Darwinist ignorance, confusion & epigenetics (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Sunday, November 14, 2010, 22:01 (5122 days ago) @ David Turell


> > Considering that the bacterial studies in the early 80's demonstrated that knocking out lactase genes caused the organisms to modify or adapt another existing gene for the same purpose, to me it seems that the creation of new organs can/would be certainly plausible under NS. How absolute are you that NS cannot cause innovation? I think the blanket you throw here is too wide...
> 
> Strictly speaking your thought about N S is wrong. NS is passive, absolutely. It must work with the mutations that occur, and which must be helpful, which is not a common event. Epigenetics is more logical as a mechanism. To jump from a minor metabolic adaptation to a whole new organ is a giant leap of faith on a chance process.-Actually--no its not. I've also been acquainting myself with the mathematics surrounding Chaos theory--for real, not just perusing. The story of Lorenz serves as the best intro, as he discovered the "butterfly effect." -Basically, when he was running weather forecasting, he had decided to take a shortcut when doing his calculations; he should have entered .603 and instead entered .600. At first, the perturbations seemed similar, but watching what happened after the 2nd and 4th minima in the functions, the two forecasts completely diverged. -The moral of the story is, that a seemingly minor change (dropping a number in the thousandths place resulted in a completely different scenario. -So I take the opposite position; a minor change in an organism--adaptation of a gene to metabolize lactase--can have profound effects for downstream organisms--including the ability for whole new organs. In fact as I've perused it, the knowledge that extremely minor permutations cause immensely different results stands as a testament against your assertion of "leap of faith." The mathematical analysis also stands more in favor of radical skepticism, as in order to come to the conclusion that you do, we have to be in possession of all the likely paths life could have taken, and experimental evidence that told us how often these things would actually appear, and an analysis of how far our path deviates from the norm. We are far off from being able to [EDIT] perform such a comprehensive study; therefore declaring any end is epistemologically problematic; you can live with that--I can't.-[EDITED]

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