Complexity of gene codes (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Wednesday, August 25, 2010, 23:36 (5013 days ago) @ David Turell


> > To answer your question, the prime mover would be the stimulus that stresses the organism and forces selection. It's like evolution within a generation, but... maybe its just the way I think, but I don't see this as threatening any paradigms...
> 
> The Darwin paradigm as presented by Charles himself was that of slow and gradual changes, step by step. Darwin could not have guessed at what we are finding now, but some of his followers still think that way. Gould's PE has come to the fore, and the Cambrian Explosion certainly shows that species appear full-blown. -You make the same assertion as young-earth creationists here however, that the fossils in the Cambrian literally were the only appearing organisms in the record, that no previous forms of those creature existed. This is an argument that simply takes advantage of the fact that we have no complete link from every intervening generation from Archaea to now. -The Dawkins whale series shows a series of differing forms, but large gaps between each one. There is no evidence of Darwin's step by step
> guess. "IF" the first Archaia had adaptive mechanisms in the genome to stresses presented by environment, that is suggestive of design. The first organisms-Fine. Then look at the evolution of horses which when I visited the Smithsonian this July, was pretty conclusive. Several (sometimes hundreds of ) thousands of years between each form. Your argument is identical to the creationists here. "Because we have gaps in the fossil record, and some of the gaps are far too short for it to have evolved by natural selection."-This argument fails for the following reasons:
1. We must be able to demonstrate what the normal rate of mutation actually was; for this we can only go by modern measurements which just like weather--are far too recent to be able to accurately push backwards into the model. Only by comparing actual to expected can the argument be made that "it's just too fast." -2. We must be able to demonstrate that the conditions during these periods were happening under some kind of balance--we need to be able to remove environmental and predatory conditions. This must be done because in order to establish "epigenetics" as the "prime mover" we need to be able to demonstrate change without selection pressure. Epigenetics can only be the cause of speciation if and only if it can create species without selective pressure. This point of mine is incisive: if this cannot be demonstrated than it means that the cause of speciation itself cannot be reduced to a single moving part. My position is that speciation begins only from a stimulus. (Which can be a collection of non-deleterious frameshifts, etc.) -> at 3.6 bya had to face enormous environmenal changes. The Earth was still cooling down, CO2 and O2 were still altering their levels enormously,'snowball' Earth was still to be experienced, etc. Without those initial adaptive abilities
> it is unlikely life would have survived. I believe as research advances, it will be fully confirmed that the earliest organisms had adaptation built in. Your answer will be that we can only study living organisms now, and more simplistic organisms preceded what we see presently. That is no more proveable than my theory which views life as surviveable only if complete with good adaptive defenses.-The present evidence shows clear movement from uncomplex to complex. No research can be done of the kind you're talking about if we don't have access to the information needed for my points 1 & 2. Especially the environmental issues. Before you can demonstrate that the world was truly hostile to life, we need a really good example of what it actually was. Shapiro claims that we don't have a good enough picture of this.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"