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ORIGINAL: gluadys
To induce more "battiness" in a mammal would require the replication of that history in both its molecular and selective aspects. In addition, it would also require that the mammal in question has not already undergone a history that blocks a turn toward "battiness". You will not get more "battiness" in an elephant unless you can take the elephant backward through its history to the point of its common ancestry with the bat.

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Good heavens, this is hardly a failure of evolution. The scenarios are quite different. In the first place bacteria are single cells and viruses simply a bit of DNA or RNA wrapped in a protein capsid. Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge, they are haploid i.e. they don't have a second copy of their genome to offset any effect of a mutation. We can exert a great deal more control over the environment of bacteria and viruses and in most experiments we are looking to induce one or a few simple changes.

A bat, however, is a complex mammal. Its cells (even germline cells before mitosis) are diploid. A mutation in such a cell may have no effect whatsoever. It has no discernable effect on the host organism (except when it initiates a cancerous growth) and only affects the offspring if it is passed on to a gamete which forms part of a zygote. Furthermore "battiness" implies not just one or a few changes in a single strand of DNA but a whole suite of changes, dependent on a fairly lengthy history of selection.

To induce more "battiness" in a mammal would require the replication of that history in both its molecular and selective aspects. In addition, it would also require that the mammal in question has not already undergone a history that blocks a turn toward "battiness". You will not get more "battiness" in an elephant unless you can take the elephant backward through its history to the point of its common ancestry with the bat.

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One has to ask "harmful to whom"? Of course, premature death is harmful to the individual whose life is cut short. But it seems to be beneficial to the population exposed to malaria.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud
So I say that one can't make the comparison because the cases are significantly different, and you jump in and say essentially, 'Heavens, you can't compare these two cases because they are quite different!', then most would call that agreement, not contradiction.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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One has to ask "harmful to whom"? Of course, premature death is harmful to the individual whose life is cut short. But it seems to be beneficial to the population exposed to malaria.

Well sure; it's rather like saying that if I jam the lock on my car to keep a carjacker from entering it benefits my potential survival, but it still constitutes a broken lock, and is less fuinctional when compared to a lock that works.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud
Well sure; it's rather like saying that if I jam the lock on my car to keep a carjacker from entering it benefits my potential survival, but it still constitutes a broken lock, and is less fuinctional when compared to a lock that works.

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Well that is getting into abiogenesis and doesn't reflect on evolution per se. Getting to cellular life is not quite the same thing as following the history of cellular life. I would certainly agree that it is an important field of research. At some point we have to relate the pre-biotic evolution of chemicals to the biological evolution of species. But it is still important to bear in mind that these are distinctive processes. The chemical evolution of RNA & DNA has relatively little to do with the Darwinian evolution of species. So a focus there is really side-stepping the issues.

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Yes, that is true. The Cambrian used to be a watershed, but now we have Ediacaran animals, and micro-fossils going back 3.5 billion years, archeal life, and much more comprehension of the complexity of the "simplest" cells. There is quite a tale yet to discover as we continue to explore possible prebionts.

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I don't know why anti-evolutionists try to load all of cosmic history into evolution. Yes these matters of the origin of the cell and the capability of life to develop will certainly give us new insights, but this should not be accounted a failure of evolution, since it was never proposed as a theory of the origin of life or of cells. It is a theory of species change and adaptation, of speciation and diversity. I don't think it has failed in its own field. Failure is only claimed when people like yourself apply it to matters it was never intended to deal with.

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Nor is it a support that evolution needs. By the way, when did evolution ever take intelligent causation off the table? I don't think it is intelligent causation that is the issue. It is assuming that evolution and intelligent causation are mutually exclusive. I have no problem with intelligent causation. I think evolution is an example of intelligent causation. It is the ID insistence that intelligent causation is not expressed through evolution that I find mystifying.

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I think you misunderstood what I meant. I too see evidence of intelligence all the way through from top to bottom. But seamlessly in and through the natural processes. What I do not see are items of evidence which stand out from the whole in a contrastive way as presenting intelligence in a manner the rest of nature does not.

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Having a car with a broken lock is better than having no car at all, is it not?

How about an even more extreme example. Let's say that you rigged your car to explode if it was unlawfully entered into. This would remove the car theif altogether and benefit other car owners (the population).

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No, you have it backward. You should be looking at a scenario in which you do not survive, but your population is better off because you don't.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud
Certainly; but evolutionists claim the same processes that break locks and explode cars also produce those cars, and are capable of turning them into planes and boats!

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ORIGINAL: Jhud
Well, no, blood cells are not part of a population but an organism. That is what is being broken; a blood cell, so an individual can endure a malarial infection. That disruption, which allows the individual to survive, is then passed on to the population genetically through reproduction. There was a first sickle cell individual, a sickle cell Eve if you will.

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No, it turns cars into cars. Planes and boats are sister taxa.

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This is exactly how neutrophils work. After attaching to or engulfing a foreing object they commit suicide (a massive oxidative burst) taking the foreign object with them.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud
Except they are designed to do that;

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when your red blood cells go kamikazi on you there are some problems with the whole oxygen transport system.

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J Evol Biol. 2004 Jan;17(1):221-4.Links
Estimation of relative fitnesses from relative risk data and the predicted future of haemoglobin alleles S and C.Hedrick P.
School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AR 85287, USA. philip.hedrick@asu.edu

Epidemiological studies of genetic differences in disease susceptibility often estimate the relative risks (RR) of different genotypes. Here I provide an approach to calculate the relative fitnesses of different genotypes based on RR data so that population genetic approaches may be utilized with these data. Using recent RR data on human haemoglobin beta genotypes from Burkina Faso, this approach is used to predict changes in the frequency of the haemoglobin sickle-cell S and C alleles. Overall, it generally appears that allele C will quickly replace the S allele in malarial environments. Explicit population genetic predictions suggest that this replacement may occur within the next 50 generations in Burkina Faso.

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Well, again, you have posited scenarios where you imagine they can be useful, but as I have pointed out repeatedly, this isn’t a scientific assertion; unless you can demonstrate those useful changes in a model animal, your assertions have no basis in fact.
[…]
I think there is no evidence that the numerous and specific changes that are required to induce the bat morphology are individually beneficial, and for those changes which we have induced and observed (like forearm and digit lengthening, two separate changes) no benefit was in evidence. The assertion that they can happen then is really a fantastic claim, one that would require evidence, the burden of which is on the person making the claim (that would be you).

Of course ongoing research may change this; but as it stands, I think my position is significantly more reasonable than yours, and more elegant.

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ORIGINAL: Method

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ORIGINAL: Jhud
Well sure; it's rather like saying that if I jam the lock on my car to keep a carjacker from entering it benefits my potential survival, but it still constitutes a broken lock, and is less fuinctional when compared to a lock that works.

Having a car with a broken lock is better than having no car at all, is it not?

How about an even more extreme example. Let's say that you rigged your car to explode if it was unlawfully entered into. This would remove the car theif altogether and benefit other car owners (the population).

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ORIGINAL: Jhud
Well, no, the essential genetic toolkit is common to all animals and therefore appears to be quite ancient;

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how that toolkit works is better understood as an engineering and information architecture venture than it is one of sitting around making up scenarios about how it could have come about.

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Well yes, but the Ediacaran event was explosive as well; neither is indicative of the gradualisms suggested by Darwin.

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I am not sure what you are responding to here; I said nothing of ‘cosmic’ history, but simply pointed out that the complexities which undergirds the development of life, the primary architecture of life, is ancient.

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We know now it didn’t develop gradually over time, end of story.

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Understanding how that complexity came to be modified in a number of ways may be helped by certain evolutionary scenarios, but the essentials of life, that all life shares and which provides the basis for the development we see, is quite beyond the explanatory ability of evolution now.

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Well I appreciate that you don’t see them as mutually exclusive, but that interpretation of evolution is obviously not held by the vast majority of evolutionary biologists.

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Well, if it were for example the development of computers we are talking about I would say both are true. I could consider the entire process, which would certainly be indicative of intelligent causation, or I could consider the structure of a microchip, which would give me another level of understanding.

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I don’t think the ideas are mutually exclusive, and I also think that is why we can say that throughout the history of our understanding of life, it has always been evident that it was designed.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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No, you have it backward. You should be looking at a scenario in which you do not survive, but your population is better off because you don't.

Well, no, blood cells are not part of a population but an organism. That is what is being broken; a blood cell, so an individual can endure a malarial infection. That disruption, which allows the individual to survive, is then passed on to the population genetically through reproduction. There was a first sickle cell individual, a sickle cell Eve if you will.

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Yes, blood cells are part of a population since they are located in organisms which are part of a population. Furthermore, the broken blood cell is not what is distributed in the population. What is distributed is the genetic information which may produce such a blood cell. Certainly there was a first sickle cell individual, but it is highly unlikely she (if it was a she) was a sickle-cell Eve, as had she been afflicted with sickle cell anemia, she would likely have died in childhood.

What you are overlooking is that mutations occur in one genome at a time and humans have diploid cells. So the first human to inherit the gene for Hemoglobin S also inherited (from the other parent) a normal hemoglobin gene and was heterozygous for the condition. That person would have sickle cell trait, not sickle cell anemia. The first person to have sickle cell anemia (which is a result of your broken blood cells) had to inherit the gene from both parents, so it had to have been in the population for some time already.

Finally genes and cells only survive or disappear as the organism in which they are located survives or disappears. So you cannot separate them from the organism, nor can you separate the organism from the population.

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That is not surprising if it existed in the common ancestor of all animals.

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You are comparing apples and oranges. How the tool kit works doesn't tell us how it diversified or how the variations in information were transmitted through a population, or why different populations use different versions of the tool-kit, nor why the patterns of dispersal are what they are.

Both aspects are legitimate fodder for biological research, but one does not explain the other. The molecular scene is not a replacement for the evolutionary scene.

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That is actually a misrepresentation of gradualism.

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So? Life is ancient.

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No we do not know that. We would have to have a falsification of abiogenesis to know that. We don't even have a theory of abiogenesis to falsify yet.

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It always was. The origin of life is not the subject of evolution. This is an example of the misapplication of evolution outside its field that I was speaking of.

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So what? Differences of metaphysical opinion don't damage scientific consensus since science doesn't speak on metaphysics.

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Another level of understanding, I can go along with. My point is that the microchip is not more indicative of intelligent causation than the computer as a whole. You would not say the microchip is evidence of intelligent causation while the computer is not.

But that seems to be the scenario ID demands of design in nature.

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Which has absolutely nothing to do with rejecting evolution.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud
It's like you just repeat and elaborate on what I say, claim I overlooked it, and that you are somehow contradicting what I claimed. Very odd.

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Actually, you continually and persistently overlook the impact on the population and that IS the evolutionary perspective.

You tend to use the word "organism" as if it were a synonym for "species", but whenever convenient, you treat it as an individual. I expect that what you are really doing is adopting an essentialist notion of "organism". Well, evolution does not operate in essentialist concepts. It operates in populations and gene pools through changes that occur originally in individual genomes and affect the lives of individuals. Evolution is the study of how differences which first appear in individual genomes come to impact populations.

Until you can deal with a population/gene pool perspective, you will continue to misrepresent what evolution is and what evidence is pertinent to evolution.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud
Even if that is the case, evolution doesn’t explain how the essential complexity got there to begin with.

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The complexity of life is ancient, that the point.

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Yes, we do know that. When the entire animal kingdom has an essential genetic toolkit, and that toolkit contains the essential complexities necessary to produce the various forms found in the animal kingdom, and is essentially conserved throughout said kingdom, then we know that this essential complexity didn’t develop gradually over time.

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‘Intelligent causation’ isn’t a metaphysical concern.

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It has everything to do with rejecting the notion that the development of life is an unguided event.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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That is not surprising if it existed in the common ancestor of all animals.

Even if that is the case, evolution doesn’t explain how the essential complexity got there to begin with.

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You are comparing apples and oranges. How the tool kit works doesn't tell us how it diversified or how the variations in information were transmitted through a population, or why different populations use different versions of the tool-kit, nor why the patterns of dispersal are what they are.

Both aspects are legitimate fodder for biological research, but one does not explain the other. The molecular scene is not a replacement for the evolutionary scene.

This is like saying ‘how a rocket works doesn’t tell us how it got to the moon…”,

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So? Life is ancient.

The complexity of life is ancient, that the point.

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No we do not know that. We would have to have a falsification of abiogenesis to know that. We don't even have a theory of abiogenesis to falsify yet.

Yes, we do know that. When the entire animal kingdom has an essential genetic toolkit, and that toolkit contains the essential complexities necessary to produce the various forms found in the animal kingdom, and is essentially conserved throughout said kingdom, then we know that this essential complexity didn’t develop gradually over time.

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It always was. The origin of life is not the subject of evolution. This is an example of the misapplication of evolution outside its field that I was speaking of.

Not the origin of life, but of it’s essential complexity in providing a framework for the various forms that now exist – this has nothing to do with abiogenesis.

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‘Intelligent causation