Richardthughes
Posts: 11178
Joined: Jan. 2006
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DaveTard:
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelli....-141187
(I've bolded the good bits)
| Quote | 17
DaveScot
10/09/2007
9:40 am
Paul
An ID proponent would never have made it through peer review with such an incoherent, disjointed, fantastic yarn. It’s amazing that someone without the taint of ID attached to them could get it through. The reaching and stretching involved in drawing parallels between cosmology and biology smacks of desperation - clutching at straws. I will give credit to the author for at least recognizing that the current biological creation yarn spun out of NDT is untenable and he’s to be congratulated for having the courage to say so and offer an alternative yarn in its stead.
The striking parallel that evolution story tellers need to recognize is that phylogenesis mirrors ontogenesis. Both processes are ones where unexpressed potentials are expressed in a predetermined sequence with chance playing little if any role in the process and where the environment at most provides cues for when to proceed to the next predetermined stage in the unfolding process. Both processes are self-terminating when the predetermined course of diversification reaches a final stage. A single cell is the beginning of every chicken and an adult chicken is the preprogrammed terminal stage where that cell stops diversifying. Phylogenesis appears to be the same process played out over a much longer span of time. It may or may not have terminated. Certainly many branchings have terminated as evidenced by the extinction of 999 out of 1000 species that ever lived after an average span of about 10 million years of life.
A big mistake in NDT inspired ideology is that the earth’s changing environment gradually molded life to fit it. That’s bass ackwards. Life molded the environment, paved the way so to speak, for the next predetermined phase of phylogenesis. That’s why the process took billions of years. It isn’t quick or easy laying down foundations that span an entire planetary surface. The atmosphere needed to be oxygenated. The time of great upheavals and catastrophy in a young solar system had to be waited out. Fossil fuel reserves had to be laid down to power an upcoming industrial species. My contention is that industry didn’t arise because a power source was available for it but rather a power source was made available so that industry could arise. The way was prepared in advance. It was planned that way.
There are two important and basic questions raised by the front-loaded phylogenesis hypothesis.
First and most amenable to finding a definitive answer is how, when natural selection is unable to conserve unexpressed genomic content, is that content conserved for geologic timespans. That such a mechanism exists seems evident in the result of a knockout experiment where 1.5 million base pairs of DNA highly conserved between mouse and man was deleted from the mouse and the resultant GM mice were indistinguishable in any metric from unmodified mice. *Something* acted to conserve that apparently unexpressed DNA for 180 million years of reproductive isolation between the mouse and man lineages. That much is obvious. What isn’t obvious is what mechanism did the conserving. When we find that mechanism we’ll have our answer, or at least an experimentally demonstrable possibility, to the conservation mechanism required by the front loading hypothesis.
The second question is less amenable to finding an answer. That question is what was the source of what must have been a hugely complex front loaded genome. How, who, or what generated the original uber-genome? We might never know the answer to that question but that’s just how the cookie crumbles in science. We might never know the origin of the observable universe either. But just because we hit a brick wall where it seems there is no way to find further answers it doesn’t follow that we should ignore the evidence that we can observe as far back as practically possible. *Something* caused the observable universe to come to exist just as *something* caused organic life on earth to come to exist. We can at least follow the story back to the wall beyond which we cannot see. We might not ever discover with any degree of certainty how the universe or organic life first came about but it appears we can at least decipher how it works and how it evolved after it appeared.
Everything in evolution makes ready sense in light of a front-loaded genome. Little makes sense in the absence of that light.
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