Modularity and Design
| November 16, 2007 | Posted by idnet.com.au under Biology |
The road to modularity Günter P. Wagner, Mihaela Pavlicev and James M. Cheverud Nature Reviews Genetics Volume 8 Dec 2007
“From our reading of the literature, origin of modularity research is still mostly based on model analysis rather than data. It is likely that we have not yet fully explored the range of theoretical possibilities to explain modularity, and more theoretical work will still be valuable. The models reviewed here, however, suggest an emerging theme. It seems that the origin of modularity requires both a mutational process that favours the origin of modularity and selection pressures that can take advantage of and reinforce the mutational bias.”
Hot off the press and freely available, this EvoDevo paper admits that we need a loaded mutational dice to achieve the results that we see in biology. A loaded dice always points to design.
http://ealerts.nature.com/cgi-bin24/DM/y/hhc30TXgoO0Hjc0Bg7i0Ea
93 Responses to Modularity and Design
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Bob,
to clear things up,
As esteemed French scientist Pierre P. Grasse has stated “What is the use of their unceasing mutations, if they do not change? In sum, the mutations of bacteria… are merely hereditary fluctuations around a median position; a swing to the right, a swing to the left, but no final evolutionary effect.” Needless to say, this limit to the variability of bacteria is extremely bad news for you Bob.
So your guys are able to deduce rare advantageous mutations in their study, But when you look at the overall picture of the bacteria in the integrated complexity of symbiotic life, they have somehow missed something very important, for the bacteria will, when put in the wild, always be out competed by the original bacteria thus failing the test for overall robustness.
Thus any supposed gain in complexity was superficial and did not “stick” in the long run as far as “proving Darwinism is concerned.
bob, I think it a wee bit odd for you to make such an argument when you yourself agreed in an earlier discussion that high replicators like bacteria should avoid genetic entropy. Never mind that this is a virus we’re talking about (not higher creatures which is the focus of genetic entropy in the first place) which is an order of magnitude more so a “high replicator” and that UD has featured whole articles on the subject.
You previously stated:
Also, I think it interesting you argue that “it has gained a function” and then selectively cite Behe without including this:
[...] I previously made the following prediction: But let’s say we did find such foresighted mechanisms. Darwinists might argue that such mechanisms would be selected for without intelligence being involved. After all, being foresighted would allow proactive responses to a changing environment and thus increase survivability. It’s kind of like how they create a story for modularity. [...]