Life is so diversified that to any statement I could make about living organisms there are exceptions. Because of the many exceptions, I should qualify everything I say with hedging phrases such as 'generally,' 'usually,' and 'almost always' But I'm afraid the constant repetition of these hedges will slow me down and bore you. So let's make a pact now that I forego the hedging phrases and you are to understand that almost all my statements may have rare exceptions.
Lee SpetnerTags: evolution neo-darwinism cell-mutation
To understand Darwin's work, you have to distinguish between his theory of descent and his theory of natural selection. THe full name of the first is the theory of descent with modification. Some call it the fact of evolution, and some call it the doctrine of evolution.
Lee SpetnerTags: evolution darwin intelligent-design neo-darwinism random-mutation select-mutation
Information and complexity go hand in hand.
Lee SpetnerTags: biology biochemistry biological-complexity random-evolution
A mutation that reverses the effect of a previous one (called a back mutation) could at one stroke revive a complex function that had been earlier shut off. If you didn’t know it was a back mutation you might be tempted to think it added a lot of information to the genome. But once you know that a single mutation cannot add more than one bit of information, you know that the complexity must have already been in the genome. The mutation must have turned ‘ON’ what had been an existing, but dormant, system.
Lee SpetnerVerbal arguments should always be suspect.
Lee SpetnerTags: evolution neo-darwinism random-mutation biological-variability chance-mutation
Common sense says that the amazing complexity of life cannot arise out of a random process. The neo-Darwinians use clever arguments to show why evolution should work and why common sense is wrong. One after the other of them has explained that although the variability occurs randomly, the selection process gives it direction and makes it nonrandom. . . . if the arguments were solid and correct they should have put the theory on a stable and reliable foundation. The neo-Darwinians would like everyone to believe they have done that.
Lee SpetnerTags: natural-selection neo-darwinism biological-complexity evolutioin random-variability
Dawkins talked about chance, but he didn’t calculate the chance of anything. Nor did he cite anyone who did. He just assumed that cumulative selection could lead to macroevolution. He assumed what I have shown to be impossible.
Lee SpetnerDawkins mentioned two mechanisms: the theory of the ‘primeval soup’ and the Cairns-Smith theory. He discussed the latter in some detail. Since no one has computed, for either theory, the chances of the events occurring, Dawkins could not tell us what those chances are. The mechanisms of both theories, however, have every appearance of being very improbably – even to the point of being impossible.
Lee SpetnerTags: evolution dawkins random-mutation biogenesis cairns-smith-theory primeval-soup
Rather than say that the bacterium gained resistance to the antibiotic, we would be more correct to say that it lost its sensitivity to it. It lost information. . . . Information cannot be built up by mutations that lose it. A business can’t make money by losing it a little at a time.
Lee SpetnerThere is another kind of variation that does not involve the genome at all, and is therefore not heritable. Yet it can produce what looks like evolution. Indeed, the results look so much like evolution that for all we know some of the best examples of evolution may be due to this nonheritable kind of variation. [It] has been observed, is well known, and is well documented.
Lee SpetnerTags: evolution faux-evolution nonheritable-variation
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