Am I allowed to think this is too complicated to be an accident?
In order to evolve such a system all you need is for the separate components to be useful. A cell laying still and multiplying is useful enough, so that is the baseline. Then adding a flagella to move randomly so it can move away from its waste product and keep hitting new nutrients is also useful. From there it can start to detect waste and move when it is near waste and stop moving when it is near food. Then yo just continue such steps, not very hard to imagine compared to imagining macro evolution.
In your case, why would a flagella be useful if it's not propelling something? A flagella is only useful as a component of something, but not by itself.
I suspect the answer is that having flagella without a nose is still better than having no flagella. If so it suggests evolution isn't good at accessing groups of mutations that aren't individually beneficial.
It produces shitty flagellum, better flagellum, good flagellum.
But the problem is we don't see the intermediate forms. So right now you might see a complicated flagellum that has a lot of highly specialized parts that all need eachother, but that is merely a refinement that took place after all the pieces were already there. Like once an arch is complete, all the scaffolding that was holding it up is now vestigial and if it is removed the arch will remain standing.
That's the thing. Evolution isn't "survival of the fittest" or even "driven by more efficient anything", evolution is simply; if you die before you pass on your genes, you don't pass on your genes. Over long enough time scales, with large enough populations, with tight enough tolerances and strict enough niches, the system roughly approximates a directed iteration of more efficient parts.
Nothing about evolution prevents carrying forward explicitly negative mutations! Nothing about evolution prevents carrying completely unused functionality and features! Nothing about evolution guarantees monotonically increasing fitness!
The giraffe has a certain nerve that goes from it's brain, all the way down around it's aorta, back up it's neck, to it's tongue. It does this, because in the fish we all evolved from, such a detour was less than a centimeter longer than an "optimal" path, and as each next generation went in different directions, it's just not that big a deal. A few hundred extra calories in development, and rare instances of a negative injury outcome are just not going to get fixed, because evolution is almost never vigilant. Most higher level animals have mating behaviors that explicitly favor "wasted" energy, including the long neck of giraffes! Sexual selection has a stronger influence on most animals than evolutionary pressure.
> Also given the extremely slow process of evolution and the relatively short number of iterations it is infeasible to suggest such a solution
This is silly. The vast majority of the ground work for complex life was developed by single celled organisms that produced a new generation every half hour, there were billions of these little creatures experiencing basically any possible mutation all the time, and a water droplet with a billion short lived single cells is exactly the kind of tight tolerance, competitive atmosphere where evolution is most prominent!
Evolution is not iteration. Evolution is pruning bad branches in your breadth first tree based algorithm.
Evolution is not a slow process, it is an irregular process. The odds of a useful mutation popping up at any given time is low, but once it pops up it's there immediately. Yes, an evolutionary process could never make an iphone, but no is claiming that evolution produced the iphone. The complex systems evolution produces are things where all the changes are individually useful.
Why not? People think in such a short time and amount scale such that we cannot comprehend trillions of cells spending billions of years, iterating. Even a small change can be significant at those scales.
And my (limited) understanding is that changes that are not useful or helpful would get lost.
And additional to that, if an organism has a pump (which it needs to function properly) and that pump suddenly is no pump, it's a very bad flagellum, that organism has a very big problem. It's like if we swapped our arms for wings. Wings are cool, but we wouldn't be able to fly anyway, and we'd have serious problems as humans with no arms and hands.
Cells has many duplicates of pumps, not just one. Switching one of those to a motor to move around the liquids so the pumps can get to new molecules to absorb will be extremely beneficial to the cell, now all pumps are more efficient at just the cost of a single pump.
Yes, but it's less complex, and it in turn evolved from even simpler forms. The point is a single mutation doesn't need to create a working flagellum from scratch, it just needs to make it from what's already available. Flagella are complex structures that did not arise until after a lot of other things had already developed.
> And my (limited) understanding is that changes that are not useful or helpful would get lost.
This misunderstanding again comes from the distinction between the features and the instructions. If a mutation isn't harmful, it doesn't get reverted and in fact will spread throughout a sizeable fraction of the population. The thing is that without evolutionary pressure as more mutations occur, they will eventually break whatever the original mutation did, so the feature it coded will eventually disappear, though it can take a long time and it may change significantly before it does. There are some caveats though - a gene might code for multiple features, or may exist on a part of the DNA where further mutations are suppressed anyway, and thus even though the feature provides no advantage on its own there will still be evolutionary pressure to preserve the gene, and thus a neutral or even a slightly bad mutation might be retained indefinitely.
> And additional to that, if an organism has a pump (which it needs to function properly) and that pump suddenly is no pump, it's a very bad flagellum, that organism has a very big problem. It's like if we swapped our arms for wings. Wings are cool, but we wouldn't be able to fly anyway, and we'd have serious problems as humans with no arms and hands.
In this particular case, cells have many molecular pumps, so converting some to flagella is not a very big problem. The benefits of a shitty flagellum did outweigh the cost of losing some molecular pumps, but this is a very real limitation to what evolution can produce. Humans certainly won't evolve wings naturally without a lot of other changes happening first. But at the same time wings have evolved - in the case of birds their ancestors evolved an extremely efficient respiratory system more than 100 million years before they took flight, which helped them survive the great dying and subsequently take advantage of the oxygen rich Mesozoic era. Among these a mutation for hollow bones aided agility on the ground, among these adaptations for feathers helped with retaining body heat, among these adaptations for lunging their arms forward helped them grab prey, among these adaptations for tree climbing allowed them to become better ambushers, and it was among these that sacrificing some of their arm capabilities for shitty wings was a net gain.
So this isn't exactly 100% true. Quite often the encoding of these things can sit in our DNA not activated and then pop up out of nowhere.
Scishow did an episode on this recently.
But that's the thing, this sort of implies that a complete flagellum can be spontaneously produced because it's useful, which sort of collides with the parent comment on systems evolving by combining previously useful components.
Flagella aren't useful until they are complete. So intermediate forms should be lost, right?
Would this leave us in a scenario where a single combination of several mutations at the same time suddenly gives you a complete, functional flagellum?
I suspect what you're really saying is "Will you still respect me for being a creationist". And the answer is, LOL of course not. Nobody is entitled to have their wacky ideas be respected. A lot of the "free speech" complaints are really demands that other people treat your bullshit with respect, which is an absurd demand.
But if my suspicion above is way off, please tell me. I am curious why anyone would say what you said.
Both are faith based responses to questions we cannot answer any other way. Getting caught up in absolutes thinking your interpretation is the gold standard is a sign of an unrefined critical thinking process.
This is unknown and a quite anthropomorphic view on the universe. Just because we can create things doesn't mean we ourselves were created, even in the way you're talking about in the First Mover argument.
Both are theories about the world. 'Creationism' as a theory really only became pure faith very recently as most specific claims attributable to it have been disproven or better explanations have been found. For a long time it was a perfectly cogent theory.
Not to mention, anything I present as being evidence of intelligence being more able to produce functional complexity than randomness you would reinterpret as "randomness-that-produced-something-that-look-like-intelligence producing functional complexity better than randomness-that-doesnt-look-like-intelligence".
You don't have to take evolution on faith. You can write a computer program that demonstrates that selection among almost-but-not-quite identical entities with heritable properties generates adaptive forms. Many people have.
DNA is real. Reproducing lifeforms are real. We know how they work in some detail. There's no faith required.
Accordingly, if we take a definition of "explain" which does not assume a particular interpretation of the fundamental axiom (as we should, when that axiom is the very thing under debate), my statement is perfectly valid: That actor which we cannot fathom made it so. Thus, it is.
How so? For that to happen you'd need to have the usual "evolution-is-science-and-creationism-is-religion-which-denies-science" stance, no?
There are creationist scientists, there is "creationism-proving", or at the very least allow "creationism-compatible" evidence in science, and so on. Let's reduce it even more, science hasn't been able to disprove Creation.
Believing "God did it" should not invalidate science, wanting to understand more, and actually making experiments. On the contrary, it should encourage it, as it did with many scientists who, in a way, brought us to where we are.
And as other commenters say, your computer program would prove absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things, primarily because micro-evolution (which can easily be understood as a feature of Creation) does certainly not imply macro-evolution or abiogenesis.
You're trying to package your religion as something which it isn't. Creationism is Christian theology, not science. People know this. On some level, you know this.
It would seem you are not paying attention to what is actually being said.
You're dead wrong about this.
Macro-evolution (what I call evolutionism), on the other hand, has never been scientifically observed, explained, tested, or anything of the sort. It is an attempt at creating a fanciful story of how things came to be by extrapolating back from what we see now in entirely unrigorous, untestable, unobservable ways. It fits much more squarely in the category of History, Mythology, and indeed Theology (aTheology?) than "Science".
Really it boils down to whether you believe the laws of physics we observe now have been constant throughout time. If you do you’re called an evolutionist, if you don’t you’re called a creationist. Neither side has any proof, nor is any proof fundamentally possible.
The point being is, creationists have zero idea why they think 6,000 is some magic number in this case, other than bob said so in a book. But yea, books are written by men and men are liars. Even looking at things like RNA/DNA mutation rates in known species it's pretty damned easy to see that things have been around a whole lot longer than 6k years.
Again, please understand the underlying assumptions you are making when you concoct statements like this. Namely: DNA/RNA started as a single form and has mutated at a constant rate since then. You have no evidence to support that, and I disagree with every component of it.
Also, any guesses on why the 'modern' age is suddenly going in slow motion. Not exactly sure how you're going to pull that off without breaking chemistry completely.
And I'm not sure why you think the almighty creator of the universe would have trouble making chemistry... "work".
(Funnily, physics have come to acknowledge the same, but they call it dark matter and say it’s all very scientific, whatever it is. But this is unknown enough to be not worth much discussion.)
Regarding the evolution we see around us all the time, I and many creationists besides me have full confidence in the idea that micro-evolution does occur. That there is a stochastic gradient decent process that hones in on time-varying local maxima over generations cannot really be denied. But that provides absolutely no answer to the questions of abiogenesis and speciation en-masse.
I will say all of science is based on faith- the faith that the human mind can perceive the universe as it truly is, using rational thought and experimental data collection. For some reason this really bothers some scientists and they like to treat science as an unquestionable objective truth, but realistically, we can't exclude any number of hypotheses, but merely state them as improbable based on our understanding.
We can certainly say that the observations look like they may have progressed at the rate we expect for the past 13 billion years, but that does nothing to exclude the possibility that around 6,000 years ago some actor we do not understand took 1 week to craft everything we observe now to be precisely how it is.
Reading your final paragraph, I believe we are more aligned than I previously thought. :)
That said, it is very rare that I hear someone describing themselves as Christian who denies the general 7 day creation story. I happen to personally believe it was seven consecutive days^, but I've heard arguments it could have been seven days with an unknown gap in-between each pair.
^ "day" being the most morally-understandable way of describing the intervals at which the creation occurred. Obviously there was no sun or even light at first, so the concept of a day itself is shaky, and I make no claims as to how many cesium-133 transitions may have occurred in that period, or how far light might have travelled in one of them once it was created, or the magnitude of the various fundamental forces' impact on matter in that period, or really anything related to our understanding of how the dynamics we currently observe may have behaved in those intervals.
But how much of the world's resources have been dominated by folks placing their faith in Eru Ilúvatar?
And I'm sure you're aware Tolkien was a devout Catholic, and described his works as fundamentally Catholic?