Genome complexity: pseudogenes (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, August 27, 2013, 20:33 (3893 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The theory that all forms of life are descended from earlier forms (whether you believe it or not) has nothing to do with chance. But Darwinism also proposes that what those forms ARE depends on chance in the form of random mutations.
 
DAVID: I agree with this but the random chance issue does not define the course of evolution as you point out. If we start with a root we have no idea what the tree or bush will look like in the future. [Isn't that randomness?] And we do not know if common descent is a natural process, since fossil records of speciation are not found, and only presumptive series of fossils exist, a la' the whales. [The question is not whether it's a "natural process", but whether the theoretical commonality depends on chance.]-I'm pointing out that evolutionary theory is not a single package but a collection of theories, some of which are chance dependent and some of which are not. It is therefore absurd to claim that non-junk proves that evolution is a "failed paradigm", since it does not in any way invalidate the theories of common descent and natural selection. In my view, it might well argue against the chance origin of the genome, but the origin of the genome is not part of the theory of evolution.
 
DHW: It proposes that nature ensures that what is useful survives: not chance.
DAVID: Again not true. Natural selection is dependent upon what is presented to it by chance. It chooses from forms that appear by chance. In a way it does mitigate chance, but chance is still the basis.
dhw: Another conflation. Darwinists believe that chance produces the organs and organisms, and chance dictates changes in the environment. But when one organism survives and another disappears, that is not by chance ... it is the logical outcome of an ability/inability to cope with the environment.
DAVID: I'm not conflating. We agree that either chance or my choice of God's guidance leads up to a new variation and then natural selection as a process takes over.-So why is it "not true" that the survival or disappearance of organisms by natural selection is not by chance?-dhw: Yes, junk supports the idea of non-design, but an atheist can always switch to the claim that non-junk supports the concept of natural selection (survival of what is useful). .... As I keep saying, you can twist information to fit any theory.-DAVID: Is twisting reasonable logic? Let's be logical.-In all controversial subjects, our information is limited and open to interpretation (if it were not, there would be no dispute). Your logical deduction from life's complexities and from what you see as evolution's guided progress towards humanity is that it was designed, and therefore there must be an eternally conscious designer. The atheist's logical deduction from what he sees as the randomness of the evolutionary bush and of life's history, the manner in which science has traced apparent mysteries to material sources, and the lack of evidence and of any conceivable origin for any sort of eternal intelligence, is that there is no designer and we are the product of chance. Each argument is logical, but each argument depends on how you twist the available information.