Comment on EducateTruth.com promoted on 3ABN by Sean Pitman.
I’ve been looking at your website and it’s total gobbledygook to me and to 99.9% of any one who loooks at it. It appears to all be based on bacteria and their extemele brief generation time.
Short generation times are helpful for observing evolution in action since many more generations can be observed over a given span of time vs. the observation of slowly reproducing creatures.
For whatever reason you have chosen not to answer my questions. I thought they were simple enough. You declared Professor Kent’s examples of change to all be very low levels of change requiring only hundreds of amino acids in changes. This seems odd to me. If it takes trillions of years to get s 1000 fsaar change in bacteria which have extremely short generation times, how can you get changes of even 100 fsars for reptiles that have years for generation times in only 6,000 years? I don’t think you have the math to support this!
I’ve only declared a very few of the changes described by Prof. Kent to be “low level”. Most of the changes described by Kent aren’t low-level changes so much as they are largely based on Mendelian-style variation of pre-existing options within the original gene pool of phenotypic options along with degenerative and non-qualitative changes in degree of functionality of the same type. Qualitatively new types of functionality were not realized in most of Kent’s examples – venom being the potential exception (discussed below).
Can you make this actually meaningful to us by telling us what the ballpark of 1000 fsaar represents?
I’ve already told you what fsaars (fairly specified amino acid residues) represent – the minimum number and degree of specificity of arrangement of the amino acids residues needed in order to achieve a particular type of system in question to a useful degree of functionality.
Better yet how about this: please tell us how many fsaars might be required for each of the following changes.
1. Evolve a new enzyme in snake’s venom (any idea how many aa changes this might be?)
The minimum size required to achieve most types of enzymes is less than a few hundred amino acid residues with an average degree of specificity. This minimum structural threshold requirement (fsaars) defines the level of functional complexity of the enzyme in question.
Your question asks for the likely minimum gap distance between those sequences in sequence space that have this particular type of enzymatic activity and anything that exists within the gene pool of options currently at hand. Given a population with a few billion individuals, the likely minimum gap distance at the level of a few hundred fsaars is going to be less than 5 or so loosely specific residue changes for finding a useful venom in sequence space. Such a gap distance can be crossed in relatively short order in such a large population – just a few generations.
Venom comes in many different forms. Some of these forms, arguably, are simply based on enhancements of the same or similar activities found within the saliva of non-venomous snakes. In other words, a quantitative enhancement of the same thing – not really anything qualitatively new. Such quantitative enhancements in functionality are easily achieved via RM/NS since the gap distances involved in these types of evolutionary changes are very small (usually only one or two residue changes wide).
The specific formula for calculating the likely minimum gap distance is listed in my essay:
http://www.detectingdesign.com/flagellum.html#Calculation
I know you said that this was all “gobblygook”. It takes some effort, but you can understand it if you try…
2. Evolve a facial pit (an actual eye) with connections to the optic tectum of the brain.
The minimum structural threshold requirements for a functional facial pit or an eye of even the simplest type would require tens of thousands of specifically arranged amino acid residues or codon equivalents of DNA. The minimum likely gap distances at this level would also be in the hundreds of specific residue/codon changes wide.
Nothing at such a level is remotely likely to evolve this side of trillions upon trillions of years of time. Why? Because the non-beneficial gap distances in sequence space between such high-level systems are hundreds of fairly specific residues changes wide (i.e., essentially uncrossable via RM/NS).
3. Evolve a new species of rattlesnake from an existing species.
This depends upon your definition of “species” – a fairly subjective idea. The concept of “species” is usually based on some for of reproductive isolation. It is not based on a functional analysis of the gene pools of different “species”. In other words, many different “species” can interbreed and produce viable and often virile offspring. Even animals classified as different genera can sometimes interbreed and produce viable offspring. Only at the limit of “order” are there no known viable hybrid cases.
In short, it is easy to produce a different “species” without really producing a qualitative difference in the gene pool and therefore a truly new “kind” of creature.
4. Evolve a venomous species of snake from a non-venomous species.
This is fairly easy given the low level of functional complexity needed to produce a useful “venom” from regular proteins found in the saliva of non-venomous snakes (as the level of less than a few hundred fsaars).
How about going a little farther. How many fsaar units are involved with these changes?
5. Evolve a snake from a lizard.
6. Evolve a lizard (reptile) from a salamander (amphibian).
7. Evolve a salamander (amphibian) from a fish.
As with the new discoveries of the significant epigenetic differences between humans and apes (especially in those regions controlling brain development), is seems like the qualitative functional differences are very high level indeed. As noted above, this explains the reason for the lack of viable hybrids between creatures that are as different as those classified in different ordinal groups. There just isn’t enough qualitative genetic similarity with it comes to higher-level functionality to produce viable hybrids.
Are you truly suggesting that each of these is a “low level†change?
I’m suggesting that you really don’t understand many of the concepts that you need to understand before you can begin to grasp the statistical limitations to the evolutionary mechanism of RM/NS – to include the concept of front-loaded information and Mendelian-style variation within the same “kind” of gene pool of pre-established functional genetic options.
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Sean Pitman Also Commented
EducateTruth.com promoted on 3ABN
@Geanna Dane:
Um, I think the evolutionists are the ones who informed us about ice ages.
You’re mistaken. Evolutionists were not the first ones to propose ice age theories – theories which were around well before Darwin published Origins in 1859.
For example, Andrew Ure (1778-1857) was one of the top chemists of his day with an international reputation as a meticulous scientist, a prolific writer and an effective teacher. But he was also one of those brilliantly versatile men of science in the early 19th century. In 1829 he published A New System of Geology in which he proposed some new theoretical ideas for the reconstruction of earth history, one of which was one of the earliest conceptions of an ice age, which he speculated would have resulted from the Flood. One of the author’s he quoted was Jens Esmark (1763-1839)
Jens Esmark also argued a sequence of worldwide ice ages well before Darwin. In a paper published in 1824, Esmark proposed changes in climate as the cause of those glaciations. He attempted to show that they originated from changes in the Earth’s orbit. Adding to Esmark’s work, Bernhardi, in a 1932 paper, speculated about former polar ice caps reaching as far as the temperate zones around the globe.
http://creation.com/british-scriptural-geologists-in-the-first-half-of-the-nineteenth-century-part-4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Esmark
They have given us more information about ice ages than creationists have and nothing, I repeat nothing, is going to change that. They have no problem with ice ages whatsoever.
They have no problem with ice ages, true. But, they do have a definite problem with the idea of very rapid, even catastrophically sudden, formation and regression. It wasn’t until just a few years ago that scientists began to realize that glacial melts can happen many times more rapidly than they tought possible just 10 years ago – to include the melting of Greenland’s ice-cap as well as the Antarctic ice. No one thought that such rapid melting could ever happen as rapidly as it is taking place today.
www.DetectingDesign.com/AncientIce.html
What is it with Adventists suddenly talking a lot about Las Vegas, card games, houses of cards, gambling and betting? I’m bewildered.
It is often a very good way to get important statistical concepts across to those people who don’t usually deal with numbers and the scientific usefulness of statistical odds analysis… like you ; )
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
EducateTruth.com promoted on 3ABN
@Geanna Dane:
So…ice ages are scientifically impossible and therefore could only result from a global supernatural flood. The arctic seas became hot which caused very high precipitation. Then an extreme cold spell came along that made an iceberg out of high elevations and high altitudes, decreased the ocean sea level and dried out the Mediterranean basin. I assume these explanations fit within the 1000 gsaar threshold (geologically supportable argumentative age reasoning) of explanatory complexity
Ice ages are not scientifically impossible. They are certainly consistent with a global catastrophe that involved massive volcanic activity. And, massive meteor impacts may indeed have provided the sudden release of the huge quantities of energy needed to produce the initial catastrophe on a global scale. Also, it is well-known that ice ages would indeed reduce ocean levels quite dramatically – easily below the level needed to maintain water in the Mediterranean basin (which is known to have been dry during the last major ice age).
I fail to see what it is about this scenario that you find so “complex” and unbelievable given the starting premise of a sudden massive release of energy on this planet?… What would you expect to happen? Orderly weather as usual? The whole surface of the planet was broken up by the massive impact that set the whole catastrophe in motion… the aftershocks of which we are still feeling to this day.
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
EducateTruth.com promoted on 3ABN
@Geanna Dane:
So did the mammoths dies of cold or starvation? Maybe it wasn’t the intolerable cold, perhaps it was too much snowfall that spoiled access to the vegetation they depended on. Unless most or all of the fossils had identifiable food in their mouths or stomachs (I have heard that some did), how could one possibly know?
It really doesn’t matter if they died directly because of the cold or indirectly because of starvation (though I favor the former idea). Either way, the evidence suggests that they, along with millions of other types of animals, died out very suddenly in line with a sudden global cold snap. That’s the key point here. The cold snap would result in a rapid decrease in the ocean’s water level, resulting in an opportunity to dry out the Mediterranean basin…
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
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