2011 by uva3021 because: (no reason given)

You're probably correct. It's my sister-in-law who's the double PhD genetic research vet.

tauristercus makes a compelling case and good read. I think I'll leave it at that and side-step this thread.

reply to post by Blue_Jay33


Well, if you want to use the house metaphor...

Demanding to know the origin of life when talking about evolution, is sort of like demanding to know where the planet came from before discussing the blueprints of the house that's being built on it.

I'm sure your sister in law PhD will be happy to know you are blurting out such absurdities as

"A single genetic mutation in just one base nucleotide and it's likely you'd be pretty ill. "

97% of our genetic material is full of inconsequential signatures and retroviruses, contributing nothing to the building of an actual body, so aside from the fact that 97% of all mutations happen in this region of genetic "ether", and mutations are for the most part neutral anyway, yes then your sister in law will be pleased at your ability to construct syntactically correct sentences.

you are really starting to sound more like a proper molecular geneticist. and you are coming much closer to the actual crux of the debate.

Originally posted by tauristercus
...when you're using such sloppy estimations ?....
..."functionality" is NEVER a dubious concept as far as nature is concerned....

the sloppy estimations that were given are the currently accepted consensus postulates for that time period. as was shown in the language analogy, the very first "bootstrap" symbols were extremely crude (pointing and grunting). bootstrapping is a huge problem for any sufficiently complex set of symbols. but once ANY type of symbol (of dubious functionality) is capable of perpetuating behavior (linking form and function), the complexity of the system proceeds exponentially. you would do well to get some knowledge of information systems under your belt.

posted by tgidkp: at this point we still have not established a causal relationship between DNA and proteins

the above statement is in relation to my original hypothetical. yes, at some point a causal relationship between these two symbol sets was established.

Taken from Evolution 101 - Berkely
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/8bc3503fb018.jpg[/atsimg]

in this drawing, what is shown as insertion is called a "simple tandem repeat" (tggTGG). this is generated by, as discussed earlier, a malfunction of the higher level processing. ANY single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), which is the concept you are trying to invoke, must ultimately be considered to be a result of a mistake of the higher level functionality. even if the mutation arises from UV irradiation in a single pair of nucleotides: if the mutation persists, it is because of a failure of the repair mechanisms.

...Now as I've pointed out so many times before, a simple 153 base protein such as insulin has odds of 10^92 against a successful creation ...

it is no longer necessary to continue pointing this out. i understand your meaning and application perfectly.

...lets give nature a break by picking an easy task and assume that by some fluke, there exists a strand of base sequences EXACTLY 153 bases in length and that is ALMOST 90% identical in sequence

now you're talkin'. so, lets wrap this up, shall we?

add to what you have stated above the following:
- THIS astute post by Maslo.
- silent mutations due to degeneracy of the genetic code.
- and a more detailed understanding of protein folding as a result of polypeptide sequence. all amino acids are not created equal. this leads to a "higher level functionality" of the genetic code itself. in a similar way as i detailed before, the functionality is passed to a higher level of interpretation. these are your new dice. the drawing below shows an approximate value of each amino acid to protein fold.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/27f3886dea48.jpg[/atsimg]
taken from an article located HERE.



that should be about it!

the message you should be taking from this is that the dice are continually passed upwards to higher level integrated systems. it never ends....as far as i can tell. there is ABSOLUTELY no sense at all in muddling about in the lower raw levels. if you wish to continue to do so, you can officially count me out.

I hope that is a little more clear to you now.

it is. and i thank you. you have made a magnificent refinement of your argument.

Originally posted by uva3021
I'm sure your sister in law PhD will be happy to know you are blurting out such absurdities as

"A single genetic mutation in just one base nucleotide and it's likely you'd be pretty ill. "

97% of our genetic material is full of inconsequential signatures and retroviruses, contributing nothing to the building of an actual body, so aside from the fact that 97% of all mutations happen in this region of genetic "ether", and mutations are for the most part neutral anyway, yes then your sister in law will be pleased at your ability to construct syntactically correct sentences.

Thanks, I'll pass it on. :@

btw, I believe your extra chromosome just dropped off your napkin.

Originally posted by Blue_Jay33
reply to post by Maslo

 

But thats the question of origin of life (abiogenesis), and not evolution. Two different things.

I am so tired of hearing that line from evolutionists.
It produces an intellectually dishonest perspective.
It like saying you can build a house with no supporting foundation.

That's a false dichotomy which I have created New Thread on.

edit on 26-1-2011 by Blue_Jay33 because: (no reason given)

Blue_Jay, can't you see... they have to separate them even though they are one and the same because if combined - one weakens the other. Now up to them which one weakens what.

Picture is getting clearer and clearer - the OP did a great job as well as (his/her) succeeding post in explaining the im/probability of life happening by chance - random/nonrandom. Couple this with the unreliabilty and incompleteness of the fossil records - how many more legs does the (organic) evolution theory can stand on?

Let's see assumptions, interpretations and imaginations...

ciao,
edmc2

Originally posted by tgidkp

Originally posted by tauristercus
...lets give nature a break by picking an easy task and assume that by some fluke, there exists a strand of base sequences EXACTLY 153 bases in length and that is ALMOST 90% identical in sequence

now you're talkin'. so, lets wrap this up, shall we?

add to what you have stated above the following:
- THIS astute post by Maslo.
- silent mutations due to degeneracy of the genetic code.
- and a more detailed understanding of protein folding as a result of polypeptide sequence. all amino acids are not created equal. this leads to a "higher level functionality" of the genetic code itself. in a similar way as i detailed before, the functionality is passed to a higher level of interpretation. these are your new dice. the drawing below shows an approximate value of each amino acid to protein fold.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/27f3886dea48.jpg[/atsimg]
taken from an article located HERE.

Errrr ... what exactly got wrapped up in the above ?

You've cherry picked the opening statement from the example that I went to great trouble to explain ... then immediately chose to disregard the subsequent main section AND conclusion (which I'll graciously re-add here)

This means that approximately 138 bases are in the correct location within this sequence and 15 are not.

So natures task is to "replace" the 15 incorrect bases with 15 correct bases ... and if successful, out pops an insulin protein.

Now we have 23 pairs of chromosomes with 3.1 billion base pairs distributed amongst them ... so on average, each chromosome pair has 135 million base pairs. But this value of 135 million base pairs is based on today's genome estimate ... so again, lets help nature out even more by going back in time to when the average chromosome had say, half these bases - let's go with 75 million base pairs, shall we ?

Therefore we have our starting 90% correct sequence located on a chromosome, somewhere amongst those 75 million bases ... already a bit of a needle in a haystack situation, wouldn't you say ?
But lets press on regardless.

Now we'll assume a mutation rate of say, 100 mutations along that chromosome and we'll only consider mutations that make a base replacement only ... as opposed to the other kinds of mutations that could potentially alter the existing 90% of already valid bases along that sequence, consequently reducing the 90% down to lower values and taking us further away from our goal of 153 correct sequential bases.

So, we have 100 base replacing mutations that are entirely RANDOM and could happen ANYWHERE along the 75 million base length of our chromosome. This works out to an average of 1 mutation every 750,000 bases.
This means that there is a probability value of 1 in 4,900 that one of those 100 random mutations would happen somewhere within the chromosome location containing our 153 base sequence. So we are looking at odds of 4,900 to 1 against any of those 100 random mutations even being in the right 153 base neighbourhood !

Ok, 4,900 to 1 against ... not bad odds, you might say.

However those are just the odds of one of the 100 random mutations happening somewhere within our target sequence. We have to bear in mind that out of that 153 base target, 138 bases are already correct and we do not want them changed by a random mutation ... we only want one of the remaining 15 incorrect bases to be randomly mutated, hopefully into the correct base for that particular location within the sequence.
But based on the above information, we see immediately that there is a far greater chance (almost 91%) that the random mutation (if it even happens) will hit one of the 138 correct bases instead of one of the 15 incorrect bases that we DO want to change.

So it's quite plainly obvious that a random mutation acting against an existing but only partially correct sequence of bases, has a substantially far greater probability of causing degradation to the sequence then it would have of improving it.

But wait, it gets worse ...

We calculated above that there was only a 1 in 4,900 chance that the random mutation would target one of the 153 bases in the sequence ... and out of that a further 9 to 1 chance against one of the 15 incorrect bases being the actual target ... significantly decreasing further the TOTAL odds of an incorrect base being hit.

But lets say that nature got lucky and did indeed hit one of those 15 incorrect bases with a random mutation.
Now we find ourselves in the situation that the already bad odds get even worse.

Lets say that the incorrect base about to be mutated is say an A ... and we actually need it to be replaced/mutated into say, a C.
The odds against this happening are 3 to 1.
The existing A could be replaced with another A, or replaced with a G, or replaced with a T ... all of which are incorrect and do nothing to improve the quality of the 153 base sequence but instead, degrades it further away from our goal of evolving an insulin gene.


Phew ... so after all that, what do we have ?

We have starting odds of 4,900 to 1 against one of the 100 mutations actually targeting one of the 153 bases in our sequence of interest.
These odds against are further increased dramatically by a 91% chance that the mutation will still target the wrong base within the sequence.
These odds against are further increased significantly with only a 1 in 3 chance that even if one of the incorrect bases is successfully targeted and mutated, that the replacement base will be a desirable one.

and then you continue talking about "continually passed upwards to higher level integrated systems" ... which conveniently never seems to get defined or clarified as to their nature, how they operate, the controlling mechanisms, etc ... to me it sounds like you're doing nothing more than simply invoking a "black box" scenario wherein something "magical" happens and eventually a protein sequence gets spat out.
All this appears to be nothing more than an attempt to deny that ALL random mutations operate at the lowest possible level ... that level being the base sequences forming the backbone of the chromosome strand.

Let me repeat that one more time ...

All random mutations occur at the lowest level possible ... and the lowest level is the base sequence stored within the chromosome.

Yes, you're correct in stating that there is no point in continuing this to and fro, so let's just leave it at that.

But even with our differing points of view, I'll still take this opportunity to thank you for taking the time to pass on all your interesting contributions.

reply to post by tauristercus


Hey tauristercus, you have great thread going here, I appreciate all the research you have put into your OP and succeeding posts, but just for clarity's sake are you atheist, agnostic or theist?

Just wondering?
I am guessing an agnostic, but I could be wrong.

Originally posted by Blue_Jay33
reply to post by tauristercus

 

Hey tauristercus, you have great thread going here, I appreciate all the research you have put into your OP and succeeding posts, but just for clarity's sake are you atheist, agnostic or theist?

If scientific arguments get more clear to you based on subjective beliefs, then you certainly are misguided.

Originally posted by Blue_Jay33
reply to post by tauristercus

 

Hey tauristercus, you have great thread going here, I appreciate all the research you have put into your OP and succeeding posts, but just for clarity's sake are you atheist, agnostic or theist?

Just wondering?
I am guessing an agnostic, but I could be wrong.

G'day Blue_Jay,

Thanks for all your posts, comments and opinions in this thread ... just great to know it's not just me, all on my own, against the ravening hoard out there going for my jugular !

But truthfully, I have to admit to being a complete and utter atheist. I've long held the belief that the universe gets along quite nicely without having to invoke deities of one kind or another.
This obviously means that I'm not a proponent of creationism or intelligent design if believing in either of them requires a belief in a deity. And even replacing a deity with an alien involvement doesn't cut it for me as that just seems like we're just passing the "creation of life" buck one level down.

So I find myself in a very unique position ... I don't hold with creationism but I also have trouble in swallowing the standard evolutionary script that we're being beaten around the head with.

As has been obvious within this thread, I DO believe in evolution (of a sort) but the simple application of what amounts to basic maths shows how astronomically improbable the random mutation pathway is .. and I know that you tend to agree with me in that regard.
No matter how much I try, the maths keeps saying that the only way we could arrive at the 3.1 billion bases currently in the human genome over a time period of 3.8 billion years is if the mutation rate proceeded at an incredible rate ... but of course every man and his dog says that evolution by way of random mutations was a slowwwwwwwwww process over a longggggggggggg period of time.
Basically the maths says that evolving high information content systems, such as proteins, through trial and error simply isn't going to work .. at least in an acceptable time frame. And yet we have not just 1 protein ... we have 20,000+ proteins ... all apparently created as a result of trial and error ... at least thats what we're asked to believe.

Well, all I can say is that one of us is wrong

Originally posted by edmc^2
Blue_Jay, can't you see... they have to separate them even though they are one and the same because if combined - one weakens the other. Now up to them which one weakens what.

edit on 26-1-2011 by edmc^2 because: spell

Evolution deals with existing populations of organisms and we know that it occurs. The Theory of Evolution serves to explain the process of evolution. On the other hand, we have abiogenesis, which is a hypothesis on the emergence of life.

The Theory of Evolution doesn't have to address the emergence of life, because evolution deals with existing populations. It's simply not what the Theory of Evolution should explain. Eventually, if abiogenesis is accepted (and it's most likely that it will be), then it's probable that there will be a Theory of Abiogenesis to explain the process of abiogenesis.

reply to post by tauristercus


I can only say that I have enormous respect for your opinion and position.
You admit to being an atheist but because your still open-minded you obviously have questions that Darwinian evolution can't answer.

What is so sad is to see, is so many other of your fellow atheists being "the ravening hoard out there going for my jugular" as you say. Perhaps now that you have openly admitted being an atheist they will go easier on you, or maybe not. Your opinion has a much higher level of value, than mine to them, as you are a peer to them on one level. But perhaps that is what makes your perspective so very dangerous to their personal worldview, and they want to squash it before it can gain traction, as it leads to more unknown variables.
This is not a bad thing is your searching for the truth about our origins, if your not searching, your idea's are considered to be heresy for an atheist.

reply to post by Blue_Jay33
OP has trouble distinguishing gradual from sudden, and improbable from impossible. Regardless of his religious affiliations, it does not alter the force of his rhetoric, or do anything towards validating his claims.

reply to post by Blue_Jay33


Ignorance is ignorance, whether it comes from an atheist, a Hindu, a Christian, or anyone else for that matter because I'm not going to bother to list out all the different religious positions because that will take all damn day.

The post has been demonstrated as being founded in ignorance and flawed logic and this was demonstrated quite well in a few posts. Instead of the OP admitting he was wrong, he's accusing us of going for his jugular...well, that's ignorant as well.

reply to post by madnessinmysoul


This thread deserves attention once again especially with the new evolution/creation ATS poll going on.

scientists have been unable to prove that life can spring from nonliving molecules. In 2008, Professor of Biology Alexandre Meinesz highlighted the dilemma. He stated that over the last 50 years, “no empirical evidence supports the hypotheses of the spontaneous appearance of life on Earth from nothing but a molecular soup, and no significant advance in scientific knowledge leads in this direction.”

How Life Began—Evolution’s Three Geneses

Robert Shapiro, professor emeritus of chemistry at New York University, “have presumed that all life’s building blocks could be formed with ease in Miller-type experiments and were present in meteorites. This is not the case.” Consider the RNA molecule. It is constructed of smaller molecules called nucleotides. A nucleotide is a different molecule from an amino acid and is only slightly more complex. Shapiro says that “no nucleotides of any kind have been reported as products of spark-discharge experiments or in studies of meteorites.” He further states that the probability of a self-replicating RNA molecule randomly assembling from a pool of chemical building blocks “is so vanishingly small that its happening even once anywhere in the visible universe would count as a piece of exceptional good luck.” What about protein molecules? They can be made from as few as 50 or as many as several thousand amino acids bound together in a highly specific order. The average functional protein in a “simple” cell contains 200 amino acids. Even in those cells, there are thousands of different types of proteins. The probability that just one protein containing only 100 amino acids could ever randomly form on earth has been calculated to be about one chance in a million billion. Researcher Hubert P. Yockey, who supports the teaching of evolution, goes further. He says: “It is impossible that the origin of life was ‘proteins first.’” RNA is required to make proteins, yet proteins are involved in the production of RNA. What if, despite the extremely small odds, both proteins and RNA molecules did appear by chance in the same place at the same time? How likely would it be for them to cooperate to form a self-replicating, self-sustaining type of life? “The probability of this happening by chance (given a random mixture of proteins and RNA) seems astronomically low,” says Dr. Carol Cleland, a member of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Astrobiology Institute. “Yet,” she continues, “most researchers seem to assume that if they can make sense of the independent production of proteins and RNA under natural primordial conditions, the coordination will somehow take care of itself.” Regarding the current theories of how these building blocks of life could have arisen by chance, she says: “None of them have provided us with a very satisfying story about how this happened.”

like ive said every time youve made a new thread about this.

Why couldnt the missing time in the development of genetic material orginated in another part of the galaxy?

atleast your not ignorant enough to claim a magic man created everything. Although disregarding a biological evolution of life... thats pretty much what your saying... is a magic man created life.

Originally posted by Blue_Jay33
reply to post by tauristercus

 

Looking at nothing but the mathematical odds logically defeats Darwinism quite handily as you continue to explain in this thread, that is if you are willing to explore, examine and inform yourself of them.
Denial is a fundamental trait that all humans display in all area's of life for various reasons.
The denial of factual math is quite sad to observe however. It's like saying 1+1 doesn't equal 2 because we don't want it to. It's an emotionally based perspective.

Can you explain the math for a creator entering the equation? I'd really like to see how the math stacks up for that one.

Originally posted by tauristercus
Now as I've pointed out so many times before, a simple 153 base protein such as insulin has odds of 10^92 against a successful creation ... taking into account the 10^24 degenerate alternatives, still gives ultra-astronomical odds of 10^68 against.

Let's have a look..

Below you see a part of multiple alignment of human, chimp, dog, cow, mouse, rat, chicken and zebrafish insulin mRNA (take notice that of the 80 or so shown loci only around 20 are conserved across all the species).



Due to the degenerative nature of the codon code aligning DNA sequences doesn't always make much sense, so here's another picture (this time multiple alignment of precursor insulin polypeptide).



Take notice only 45 of the 111 positions are conserved across all species in the alignment, yet they all result in a functional insulin protein. Also, notice the conserved block at the end.. lots of other proteins have the same domain (as in nature is reusing it for many things).

p.s. Only a fool would assume that no other sequence apart from these 8 examples results in a functional insulin protein. How do you acknowledge this in your math?

p.p.s How cool is it that our precursor insulin is this similar to fish precursor insulin (lowest row, second lowest is chicken, the two at the top are human and chimp). Hmm, I wonder how to explain the alignment, identical with chimps, very similar with mammals, less so with chicken and even less with fish

Most of the thread so far has been about genetics and cellular biology.

My background is in physical anthropology; I have also become become disenchanted with that field.

Here are a couple of the major problems:

1. Every decade, the "family tree of Man" gets completely redrawn. And I mean completely. Next time you're in a used book store, pick up an old anthropology text and look up "Homo Habilis." Look at the dates and the question of whether HH is ancestral to modern humans. You can pick up a text from the 70's and get the current answer; or a book from the 80s and get an older, ancestral HH, or a 90's text with a mishmash of answers. Science is supposed to represent progress, not just continually erasing the past and pretending like we never believed those things.

By the way, this is more than a passing problem, as regards the philosophy of science. Immanuel Kant's rejection of what we now call parapsychology in his "prolegemma to any future metaphysics" is based on the fact that the "sciences" of alchemy and astrology never make any real progress--they just invent new jargon. But how does physical anthropology measure up????


2. Paucity of a fossil record.
Look at the fossil evidence for australopithecus or habilis again. You've got "scientific deductions" based on what, less that 50 INCOMPLETE specimens? And the skull of the primary habilis skull has been deformed by geologic forces after it's deposition. The entire "family tree of man" (you cannot count neaderthals any more!) have less than what, 500 individuals? And not 50 of them are complete skeletons. How well could you describe the history of your country, only interviewing 500 people, and reading only a random 5% of each person's reply?

3. The Unreliability of Radiometric dating
If you've every looked at the raw data from a carbon dating lab, you'd see that the investigator may take over a hundred "snapshots" and throw away the bulk of the readings because "that data point is too far from the expected answer---it must be from a compromised sample." The truth is, this is done routinely until an acceptable answer is found. If you take the same object, and re-date it a decade later, you'll get much diferent (often older!) results. The shroud of turin is an obvious example. Honestly, the whole field of radiometric dating became useless once the superpowers began discharging atomic weapons testing into the earths atmosphere. Gamma radiation will itself alter (accelerate) the rate of decay. And radon gas emitted from the soil itself can cause a false aging....but try to find a single instance of a sample controlled for disturbance by radon. good luck.

Note:
-While I am a Christian, I don't "need" to believe in a literal 6 day creation. I'm probably more of a Fortean than a creationist.

-It's not that I doubt an "old earth" specifically; just that I think any date we arrive at is almost complete conjecture.

-500 years ago, there were only a couple dozen breeds of cow. Now there are over a thousand. So obviously, variability in the population allows for changes and speciation. Of course the cow "evolution" wasn't random---it was controlled by human breeders; but we won't talk about those "intelligent designers..."

reply to post by tauristercus


I'm with you, never worked for me. The part about the series of mutations occurring over billions of years . No evidence for it.