John, my friend, you have a fundamental problem in your analysis. Your
unyielding adherence to Darwinian dogma is blinding you and preventing you from
asking the right questions. You assume Darwinian Evolution is true first and
that skews your analysis.
For example, you assume that the Coelacanth is 350 million years old. How do
you know that? You know that only because Darwinian Evolution theory told you
so. Since your first assumption is that Darwinian Evolution is true, you can
liberally conclude that the Coelacanth is 350 million years old. Then a wrong
question stems from this wrong understanding - wrong assumption. You then ask
why the coelacanth "stopped" evolving? This of course is the wrong question
that you are trying to answer.
What you should do is not assume anything. You then look at the data and see
if Darwinian Evolution fits the data. Can Darwinian Evolution explain the
existence of the Coelacanth up to today and why it hasn't evolved? If not,
Darwinian Evolution theory is wrong.
Instead, you ask, how could the Coelacanth exist unchanged for 350 million
years? This is the wrong questions that should not have been asked if your
initial assumptions did not screw with your analysis.
Jojo
PS: I'm really at a loss understanding why people can't seem to see the
stupidities of their belief in Darwinian Evolution - why they can see that
Darwinian Evolution could be wrong.
----- Original Message -----
From: jwin...@cyllene.uwa.edu.au
To: vortex-l@eskimo.com
Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2014 12:50 AM
Subject: Re: [Vo]:Punctuated equilibrium
Hi Nigel,
Thanks again for your answer, but again I cannot find the data point I am
after in all the interesting information you have provided! So I will try
again.
Purely as an illustration or analogy, consider the growth of the human body.
It starts at conception having many embryonic stem cells. These all have the
potential to differentiate into the many varieties of cell types that are
required to form all the organs in the body. Once they have fully
differentiated, they seem to lose the plasticity that they once had when stem
cells and can no longer go back and reproduce into different types of organ
cells.
Elements in the phylogenetic tree (made up of life forms instead of cells)
seems to possess similar traits. There are elements such as the coelacanth
which has reproduced itself for ~350 million years with "scarcely a whisker out
of place", while the offspring of some very near neighbour has crawled out of
the water onto dry land and formed into all the reptiles, dinosaurs, birds,
mammals, and finally as human, looked back at its own evolutionary history. I
think all must agree that this enormous difference in the evolutionary
potential of such near neighbours is truly remarkable! If this has an
explanation I would love to hear it. But I am getting sidetracked.
My point is that there are some life forms which seem to be like stem cells
and have the plasticity to evolve into a countless variety of other life forms.
And there are others which seem to be like fully differentiated cells which
have spent their evolutionary potential and can no longer produce other forms.
So if one draws the phylogenetic tree, there must be a trunk (or root) of
simple life forms at the centre from which all large branches proceed, leading
finally to leaves at the outer extremities where the fully complex but often
evolutionarily spent life forms exist.
One could put the first creature that crawled from the sea (which you failed
to name but which I might call a proto-frog) as one of the major branches, and
things like the bat (which seems have remained unchanged for 50 million years)
as one of the leaves.
What I would mostly like to find out is whether the DNA information content
seems to increase or decrease as we go from trunk to leaves? I appreciate it
may be difficult to know the information content when you can't pick the
difference between random numbers and vital information. But if one was to
"zip" or compress the DNA letters so as to at least get rid of duplicates and
repetitive strings, that would provide an upper limit.
So do "simple" organisms like stromatolites and cyanobacteria seem to have
significantly more, or significantly less DNA information than "complex"
organisms like vertebrates?
John
On 27/08/2014 7:35 PM, Nigel Dyer wrote:
Hi John
Evolutionary principles can help understand how the first self replicating
cell originated. For example all the evidence suggests that it came from an
RNA based predecessor, where RNA is replicated and splits into chunks to form
enzymes etc. We are currently finding RNA has far more roles than we had
previously realised, plenty of scope for RNA based lifeforms.
As for whether there is an inevitability of humanoid based life forms, no
there is nothing that suggests that we were inevitable. In 10 million years
time it might be that the descendants of todays mice (see Douglas Adams) or
dolphins who are in many ways as advanced as we are might be asking themselves
the same question, and they are not sexually compatible with us.
There is an emergent phenomena that gives rise to more complex life forms
that are better fitted than their predecessors to survive. Darwin describes
well the process that makes this happen, and all that we have found in genetics
supports and can be understood based this idea.
OK this is something that I would like to find out. I can see no ratchet
mechanism to help complexity develop from simplicity rather than vice-versa.
Every molecular level mutation that you can imagine must be effectively
reversible. Thus every micro-evolutionary step must also be reversible. Thus
every macro-evolutionary change must also be reversible if the selection
pressure is removed or reversed - No?
We have a similar situation in physics: Every microscopic interaction is
time reversible, therefore you would expect that every macroscopic event can
happen just as well in reverse. And indeed it could, but in practice it
doesn't. You can very quickly pick whether a film is being run in reverse or
in the forward direction. So what determines the arrow of time? The way that
this is usually explained is with probability - the second law of
thermodynamics - the inevitable increase of entropy. This is what ensures for
instance that objects that are hotter than their environment will cool towards
their environment rather than warm up even more.
If you were to apply this law that is so overriding in physics to evolution,
it would say that things must go in the opposite direction to the one that we
always seem to see them go. If you like, the evolution of man into microbes is
almost infinitely more probable than microbes evolving to man. But since that
is not what we see in the historical record, and since it flies in the face of
all orthodoxy, it is best quietly forgotten and never mentioned!
Do you know of a convincing ratchet mechanism that ensures that "mount
improbable" will always be climbed and never rolled back down? Or do you think
there is plenty of rolling back down that happens but that just never gets
mentioned?
However, the more find out about biological processes, the more we seem to
rule out alternative none DNA/RNA ways that life could occur. Basically
evolution (and our chemists) seems to have explored just about every available
option, and there is nothing else that comes close to doing what DNA/RNA can
do. If life exists elsewhere, I find it increasingly difficult to see how it
can be anything other than DNA/RNA based. If it is DNA/RNA based then that
would therefore just be an example of parallel evolution, which we already have
lots of examples of within nature. What will then be interesting will be to see
what the similarities and differences are in the way that the DNA/RNA encodes
information (e.g. coding for proteins, which is more abitary), which would be
the only way that we could determine whether there was a common ancester.
My particular heresy/unproven hypothesis is that I beleive that some of the
information in DNA is stored in a 'non-local' form (similar to Sheldrake's
morphogenetic fields), so in principle could be shared with an alien DNA based
life form, which could mean that the aliens might indeed turn out to be hairy
humanoids. I await the arrival of aliens with interest so that these various
hypothesies can be tested.
Nigel
