Logic and evolution (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, July 16, 2016, 19:29 (3050 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: You keep equating two facts that are not necessarily related to any great degree. Complexity for complexity's sake may be a method God used to drive evolutionary complexity so that it reached the end result of humans.
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> dhw: It is you who keep linking the two ideas, as if somehow the vast array of life forms and natural wonders, extinct and extant, was designed to produce humans.-I base my theory on the fact that the arrival of humans is a most unlikely result, unless guided. I know you don't follow the inference of purpose as I do.-> DAVID: But you are basically agreeing with me in the beginning of your comment. Humans are logical endpoint of the drive to complexity.
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> dhw: I am pointing out to you that the non-requirement for humans applies to all multicellular organisms, and is therefore no justification for your belief that humans were the reason for your God's creation of all the life forms and natural wonders in the history of evolution. I have no idea what evolution will produce in the next 3.8 billion years, but I agree with you that humans are the most complex organisms so far.-I've presented to you recently that many scientists think we are the end point. Again, I look at purpose as a driving factor and you do not.-> 
> dhw: You still have no evidence whatsoever for your claim that speciation may occur “solely from a loss of information, which means all the info needed for evolution was present from the beginning,” (my bold) and you still haven't explained what you mean by “all the info”. -> DAVID: The evidence I have is that I read over and over again from all researchers, Darwin-types and ID folks that innovation is the result of a loss of genes. If I run into another article I'll give its source.-I was working from a memory impression: here are two articles I read in the past and they describe that one of the ways adaptations occur is with loss of genes (i.e. information)-http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/08/a_leaky_faucet098751.html-"What does Behe's first rule of adaptive evolution say about evolution in general? If most "beneficial" mutations are due to the loss of something rather than a gain of something, we are losing information when most adaptations occur, sometimes irreversibly. Let me give an example.-"Microbiologist Ralph Seelke and I published a paper in 2010 where we demonstrated that cells always, or nearly always, take the easiest road to success......In fact, that is what we observed. Nearly all the cells inactivated the genes (only one out of a trillion didn't). -Behe's paper: http://www.lehigh.edu/bio/Faculty/Behe/PDF/QRB_paper.pdf-"In this paper, I review molecular changes underlying some adaptations, with a particular emphasis on evolutionary experiments with microbes conducted over the past four decades. I show that by far the most common adaptive changes seen in those examples are due to the loss or modification of a pre-existing molecular function, and I discuss the possible reasons for the prominence of such mutations.-"The results of decades of experi-mental laboratory evolution studies strongly suggest that, at the molecular level, loss-of-FCT and diminishing modification-of-function adaptive mutations predominate."-> dhw: And why do you not respond to the logical argument that adaptations and innovations will inevitably involve the gain of new information both external and internal - bearing in mind that external information is likely to be the trigger for both adaptation and innovation - and this may well be accompanied by the loss of old internal information that is now redundant?-In review I apologize. I was too forceful about only loss of information being the only important step. Reduplication of genes is another way. As for adding external information we know of methylation to modify gene function as a response to stimuli. When I have time I will try to unearth other articles on this subject. Still nothing explains speciation.