Evolution v Creationism: guided evolution? dhw? (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, March 20, 2015, 21:09 (3534 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Read this essay to see the odds against unguided evolution: nature's library of possible useful proteins;-http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/natures-library-of-platonic-forms/-Why hasn't dhw commented on this? This is the key to understanding the argument for design-You have naturally selected the paragraphs relating to complexity. Fair enough. But Wagner is asking how this complexity is possible in the evolutionary process, and his big question is : “How do random DNA changes lead to innovation?” The essay develops his answer very clearly:-“Random DNA changes in some members of a population could disable an essential protein such as haemoglobin and lead to death, but because genotype networks exist, other mutations can create a synonymous text that preserves the protein's function and saves the organism. This cycle of mutation and natural selection repeats in the survivors' descendants. Some of them die, but others live and get to take one step further. Step by step, the population of survivors spreads out through the library in a process that unfolds over many generations.”-“Relatives of the lizard's oxygen transport protein illustrate how far this exploration can go. They are all descendants of a single long-forgotten ancestral protein that existed more than a billion years ago. By now, they occur not only all over the animal kingdom but even in plants.”
 
“Just as the word GOLD emerges from a single letter change in MOLD, some neighbours of a text express new meanings. And as the browsers work their way through each synonym for some original text, different innovations become accessible. By creating safe paths through the library, genotype networks create the very possibility of innovation.”-“Let me put this point as strongly as I can. [Without these pathways of synonymous texts, these sets of genes that express precisely the same function in ever-shifting sequences of letters, it would not be possible to keep finding new innovations via random mutation. Evolution would not work.” (My bold.)-As evolutionists we agree that every innovation must take place within existing organisms. Wagner does not even reject random mutations, but he concludes that there is an inventive mechanism which can accelerate the process of innovation, and he calls it “genotype networks”. Is there anything here that you and I have not discussed ad nauseam? There are two stages to the argument: 1) How does evolution work? Even you accept the possibility of organisms having an inventive mechanism. Now you can call it “genotype networks” if you like. That is as far as the article goes. 2) How did the intelligent inventive mechanism get there? You say God, I say I don't know, but maybe God or maybe some sort of panpsychist evolution, and Wagner doesn't say anything at all here. No key, then. Just a theory as to what drives the innovations that have powered evolution to its current complexity.