Comment on Dr. Jason Rosenhouse “Among the Creationists” by Sean Pitman.

This is where your fundamentalism comes up agaisnt the realities of knowledge. You want it to be black or white, obvious and certain. It is not and there is great amounts of ignorance which motivates the scientific endeavour. Scientists admit ignorance and you then assume that your unsubstantiated views must be correct.

You are ignorant about how the very mechanism of Darwinian evolution does its job at various levels of functional complexity? – but your still so sure that random mutations and natural selection must have been the mechanism that did the job somehow? – even though you don’t know how?

Beyond this, how are my observations “unsubstantiated”? The observation that the ratio of potentially stable, not to mention beneficial, vs. unstable sequences in protein sequence space declines exponentially with each increase in the minimum size requirement has been published by several authors. This particular claim is not at all hypothetical. The question is, how are the resulting gap distances in sequence space crossable at various levels? No one has any idea – certainly not you. Yet, you are still most confident that your favorite mechanism is still up to the job. Really? How is this a “scientific” position when you have no reasonable idea how your mechanism works at various levels? – science based on complete ignorance? – based on “circumstantial evidence” as Rosenhouse argued? – circumstantial evidence that is entirely based on what a God would or wouldn’t do, not on what your mechanism can or cannot do? Please…

Where are we in terms of our agreements ?

1] You accept that most [of] the species that exist today arose by a process of natural selection from ancestral populations. We have been over humans, hogs and canines and largely agree on diversification mechanisms except in the pace. I accept long periods you do not.

Exactly. You can add cats to that list since it seems likely to me that all cats, from lions to house cats, evolved from the same original parental gene pool very rapidly over just a few thousand years.

2] You image that a population of 2 can generate sequence variation sufficient to generate species and genera in a period of 4000 years. In terms of the levels of diversity I am presuming that you do agree with David Catchpole of CMI who in Creation 2013 35(4):31 claims that 2 badgers went on the ark and generated a great diversity of species and genera within the Mustelidae family’

“Also likely descended from that same pair are these nine non-American badger species: the European badger [Meles meles). the Asian badger (Meles leucurus), the Japanese badger (Meles anakuma), the hog badger (Arctonyx collaris——which lives in central and southeast Asia), the Chinese ferret- badger (Melogale moschata). the Javan ferret-badger (Melogale orientata), the Bornean ferret-badger (Melogale everetti), the Burmese fcrret—badger (Melogale personata), and the Vietnam ferret-badger (Melogale cucphuongenesis).
These are ten different species but also four different genera.”

“But we haven’t exhausted the badger kind yet. The honey badger or ratel, Mellivora capensis, marks the 11th species and the 5th genus of badgers in the Mustelidae, which is sometimes referred to as the ‘weasel family’. Indeed, the honey badger itself is often described as ‘weasel-like’. In fact, it’s highly likely that weasels and other members of the Mustelidae are also descended from the same ancestral pair as the badgers. That includes not ‘ just the likes of polecats and stoats (ermine) but also otters—recent genetic studies point to American badgers having become reproductively isolated from Eurasian badgers before weasels, ferrets and otters….”

I’d have to look more closely at some of these relationships, but certainly a very wide range of phenotypic variations is possible in a very short period of time.

You image this diversity was by a process of mendelian inheritance where phenotype differences were selected by transmission of specific allelic variants from the gene pool present in 2 animals.

I believe that a great many novel alleles were produced by random mutations in very short order after the Flood – just at a low-level of functional complexity.

3] I have a much more conventional view of population genetics and think that a gene pool in a population of 2 dooms to failure levels of diversity required for the observed speciation cannot exist in 2 animals except by a miracle. You do not think that any miracle was involved. I think it highly unlikely that there was such a genetic bottleneck and then this level of speciation except by miracles. You agree that almost all the genetic allelic variation present across the derivative species came from new mutations not present in the original pair but I would say the new mutation occurred in a viable population of hundreds if not thousands of animals and that speciation occurs in populations not in individual pairs.

Of course speciation occurs in populations, not in individual pairs. Our only real disagreement here is if a viable population can start from a bottleneck of just two individuals. Clearly, it can. You assume that modern levels of detrimental mutations were present during the time of the Flood. This isn’t true. The gene pools at the time of the Flood had far less detrimental mutations, which would have allowed for an extreme population bottleneck without genetic meltdown and extinction.

4] I think it likely that the same process that lead to speciation within genera or “kinds” also accounts for derivation of different families from common ancestors. You do not an propose there is an insurmountable barrier to that diversification at the level of families and above.

Where did I draw the line at “families and above”? I draw the line at the production of novel protein-based systems that require 1000 specifically arranged amino acids and above. I haven’t drawn a line based on far more subjective taxonomic classifications. But, if I were to draw such a line within the taxonomic classification system, it would be at the level of Orders, not Families, since intra-family hybrids are known, whereas no viable intraordinal hybrids are known – as far as I’m aware. Examples of intra-ordinal hybrids, like crosses between a sand dollar and a sea urchin, are interesting in that they produce larvae that appear to share features of both parents, but don’t survive past the larval stage of development.

5] You have proposed that it is at the level of 1000FSAAR but have not given me any example derived from the comparison of genomic sequences for specific genes.

I’m not sure what you’re asking for here? What does a genomic comparison have to do with defining a level of functional complexity? Functional complexity is defined by the minimum number of specifically arranged residues required to produce the function in question. The greater the minimum requirement, the greater the level of functional complexity for that type of system – regardless of the sequences of other types of systems. This has nothing to do with genomic comparisons with other types of systems.

It is at this point that you would have a publishable paper if you compare genomic sequences between different mammalian species and document the 1000FSAAR systems that equate to the limits defining “Kinds” and the evolutionary limit. Statistical probability and islands of functional sequence as you admit is not novel or publishable. You have to have data and analysis that is novel and compelling.

It’s not that its “not publishable”, but that it’s already been published. The data already published in literature shows that the stable islands in sequence space get significantly farther and farther apart with each step up the ladder of functional complexity (due to an exponential decline in potentially beneficial vs. non-beneficial with each step up the ladder with a fairly uniform distribution of functional sequences within sequence space – contrary to Rosenhouse’s vision of sequence space). The conclusion that this would have an exponentially negative effect on the effectiveness of RM/NS should be published, but no one will publish this rather obvious observation because this observation clearly undermines the very basis of neo-Darwinism.

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