De constructing Darwinism

@farmerman,

Gunga--question. What is your opinion about the existence of unicorns?
WOuld you require some evidence of their existence beyond fairy tales?

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@farmerman,

Quote:

when you enied abiogenesis and then said "I care nothing about evolution becaue its ignoring design",

I mase up my min about your intent.
I dont know who you are nor do I really care. What you say here lives with you and is your entire persona as far as I care.
If you flip flop about, Ill just ignore what you say as clowning around.
and not wanting to engage in a knock down.

You have several times "quoted" me without the actual words I said or a link to the post from which it came. So how about giving those if you're going to make the extreme charges and names you apply to me.

I don't believe I said those exact words but in the context of a discussion about abiogenesis (the origin of the first self reproducing organism capable of evolution) I might say that I don't care about evolution because evolution has nothing to do with that argument.

I agree, you don't have to care about who I am. That has nothing to do with the argument either.

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@Leadfoot,

I dont think I sqid I was quoting you. I was indeed paraphrasing what you said and you seem to concur that you did convey thse thoughts.

Your initial entry on another thread was trying to deny that abiogenesis occurred and was an infinitesimally tiny possibility, and we discussed that until your religious leanings became evident and your assertions became more certain .

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@farmerman,

OK, thanks for the clarification.

I do think abiogenesis is unlikely to have happened with only the forces of nature understood by science to bring it about for the reasons we have discussed at length. Unless you classify 'intelligence' as a force of nature that is. That is based on the idea that the only known source of 'information' is an intelligent source. I've just never seen an exception to that. The SETI program is based on that principle so even science accepts that.

However, my theistic leanings had nothing to do with those conclusions. Correlation is not equivalent to causation.

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@Leadfoot,

SETI is a "search " for intelligent life, not for "signs of intelligent causation". One is observation, the second is conclusionary.
I think that a pretty good piece of evidence about origins of life all over the universe would result if we were to focus in on the chemical mixes we see in exoplanets, followed by close inspection as qe develop our own technologiws (Im qilling to wait and reserve any conclusion).
I believe we probably will find tht environments on rocky exoplanets will be much Like on earth/Venus/ Mars, wherein(on earth) the events in which life was begun started in a very simple manner .We can evidence the occurrences of a few "false starts"(by virtue of C12 deposits nd evidence of "fossil"chemicals like isoprenes. Chemical evolution seems to follow a fairly proscribed direction once initiate, and all the successive evolutionary changes (I would say that they are directed by virtue of successive "eliminations" of more random ends) seem to follow catastrophic events on the planet that have been used to define the starts nd stops of epochs and Geologic peeiods. (Cryogenic earth, thermogenic earth, presence of water, supwerabundqnce of O2 as a biological "waste product", presence of sulfur catalyses, etc etc).
Its a very simple process and doesnt rely upon a lot of deific futzing or cooking.

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@farmerman,

SETI stands for Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (primarily via radio telescopes). They listen for any signal containing any trace of 'information' as opposed to random noise.

For instance, if we heard a signal (or saw light source) pulsing a sequence of 3 1 4 1 5 that would be considered hard evidence of ET intelligence because it is assumed any source capable of sending such a signal would know the value of pi. Heck, even just repeating 3 pulses a few times would do since no natural source would do that. That is how rare encoded information is in the universe.

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@Leadfoot,

Im aware. Its just that I said that SWTI was NOT a search for Causation.
I was down at Greenbnk W Va several years ago nd they hqve the SETI qrrys tht "rent" time on th big dihes. They hqve severql dishes qll pointing nd focusing on the me spots with the idea that, spectral signals my be available that can be decoded by using the 3D capbilities of interferometry.

Id love to see a conttact made during our lives in which we have a chance to exchange "universe-wide-views"

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Anybody bright enough to have any sort of a need to communicate across stellar distances is going to be bright enough not to be thinking in terms of electromagnetic waves to do that.

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@gungasnake,

Even the janitors at Greenbank have PhD's in "astrosciences". They have multi array communications that send out everything but intergalactic candy-grams

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@gungasnake,

Quote:

going to be bright enough not to be thinking in terms of electromagnetic waves to do that.

What do you suggest? after all nobody has "a need" to do anything.

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@farmerman,

Quote:

What do you suggest? after all nobody has "a need" to do anything.

I dunno about that. Those guys been listening for ET 40+ years now. With no guarantee of success and no commercial payoff if they do. Who funds a thing like that? What makes them do it? There must be a 'need' here somewhere.

BTW, I think you totally missed the context and meaning in my mention of 'causation' because you seem to confuse correlation with causation. Which was my original point.

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@Leadfoot,

maybe so, e have definite definitions of qords so I hose the on that usually shows up unadorned with philosophical context (Mostly bwcause I think Philosophy is a language in earch of a topic) Twisted Evil

PS, you also totally missed the point that gunga was making . PErhaps you should go back 2 posts and see. Gunga , by being the eternal countervailior enjoys appearing "smarter than Fredo"

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@gungasnake,

How can you deconstruct an tautology?

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@farmerman,

See what you mean re what gunga said last. IDK what method he was inferring. Maybe they'd send us an entangled particle so we could talk back & forth?

Quote:

Philosophy is a language in earch of a topic

I think it's a topic that explains our 'need' to do stuff like SETI. Beyond the cool factor, there is no need in your world view. It will not further science (or negate theism, religion or philosophy) in any way.

So what's the drive? It might be the Neo-Darwinists' assumption that it would confirm their mind set but I don't see how. They would say 'See, abiogenesis can happen anywhere life can exist" and the Creationists would say "Praise God, he put life all over the universe!" Successful SETI wouldn't change a thing for anybody. Unless the signals were coming from Jupiter or other gas giant. That might infer totally new life chemistries but nobody is betting on that TIKO.

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Aeon wrote:

When researchers at Emory University in Atlanta trained mice to fear the smell of almonds (by pairing it with electric shocks), they found, to their consternation, that both the children and grandchildren of these mice were spontaneously afraid of the same smell. That is not supposed to happen. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is impossible. A mouse should not be born with something its parents have learned during their lifetimes, any more than a mouse that loses its tail in an accident should give birth to tailless mice.

http://aeon.co/essays/science-in-flux-is-a-revolution-brewing-in-evolutionary-theory

Aeon wrote:

Take the idea that new features acquired by an organism during its life can be passed on to the next generation. This hypothesis was brought to prominence in the early 1800s by the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who used it to explain how species evolved. However, it has long been regarded as discredited by experiment -- to the point that the term ‘Lamarckian' has a derogatory connotation in evolutionary circles, and any researchers expressing sympathy for the idea effectively brand themselves ‘eccentric'. The received wisdom is that parental experiences can't affect the characters of their offspring.

Except they do. The way that genes are expressed to produce an organism's phenotype -- the actual characteristics it ends up with -- is affected by chemicals that attach to them. Everything from diet to air pollution to parental behaviour can influence the addition or removal of these chemical marks, which switches genes on or off. Usually these so-called ‘epigenetic' attachments are removed during the production of sperm and eggs cells, but it turns out that some escape the resetting process and are passed on to the next generation, along with the genes. This is known as ‘epigenetic inheritance', and more and more studies are confirming that it really happens.

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@oralloy,

This may be one more thing that Darwin was incorrect about. But it really has no effect on the veracity of his theory. Epigenetic effects are being researched like a mad trainwreck. It probably will wind up with several time levels for changes to be manifest in populations.
Really, the first indications we did have was for prenatal drug sensitivity , that led to other effects that were mostly human.
We shall see what we shall see. (Read Sigma Xi "American Scientist" for more non-sensational reports ). Theyve included the allele targets in articles about this all.
Darwin was really wrong about one major area of his theory. He projected that the"Strength" of a heritable characteristic will lose effectiveness or potency with successive generations. Since he didnt know about genes at all, he had no idea that genes were not "diluted" by generations but retained. They could be shut off and turned on, but not diluted .

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@farmerman,

heritability of acquired characteristics may be something that, coupled with the capture of genomes via epigenetic transfer, will re kindle the entire discussion of "we cant understand how all these mutations can occur so fast , so that nat selection can "mold" the phenotypes through time". In my early days Lamark was kind of a joke. In the last 40 years years, Lynn Margulis hinted at the contrary, Ernst Mayr fired against it, and more recently several young researchers looked into it as the uncoiling of genomics and chemistry became better understood.

So far, however, in humans, we are mostly seeing the negative impacts of "acquired characteristics" , like inherited sensitivities and allergies. Maybe it takes a greater and greater population "sorting" to recognize fitness.

The literature i no longr shying away from Lamark. Lots of work is needed but who knows, Never say never.However there still are quite a few unknowns, like catalyzing the unzipping of DNA that has an epigenetic component .

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@farmerman,

One thing, and I thought itd need its own post, Lamark never stated that the environment caused these acquired traits. What he actually stated was that the environment created a need in the species and that cause the giraffe to "atretch his neck".
Lamrk, taken literally is still kinda wacky but lets not quibble

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De constructing Darwinism

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