Of Baramins and Baloney 25

April 13, 2009 by Dr. Mc.

[Don,]
We may be getting toward the end of our discussion.
Yes, it would appear to be the case, since you have not managed to propose a single scientific hypothesis based on what you hope/wish is a powerful scientific approach. But I’m willing to be patient.
If I responded to your request for an hypothesis at any time with a list of topics, books, and referred articles, you would have rejected it.
I’m not sure I would have rejected it, since I haven’t seen them. I can tell you that I have yet to see a scientific hypothesis based on ID that would lead to a testable prediction unexplainable by current evolutionary theory. That was true before we started this conversation, and I have read additional ID and creationist materials since then, yet it remains true. I merely thought that since you broached the subject of the Cambrian explosion, you would have a ready explanation for it, based on your perspective. I guess that was a premature expectation.

Your example of nylonase in bacteria was better.
This is such a remarkably incorrect perversion of what we know that I don’t know where to start. But rather than get sidetracked on those issues (and further away from hearing a single hypothesis from you), I’ll merely point out that if you had read anything in Carroll’s book, or any of a number of other primary sources, you would not say that “loss of complexity” or “a degenerated mechanism” is the explanation. As pointed out before, you will need a significantly deeper understanding of genetic control mechanisms to proceed toward an understanding of why the entire paragraph above is simply wrong. Clearly you don’t have that understanding.

I think complexity is a legitimate term in biology,
I was asking simply because I had no idea what YOU meant by the word “complexity”. And now that I have that information, I have to point out to you (again) that your understanding is quite superficial. Increases in information are not the same thing as increases in complexity. Some well-accepted definitions of information would posit that there is more information in white noise than in a Beethoven sonata of the same length. Is white noise more “complex” than a Beethoven sonata? Most folks would say no. Others would posit that mere duplication of information is an increase in complexity; two copies of War and Peace is more complex than one. Yet there is no more information in two copies compared to one. At the biological level this conflation is also obvious. A duplicated gene has no more information content than the original gene, yet it can lead to increases in the “complexity” of the organism’s metabolism, structure, etc. See methotrexate resistance in human cancers, for one non-trivial example. A genetic control element moved to a novel chromosomal environment has no new information, but it can (as you would know if you read Carroll and others) lead to new structures which most people would describe as an increase in “complexity”.
So until you understand the fact that information and complexity are different things, we can’t really get much further.

I need nothing about natural selection.
Yet you deny those mechanisms. Gene duplication gives rise to new possibilities for selection to act upon. There are innumerable examples (antifreeze proteins in Antarctic icefish, for one) of duplicated genes giving rise to proteins with novel structure. Is an icefish with antifreeze proteins more “complex” than a related fish without those proteins? I happen to think so, but I can’t really figure out where you would stand on that question. Mutations that result in novel protein-protein interactions, for example in the Vpu gene in human immunodeficiency virus I (the virus that causes AIDS), can give “more complex alternatives” from which nature selects more lethal viruses (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=8794357&ordinalpos=5&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum%E2%80%9D). The literature is replete with the examples that you seek. Read about them, please. But don’t let it distract you from formulating your hypothesis about the Cambrian explosion, please.
So, more important than examples of change or defense of natural selection, I would like to see a logical argument supporting an hypothesis pertaining to increased complexity by random mutation.
Let me just say, then, that “where you come from” is a place that is remarkably uncluttered by the results of scientific research of the past 60 years. In addition, that place supports a definition of “complexity” (information = complexity, NOT) that fails to conform to standard usage. See http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2008/06/more-on-the-ori.html for a discussion of new genes in fruit flies, or http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2008/06/de-novo-origina.html for a discussion of the origin of a new gene in yeast. It is simply not true that “no hypothesis can stand” in this arena.

I believe I can give an example of an hypothesis supporting design
Let’s just hear the hypothesis, please.
Thanks

Mark

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