"100 Reasons Why Evolution Is STUPID!"

In this paper, "Modern Synthesis", refers to the commonly taught evolutionary mechanism of incremental Random Mutations + Natural Selection as the primary factor for creating all of biodiversity.

Yes this is the dogma that you've been called 'stupid' and 'ignorant' for not believing in for decades. Mainstream Science is finally being forced to admit that it was a failed assumption.

What 'Soft Inheritance' refers to is Epigenetics. These are developmental changes in an individual organism that gets inherited by its offspring, that do not include genetic variations in the underlying DNA.


[link to www.somosbacteriasyvirus.com]

Soft inheritance: Challenging the Modern Synthesis

This paper presents some of the recent challenges to the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary theory, which has dominated
evolutionary thinking for the last sixty years. The focus of the paper is the challenge of soft inheritance - the
idea that variations that arise during development can be inherited. There is ample evidence showing that phenotypic
variations that are independent of variations in DNA sequence, and targeted DNA changes that are guided by
epigenetic control systems, are important sources of hereditary variation, and hence can contribute to evolutionary
changes. Furthermore, under certain conditions, the mechanisms underlying epigenetic inheritance can also lead to
saltational changes that reorganize the epigenome. These discoveries are clearly incompatible with the tenets of the
Modern Synthesis, which denied any significant role for Lamarckian and saltational processes. In view of the data
that support soft inheritance, as well as other challenges to the Modern Synthesis, it is concluded that that synthesis
no longer offers a satisfactory theoretical framework for evolutionary biology.

This!

I was on the point of conceding this on procedural grounds; aka, the discussion has wandered so far from the original point it has become something neither of us can argue with.

But then I thought a moment.

The point of having a universal law of gravitation is that it is predictive. Mathematically predictive. If one day an astronaut brings her pet cat out on an EVA (with the appropriate attire), we would be successfully predict the orbital period of said cat around the minuscule mass of a human being. And be confident in the answer.

The evolutionary theories you disdain have the same predictive power. That's why they are in use.

Both cases are still identical in that we may be entirely mistaken -- not just about the root cause (as in, gravity is actually caused by the shoves of angels) but that it actually adheres to the model. At any moment, one of us may suddenly fly up into the sky, instantly refuting the idea that we can predict the steady gravitational attraction of our own planet. Or we may discover at the fringes of the observable universe that the values worked out for G don't add up there.

The ONLY shoe you have to stand in is that you are willing to reject certain data but accept others. That is to say; you accept allele frequency shift, and mutation, quibble on speciation, and reject beneficial mutation and common descent.

You do so because one can be demonstrated "instantaneously" -- aka the lifetime of a bacterium, easily witnessed in a lab by a patient observer.

The same caveat applied to geology, say, would hold that mountains never erode, the continents have always been in the arrangement they are today, the magnetic field has always had the same polarity, and the structure of most minerals is impossible. Because the large-scale events like the formation of mountain ranges or ocean basins -- whilst arising from processes which are observable -- are too large a scale to fit within human lifetimes or even human history. The simplest rock falls prey to this problem, as geology agrees that the processes of infusion and crystallization seen in many common minerals simply can not happen on a scale of less than millions of years.

Which means they can only be "inferred." The complete formation has never been observed.



I don't see a bright line here. Perhaps you could be more specific.

WHAT is different between, say, inferring the passage of stars across the Main Sequence, and inferring that two living organisms have a common (and extinct) ancestor?

What makes one of these "measurable, testable, repeatable" and the other "historical claims and assumptions?" What makes one of them empirical and the other not?





I don't know what this is supposed to mean. Assuming you do, could you explain?

The closest I can come to a guess is either that you are making some remark about the explosion of body plans that appeared in the early Cambrian, or, that you are remarking on something more modern and more specific, such as the origin of snakes. (Hint...look at the HOX genes.)




I will agree with you there; Common Descent is very different than Natural Selection. One is the data. The other is the explanation. One is theory. The other is LAW.

The pattern of interrelationship of species, even if it is an illusion, pre-dates Darwin and is far too well established for there to be any remaining quibble about the fact. You can argue all you like that there is no "proof" Microclaenodon is an actual ancestor between Eoconodon and the mesonychids. But you can not deny the multiple lines of investigation that all confirm the apparent relationship.





There are design theories? I haven't seen one yet. Saying "Hey, it could have happened," (or, as is more usually the case among the Cdesign Propentists, "Well, YOUR way is broken, so it has to be something else") is hardly what anyone would call a functional theory.

I am reminded of what Galileo argued at one point. He said, basically "Let us assume that the solar system is in truth arranged the way Aristotle described it. However, use my arrangement to make your calculations -- it is faster and gives more accurate results."

Even if one were to drop all the philosophical level from the discourse, ID has nothing to offer. No guide to develop new experiments or new vaccines or new fossil hunts. No guide to relationships of histocompatibilities or structural similarities of possible use for organ donation. Nothing. Just a fun story for the camp fire.

Perhaps ID's time would be better spent making a functional theory first. Starting a proper science. Then they could argue for a seat at the table. Instead they seem to want to Nobel but without having to do any of the work.




You may want to broaden your reading here. Your description doesn't come close to what I've seen in the literature -- and I'm talking literature from 5-10 years ago, too.

You also appear to be showing some confusion of what evolution looks like across time and across species. It isn't built on one-time innovations. There wasn't one single proto-bird that developed the first feather, and all else descends from that.

(Your later remarks in re land dwellers pre-dating tiktaalik is naught but an even better example. No. It doesn't work like that.)




Not even Darwin required change at a constant rate. And only creotards use the term "Darwinism" outside of discussions about the history of science.

I'll cop to ongoing non-congruences, because I didn't want to go into that sideline on my previous (already far too long) post. Yes; these crop up all the time.
The lie is not that they don't exist. The lie is that everyone around simply throws up their hands and decides to work around it.

I've mostly read deeply in hominid evolution, and nary a year (or a major conference, or a book, or a discovery) that there aren't shouting matches, recriminations, fist fights in the hallways (almost!) about aligning the results of one data pool with another. Studied disinterest is about as far as you can get from the correct description of how differences in the relationships revealed by, say, mitochondrial DNA versus pre-historic migration patterns are treated within the field.

They aren't left fallow. They are worked on and argued over until they are solved and accounted for.

Which means if you sift through the literature with a creationists' eyes, you will always, for any period, find unanswered questions and places where the data doesn't seem to make sense.

Because if all the data made sense and there were no more questions left, no-one would need to be working in the sciences any more. They could just write it all down in one big book and go home.

Oh, yeah. And design doesn't predict these arrangements. Because it can't predict. Because there is no characterization of the designer, and no agreement on what make up the tenants of design.

(It sure as hell ain't human design, because no human team would have done some of the things we see in even our own physiology. And, yes, it is easy to snap back that we don't know the constraints that designer was working under. But you see, that's exactly the point. A known designer with unknown constraints looks exactly like an unknown designer. And you are back to having no ability to predict based on any two examples what you may find in a third.)


When there are unexpected divergences between genes, it is attributed to an unusually high level of conservation, or vise-versa, periods of 'rapid evolution', 'stasis', etc. if it comes down to totally unpredicted genes, HGT can explain it away. There is a model for every discrepancy. It is mostly unfalsifiable beyond what we would expect of similar phenotype possessing similar genotype.





Citation, please.

I notice you said "morphology," not "physiology." If you have found two burrowing lizards...heck, two of any lizards...with identical blood chemistry despite an otherwise well-documented evolutionary separation of millions of years, then I will happily enter the whack-job cult of your choice.

Morphology. Huh. At a gross enough scale, our morphology is identical to that of an Emperor Penguin.

See, convergent evolution doesn't proscribe against evolving a similar trait along a similar path. Species don't face a completely flat landscape, in which all choices are equally possible. They are constrained by existing biology and evolutionary history. Every tetrapod on Earth is heir to a similar skeletal structure. As much as it might be "more fit" to have a brain located below the caudal plate, the climb towards that is simply too great to be at all likely.

So two lizards, moving towards almost identical ecological niches, happen to move/fuse/drop parts of their skeletons in the same manner? Whoda thunkit!

I'm guessing here what the deep dark secret of your magic lizards are, though. So please do provide a cite. I'm honestly interested in reading it.






If you want to go there, sure. Species is a semantic construct. No organism on Earth ever gained or lost anything by being one of a "species." It is only the container we put them in to better understand their relationships.

For the purpose of this argument, I define speciation as the arising of a population with BOTH novel form AND an a strong disability to breed back to the original population.

And if we want to be extra careful, we'd omit bacteria as well, since species doesn't mean quite the same thing to those plasmid-swapping little guys.

Isn't goal-post dragging fun? Add enough caveats, and soon enough no possible observation will fit. Have fun with it...I don't consider it necessary to observe only in the lab, as opposed to, say, observing the natural history of the Galapagos. Or observing the fossil record.

It's the time scale again. You are demanding we show you a star forming from interstellar gas, and you won't take anything less than average density all the way through to stabilization on the Main Sequence (hint...MAMMALS haven't been around long enough to witness that!)

So we take what we can get. Novel developments that fall far short of our bacterial culture becoming a metazoan and sprouting wings to fly off the petri dish.

And what has been seen on this more human scale has been convincing to everyone but a small number of people who all have surprising commonalities in their backgrounds.





I think you haven't answered how you can play the game of shifts in allele frequency for something that has no allele.

I mean the flavobactin, specifically. Not familiar with your P. sicula but I'll look it up some time.

Ah. Just did. I didn't recognize the name but the story was vaguely familiar.

I assume you have something you are dying to trot out about how the cecal valves doesn't mean what it appears to mean? Otherwise I'm not sure why you brought this up. Evolution isn't steady-state. No-one I know argues it is. The mechanism doesn't require it...or support it (and now I'm trying to image an environment that changes continually at a pace defined by the ability of organisms in it to successfully adapt -- regardless of whether such adaptation is even within range.)

And pardon me for using the word "adapt." I'm not interested in having a conversation with Humpty-Dumpty here. I refuse to attempt to converse only using the limited and specific (and sometimes hidden) meanings ascribed to common terms by one individual in the discussion.




Ah, good. You did get to it. I should have simply read downwards.

Who said it had to be random? Do you actually think the fitness landscape is flat? Do you think that all evolutionary pathways are of equal cost? Do you imagine that mutations are truly random?

NONE of these things are argued within the modern synthesis. Heck...none of them were required by Darwin, writing a century earlier.

Is this really the corner you are arguing from? That only truly random events can be evolutionary, and anything that isn't random can be written off as simply "designed in?"

I think the only thing that allows you to get away with this is the time scale problem again. Every change in a species builds upon the gestalt of that species as of that moment; past evolutions, and most recent evolutions. Give it a few hundred thousand years, and each group of the now divergent species of lizards would move in different directions when presented with the same environmental pressures. Because their history is now different.

The fact that one SINGLE change is observed to happen statistically often among members of the same original species, presented with the same pressure....well, it is all but meaningless. It is like taking the first bounce of a superball and claiming you now have no need to know where or how it might be bouncing four minutes from now.

Heck...even the studies you mention (would an actual cite kill you?) show the same thing; there is variation in the details as to how the cloacal valves form. The lizards are only near-identical at this the first advance of the first pawn. Six moves down is when you will start to see the difference between a check and a mate!




Cite, please.

I know it wasn't a frameshift. That's an over-simplified way of putting what it was; but it is still a known and common form of transcription error.

And, yes...it is exactly as you described. An existing protein that was modified. Because that is how it is done. No-one is requiring a novel protein to be constructed from thin air.

Are you going to argue that the antigens of my blood are completely unimportant, as several of them are "just" slight modifications from their ancestor? That they are in fact arisen from a similar mechanism? Because if so I hope you aren't a blood donor!

It is not just possible, it is almost certain that many, many individual bacteria at some point coded for and manufactured the "broken" protein. In many cases (there is more than one observed mutation here in this and similar species), the result for the organism was negative enough for that gene to be uncoded again, and added to the general detritus all of us DNA-users carry around with us. In some cases that or a similar mutation may have been sufficiently neutral to be carried around for many generations (which we certainly do for non-coding stuff!)

So whereas the gene existed many times before, it would be nonsense to claim that it was part of the regular genetic make-up of the species.

It only became common enough to be selected for (or against) when there was a change to the environment; one that had never been there before. Before that, it was simply noise; no more or no less import than any other substitutions of amino acids within that same protein.

There are a 1001+∞

They only lie when their lips move. Everything they say is 180°

All you commenting that didn't read the prior comments need to see the Sea Slug Above ^ ^ that should help you with seeing things differently.

I'm aware nomuse took note

Isn't biology awesome? So many features that life is equipped to handle.

What is predictable is that this is another example of change that did not involve the oft repeated mantra of evolution: (Random Mutation + Natural Selection)

Funny how every time we observe some fascinating change in nature, it has nothing to do with that mechanism.