Alan Wostenberg <awostenb
...@psalmweaver.com> wrote in message <
news:lfsed.48698$%x.48036@okepread04>...
> Matt Silberstein wrote:
> > Alan Wostenberg <awostenb
...@psalmweaver.com> wrote in message <
news:41752356.9080507@psalmweaver.com>...
> >>Chzwmn wrote:
> >>>>science, philosophy or just plain common sense can go a long
> >>>>way..........what meaning asks a daisy (if a daisy could think) can my
> >>>>life have?.......btw evolution does not rely on chance.........things
> >>>>change because they must meet the challenges that are before
> >>>>it.....weather, other species etc
> > As far as all of our experiments can show evolution has a chance and a
> > non-chance component. As far as all experiments have shown, and people
> > have tried very hard to show otherwise, mutations happen randomly with
> > respect to the situation. That is, a particular mutation is equally
> > likely no matter the conditions of an organism. Selection is, in a
> > sense, the "challenges" facing an organism. Particularly, selection is
> > those things that promote or inhibit reproduction.
> >>>This is just SO wrong. THey call that Lamarkism at best, creationism at worse.
> >>>By what mechanism do animals and plants recognise the challenges and change
> >>>their genes ?????
> >>It is not so much changing their genes, but activating pre-programmed
> >>capability in response to environmental cues,
> >>like unzipping and installing a device driver onto your hard drive. The
> >>driver code was always there, dormant, until an a external cue activated
> >>it. Coding schemes can do that, and a good Engineer endows his creatures
> >>with a certain amount of this adaptive ability.
> > No such
> > pre-programmed capability has been found and, again, people have
> > looked very hard for one. No one can think of how such a mechanism
> > would work. How do you keep mutations out of this dormant "code"
> > before it is used? After a few million years it will get changed
> > beyond usefullness.
> I admit it's speculative. So people "looked very hard" for a mechanism,
> not finding one, say "it's random"?
For the meaning of random in science, yes. We can't find any pattern
in the data, we can't find any correlations. Random does not mean
uncaused. Mutations are certainly caused, we often can point out the
cause. They are just not correlated to the problem facing the
organism.
Sorry, Alan, but it takes evidence to back up an asserted mechanism.
You have proposed some pre-programmed capability in the genome. You
have to show how it would work and provide some evidence for its
existence. Or, at least, show how your proposed mechanism differs from
completely random mutation. Think about the characteristics of your
proposed mechanism. Somehow this mechanism has to know about the
external conditions, say increased cold weather. (More to the point,
increase cold weather in the future.) It then has to know what
morphology, say a thick coat, would deal with the environmental
change. Then it has to figure out what genetic change is necessary to
achieve that morphological change. Then it has to do this for only
some few of the organisms. Remember, most organisms do not survive to
reproduce.
> >>How do we know these "mutations" are random?
> > Because they do tests.... Take a single
> > bacteria (bacteria only have one copy of their genes). Let it grow to
> > a colony and then make multiple colonies from that. At this point,
> > baring mutations, you have multiple genetically identical bacterial
> > colonies. Subject them to some kind of stress (an anti-bacterial
> > agent, for example). Only some of the colonies will survive and only a
> > small portion of the colony. If the mutations were not random then all
> > or none would survive.
> I read in _not by chance_ such tests have been done
> and the same multipoint mutations did happen in certain cases.
And the same mutations can happen even if the environment does not
"require" them. That said, I would ignore most of Spetner's stuff. He
is a physicist, not a biologist, for one thing. For another, he
actually thinks that all of this stuff is explained by the Kabbalah.
He really does not know the material and offers not much more than "it
is so complex and wonderful, it must be from God".
