The essential question has always been is where did the genes leading to proteins come from. Evolutionary biologists will say they built up a long time ago but there is no evidence for this. This is the fallacy of begging the question. They just assume it’s true.
Natural selection happens but it is very rare. It is the process of adaptation and can most often work according to Michael Behe by deselecting or eliminating genes (and thus proteins) that then go inoperative as opposed to adding genes (and thus adding proteins). In other words, the species loses something and doesn’t gain anything. By this lost it can survive better in certain ecologies.
I believe there are a couple of very rare examples of new genes forming and thus, new proteins
What is conspicuously missing from evolutionary biology are examples of these new genes forming. There should be 10s of thousands of them not just a few but all there is are assertions they happen.
Also for every new gene forming, there should be failed but very close DNA sequences in closely related species that eventually separated the species. But we see none reported.
This is one of the failures of ID, to point this out. To point out the failures of evolutionary biology should be one of the main functions of ID. If something is essential for evolutionary biology to be true but is missing, it should be top of mind.
Instead, accept natural selection but point out there are very few examples of it working to produce new proteins. It’s main function is slight changes in current genomes or the actual reduction of the gene producing sequences.
Natural selection works fine within a species. But even here it is exaggerated in what it can do. Species do adapt so some change is possible.
Natural selection is essentially a tautology. Whatever happened has to be natural selection. The proper word is adaptation. And it should be applied to an ecology if it is applied at all. This would include minerals and geological changes as well as changes in the genomes of living organisms.
The problem comes when one denies it 100%. It actually does work on some things within a species and occasionally with significant effects on survival but no one has ever shown it works to make major changes in body organization. Happily confine natural selection to genetics but emphasize it had no effect on what people and scientists call evolution.
I think, actually, that many of the things that fall under the label of "natural selection" are in fact logically distinct concepts that Darwin and his successors have conflated together. The central premise of the idea is simply incoherent, whereas some of the phenomena that are referred to as "natural selection" are real but mislabeled.
The incoherent part is the main idea of "natural selection" as a mindless process that can create biological function by acting analogously to a human designer. The issue here isn't even that Darwinists haven't shown how examples of sophisticated integrated function could be produced by a series of beneficial mutations. The issue is that a beneficial mutation, even if it does occur and get preserved, is not being preserved because of some role in might play in a future system. It is no more likely to be useful in that regard than a negative or neutral mutation. "Beneficial" in this context simply has nothing to do with any as-yet-unrealized function.
In reality, Darwinists are dependent PURELY on chance to account for biological function. The idea of "natural selection" as a causal agent that makes it more likely is an illusion caused by reifying Darwin's analogy between natural selection and human design and projecting the conscious foresight and planning of a literal intelligent agent onto it.
And indirect pathways don't help here either. Even if one postulates that a biological structure could have been built up performing one function and then been coopted to perform another, one is left with a radical discontinuity (the point of transition from old function to new) and an appeal to pure chance for the new function (since at no point was anything being selected for it, and hence it is pure luck that a structure happened to come into existence that could be coopted to it).
And even if a seemingly functional object DID come into exist by chance, it wouldn't actually have function at all, but would only seem to us to have it, hence it would only be a subjective mental projection, not a real thing needing explanation.
So "natural selection" in the sense of a blind process that generates biological function is just incoherent. It doesn't refer to anything existing in concrete reality, nor even to anything intelligible even in theory.
Nor is there any real process called "natural selection" that can explain adaptation/microevolution in principle. For as one of the answers in the Darwin Devotion Detector points out, "For an organism to be selected it must already be well adapted; therefore, the theory of natural selection begs the question of the origin of adaptations."
It IS true that biological functions and useful adaptations, once they exist, will tend to continue existing. But the better term for that phenomenon is "natural preservation," not natural selection. We're talking about something fundamentally different from the alleged but nonexistent creative process referred to as "natural selection" here.
There's only one special case, I think, where something that could be fairly called "natural selection" can be intelligibly said to *cause* a biological effect to exist in some sense. That's when you have a population with multiple genetic variants influencing some trait, each of which has a similar effect, and the effect is additive such that when more than one of these variations are present in the same organism, the magnitude of the effect is enhanced.
To give a concrete example, let's say you have a population of dark-skinned people migrating from Africa to northern Europe. Now let's say that there are 12 different genetic variations present in that population that each results in slightly diminished melanin production, hence lighter skin. When all 12 variations are present in a single person, you get someone with pale skin resembling a modern Scandinavian, but this is extremely improbable to happen while the population remains in Africa. However, once in northern Europe, each skin-lightening variation becomes advantageous individually (since it allows sunlight to be absorbed more easily for vitamin D production), and so is preserved more frequently by natural selection (or rather natural preservation), which increases the probability of individuals being born with multiple of these variations, and eventually with all 12 at once. I think that natural preservation of traits that have an aggregate effect accounts for a few examples of adaptation in biology referred to as "microevolution," such as the changing beak sizes of Darwin's finches, for instance.
Notice that this doesn't involve the origin of any new function, but just the variation of parameters to preserve existing function. The various mutations in this kind of scenario are independent of each other and don't work together to form a new system, but merely have an aggregate effect, so "natural selection" in this sense has a fundamentally different meaning from the "natural selection" that supposedly creates biological function (which is not an aggregate concept), and it is a category error to try to extrapolate from one to the other.
The essential question has always been is where did the genes leading to proteins come from. Evolutionary biologists will say they built up a long time ago but there is no evidence for this. This is the fallacy of begging the question. They just assume it’s true.
Natural selection happens but it is very rare. It is the process of adaptation and can most often work according to Michael Behe by deselecting or eliminating genes (and thus proteins) that then go inoperative as opposed to adding genes (and thus adding proteins). In other words, the species loses something and doesn’t gain anything. By this lost it can survive better in certain ecologies.
I believe there are a couple of very rare examples of new genes forming and thus, new proteins
What is conspicuously missing from evolutionary biology are examples of these new genes forming. There should be 10s of thousands of them not just a few but all there is are assertions they happen.
Also for every new gene forming, there should be failed but very close DNA sequences in closely related species that eventually separated the species. But we see none reported.
This is one of the failures of ID, to point this out. To point out the failures of evolutionary biology should be one of the main functions of ID. If something is essential for evolutionary biology to be true but is missing, it should be top of mind.
Instead, accept natural selection but point out there are very few examples of it working to produce new proteins. It’s main function is slight changes in current genomes or the actual reduction of the gene producing sequences.
Well, I flunked that one with flying colors, I'm glad to say!
I stopped after 15 with 0.
Natural selection works fine within a species. But even here it is exaggerated in what it can do. Species do adapt so some change is possible.
Natural selection is essentially a tautology. Whatever happened has to be natural selection. The proper word is adaptation. And it should be applied to an ecology if it is applied at all. This would include minerals and geological changes as well as changes in the genomes of living organisms.
The problem comes when one denies it 100%. It actually does work on some things within a species and occasionally with significant effects on survival but no one has ever shown it works to make major changes in body organization. Happily confine natural selection to genetics but emphasize it had no effect on what people and scientists call evolution.
I think, actually, that many of the things that fall under the label of "natural selection" are in fact logically distinct concepts that Darwin and his successors have conflated together. The central premise of the idea is simply incoherent, whereas some of the phenomena that are referred to as "natural selection" are real but mislabeled.
The incoherent part is the main idea of "natural selection" as a mindless process that can create biological function by acting analogously to a human designer. The issue here isn't even that Darwinists haven't shown how examples of sophisticated integrated function could be produced by a series of beneficial mutations. The issue is that a beneficial mutation, even if it does occur and get preserved, is not being preserved because of some role in might play in a future system. It is no more likely to be useful in that regard than a negative or neutral mutation. "Beneficial" in this context simply has nothing to do with any as-yet-unrealized function.
In reality, Darwinists are dependent PURELY on chance to account for biological function. The idea of "natural selection" as a causal agent that makes it more likely is an illusion caused by reifying Darwin's analogy between natural selection and human design and projecting the conscious foresight and planning of a literal intelligent agent onto it.
And indirect pathways don't help here either. Even if one postulates that a biological structure could have been built up performing one function and then been coopted to perform another, one is left with a radical discontinuity (the point of transition from old function to new) and an appeal to pure chance for the new function (since at no point was anything being selected for it, and hence it is pure luck that a structure happened to come into existence that could be coopted to it).
And even if a seemingly functional object DID come into exist by chance, it wouldn't actually have function at all, but would only seem to us to have it, hence it would only be a subjective mental projection, not a real thing needing explanation.
So "natural selection" in the sense of a blind process that generates biological function is just incoherent. It doesn't refer to anything existing in concrete reality, nor even to anything intelligible even in theory.
Nor is there any real process called "natural selection" that can explain adaptation/microevolution in principle. For as one of the answers in the Darwin Devotion Detector points out, "For an organism to be selected it must already be well adapted; therefore, the theory of natural selection begs the question of the origin of adaptations."
It IS true that biological functions and useful adaptations, once they exist, will tend to continue existing. But the better term for that phenomenon is "natural preservation," not natural selection. We're talking about something fundamentally different from the alleged but nonexistent creative process referred to as "natural selection" here.
There's only one special case, I think, where something that could be fairly called "natural selection" can be intelligibly said to *cause* a biological effect to exist in some sense. That's when you have a population with multiple genetic variants influencing some trait, each of which has a similar effect, and the effect is additive such that when more than one of these variations are present in the same organism, the magnitude of the effect is enhanced.
To give a concrete example, let's say you have a population of dark-skinned people migrating from Africa to northern Europe. Now let's say that there are 12 different genetic variations present in that population that each results in slightly diminished melanin production, hence lighter skin. When all 12 variations are present in a single person, you get someone with pale skin resembling a modern Scandinavian, but this is extremely improbable to happen while the population remains in Africa. However, once in northern Europe, each skin-lightening variation becomes advantageous individually (since it allows sunlight to be absorbed more easily for vitamin D production), and so is preserved more frequently by natural selection (or rather natural preservation), which increases the probability of individuals being born with multiple of these variations, and eventually with all 12 at once. I think that natural preservation of traits that have an aggregate effect accounts for a few examples of adaptation in biology referred to as "microevolution," such as the changing beak sizes of Darwin's finches, for instance.
Notice that this doesn't involve the origin of any new function, but just the variation of parameters to preserve existing function. The various mutations in this kind of scenario are independent of each other and don't work together to form a new system, but merely have an aggregate effect, so "natural selection" in this sense has a fundamentally different meaning from the "natural selection" that supposedly creates biological function (which is not an aggregate concept), and it is a category error to try to extrapolate from one to the other.
That's the lowest I have ever scored on a test. Woe is me !
I think I passed. Please send me a trophy.
Your trophy is simply the knowledge that you have kept your intellect pure!