Genome complexity: pseudogenes (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, August 26, 2013, 15:36 (4108 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You always talk of evolution as if it were a single theory, but you know that in fact it's several theories, only parts of which depend on chance. It doesn't deal with the origin of life, but atheists attribute that to chance. It proposes that all forms of life are descended from earlier forms: nothing to do with chance. It proposes that innovations are caused by random mutations: dependent on chance.-DAVID: Of course chance play a role here. Gould's point about contingency is a counter to your statement. What comes next depends on what came before, and mutations develop forms by a series of accidents. Gould called us a glorious accident!
 
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. Many theists believe in guided common descent (I thought you were one of them), and not in random mutations. They accept one theory and not the other. Once again you are conflating separate ideas. -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.-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. You have said yourself that natural selection does not PROVIDE that ability ... it only begins when organs and organisms already exist.-dhw: If junk is not junk, Dawkins can say that natural selection has ensured the survival of the useful, and that's how non-junk DNA fits in with Darwinism. You say, quite rightly in my view, "complexity is anti-chance", but that does not undermine the natural selection part of the argument. You, Dawkins and I agree that once the mechanism is in place, with all its potential for variation, complexity increases and we have evolution.-DAVID: Again be careful. Natural selection has no 'potential for variation', it acts on variation.
 
It is the mechanism of the genome that has the potential for variation.-DAVID: And as for 'junk' it supports the atheist idea that evoluton is a random walk into the future, purposeless to its core, and junk piled up as garbage might under such circumstances, as a hunt and peck approach to complexity might create.-This sentence is difficult to follow. 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). In the same way, believers used to think God created species separately, but when the theory of common descent caught on, some of them switched to the idea that God directed evolution. As I keep saying, you can twist information to fit any theory.-dhw: You and I reject random mutations in favour of intelligence built into the genome, and I agree with you that the almost unfathomable complexity of this mechanism undermines the atheist's faith in origin by chance, and favours origin by design. But as usual that only leads us to the problem of the origin of a designer, which is even more unfathomable. You choose to believe in the unfathomable designer, Dawkins chooses to believe in the chance origin of the unfathomable genome, and I choose not to choose.-DAVID: You don't have to choose. Don't act too surprised when you arrive at the Pearly Gates.-They'll never let me in.