Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Thursday, March 18, 2021, 11:23 (1136 days ago) @ David Turell

POSSUMS
DAVID: Show and tell involves another possum watching the prey possum timing his stillness. It may work or not (gets killed). Now two possums know the trick. To have this spread throughout the possum population, it takes lots of time and lots of killed possums to work that way if it ever does.

We don’t know precisely how any form of behaviour gets relayed to the whole species until it becomes the norm, but your explanation seems unnecessarily cumbersome. Maybe Pete Possum was the great inventor of the strategy. When it worked, Pete went home and told his family and all his mates, and they told their families and all their mates, and all the families and all the mates passed it on, and over the course of a few generations, lots and lots of possums knew about it and passed it on.

dhw: Pretty soon you will have your God popping in to give tutorials to every individual possum, bird and ant.

DAVID: Remember the weaverbirds!!!

I can hardly forget them. Same idea: Willie Weaverbird invented a new nest-building technique, and passed on his knotty knowledge to family and friends etc., as above. (They might even have added their own knots to his prototype.) And your theory: divinely preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago (as part of the goal of designing humans), or personal tutorials, though even then, your God would have relied on his students to pass on the information – or do you think he’s still giving lessons?

New proteins
DAVID: You miss the point. Their study with computer simulation found probable useless proteins. This is just like junk DNA proving the randomness of Darwin chance mutations driving evolution.

What IS your point? If their findings are correct, then there were useless proteins. There is certainly no point in complaining that their research supports Darwin. If it does, then, it’s up to you to find an explanation that doesn’t support Darwin!

Talbott and Shapiro
DAVID: All Shapiro says is bacteria can modify their DNA. The rest is pure theory that you have blown up into something else as fact.

dhw: I have not blown it up into fact! Yes, it is a theory, but you keep pretending that Shapiro does not say what he says, although I keep repeating the quotes: “Living cells and organisms are cognitive (sentient) entities that act and interact purposefully to ensure survival, growth and proliferation.” “Evolutionary novelty arises from the production of new cell and multicellular structures as a result of cellular self-modification functions and cell fusions”.

DAVID: And I have shown you when he faced the Royal society his conclusions were softened from his book quotes.

I asked you before to point out any indication that he has rescinded his theory. You could not do so. In any case, I did not blow up his theory into fact.

Fingerprints
DAVID: You still favor all natural developments to explain evolution. I have God as the designer.

dhw: […] You keep using “natural” in order to pretend that this theory does not allow for a designing God. Please stop it. A God who designs an autonomous mechanism is just as much a designing God as a God who designs every individual product of the mechanism.

DAVID: The God you entertain does not relate the God I accept. We've been over all of this.

That is no reason to imply that my theory excludes God as designer.

Giraffes
These findings provide insights into basic modes of evolution. The dual effects of the strongly selected FGFRL1 gene are compatible with the phenomenon that one gene can affect several different aspects of the phenotype, so called evolutionary pleiotropy. Pleiotropy is particularly relevant for explaining unusually large phenotypic changes, because such changes often require that a suite of traits are changed within a short evolutionary time. Therefore, pleiotropy could provide one solution to the riddle of how evolution could achieve the many co-dependent changes needed to form an animal as extreme as a giraffe." (David’s bold)

DAVID: The bold above describes the problem perfectly. How so many complex physiological changes so coordinated appear so quickly? Of course, the authors think a Darwin style gene did the job all by itself like an octopus with all its arms in action. How did a naturally occurring chance set of mutations find the perfect gene? It is much easier for me to propose the designer did it.

Alternatively (theistic version), your God gave cell communities the intelligence to cooperate in changing structures. The process of “pleiotropy” fits in very neatly with this theory.

Chimps \'r\' not us: 3-D DNA shows vast differences

I don’t actually know of anybody who thinks that chimps ARE us. However, this opens up an almost infinite field for research, and in my constant quest for knowledge, I am now applying for a grant to prove that ants \’r’\ not us. I plan to follow this with the duck-billed platypus \is\not us (I don’t want to be accused of repetition) and so forth. I hope you will support my application.