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What bothers me about evolutionary theory is that it is a theory without a mechanism (natural selection needs something to select, after all -- and where did th

What bothers me about evolutionary theory is that it is a theory without a mechanism (natural selection needs something to select, after all -- and where did that thing come from?). Also, the process can't even get off the ground until the existence of life has been established, which is basically the entire game.

gus_massa 3y ago
> natural selection needs something to select, after all -- and where did that thing come from? Random mutation. You can blame cosmic rays, transcription errors and a few more problems that cause random mutations. Note that this random mutations usually cause very small changes. For example making the neck a 1% shorter or longer. In some cases, the longer neck helps to get to the food and not starve. You need a lot of 1% small changes to get a giraffe. It's not like in the X-men movies that a mutation gives you fully formed wings. Note that most mutations are bad, you get a 99% less efficiency eating sugar, or 50% less calcium in the bones or other very bad stuff. Or a dead cell or a crazy cell that is the seed of a cancer. So sunbathing under an X-ray lamp all day is a very bad idea.
- jononomo 3y ago
  1% of wing is actually worse than just not having a wing. And saying "well, it just randomly happened" is not a "mechanism" in any sense whatsoever.
  - gus_massa 3y ago
    Just consider: rat -> flying squirrel -> bat How much "wings" does a flying squirrel has 30%? (It didn't evolve that way, but it's easier to imagine that sequence. But flying squirrel "wings" look more similar to pterodactyl wings that bat wings in spite they are unrelated.) "30%" wings are good to glide. "1%" wings are probably good to jump a little farther. "80%" wings are probably good to jump to a branch instead of climbing. This numbers are totally made up, but I hope they show that intermediate "wings" can be useful.
    - jononomo 3y ago
      It's a nice story you've convinced yourself of, I guess. People will rationalize anything because they just assume the theory is true. Also a new body part isn't just shapes at the macro level, like wings and noses, but they have functions at the cellular level that require entirely new proteins -- proteins that would need to be found in a search space that would make picking the correct atom out of the galaxy look like an extraordinarily likely event. It's like saying "oh yeah, and it also just happened to randomly guess the combination on this combination lock that has 60 digits in in. You can do the math, unless you're a evolutionary biologist, which is why in the faculty lounges the mathematicians make fun of the biologists behind their back for not understanding rudimentary statistics. I'm sure you'll say that the magical process just kept guessing numbers for the lock that were somehow closers and closer, without realizing that when a lock is locked it doesn't give you any feedback about how close you are. The math just doesn't work. There is no mechanism (other than "random mutation", sheesh) and on top of that the theory is refuted by the fossil record at every turn. It's a joke.
      - gus_massa 3y ago
        Sorry for the late reply... I don't remember a protein that appears out of the blue in vertebrates. Do you have an example? For many proteins we have reconstructed the evolution. A famous example is the hemoglobin (that keeps the oxygen in the blood) and the myoglobin (that keeps the oxygen in muscles). A long time ago they were the same protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemoglobin#Evolution_of_vertebrate_hemoglobin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemoglobin#Evolution_of_verteb... I'm a mathematician. All the calculations that have results that are harder than "picking the correct atom out of the galaxy" use very simple models where the bases of the DNA are picked randomly. Everyone agree that this method is very bad and it's very hard to get a working protein this way. Evolution is a randomized version of "branch and cut" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_and_cut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_and_cut You don't search the whole space, but you cut most of the branches without checking them. Also, some calculations I saw use the modern version of the protein that is long and very efficient. It's expected that the original version was shorter and barely useful, so it's much easier to find it. Anyway, we still don't have good candidates for the short and crappy versions. So there is still a hole there, but I expect it will be fixed, perhaps in a hundred of years :) . And the origin may have been even more weird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world
za3faran 3y ago
Your instinct is correct about being suspicious about how this dogma is being forced. According to James Tour, behind closed doors the conversation is very different, and people admit to things that they would never in public. As per another comment in this thread, people are afraid to speak out because of fear for their careers or being cancelled - which I think there was a documentary that showed several of those cases. Dr. Eyad Qunaibi has a good introductory series that looks at evolution in a critical manner. I came across some material with English captions[1][2][3] for those interested. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYHhWkQZz30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYHhWkQZz30 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irwTgwkjkRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irwTgwkjkRU [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDrj3Gj8G6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDrj3Gj8G6U

gus_massa 3y ago

> natural selection needs something to select, after all -- and where did that thing come from? Random mutation. You can blame cosmic rays, transcription errors and a few more problems that cause random mutations. Note that this random mutations usually cause very small changes. For example making the neck a 1% shorter or longer. In some cases, the longer neck helps to get to the food and not starve. You need a lot of 1% small changes to get a giraffe. It's not like in the X-men movies that a mutation gives you fully formed wings. Note that most mutations are bad, you get a 99% less efficiency eating sugar, or 50% less calcium in the bones or other very bad stuff. Or a dead cell or a crazy cell that is the seed of a cancer. So sunbathing under an X-ray lamp all day is a very bad idea.

jononomo 3y ago
1% of wing is actually worse than just not having a wing. And saying "well, it just randomly happened" is not a "mechanism" in any sense whatsoever.
- gus_massa 3y ago
  Just consider: rat -> flying squirrel -> bat How much "wings" does a flying squirrel has 30%? (It didn't evolve that way, but it's easier to imagine that sequence. But flying squirrel "wings" look more similar to pterodactyl wings that bat wings in spite they are unrelated.) "30%" wings are good to glide. "1%" wings are probably good to jump a little farther. "80%" wings are probably good to jump to a branch instead of climbing. This numbers are totally made up, but I hope they show that intermediate "wings" can be useful.
  - jononomo 3y ago
    It's a nice story you've convinced yourself of, I guess. People will rationalize anything because they just assume the theory is true. Also a new body part isn't just shapes at the macro level, like wings and noses, but they have functions at the cellular level that require entirely new proteins -- proteins that would need to be found in a search space that would make picking the correct atom out of the galaxy look like an extraordinarily likely event. It's like saying "oh yeah, and it also just happened to randomly guess the combination on this combination lock that has 60 digits in in. You can do the math, unless you're a evolutionary biologist, which is why in the faculty lounges the mathematicians make fun of the biologists behind their back for not understanding rudimentary statistics. I'm sure you'll say that the magical process just kept guessing numbers for the lock that were somehow closers and closer, without realizing that when a lock is locked it doesn't give you any feedback about how close you are. The math just doesn't work. There is no mechanism (other than "random mutation", sheesh) and on top of that the theory is refuted by the fossil record at every turn. It's a joke.
    - gus_massa 3y ago
      Sorry for the late reply... I don't remember a protein that appears out of the blue in vertebrates. Do you have an example? For many proteins we have reconstructed the evolution. A famous example is the hemoglobin (that keeps the oxygen in the blood) and the myoglobin (that keeps the oxygen in muscles). A long time ago they were the same protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemoglobin#Evolution_of_vertebrate_hemoglobin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemoglobin#Evolution_of_verteb... I'm a mathematician. All the calculations that have results that are harder than "picking the correct atom out of the galaxy" use very simple models where the bases of the DNA are picked randomly. Everyone agree that this method is very bad and it's very hard to get a working protein this way. Evolution is a randomized version of "branch and cut" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_and_cut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_and_cut You don't search the whole space, but you cut most of the branches without checking them. Also, some calculations I saw use the modern version of the protein that is long and very efficient. It's expected that the original version was shorter and barely useful, so it's much easier to find it. Anyway, we still don't have good candidates for the short and crappy versions. So there is still a hole there, but I expect it will be fixed, perhaps in a hundred of years :) . And the origin may have been even more weird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world

za3faran 3y ago

Your instinct is correct about being suspicious about how this dogma is being forced. According to James Tour, behind closed doors the conversation is very different, and people admit to things that they would never in public. As per another comment in this thread, people are afraid to speak out because of fear for their careers or being cancelled - which I think there was a documentary that showed several of those cases. Dr. Eyad Qunaibi has a good introductory series that looks at evolution in a critical manner. I came across some material with English captions[1][2][3] for those interested. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYHhWkQZz30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYHhWkQZz30 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irwTgwkjkRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irwTgwkjkRU [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDrj3Gj8G6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDrj3Gj8G6U