Briggs needs to invent a clever name for the fallacy of explaining something you do not understand by appealing to something else which you also do not understand.
Briggs offers an excellent analogy. Geneticists assume they will eventually have a genetic WOPR (the super-computer from the movie War Games) tracking the random minute mutations that one by one will eventually add up to unlock a new species. But it clearly doesn't work that way.
Forget for a moment the geneticist’s dream of a computer to build a new species. Matt’s water analogy was an eye-opener for me. Is gene therapy an impossible dream?
Thanks for a great article. I believe Vox's argument was that even given the most favorable of circumstances for Evolutionists, and using the highest measured fixation rate available for an organism, the numbers produce a floor for mutation --getting all the way from there to here -- much greater than the lifetime of the Sun.
Evolutionists are still so screwed up they are almost walking category errors.
Discussions that I have had with biologists about the "step-determine gene-lock gene-step again" devolve to "it all happens at once", with them never realizing/comprehending that the gene which supposedly "locked" doesn't have a mechanism to keep it locked, unless God is doing the locking.
More fundamentally, there is a grim and terrifying innumeracy problem among biologists in general.
Destroying an argument from its own premises is a time-tested method.
They don't have to accept your alternative paradigm and there is an overhead of getting past communication barriers. They've already committed to their own argument, and if it has an inherent flaw you do more damage sweeping the leg.
The whole DNA code, which is infinitely more complex than the WOPR code, had to be generated completely and instantaneously for that first “simple” organism. And by the way, it also had to, at the same time, form a selectively permeable cell membrane, cytoplasm, organelles and a nucleus. Sounds like a miracle of miracles to me. It’s been described as a tornado tearing through a junkyard forming a fully functional 747. But it’s actually even less likely than that. How did the junkyard have all that “junk” in the first place?
You won’t convince me. Your argument that they did it wrong is the same type of argument socialists/communists use when their experiment fails. Again. You actually self-refuted, if you think about it. The point I was making is that “simple” single-celled organisms are stupendously complex and it’s laughably impossible for them to form themselves by themselves. But you think it still happened. With no concrete scientific proof that it happened, just that it must’ve happened for macroevolution to be true, that’s a faith statement.
A natural origin for life isn't a requirement for macroevolution to be true. It is a requirement for avoiding something like an intelligent designer to kick things off.
"The whole DNA code, which is infinitely more complex than the WOPR code, had to be generated completely and instantaneously for that first “simple” organism. And by the way, it also had to, at the same time, form a selectively permeable cell membrane, cytoplasm, organelles and a nucleus. Sounds like a miracle of miracles to me. It’s been described as a tornado tearing through a junkyard forming a fully functional 747. But it’s actually even less likely than that. How did the junkyard have all that “junk” in the first place."???
Yes of course, It's much simpler in fact. Obviously, the starting point for life happens all the time all over the universe but on this planet the current ultimately improved versions have the space fully controlled & occupied, starting point activity never gets beyond the first few steps on earth at the moment & is undetectable.
The starting point indeed being relatively simple molecules that depend on day night changes for their production & destruction & which can be produced only in close proximity to other identical molecules & which have a definite temporally limited life.
So the existence of life & start of life as we see it is guaranteed & doesn't need some statistically impossible process to occur.
Always your eternally faithful & thoroughly humble servant,
Sorry, I don’t see even a semblance of a guarantee of life in the way you describe. Last I heard, scientists have tried to create a “simple” organism using what they think were the primordial conditions. They’ve never come close and have abandoned such research as laughably impossible. What they DID produce had the wrong chirality and was not even usable. Another way I’ve heard life from lifeless chemicals described is a solar system full of blind men simultaneously solving the Rubik’s Cube. That’s more a faith proposition than science.
They did it wrong, they tried to produce life directly at a level of complexity far too advanced.
So the start of life is of course guaranteed in a place like planet earth given all the raw materials & the environment. There's a 1 in 1 chance of it happening.
As previously mentioned, the start of life consists of relatively simple molecules with very specific properties.
Thank you, Sir Briggs! I couldn't have said it better myself - actually, I couldn't have said it one-tenth as well, but I may have said it simpler, without all the math.
I wrote about this topic last week on my new Substack, Biology Bites (now less than 2 months old). Some of your readers may know me from the polar bear end of the climate change fight but evolution is actually my passion. I did my Ph.D. on speciation and that's primarily what my Substack is about (with some fiction thrown in on the side).
But I don't stop there. I've got a potential solution. I'm just at the point of laying it all out in recent and upcoming posts over the next month or so. Come and see what you think!
I’ve been reading “Return of God Hypothesis” by Stephen C. Meyer (intermittently, there are some deep thoughts by Jack Handy in there). He also wrote “Darwin’s Doubt”, recommend that one too.
A lot of confusion comes from the fact that our mental tools for understanding are cartoon cutouts in our minds invoked by words, which we employ as proxies for a reality that is vastly more complex.
"Species" is a cartoon cutout to stand for an empirically-recognized biological type. New, genetically-distinctive "species" can indeed come about via evolution. But this is not a matter of hitting randomly on a wonderful new gene combination that spreads through the population and becomes fixed because it is so great. Rather, it is a matter of a subset of the original "species" finding a new "niche," i.e. a new workable strategy or resource base for making a living, and developing with respect to that niche under natural selection in genetic segregation from the original. Gene combinations that improve their bearers for living with respect to the new niche will develop incrementally from there.
I've long felt that, while Darwinism is essentially correct in itself, it is only half of the necessary theory. Natural selection gives us a path to genes that are "fit," but "fitness" is determined by the relationship of the bio-base with the niche-conditions under which it lives. The latter subject is the requisite other half of the model.
"New, genetically-distinctive "species" can indeed come about via evolution....it is a matter of a subset of the original "species" finding a new "niche," i.e. a new workable strategy or resource base for making a living, and developing with respect to that niche under natural selection in genetic segregation from the original."
Really?
Can you point to an example of a new species developing like that?
I would say pretty much any species, or breed, we care to point to. But again, we need to be clear on what we mean by a "species."
Domesticated animals might be a good starting point, let's say dogs. Dogs presumably became genetically, physically, and behaviorally distinct from wolves in fairly recent times, maybe about the past 14,000 years, due to their ancestors finding a new niche that involved close living and cooperation with humans. As they increasingly made their living with respect to that niche, they became genetically segregated from wolves, and in fact developed into numerous different breeds reflecting various dog niches for different kinds of functionalities favored by the humans they depended on.
The term "species" has some history that confuses the question. First, it was coined for the Linnaean biological classification system, which was made up in the eighteenth century when the scientific consensus was creationist and it was thought that basic biological types were created separately without common ancestry with other types. Second, it was used by theorists in the mid-twentieth century who opposed racial segregation, discrimination, and White ethnic solidarity to argue the non-existence and non-importance of racial types. Their criterion for a "species" was that its members could interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Since all groups of humans can presumably do this, all humans are of the same species, and there are no grounds for distinguishing them biologically, QED.
Third, some creationists will deflect the evolutionary implications of domestic animal breeds by using the argument that since different breeds of dog can still interbreed, they are still all the same "species," "dog," and therefore do not constitute an argument for new species coming about by evolution. In fact, there are probably many examples of distinct animal types that we normally count as separate species, such as polar bears and Alaskan brown bears, or lions and tigers, that can interbreed with each other to produce fertile offspring if they are artificially put together. And if all dogs were removed but greyhounds, Great Danes, and chihuahuas, we would easily count those as three separate species.
Different breeds, facing different niches with different regimes of selection, can arise fairly quickly, so that no one doubts that the new breed developed from the old type. Evolving far enough apart to satisfy the strong requirement for "species" that no interbreeding is possible, probably takes hundreds of thousands or millions of years. After that much time, we simply can't capture the moment the species' ancestors moved into the new niche. So if we can show the origin of a breed, then one can counter that it is still the same species, and if one can show that two types cannot interbreed, then their time of differentiation is too far back to prove to a skeptic that they had one.
"...we need to be clear on what we mean by a "species."
Well, you foresaw the weakness of your own assertions. If bears interbreed to produce fertile offspring, they're the same species.
"Evolution" isn't about Rottweilers being cross-bred to produce Doberman Pinschers.
Evolution asserts that fish became amphibians became lizards became mice became squirrels became monkeys became apes became man.
That's the evolutionary theory. The theory requires one species to become another species--completely different species.
Where's that evidence? Of one species becoming another species? Not a a dog "breed" becoming another "breed." Not the bill of a finch becoming adapted to eat hard seeds. Not a moth turning black in a polluted environment. That's NOT "evolution," a species becoming a completely separate species. It's micro-adaptation.
So you would claim that polar bears and Alaskan brown bears are the same species, and that lions and tigers are the same species, on grounds that they can interbreed to produce fertile offspring? What about horses and donkeys, who can interbreed to produce offspring that are usually sterile? Are they the same species, or two different species?
You seem to accept evolution on a short-term scale, but reject it on a long-term scale. Your argument depends very heavily on the term "species," which is largely a mental projection. What do you actually mean by that term?
If you say that one "species" is separate from another if and only if they cannot interbreed to produce fertile offspring, how does that play into your argument against macro-evolution? Supposing that we humans are descended from an Australopithecus living three million years ago, how do we get together with that party to find out if we can interbreed with it or not? If an animal has no opportunity to mate with its distant ancestor, how can you tell, under your definition of a species, whether they are separate species or not?
The evidence does not show huge numbers of unique species just appearing over night with no intermediary stages. There's massive amounts of evidenc of the stages between fish & rat. One thing we must a remember though is there hasn't been an archivist species busily taking notes & making records for more than 200 million years unfortunately & usually all traces of almost every individual instance of life disappears in nature.
Generally speaking it's good to remember that for a given species in a given location a significant next genetic step results in the previous version disappearing from the entire specific species gene pool.
Always your most humble & eternally obedient servant, your most trivial wish is my command.
"Where is there evidence for ANY species becoming another species?"
I'm an evolutionist. I don't really believe in "species," because I believe that all life forms compose a continuous, branching tree if traced back through time. What changes there may be from one generation to the next are almost imperceptible, but over a long period of time those changes may add up to something very different from its distant ancestors.
You are a creationist. You believe in species, because you believe that the biological world is divided up into discrete types that each descend from their own common ancestor that was created separately from the common ancestor of other types. Each of these species is biologically and evolutionarily discrete from every other species. (Please correct me if I'm misrepresenting your views.)
Before we can discuss evidence of one "species" becoming another, we need to define the term so that we can tell when two different life forms, one living long before the other, are different species. I don't believe in species, but you do, so you need to take the lead in offering the definition.
Until you, who believes in species, can tell me, who does not, how to recognize whether two different life forms are different species or not, your question is too squishy to be answered. Can you propose a workable definition?
There's no probability for sure, but there is certainty of outcome IF you run ALL combinations. If you have $292.2 million at your disposal, play all number combinations in the Power Ball lottery when the jackpot is over $293 million and you will win.
Excellent explanations, thank you, and thank you for bringing up the Reification Fallacy. I've always hated it when evolutionists do that, but I never knew what it was called.
BTW, if anyone suffers from the Big Muscles Fallacy, it's "The Dark Lord." Ha ha, what a dork.
You demonstrate the difference between knowledge and understanding. Thank you and bless you.
Everyone knows that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting them in fruit salad.
“No, something much deeper and more interesting is happening than “random” change.”
Oh yes, it’s a quantum phenomenon, which, you see, instantly explains everything.
Briggs needs to invent a clever name for the fallacy of explaining something you do not understand by appealing to something else which you also do not understand.
Heretic!
It was climate change, no wait, it was God, well one of them anyway.
See, instantly explained.
You missed the 'most probable' answer.
It was Trumps fault!
Well yes, but that is automatically assumed.
I see what you did there—I love it lol
It always strikes me that the Atheists, not the Christians, are the ones who are so incredulous.
Briggs offers an excellent analogy. Geneticists assume they will eventually have a genetic WOPR (the super-computer from the movie War Games) tracking the random minute mutations that one by one will eventually add up to unlock a new species. But it clearly doesn't work that way.
WOPR made me realize that some biologists think evolution is a game of Wordle.
"METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL" made me realize that the evolutionist didn't understand the problem.
Forget for a moment the geneticist’s dream of a computer to build a new species. Matt’s water analogy was an eye-opener for me. Is gene therapy an impossible dream?
Thanks for a great article. I believe Vox's argument was that even given the most favorable of circumstances for Evolutionists, and using the highest measured fixation rate available for an organism, the numbers produce a floor for mutation --getting all the way from there to here -- much greater than the lifetime of the Sun.
Evolutionists are still so screwed up they are almost walking category errors.
Discussions that I have had with biologists about the "step-determine gene-lock gene-step again" devolve to "it all happens at once", with them never realizing/comprehending that the gene which supposedly "locked" doesn't have a mechanism to keep it locked, unless God is doing the locking.
More fundamentally, there is a grim and terrifying innumeracy problem among biologists in general.
Destroying an argument from its own premises is a time-tested method.
They don't have to accept your alternative paradigm and there is an overhead of getting past communication barriers. They've already committed to their own argument, and if it has an inherent flaw you do more damage sweeping the leg.
I understood this post. Amazing, for me.
Me too!
The whole DNA code, which is infinitely more complex than the WOPR code, had to be generated completely and instantaneously for that first “simple” organism. And by the way, it also had to, at the same time, form a selectively permeable cell membrane, cytoplasm, organelles and a nucleus. Sounds like a miracle of miracles to me. It’s been described as a tornado tearing through a junkyard forming a fully functional 747. But it’s actually even less likely than that. How did the junkyard have all that “junk” in the first place?
You won’t convince me. Your argument that they did it wrong is the same type of argument socialists/communists use when their experiment fails. Again. You actually self-refuted, if you think about it. The point I was making is that “simple” single-celled organisms are stupendously complex and it’s laughably impossible for them to form themselves by themselves. But you think it still happened. With no concrete scientific proof that it happened, just that it must’ve happened for macroevolution to be true, that’s a faith statement.
A natural origin for life isn't a requirement for macroevolution to be true. It is a requirement for avoiding something like an intelligent designer to kick things off.
"The whole DNA code, which is infinitely more complex than the WOPR code, had to be generated completely and instantaneously for that first “simple” organism. And by the way, it also had to, at the same time, form a selectively permeable cell membrane, cytoplasm, organelles and a nucleus. Sounds like a miracle of miracles to me. It’s been described as a tornado tearing through a junkyard forming a fully functional 747. But it’s actually even less likely than that. How did the junkyard have all that “junk” in the first place."???
Yes of course, It's much simpler in fact. Obviously, the starting point for life happens all the time all over the universe but on this planet the current ultimately improved versions have the space fully controlled & occupied, starting point activity never gets beyond the first few steps on earth at the moment & is undetectable.
The starting point indeed being relatively simple molecules that depend on day night changes for their production & destruction & which can be produced only in close proximity to other identical molecules & which have a definite temporally limited life.
So the existence of life & start of life as we see it is guaranteed & doesn't need some statistically impossible process to occur.
Always your eternally faithful & thoroughly humble servant,
Rex8or Legitimax Prime.
Sorry, I don’t see even a semblance of a guarantee of life in the way you describe. Last I heard, scientists have tried to create a “simple” organism using what they think were the primordial conditions. They’ve never come close and have abandoned such research as laughably impossible. What they DID produce had the wrong chirality and was not even usable. Another way I’ve heard life from lifeless chemicals described is a solar system full of blind men simultaneously solving the Rubik’s Cube. That’s more a faith proposition than science.
They did it wrong, they tried to produce life directly at a level of complexity far too advanced.
So the start of life is of course guaranteed in a place like planet earth given all the raw materials & the environment. There's a 1 in 1 chance of it happening.
As previously mentioned, the start of life consists of relatively simple molecules with very specific properties.
Always your most exceedingly obedient servant,
Rex8or Legitimax Prime.
Thank you, Sir Briggs! I couldn't have said it better myself - actually, I couldn't have said it one-tenth as well, but I may have said it simpler, without all the math.
I wrote about this topic last week on my new Substack, Biology Bites (now less than 2 months old). Some of your readers may know me from the polar bear end of the climate change fight but evolution is actually my passion. I did my Ph.D. on speciation and that's primarily what my Substack is about (with some fiction thrown in on the side).
Last week, I addressed this issue of the "species problem." https://susancrockford.substack.com/p/evolutionary-theory-has-a-species
But I don't stop there. I've got a potential solution. I'm just at the point of laying it all out in recent and upcoming posts over the next month or so. Come and see what you think!
Thanks.
... and yet, like climate change, it is still taught in every school and university.
All hysterical female ideas must continue to be taught as fact in perpetuity
Do you understand why Saint Paul said “I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence”?
I’ve been reading “Return of God Hypothesis” by Stephen C. Meyer (intermittently, there are some deep thoughts by Jack Handy in there). He also wrote “Darwin’s Doubt”, recommend that one too.
I'm a little disturbed by Denis Nobles' belief in the COVID "vaccine."
A lot of confusion comes from the fact that our mental tools for understanding are cartoon cutouts in our minds invoked by words, which we employ as proxies for a reality that is vastly more complex.
"Species" is a cartoon cutout to stand for an empirically-recognized biological type. New, genetically-distinctive "species" can indeed come about via evolution. But this is not a matter of hitting randomly on a wonderful new gene combination that spreads through the population and becomes fixed because it is so great. Rather, it is a matter of a subset of the original "species" finding a new "niche," i.e. a new workable strategy or resource base for making a living, and developing with respect to that niche under natural selection in genetic segregation from the original. Gene combinations that improve their bearers for living with respect to the new niche will develop incrementally from there.
I've long felt that, while Darwinism is essentially correct in itself, it is only half of the necessary theory. Natural selection gives us a path to genes that are "fit," but "fitness" is determined by the relationship of the bio-base with the niche-conditions under which it lives. The latter subject is the requisite other half of the model.
"New, genetically-distinctive "species" can indeed come about via evolution....it is a matter of a subset of the original "species" finding a new "niche," i.e. a new workable strategy or resource base for making a living, and developing with respect to that niche under natural selection in genetic segregation from the original."
Really?
Can you point to an example of a new species developing like that?
I would say pretty much any species, or breed, we care to point to. But again, we need to be clear on what we mean by a "species."
Domesticated animals might be a good starting point, let's say dogs. Dogs presumably became genetically, physically, and behaviorally distinct from wolves in fairly recent times, maybe about the past 14,000 years, due to their ancestors finding a new niche that involved close living and cooperation with humans. As they increasingly made their living with respect to that niche, they became genetically segregated from wolves, and in fact developed into numerous different breeds reflecting various dog niches for different kinds of functionalities favored by the humans they depended on.
The term "species" has some history that confuses the question. First, it was coined for the Linnaean biological classification system, which was made up in the eighteenth century when the scientific consensus was creationist and it was thought that basic biological types were created separately without common ancestry with other types. Second, it was used by theorists in the mid-twentieth century who opposed racial segregation, discrimination, and White ethnic solidarity to argue the non-existence and non-importance of racial types. Their criterion for a "species" was that its members could interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Since all groups of humans can presumably do this, all humans are of the same species, and there are no grounds for distinguishing them biologically, QED.
Third, some creationists will deflect the evolutionary implications of domestic animal breeds by using the argument that since different breeds of dog can still interbreed, they are still all the same "species," "dog," and therefore do not constitute an argument for new species coming about by evolution. In fact, there are probably many examples of distinct animal types that we normally count as separate species, such as polar bears and Alaskan brown bears, or lions and tigers, that can interbreed with each other to produce fertile offspring if they are artificially put together. And if all dogs were removed but greyhounds, Great Danes, and chihuahuas, we would easily count those as three separate species.
Different breeds, facing different niches with different regimes of selection, can arise fairly quickly, so that no one doubts that the new breed developed from the old type. Evolving far enough apart to satisfy the strong requirement for "species" that no interbreeding is possible, probably takes hundreds of thousands or millions of years. After that much time, we simply can't capture the moment the species' ancestors moved into the new niche. So if we can show the origin of a breed, then one can counter that it is still the same species, and if one can show that two types cannot interbreed, then their time of differentiation is too far back to prove to a skeptic that they had one.
"...we need to be clear on what we mean by a "species."
Well, you foresaw the weakness of your own assertions. If bears interbreed to produce fertile offspring, they're the same species.
"Evolution" isn't about Rottweilers being cross-bred to produce Doberman Pinschers.
Evolution asserts that fish became amphibians became lizards became mice became squirrels became monkeys became apes became man.
That's the evolutionary theory. The theory requires one species to become another species--completely different species.
Where's that evidence? Of one species becoming another species? Not a a dog "breed" becoming another "breed." Not the bill of a finch becoming adapted to eat hard seeds. Not a moth turning black in a polluted environment. That's NOT "evolution," a species becoming a completely separate species. It's micro-adaptation.
So you would claim that polar bears and Alaskan brown bears are the same species, and that lions and tigers are the same species, on grounds that they can interbreed to produce fertile offspring? What about horses and donkeys, who can interbreed to produce offspring that are usually sterile? Are they the same species, or two different species?
You seem to accept evolution on a short-term scale, but reject it on a long-term scale. Your argument depends very heavily on the term "species," which is largely a mental projection. What do you actually mean by that term?
If you say that one "species" is separate from another if and only if they cannot interbreed to produce fertile offspring, how does that play into your argument against macro-evolution? Supposing that we humans are descended from an Australopithecus living three million years ago, how do we get together with that party to find out if we can interbreed with it or not? If an animal has no opportunity to mate with its distant ancestor, how can you tell, under your definition of a species, whether they are separate species or not?
The theory of evolution requires fish that became salamanders that became mice that became monkey that became men.
Polar bears breeding with grizzly bears or Zulus interbreeding with Hottentots is not evolution.
Again, please show evidence of one separate species becoming another unrelated species, as evolution requires.
Here's a graphic of what the theory posits:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/keyevolutionarystages.png
It illustrates the theoretical chain of "evolution":
Protocells-->multi-cells-->Animals-->Fish-->Rats-->Great Apes-->Man
Where is there evidence of this theory? Where is the step from fish to rat?
The evidence that we have shows huge numbers of unique species just appear, geologically overnight, with no intermediate "evolutionary" stages.
Where is there evidence for ANY species becoming another species?
The evidence does not show huge numbers of unique species just appearing over night with no intermediary stages. There's massive amounts of evidenc of the stages between fish & rat. One thing we must a remember though is there hasn't been an archivist species busily taking notes & making records for more than 200 million years unfortunately & usually all traces of almost every individual instance of life disappears in nature.
Generally speaking it's good to remember that for a given species in a given location a significant next genetic step results in the previous version disappearing from the entire specific species gene pool.
Always your most humble & eternally obedient servant, your most trivial wish is my command.
Rex8or Legitimax Prime.
"Where is there evidence for ANY species becoming another species?"
I'm an evolutionist. I don't really believe in "species," because I believe that all life forms compose a continuous, branching tree if traced back through time. What changes there may be from one generation to the next are almost imperceptible, but over a long period of time those changes may add up to something very different from its distant ancestors.
You are a creationist. You believe in species, because you believe that the biological world is divided up into discrete types that each descend from their own common ancestor that was created separately from the common ancestor of other types. Each of these species is biologically and evolutionarily discrete from every other species. (Please correct me if I'm misrepresenting your views.)
Before we can discuss evidence of one "species" becoming another, we need to define the term so that we can tell when two different life forms, one living long before the other, are different species. I don't believe in species, but you do, so you need to take the lead in offering the definition.
Until you, who believes in species, can tell me, who does not, how to recognize whether two different life forms are different species or not, your question is too squishy to be answered. Can you propose a workable definition?
There's no probability for sure, but there is certainty of outcome IF you run ALL combinations. If you have $292.2 million at your disposal, play all number combinations in the Power Ball lottery when the jackpot is over $293 million and you will win.
It seems I must reduce my approval to clicking like button only once
Or at least to an odd number of times.
Excellent explanations, thank you, and thank you for bringing up the Reification Fallacy. I've always hated it when evolutionists do that, but I never knew what it was called.
BTW, if anyone suffers from the Big Muscles Fallacy, it's "The Dark Lord." Ha ha, what a dork.
Good campanion to 'Genetic Entropy,' which I picked up last week