Evolving to evolve? Evidence that contradicts Darwinism

_{Denyse O'Leary

November 19, 2013

Darwinism, Natural selection, News}

Share: Facebook; Twitter; LinkedIn; Flipboard; Print; Email

Or neo-Darwinism. Or whatever they are calling it now. Here:

The idea of evolution driving evolvability is “highly controversial,” the team, including biologists from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Kentucky, wrote in their paper, published in the journal PLOS Pathogens. Although many quickly evolving creatures are successful, it seems strange that evolution should build that into organisms. After all, evolution should be as blind to the future as your local psychic (Sorrynotsorry). Natural selection selects for traits that are useful right now. Sometimes those traits happen to be useful to later generations in unexpected ways, but there’s no mechanism in evolution to actively prepare for the future, which is what evolvability does.

Nevertheless, to look for some real-world evidence of selection acting on evolvability, the Pennsylvania and Kentucky biologists examined Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria species that gives people Lyme disease.

We are assured, however, that organisms more complex than microbes cannot evolve to evolve. Formerly, we were assured that it couldn’t happen even in microbes, and that that claim is the most powerful idea ever:

And like all the best ideas it is beguilingly simple. In fact, it is so staggeringly elementary, so blindingly obvious that although others before him tinkered nearby, nobody thought to look for it in the right place. – Richard Dawkins, 2010

See also Nature’s take:

“It makes a lot of sense that organisms should be predisposed to dealing with future environments, but when you get down to thinking about how this might come about, it’s not so obvious,” says Paul Rainey, an evolutionary geneticist at the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study in Auckland and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany. “These guys show quite clearly that natural selection can lead to the evolution of types that have a greater capacity to respond to future environments.”

But rest assured, if you like your Darwinism, you can keep your Darwinism. We’re not going to just up and change it on you.

Comments

What is one to make of a theory of evolution that cannot even describe the minimum requirements for evolvability?Mung_{November 19, 2013
November
11
Nov
19
19
2013
04:25 PM
4
04
25
PM
PDT}

If evolution itself evolves, what then of Darwin's principle of uniformitarianism?Mung_{November 19, 2013
November
11
Nov
19
19
2013
04:22 PM
4
04
22
PM
PDT}

The human immune mechanism is amazing. The immune system cells build up a library of answers (antibodies) to all sorts of foreign attacks (infections)by altering their DNA as the person's life proceeds from childhood until death! The article simply describes a bacterium with the same mechanism. To my mind this is strong support for ID. The first original simple cell at the start of life must have contained this defense mechanism, which I'll bet will be found throughout all organisms, and indicates design pre-planning.turell_{November 19, 2013
November
11
Nov
19
19
2013
04:19 PM
4
04
19
PM
PDT}

How did organisms evolve the capacity to evolve? These are the type of questions that many sensible people have asked over the years and for which there can be no sensible answer. One is left to wonder. Why hasn't this house of cards come crashing down many decades ago? What powerful evil forces are keeping this farce alive? Who are the invisible powerful jerks who are benefiting from holding up the voodoo science that is Darwinian evolution? What's in it for them? Inquiring minds and all that.Mapou_{November 19, 2013
November
11
Nov
19
19
2013
09:06 AM
9
09
06
AM
PDT}

lifepsy has a video and article up that refutes their notion that evolving to evolve 'likely doesn’t happen in organisms such as animals, plants and fungi':
Phenotypic Plasticity - Lizard cecal valve (cyclical variation)- video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEtgOApmnTA Lizard Plasticity - March 2013 Excerpt: So in this study, plasticity experiments were conducted. When the lizards were taken off a plant diet and returned to their native insect diet, the cecal valves in their stomachs began to revert within weeks. As the authors conclude, this pointed heavily to plasticity as a cause. We can infer that the this gut morphology likewise arose in similar fashion when coming into contact with the plant diet. This isn't a unique observation, though. http://biota-curve.blogspot.com/2013/03/lizard-plasticity.html
OOOPS!.. Oh well, shouldn't be to hard for Darwinists to spin another just so story so as to stay 'scientific'. of related note to 'evolving to evolve' in bacteria, it is interesting to note that the ability of bacteria to 'evolve' to resist antibiotics, (which we were told for years was proof of Darwinian evolution), was present in bacteria for millions of years before the bacteria had seen the antibiotics.
A Tale of Two Falsifications of Evolution - September 2011 Excerpt: “Scientists were surprised at how fast bacteria developed resistance to the miracle antibiotic drugs when they were developed less than a century ago. Now scientists at McMaster University have found that resistance has been around for at least 30,000 years.” http://crev.info/content/110904-a_tale_of_two_falsifications_of_evolution (Ancient) Cave bacteria resistant to antibiotics - April 2012 Excerpt: Antibiotic-resistant bacteria cut off from the outside world for more than four million years have been found in a deep cave. The discovery is surprising because drug resistance is widely believed to be the result of too much treatment.,,, “Our study shows that antibiotic resistance is hard-wired into bacteria. It could be billions of years old, but we have only been trying to understand it for the last 70 years,” said Dr Gerry Wright, from McMaster University in Canada, who has analysed the microbes. http://www.scotsman.com/news/health/cave-bacteria-resistant-to-antibiotics-1-2229183#
bornagain77_{November 19, 2013
November
11
Nov
19
19
2013
08:55 AM
8
08
55
AM
PDT}

Dembski #2: But if these are presupposed by evolution, how does one evolve these capacities?
IOW: if evolution depends on cellular mechanisms that mess with DNA in order to work, how can evolution be invoked as a cause for these cellular mechanisms?Box_{November 19, 2013
November
11
Nov
19
19
2013
08:08 AM
8
08
08
AM
PDT}

This reminds me of exchanges I've had with James Shapiro in which I asked him how one gets organisms capable of "natural genetic engineering." Likewise, how does one get evolvable organisms? It seems that one needs a capacity for natural genetic engineering or evolvability for evolution to do anything interesting. But if these are presupposed by evolution, how does one evolve these capacities?William Dembski_{November 19, 2013
November
11
Nov
19
19
2013
07:23 AM
7
07
23
AM
PDT}

as to this comment:
"After all, evolution should be as blind to the future as your local psychic (Sorrynotsorry). Natural selection selects for traits that are useful right now.",,,
But then how can I possibly contemplate the future, i.e. possibly have foresight and plan, if I was generated by a process that is completely blind to the future and is completely lacking the foresight to plan?
"I have argued patiently against the prevailing form of naturalism, a reductive materialism that purports to capture life and mind through its neo-Darwinian extension." "..., I find this view antecedently unbelievable---a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense". Thomas Nagel - "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False" - pg.128
as to this comment from the article:
"This likely doesn't happen in organisms such as animals, plants and fungi, however, the team writes. The way those cells work, latent evolvability isn't so directly linked to traits important to their survival. So for humans, at least, the idea of evolving to evolve will have to stay in the self-help books."
Although I don't buy their just so story for bacteria 'evolving to evolve' for a moment, (since Darwinists cannot even demonstrate just one gene/protein arising by Darwinian processes), I'm glad they mentioned, however understated it was, that 'evolving to evolve' is much more difficult for evolution to explain in multicellular creatures. The tremendous foresight that would be required for the evolution of multicellular creatures, over and above 'simple' bacteria, is clearly elucidated by Dr. Paul Nelson here;
Darwin or Design? - Paul Nelson at Saddleback Church - Nov. 2012 - ontogenetic depth (excellent update) - video Text from one of the Saddleback slides: 1. Animal body plans are built in each generation by a stepwise process, from the fertilized egg to the many cells of the adult. The earliest stages in this process determine what follows. 2. Thus, to change -- that is, to evolve -- any body plan, mutations expressed early in development must occur, be viable, and be stably transmitted to offspring. 3. But such early-acting mutations of global effect are those least likely to be tolerated by the embryo. Losses of structures are the only exception to this otherwise universal generalization about animal development and evolution. Many species will tolerate phenotypic losses if their local (environmental) circumstances are favorable. Hence island or cave fauna often lose (for instance) wings or eyes. http://www.saddleback.com/mc/m/7ece8/
and is also clearly elucidated here:
HOW BIOLOGISTS LOST SIGHT OF THE MEANING OF LIFE — AND ARE NOW STARING IT IN THE FACE - Stephen L. Talbott - May 2012 Excerpt: “If you think air traffic controllers have a tough job guiding planes into major airports or across a crowded continental airspace, consider the challenge facing a human cell trying to position its proteins”. A given cell, he notes, may make more than 10,000 different proteins, and typically contains more than a billion protein molecules at any one time. “Somehow a cell must get all its proteins to their correct destinations — and equally important, keep these molecules out of the wrong places”. And further: “It’s almost as if every mRNA [an intermediate between a gene and a corresponding protein] coming out of the nucleus knows where it’s going” (Travis 2011),,, Further, the billion protein molecules in a cell are virtually all capable of interacting with each other to one degree or another; they are subject to getting misfolded or “all balled up with one another”; they are critically modified through the attachment or detachment of molecular subunits, often in rapid order and with immediate implications for changing function; they can wind up inside large-capacity “transport vehicles” headed in any number of directions; they can be sidetracked by diverse processes of degradation and recycling... and so on without end. Yet the coherence of the whole is maintained. The question is indeed, then, “How does the organism meaningfully dispose of all its molecules, getting them to the right places and into the right interactions?” The same sort of question can be asked of cells, for example in the growing embryo, where literal streams of cells are flowing to their appointed places, differentiating themselves into different types as they go, and adjusting themselves to all sorts of unpredictable perturbations — even to the degree of responding appropriately when a lab technician excises a clump of them from one location in a young embryo and puts them in another, where they may proceed to adapt themselves in an entirely different and proper way to the new environment. It is hard to quibble with the immediate impression that form (which is more idea-like than thing-like) is primary, and the material particulars subsidiary. Two systems biologists, one from the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Germany and one from Harvard Medical School, frame one part of the problem this way: "The human body is formed by trillions of individual cells. These cells work together with remarkable precision, first forming an adult organism out of a single fertilized egg, and then keeping the organism alive and functional for decades. To achieve this precision, one would assume that each individual cell reacts in a reliable, reproducible way to a given input, faithfully executing the required task. However, a growing number of studies investigating cellular processes on the level of single cells revealed large heterogeneity even among genetically identical cells of the same cell type. (Loewer and Lahav 2011)",,, And then we hear that all this meaningful activity is, somehow, meaningless or a product of meaninglessness. This, I believe, is the real issue troubling the majority of the American populace when they are asked about their belief in evolution. They see one thing and then are told, more or less directly, that they are really seeing its denial. Yet no one has ever explained to them how you get meaning from meaninglessness — a difficult enough task once you realize that we cannot articulate any knowledge of the world at all except in the language of meaning.,,, http://www.netfuture.org/2012/May1012_184.html#2
Verse and Music;
Proverbs 23:18 There is surely a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off. Casting Crowns - Already There http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrOotpSKOX0
bornagain77_{November 19, 2013
November
11
Nov
19
19
2013
06:45 AM
6
06
45
AM
PDT}

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Leave a Reply