Genome complexity: pseudogenes (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, August 26, 2013, 17:19 (4108 days ago) @ dhw


> 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!
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> 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. -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. 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. 
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> DHW: It proposes that nature ensures that what is useful survives: not chance.
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> 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.
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> 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.-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.- 
> dhw: It is the mechanism of the genome that has the potential for variation.-Agreed
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> 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.-Is twisting reasonable logic? Let's be logical.