nonrandom mutations

Google rapid evolution and get stuff like

The neo-Darwinian idea of random mutation and selection is, as you note, slow. Too slow for species survival in a changing world.

A change of venue, or a new predator or disease, is a problem to be solved. Better do it wide and fast or become extinct.

Thanks.

While generally true, this sounds awfully clumsy to be saying that after each and every sentence. And the audience will soon wander off.

Really? We don't generally assert something as true unless we believe that thing to be true. Or more to the point, in Law if we assert as true material (=important) things that we know to be untrue, we are guilty of a felony.

That's a lot of hairsplitting to avoid a standard, well-understood word.

Ultimately one judges which theories one feels are most likely correct. One can describe this as belief in those theories, or choose an equivalent term.

One traditional approach is simply to ask, and then listen.

Do we know that Larkin does not know this (regardless of belief or its lack)?

I believe so. QED.

Joe Gwinn

<snip>

There's not a lot pf point in asking John Larkin or Flyguy. They tend to repeat what they said before without any useful clarification of what they had in mind (not that Flyguy seems to have enough mind to accommodate anything more complicated than the ideas he cuts and pastes).

It is difficult to imagine that he does. Somebody as vain as he is wouldn't post such obvious nonsense if he realised that it was obvious nonsense.

<snip>

Some people are in the possibilities business. Some are in the impossibilities business.

Until we understand everything, things are still possible.

Not well-understood at all, but a loaded word which will trigger outrage and/or religious terms like 'dogma'. The word has ambiguities built in, and there's no way to defuse it.

It's loaded, like a loaded cigar: it explodes.

<snip>

John Larkin doesn't understand much, and thinks that a whole lot of impossible things are still possible. He thinks that it worthwhile to expose his ignorance on a regular basis, and feels hurt when he is reminded that it makes him look foolish.

Just for the record, it is impossible that global warming isn't happening right now. It is possible - in fact obviously true - that people who make a lot of money out of digging up fossil carbon and selling it as fuel don't want people to believe this, and will lie to gullible twits about it. It's entirely possible - in fact obviously true - that John Larkin is one of those gullible twits.

The fallacy in this logic is the assumption that for any given matter, science has enough information to actually "understand" the matter or to make accurate predictions.

I have come to realize for some time that there actually is virtually nothing that is hard, solid logical science, but rather that there is always some amount of "belief" or emotion involved. Scientists tie their emotions to logic, so when they think they are evaluating logically, they are actually evaluating by emotion that is tied to logic. So, when the logic is not quite rock solid and there is any degree of interpretation, the illogical aspect of emotion can leak in and corrupt the science.

Even Einstein said he didn't believe quantum mechanics because, "God doesn't play dice with the universe". That was pure emotion and no logic at all.

Of course this can be used inappropriately to refute every part of science by those who have ulterior motives. That has nothing to do with science other than the fact that it is a weakness of science, that it can be attacked as untrue because it is not perfect.

When it comes to judging perfection, who will cast the first stone?

"Understanding" is always incomplete. There's always a more detail explanation which we lack the time (and usually the sufficiently finely detailed information) to fill out.

Making sufficiently accurate predictions is less demanding, and there are lots of situations where current science is quite good enough to let us do that

What on earth would make you think that?

It's a risk, but people are aware of it. Stephen Jay Gould wrote a whole book on particularly emotionally charged subject.

And nobody took him seriously. He wasn't speaking as a scientist at the time, but rather expressing an aesthetic reservation

The fact that science isn't perfect - we always expect to be able to get more subtle and detailed explanations that work more accurately over a broader range of observations - isn't a weakness , but rather it's central strength.

Science isn't about judging perfection - which we know we can't attain - but rather about judging how close we've got to perfection so far, and how we can get closer.

That depends. Newtonian dynamics are known to be now quite right but they are routinely taught as true up until degree level physics. In normal daily life we never experience anything where relativistic effects or general relativity affects the outcome.

Science does know when it is close to the edge and bordering on speculation. The fundamental thing about a scientific theory is that it makes testable predictions which can be tested experimentally.

It only takes one good reproducible experiment to refute a scientific theory completely and start again from the drawing board.

There can be some pretty big egos involved. The most recent major big bun fight was Fred Hoyle's Steady State Cosmology vs Martin Ryles radio galaxy observations and Stephen Hawking over Einstein-Lemaitre "Big Bang" theory.

"Big Bang" Cosmology was a disparaging name Hoyle coined for it.

Prior to that there was Leibniz vs Newton and Hooke vs Newton. Newton's acolytes had a habit of airbrushing out the achievements of his rivals. Thank your deity of choice we mainly use Leibniz notation today rather than the arcane fluxions.

He was saying something intended to resonate with the public. The best description of QM now suggests not only does he play dice he does it in such a way that we can never hope to see them. Making any measurement always disturbs a quantum system.

Science is always striving to make a better and more accurate model of how the universe behaves by formulating theories and testing them.

When new data comes along science alters its theories to accommodate the new information. It still includes all previous theories as weak field limits of the more complete complex one.

The old theories are still plenty good enough for ordinary use.

Speed of light in a vacuum being a universal constant isn't a bad one.

When Maxwell's first derived this result from his electromagnetism equations it seemed very odd but it turned out he was right all along and he obtained that clear and unexpected result in 1865 well before Lorentz ether and Einstein's relativity at the turn of the century.

You are an unusually patient, calm and diplomatic poster. What are you doing in this group? :-)

/Some/ things are possible. Other things are impossible. That is true regardless of how much or how little you or anyone else understands.

It is good to keep an open mind - but not /so/ open that your brains dribble out.

Neo-Darwinism is at its core agressively anti-theological, so it fights any hints of complexity beyond random selection and mutation, lest it drift even slightly in the direction of cause in nature.

This interests me because it is yet another example of tribal beliefs blocking thinking and discovery.

Jumping genes, junk DNA, epigenetics, horizontal gene transfer, are all post-Darwin effects; some took 50 years to be accepted. There are surely more.

google post darwin theories of evolution

"Neo-Darwinism" is a term used by people who don't understand the scientific view of evolution, and prefer something invoking an "intelligent designer" (i.e., one or more gods).

Science does not "fight" anything, except perhaps ignorance. If someone were to provide evidence that there was a direction, planning, or intelligence of some sort behind evolution as seen on earth, then scientists would accept that as proof that the current theories are wrong (or at least incomplete and inaccurate), and be forced to come up with something new that fits all the old evidence and the new evidence.

Scientists love doing that. Good scientists like to be proven wrong, because they understand that's how science progresses. /All/ scientists enjoy being able to prove other scientists and existing theories wrong.

Lots of people have tried to find evidence of direction or goals in evolution. That includes laymen, scientists, theologians, and many others. None have found anything.

And no, neither science in general nor evolutionary biology in particular have any "anti-theological" agenda. Science simply doesn't care. There is no proof for a god of any sort, no need to introduce one in any theory, and no reason to think about one. They are not "anti-theological" any more than they are "anti-pink-unicorns". Some individual scientists may be anti-religion, or outspoken pro-atheist, just as some are highly religious. But that's a personal thing, not a science thing. (Anyone who argues that science disproves the existence of god or gods is as wrong as those who argue that science /proves/ their existence.)

Take a look in the mirror, and try to see who /really/ has tribal beliefs that misunderstand science.

Sure. No one is claiming that we have a /full/ understanding of biology, either present biology or its history through the ages. We are continually finding new ways in which genetic information is or has been transferred, as well as how it is expressed and controlled. We are continually examining different organisms in more detail, and finding new details in how this all works. And scientists are sceptics - it is part of their job description to demand evidence. They don't accept things just because one person says so - they want to see data, and experiments. They want the experiments to be repeated by others to show it was not just luck, or experimental evidence. The more dramatic the claim, the more evidence they want to see supporting it. And when the evidence is strong enough, the state of the "current best theories" is updated.

But what we can be sure about - as sure as we are that gravity makes bricks fall when you drop them - is that the fundamentals of evolution are known. There are mechanisms for passing traits onto future generations (primarily genes, but also other biochemical or environmental factors). There are mechanisms for random mutations (sexual intermixing, copy-error mutations, and other mechanisms). And there are mechanisms for selection (survival of the breeding line). We know this. We are still filling in details, but the big picture is there.

To rock that, would require something extraordinary. We'd need to see a copyright notice on a gene, or a billion-year old human fossil, or a dog giving birth to a cat, or an intelligent virus with a battle plan for its evolution, or a god that shows how he/she/it guides evolution. Find one of these, and the science will be changed to fit.

In the meantime, remember that "Plague Inc." is a game (quite a fun one), and real evolution is not guided.

Absolutely not. Science is mostly social, and establishments resist new ideas.

Try "Finding The Mother Tree."

I appear alone in a mirror. I belong to no tribe.

That's one reason why I design things.

Than leave room for new ideas.

There is nothing about science that is "anti-theological". They are orthogonal. They address completely different aspects of life. Anyone who suggests they are in conflict in any way does not understand one, the other or both... most likely both.

The conflicts arise when specific people try to interpret writings by other specific people about either religion or science. The conflicts are mostly created when someone has a purpose to a creating conflict, as is true for most conflicts in general.

Here is an excellent example of what Larkin is talking about. There are some in science who close their minds to new ideas, namely Larkin. He refuses to consider anything David Brown posted in spite of the voluminous evidence to the contrary. Science journals are full of people proving other people wrong.

You mean ideas like AGW?

Nonsense. Any multiperson activity is 'social' in a sense, but science has the goal of seeking/testing/using information. That's not a social goal. Scientists' main social concern is education, propogation of ideas, and never 'resist new ideas'. Trying to call science an 'establishment' is another major error: science means knowledge and understanding, it is NOT identical to any establishment. I have fingers, but I am not a finger. Science has establishments, but it is not an establishment.

Laplace summed it up when Napoleon asked him why one of his theories made no reference to God. God. Laplace is said to have replied, “Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là. (“I had no need of that hypothesis.”)

It is convenient for the less well educated/informed religious believers to /claim/ that Darwinism is anti-God. That enable them to falsely cast people that understand evolution as Them (not Us).

I wonder whether John's response, if any, will be akin to "all crows are black birds, so all black birds are crows".

Twaddle. It gets a bit snooty about the "watchmaker" fallacy.

Richard Dawkins is an aggressive atheist, so he uses the opportunity to go after the "intelligent design" crowd, but he isn't the only neo-Darwinist around and he isn't any kind of representative example of the breed.

That wasn't so much science as the "clear-felling and plant a pine plantation" industry. Nobody likes being told that what they are doing doesn't work as well as it should, and they actively resist changing their ways to do something that would work better.

That wasn't science resisting new ideas, but rather the aboreal equivalent of the fossil-carbon extraction industry.

Science is a social system that has been developed to accommodate and encourage new ideas, and it works remarkably well. Sadly. you don't know a thing about it.

If there was any evidence that god or gods existed, science could probably test it. Nothing has come up so far.

Ignorant people are ignorant about being members the ignorant tribe. They don't know enough to realise how little they know.

Or think that your approach to developing new products amounts to some kind of design process. If you don't know what's involved in actual design you can think that persistent tweaking is a kind of design process. Anybody who has had to clean up after that kind of "design" knows different.

So what? "Junk DNA" isn't junk but rather operating programs.

But lay off posting bad ideas that have long since been exploded. That would meaning learning a bit more about the subject, so you could recognise bad old ideas and not waste our time telling us about them