Horizontal Transfer Finally Reaches the Eukaryotes
| January 2, 2013 | Posted by Cornelius Hunter under Intelligent Design |
If falsifiability is essential in science then perhaps evolutionary theory belongs in a different box. Repeatedly evolution sustains contradictory evidence without missing a beat and the latest example is the next step in the long story of horizontal transfer of genomic material. Once evolutionary theory held that when the species were compared they would form an evolutionary tree, common descent, pattern. And when the genes of bacteria violated this pattern, it was said they had been horizontally transferred—a complicated mechanism that allows bacteria to trade genetic material with each other rather than merely inheriting it. Suddenly the framework of evolutionary theory was much more fluid as most any genetic pattern could be explained. The horizontal gene transfer explanation was used liberally and it was even recruited and greatly expanded in highly speculative narratives of how early evolution created its designs. But all of that was for bacteria. The higher eukaryote species, evolutionists argued, still very much confirmed the traditional evolutionary tree model. The theory was solid and falsifiable, the evolutionists assured their skeptics. That is, until now. For new research has brought horizontal transfer to the front and center for eukaryotes as well. To wit: Read more
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“If falsifiability is essential in science then perhaps evolutionary theory belongs in a different box.”
So true! But how could it be otherwise that Darwinism would fail to make accurate predictions? How is it possible for a materialistic theory (Darwinism) which denies the reality of ‘mind’ to have any real predictive power as a scientific theory in the first place since to make accurate predictions it takes a ‘mind’ to assess what the future may hold and predict what may take place in that future!
Science and Pseudoscience (transcript) -
“In degenerating programmes, however, theories are fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts” – Imre Lakatos (November 9, 1922 – February 2, 1974) a philosopher of mathematics and science, , quote as stated in 1973 LSE Scientific Method Lecture
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/philosop.....cript.aspx
Exposing Darwinism as a ‘degenerating science program’
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LpGd3smTV1RwmEXC25IAEKMjiypBl5VJq9ssfv4JgeM/edit
Science and Pseudoscience – Imre Lakatos
“nobody to date has yet found a demarcation criterion according to which Darwin can be described as scientific” – Imre Lakatos (November 9, 1922 – February 2, 1974) a philosopher of mathematics and science, , quote as stated in 1973 LSE Scientific Method Lecture
Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Wolfgang Pauli on the Empirical Problems with Neo-Darwinism – Casey Luskin – February 27, 2012
Excerpt: “In discussions with biologists I met large difficulties when they apply the concept of ‘natural selection’ in a rather wide field, without being able to estimate the probability of the occurrence in a empirically given time of just those events, which have been important for the biological evolution. Treating the empirical time scale of the evolution theoretically as infinity they have then an easy game, apparently to avoid the concept of purposesiveness. While they pretend to stay in this way completely ‘scientific’ and ‘rational,’ they become actually very irrational, particularly because they use the word ‘chance’, not any longer combined with estimations of a mathematically defined probability, in its application to very rare single events more or less synonymous with the old word ‘miracle.’” Wolfgang Pauli (pp. 27-28) -
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....56771.html
Murray Eden, as reported in “Heresy in the Halls of Biology: Mathematicians Question Darwinism,” Scientific Research, November 1967, p. 64.
“It is our contention that if ‘random’ is given a serious and crucial interpretation from a probabilistic point of view, the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws—physical, physico-chemical, and biological.” Murray Eden, “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory,” Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, editors Paul S. Moorhead and Martin M. Kaplan, June 1967, p. 109.
Where’s the substantiating evidence for neo-Darwinism?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q-PBeQELzT4pkgxB2ZOxGxwv6ynOixfzqzsFlCJ9jrw/edit
Falsification Of Neo-Darwinism by Quantum Entanglement/Information
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p8AQgqFqiRQwyaF8t1_CKTPQ9duN8FHU9-pV4oBDOVs/edit?hl=en_US
Whereas, where Darwinists fail to accept any evidence that falsifies Darwinian evolution, ID, on the other hand, does provide a fairly rigid framework for falsification:
Dembski’s original value for the universal probability bound is 1 in 10^150,
10^80, the number of elementary particles in the observable universe.
10^45, the maximum rate per second at which transitions in physical states can occur.
10^25, a billion times longer than the typical estimated age of the universe in seconds.
Thus, 10^150 = 10^80 × 10^45 × 10^25. Hence, this value corresponds to an upper limit on the number of physical events that could possibly have occurred since the big bang.
How many bits would that be:
Pu = 10-150, so, -log2 Pu = 498.29 bits
Call it 500 bits (The 500 bits is further specified as a specific type of information. It is specified as Complex Specified Information by Dembski or as Functional Information by Abel to separate it from merely Ordered Sequence Complexity or Random Sequence Complexity; See Three subsets of sequence complexity)
Three subsets of sequence complexity and their relevance to biopolymeric information – Abel, Trevors
http://www.tbiomed.com/content/2/1/29
This short sentence, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” is calculated by Winston Ewert, in this following video at the 10 minute mark, to contain 1000 bits of algorithmic specified complexity, and thus to exceed the Universal Probability Bound (UPB) of 500 bits set by Dr. Dembski
Proposed Information Metric: Conditional Kolmogorov Complexity – Winston Ewert – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm3mm3ofAYU
Michael Behe on Falsifying Intelligent Design – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8jXXJN4o_A
Here is a general overview of the falsification criteria for Intelligent Design:
A Positive, Testable Case for Intelligent Design – Casey Luskin – March 2011 – several examples of cited research
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....45311.html
A Response to Questions from a Biology Teacher: How Do We Test Intelligent Design? – March 2010
Excerpt: Regarding testability, ID (Intelligent Design) makes the following testable predictions:
(1) Natural structures will be found that contain many parts arranged in intricate patterns that perform a specific function (e.g. complex and specified information).
(2) Forms containing large amounts of novel information will appear in the fossil record suddenly and without similar precursors.
(3) Convergence will occur routinely. That is, genes and other functional parts will be re-used in different and unrelated organisms.
(4) Much so-called “junk DNA” will turn out to perform valuable functions.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....rom_a.html
On the Origin of Protein Folds – Jonathan M. – September 8, 2012
Excerpt: A common objection to the theory of intelligent design is that it makes no testable predictions, and thus there is no basis for calling it science at all. While recognizing that testability may not be a sufficient or necessary resolution of the “Demarcation Problem,” my article, which I invite you to download, will consider one prediction made by ID and discuss how this prediction has been confirmed.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....64081.html
David Berlinski, in “The Deniable Darwin”:
Everything is certain and overwhelming and supported and not just a theory but a scientific theory up until it isn’t anymore, then science is provisional and ever learning. I notice a repeated pattern here from the very days of Darwin up until now, the very same thing over and over. From the beginning Darwin defenders evolution believers, worshipers of creation rather than the Creator, defended evolutionary theory with a almost blood-lust zeal which was amazing, as if it were a certain fact and a matter of science, not open to debate by non scientists.
This is repeated over and over again. Everything is neat and in order and every part is defended with unbelievable hostile zeal and anger and then there are adjustments done in silence without ever a true acknowledgment of the shifting and the fact that what was just yesterday near dogma is completely expendable and changeable. So which part exactly is the solid part?
I am no expert but I do see this pattern and the pattern is recognizable and can be classified.
It is not something that can easily be covered over with the theories are provisional paintbrush, when the level of sensitivities and open hostilities betray something much more than neutral objective dispassionate provisional science. No the behavior is more common to ideologues who tend to make fools of themselves by defending so called provisional model(when in a humbled state) as absolute facts(when in the ideologue state)
OT: Save for the gratuitous nod to evolution at the beginning of the following video, I find that even the lowly dung beetles reflect Design to an extraordinary degree in the video:
Marcus Byrne: The dance of the dung beetle – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eosckjQ4mJ0
Music:
Help – The Beatles
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t8MeE8Ik4Y
Thanks for admitting that it’s ‘big D’ Design.
Mung,
I find your comment ambiguous. Do you mean ‘BIG D’ Design
or something done by one of His not so ‘big’ underlings?
Is that two liner?
‘“If falsifiability is essential in science then perhaps evolutionary theory belongs in a different box.”
So true! But how could it be otherwise that Darwinism would fail to make accurate predictions? How is it possible for a materialistic theory (Darwinism) which denies the reality of ‘mind’ to have any real predictive power as a scientific theory in the first place since to make accurate predictions it takes a ‘mind’ to assess what the future may hold and predict what may take place in that future!’
-Cornelius Hunter
Evidently, those elementary, yet pivotal, questions are far too abstruse and subtle for those partisans of atheist Darwinian scientism, with their fabled ‘promissory note’, to even attempt to address – at least without sinking into greater ignominious confusion.
They were, in fact, routed by the birth of the quantum paradigm, but they were and remain too dumb to realise it. Instead they circumvent the counter-rational nature of paradoxes, and claim that ‘intuition’ (and their imputation of counter-intuitiveness, rather than counter-rationality to paradoxes) is perfectly compatible with materialism, etc. Indeed, they have enforced that Orwellian definition on paradoxes, our dear, young friend, Wikipedia, in its relevant coverage, seemingly confusing oxymora, at least, in the modern usage of the term, with paradoxes.
Yet the truly terrible aspect of all of this, is that it is a wilful cretinism (imbecility, in fact, seems beyond their reach). It was the wilful ignorance, albeit in their rejection of the truth of Christ’s spiritual teachings, backed up by his miracles, instead, preferring to cast him as a devil, that Christ called ‘blasphemy against the Holy Spirit’, an eternal sin, for which there could be no forgiveness.
I think this sin on the part of many of them, is more likely to incur punishment for them during this life. It puts me in mind of Harry Truman’s ‘bon mot’: ‘I never give them hell. I just tell the truth about them, and they think it’s hell.’ Except, that it will have been they who will have told the truth about themselves, to their enduring shame.
They simply cannot accept that, by definition, the mechanistic paradigm is the most advanced level on which materialism can effect any purchase, however notional.
However, they have had to make their living under the sovereignly explanatory quantum paradigm, hence the Newspeak.
Evidently, Darwinism is one great cirumlocution, and, indeed, a never-ending ‘work in progress’, a cartoon-like counterfeit of science, itself. Oddly enough, I believe the Monthy Python team, in fact, did satirize scientism in all its risible duplicity.
If this child had a premonition, they will tell us, no doubt, it’s all down to proteins, lightning and Heinz’s finest:
http://www.spiritdaily.com/A13sandyhook.htm
And physicists once said that the Universe was constructed on Newtonian principles in a theory that was “solid and falsifiable.” Einstein falsified it and revolutionized all of science in the process. What is the point?
You’ll have to do better than that. In a procedure common to Intelligent Design, you have selected a bit of information from evolutionary science and used it to set up a false position as a red herring, which then you shoot down allowing you to say that you have disproved evolution. If the arguments seem circular, it is because your falsified premises are circular. What you have disproved is your own falsification.
Note that bacteria are prokaryotes, meaning they have no cell nucleus with a membrane to block transfer of information from the environment into the cell’s DNA or RNA. Nevertheless, just because information is moving horizontally between cells doesn’t mean we can’t identify where it has come from or how it has evolved, to the contrary. Evidence how scientists were able to identify the Haiti cholera as originating in Nepal by its genetic material. All this is well understood. If there are issues, they are much more interesting than the one you propose.
While evolution of cells with nuclei about 1.5 to 2 billion years ago limited the transfer of information from the environment into the cell, it allowed a stability necessary for evolution of organisms more complex than one cell, whose specializations would engage organisms with their environment in far more complex ways than available to one-cell organisms without nuclei.
Another example of an ID red herring is that female giraffes should have as long necks as males since long necks are supposed to be adaptive by allowing giraffes to reach high leaves. Because female necks are shorter is supposed to indicate some kind of outside intervention. There are several problems here. The first is that evolution always results in compromises. Due to their long necks giraffes experience the highest blood pressure of all mammals. Females which must undergo the additional stress of gestating and nursing the young do better with shorter necks. Males on the other hand, who fight with other males using their heads as bludgeons do better with a longer lever to propel their heads. This actually was probably the primary selective force in the evolution of giraffes’ necks. Without understanding the behavior of an organism you cannot understand the selective forces at work. There are many similar arguments in ID.
A major problem with ID is that it offers no mechanism. If there was an intelligent force directing evolution, how would it go about doing so? How would it overcome the membrane barrier of nucleus in cells of higher organisms allowing only one-way transfer of information? ID’s explanations, if they have any, would require what Romans call ‘deus ex machina.” One complexity on top of another is needed to explain itself much in the manner that pre-Copernicus astronomers had to set up orbits within orbits to explain the movements of planets. Natural selection in contrast utilizes a few simple principles to explain immense complexity.
There have been major roadblocks in its development, but these were moved aside by further experiment and understanding and modifications, not by discarding the theory. The primary one among these was an inability to explain how mutations could be passed to the next generation, but even at the time of Darwin, Gregor Mendol had already demonstrated the mechanism at work.
When somebody has an agenda against somebody, it is better not to take their word for it but to go to that person and ask what is really going on. Similarly, when an organization has an agenda against a field of science, it is better to try to understand what that science is really about than allow yourself to be misled by red herrings. Also, look carefully at the other issues that organization may support, such as attack on the protected species laws and ask if they maybe they are not what they present themselves as.
For those whose belief in God should be shaken by science, I say they have a problem with the conceptions implied in their belief, not with God. To say otherwise is to belittle God as something no larger than human imagination expressed in one culture among thousands, in one book among many millions, in one planet among billions, and in one galaxy among hundreds of billions.
coyote:
So?
OT:
Dragonfly Designs Inspire Engineering – January 3, 2013
Excerpt: Another paper on dragonflies shows that these marvels of the insect world are equipped with navigational equipment that can do vector calculus.,,,
“Intercepting a moving object requires prediction of its future location. This complex task has been solved by dragonflies, who intercept their prey in midair with a 95% success rate. In this study, we show that a group of 16 neurons, called target-selective descending neurons (TSDNs), code a population vector that reflects the direction of the target with high accuracy and reliability across 360°. ”
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....67971.html
Quote of note from preceding:
coyote:
But they still have a cell membrane.
And if you believe the symbiotic theory, that’s what the membrane of the cell nucleus was, the membrane of a prokaryote.
I can’t make sense of that, could you please unpack it?
coyote:
But you just argued that transfer of information into the cell was not inhibited in prokaryotes. Did you mean to say into the DNA rather than into the cell?
Why wasn’t all that transfer of information into the cell a good thing that allowed for more evolvability? How do you know that the advent of the nucleus is what was responsible for evolution of organisms more complex than one cell? Why is recombination good and HGT bad?
coyote:
Listen to yourself. You claim there’s no mechanism by which it could occur but then you turn right around and appeal to natural selection.
coyote:
Except ID doesn’t make any claims about female giraffe’s neck length.
Design is a mechanism and a targeted search, ala “weasel”, is one specific design mechanism.
“built-in responses to environmental cues” and other software.
There isn’t a one-way transfer of information.
Except natural selection doesn’t do (much of) anything. All natural selection is is differential reproduction DUE TO heritable, random (as in chance/ happenstance) variation. And one issue with that is you can have differential reproduction due to something other than heritable random variation.
One thing natural selection can do is it can undo what artificial selection has wrought. However it cannot come close to producing what artificial selection can, and that is a problem for you and your ilk.
BTW coyote, Gregor Mendel was a Creationist.
Go figure…
Coyote – yes, listens to yourself “To say otherwise is to belittle God as something no larger than human imagination expressed in one culture among thousands, in one book among many millions, in one planet among billions, and in one galaxy among hundreds of billions.” WOW, you “know” a lot! – and your point regarding Newtonian Physics is somehow not as good a corollary as you take it to be – i.e 1. do you know who is going to be successful in revolutionizing all of science and 2. are you sure it is “all” of science. Your being quite gracious to yourself I think.
Gotta love the “science” here guys!
coyote, as Mung has briefly alluded to, there are so many problems in your short post as to make it hard to know where to begin. It seems that you have taken the vast bulk of the ‘just so’ story you have just laid out on blind faith with no empirical evidence, which perhaps might have been excusable a few short decades ago, but now, due to the rapid pace to which modern science has advanced, we can address many of these ‘just so’ stories you have just laid out for Darwinism and find that there are, indeed, severe deficiencies in them. For instance you claim:
Excuse me coyote but that is plain wrong! Darwinists have yet to explain where a single functional gene/protein has ‘come from’:
And although bacteria do share a large number of genes through HGT, there is still a large percentage of genes that individual classes of bacteria possess that are not found in any other bacterial class:
coyote you also state:
And coyote, other than blind faith that evolution did it, you know this how exactly?
coyote, you also state:
And once again coyote, other than your blind faith in Darwinism, you know this how exactly?
There simply isn’t any evidence in the fossil record indicating that single cells ever formed anything other than ‘simple aggregates’:
coyote, Nor does the experimental evidence suggest that such a transition from single cell aggregates to multicellular organisms is possible. To highlight the monumental problem that Darwinian processes face in going from a single cell to a multicellular creature,,,
And yet, Dr. Behe, on the important Table 7.1 on page 143 of Edge Of Evolution, finds that a typical cell might have some 10,000 protein-binding sites. Whereas a conservative estimate for protein-protein binding sites in a multicellular creature is,,,
So taking into account that they only covered 2%, of the full protein-protein “interactome”, then that gives us a number, for different protein-protein interactions, of 310,000. Thus, from my very rough ‘back of the envelope’ calculations, we find that this is at least 30 times higher than Dr. Behe’s estimate of 10,000 different protein-protein binding sites for a typical single cell (Page 143; Edge of Evolution; Behe). Therefore, at least at first glance from my rough calculations, it certainly appears to be a impossible step that evolution cannot make, by purely unguided processes, to go from a single cell to a multi-cellular creature.
Further experimental work agrees with this conclusion:
In fact Dr. Stephen Meyer’s, who wrote “Signature In The Cell”, next book is going to be on the sheer impossibility of neo-Darwinian processes to explain the origination of ‘Body-Plan information’ from single cells to multicellular organisms in the Cambrian Explosion:
Here is a sneak peek at his forthcoming book:
Moreover there another whole level of information on a cell’s surface that is scarcely understood at all, much less understood to a reductive DNA, information theoretic, basis:
further problems with single cells turning into multicellular creatures:
coyote you also comment on female giraffes, and though I’ve never seen the ‘shorter neck’ argument that you are talking about, one thing I do know is that you cannot tell me exactly, with any certainty, where giraffes came from in the first place:
coyote you also claim:
And yet, the ironic thing in all this, is that you yourself, by your own intelligence, just generated far more functional information in your post than has ever been witnessed, or reasonable expected, to be produced by the entire material processes of the universe over the entire history of the universe!
coyote you then claim:
Yet natural selection is hardly what you have conceptualized it to be:
coyote you then claim:
Yet the modern synthesis (which sought to meld Genetics with Darwinian evolution) is now known to be ‘dead’:
coyote you also state:
Wise words indeed coyote!,,, So,, What’s really going on coyote???
music and verse
We’ve known about horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotes since, oh, the late 1970′s (at least).
Welcome to the 1980′s, Cornelius. That was an exciting time to be a biologist, to be sure. It’ll be interesting to come along with you as you catch up with the rest of the scientific community.