Yes, but that doesn't mean people will take you seriously.
In order to evolve such a system all you need is for the separate components to be useful. A cell laying still and multiplying is useful enough, so that is the baseline. Then adding a flagella to move randomly so it can move away from its waste product and keep hitting new nutrients is also useful. From there it can start to detect waste and move when it is near waste and stop moving when it is near food. Then yo just continue such steps, not very hard to imagine compared to imagining macro evolution.
But doesn't that reduce to a point where something useful becomes from separate useless components?
In your case, why would a flagella be useful if it's not propelling something? A flagella is only useful as a component of something, but not by itself.
Flagella only exist as components of something, they do not need to and shouldn't exist by themselves. If flagella spontaneously popped into existence and cells picked them up, that would be quite difficult to explain without design, but cells producing flagella because they are useful components makes perfect sense on its own.
I think he's saying, random mutation wouldn't produce all required components at once. One mutation gives you a bit of a flagella, another gives you bit of a nose, but how does the flagella mutation survive to coexist with the nose mutation that makes it useful.
I suspect the answer is that having flagella without a nose is still better than having no flagella. If so it suggests evolution isn't good at accessing groups of mutations that aren't individually beneficial.
Evolution doesn't produce 1st part of the flagellum, second part of the flagellum, third part of the flagellum.
It produces shitty flagellum, better flagellum, good flagellum.
But the problem is we don't see the intermediate forms. So right now you might see a complicated flagellum that has a lot of highly specialized parts that all need eachother, but that is merely a refinement that took place after all the pieces were already there. Like once an arch is complete, all the scaffolding that was holding it up is now vestigial and if it is removed the arch will remain standing.
It seems you may have misunderstood the original argument. The iterative approach suggests increments so minute at each step that they wouldn't significantly impact an organism's survival at any given time. Also given the extremely slow process of evolution and the relatively short number of iterations it is infeasible to suggest such a solution. If a person would like to create an iPhone it's easy to tell them to start with a shitty scrap of metal and work from there. You can make that sort of argument as a solution for creating anything but it is clearly not feasible.
I understand that, but it seems like even the MVP "shitty" flagellum would require many mutations that individually have no benefit. But I suppose with enough generations/parallelism you get enough stacking of useless mutations to reach the useful ones.
> cells producing flagella because they are useful components makes perfect sense on its own.
But that's the thing, this sort of implies that a complete flagellum can be spontaneously produced because it's useful, which sort of collides with the parent comment on systems evolving by combining previously useful components.
Flagella aren't useful until they are complete. So intermediate forms should be lost, right?
Would this leave us in a scenario where a single combination of several mutations at the same time suddenly gives you a complete, functional flagellum?
I read a quote once that said “Simple bacteria can divide about every 20 minutes and have many hundreds of different proteins, each containing 20 types of amino acids arranged in chains that might be several hundred long. For bacteria to evolve by beneficial mutations one at a time would take much, much longer than three or four billion years, the time that many scientists believe life has existed on earth.” I haven't performed the math to back up the quote. As well would it change the time required if the bacteria mutate in parallel rather than in series?
It's the "one at a time" that is the issue here. Evolution is a massively parallel process. If a beneficial mutation happens once every million gnerations, and a generation is 20 minutes, that's a beneficial mutation every 38 years. If you have a million cells, that's a beneficial mutation every 20 minutes. If you have a billion cells, that's 1000 beneficial mutations every 20 minutes. In your body there are around 40 trillion cells. There are something like 10^31 cells on earth.
It's called the plasmid exchange. The search is parallelized to however many individuals there are, which is arbitrarily large, then the result is shared.
I find this to be an incredibly bizarre thing to say. Nobody is stopping you from thinking anything, of course you're allowed and surely you know this very well.
I suspect what you're really saying is "Will you still respect me for being a creationist". And the answer is, LOL of course not. Nobody is entitled to have their wacky ideas be respected. A lot of the "free speech" complaints are really demands that other people treat your bullshit with respect, which is an absurd demand.
But if my suspicion above is way off, please tell me. I am curious why anyone would say what you said.
It’s funny, because the creationists generally feel the exact same about evolutionists.
Both are faith based responses to questions we cannot answer any other way. Getting caught up in absolutes thinking your interpretation is the gold standard is a sign of an unrefined critical thinking process.
No, evolution is not faith based. If you want something faith based, which creationism purports to resolve, it would be if someone has a strong belief on how abiogenesis actually happened, since that is something that is still not well understood. But, we see evolution happening all around us, all the time.
It most certainly is. Evolutionists believe in the time invariance of the laws of physics with no proof, creationists believe the processes by why things have changed in the universe (“physics”, broadly) have changed over time, also with no proof. That there is some external influence that we cannot directly observe that has some massive impact on the development of the universe in ways we cannot explain.
(Funnily, physics have come to acknowledge the same, but they call it dark matter and say it’s all very scientific, whatever it is. But this is unknown enough to be not worth much discussion.)
Regarding the evolution we see around us all the time, I and many creationists besides me have full confidence in the idea that micro-evolution does occur. That there is a stochastic gradient decent process that hones in on time-varying local maxima over generations cannot really be denied. But that provides absolutely no answer to the questions of abiogenesis and speciation en-masse.
The reason we believe in time invariance of the laws of physics is based on observation of old structures in the universe (at least we only have to look back about 4 billion years to the beginning of evolution on earth). So far we have not found any convincing evidence that the laws have changed (either new or different interactions, or the strength of the interactions).
I will say all of science is based on faith- the faith that the human mind can perceive the universe as it truly is, using rational thought and experimental data collection. For some reason this really bothers some scientists and they like to treat science as an unquestionable objective truth, but realistically, we can't exclude any number of hypotheses, but merely state them as improbable based on our understanding.
I fear you are failing to comprehend how fundamental the axiom in question (is the universal state influenced by actors beyond our comprehension?) really is. There is no experiment that can answer it, any and all observations must be looked at under a lens that is fundamentally influenced by your answer to the question.
We can certainly say that the observations look like they may have progressed at the rate we expect for the past 13 billion years, but that does nothing to exclude the possibility that around 6,000 years ago some actor we do not understand took 1 week to craft everything we observe now to be precisely how it is.
Reading your final paragraph, I believe we are more aligned than I previously thought. :)
Oh they really aren't. Its sort of a tired rhetorical ploy pitting them as faith based beliefs on equal intellectual footing though.
Both are theories about the world. 'Creationism' as a theory really only became pure faith very recently as most specific claims attributable to it have been disproven or better explanations have been found. For a long time it was a perfectly cogent theory.
This is objectively false. Evolution explains absolutely nothing creationism doesn’t, and creationism explains a whole lot that evolution cannot. For instance, universal origins and the formation of cells.
You don't have to take evolution on faith. You can write a computer program that demonstrates that selection among almost-but-not-quite identical entities with heritable properties generates adaptive forms. Many people have.
DNA is real. Reproducing lifeforms are real. We know how they work in some detail. There's no faith required.
How so? For that to happen you'd need to have the usual "evolution-is-science-and-creationism-is-religion-which-denies-science" stance, no?
There are creationist scientists, there is "creationism-proving", or at the very least allow "creationism-compatible" evidence in science, and so on. Let's reduce it even more, science hasn't been able to disprove Creation.
Believing "God did it" should not invalidate science, wanting to understand more, and actually making experiments. On the contrary, it should encourage it, as it did with many scientists who, in a way, brought us to where we are.
And as other commenters say, your computer program would prove absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things, primarily because micro-evolution (which can easily be understood as a feature of Creation) does certainly not imply macro-evolution or abiogenesis.
Please understand the discussion at hand before commenting. Nobody is denying the existence of small-scale "micro-evolution" that subtly guides species into local optima. The question is of abiogenesis and mass-speciation, topics evolutionism has been thoroughly unable to explain, despite many attempts.
Could you show us an experiment that would demonstrate creationism is a better explanation than evolution (and random chance) for the formation of cells? If you can't come up with an actual experiment, there's really no way to say that creationism "explains" something.
Creationism explains everything very simply: "X is the way it is because God ordained it to be". There is no need to experimentally verify, its existence is the proof. In general, the need for experimental evidence is only present when you've accepted the lack of external intervention as axiomatic. When that very axiom is under debate, experimentalism is entirely irrelevant.
Not to mention, anything I present as being evidence of intelligence being more able to produce functional complexity than randomness you would reinterpret as "randomness-that-produced-something-that-look-like-intelligence producing functional complexity better than randomness-that-doesnt-look-like-intelligence".
That's cool and all, but do you give an equal amount of credit to Young Earth Creationists and regular creationists? Because both are equally based in faith. It is equally possible some holy being made fake dinosaur bones 6000 years ago to fool us, and no amount of scientific rigor can compete with a being with the foresight to know exactly how we would test the bones. At what point is "umm we obviously have evidence these bones are over 6000 years old" thinking in absolutes? In the meantime, I'm willing to be disrespected for thinking both forms of creationism are equally woo-woo in comparison to evolutionary theory.
It’s important to understand why we think the bones are over 6,000 years old, and especially consider what assumptions we make in determining that age. Most importantly, the time invariance of physics.
Really it boils down to whether you believe the laws of physics we observe now have been constant throughout time. If you do you’re called an evolutionist, if you don’t you’re called a creationist. Neither side has any proof, nor is any proof fundamentally possible.
Then please provide a consistent with observations theory on how physics has changed with time. Or do you have to throw thermodynamics out the window because you've gone and screwed causality? One side has a whole bunch of consistent observational evidence. The other side has a lot of frantic handwaving and inconsistent data points.
The point being is, creationists have zero idea why they think 6,000 is some magic number in this case, other than bob said so in a book. But yea, books are written by men and men are liars. Even looking at things like RNA/DNA mutation rates in known species it's pretty damned easy to see that things have been around a whole lot longer than 6k years.
> looking at things like RNA/DNA mutation rates in known species it's pretty damned easy to see that things have been around a whole lot longer than 6k years
Again, please understand the underlying assumptions you are making when you concoct statements like this. Namely: DNA/RNA started as a single form and has mutated at a constant rate since then. You have no evidence to support that, and I disagree with every component of it.
God designing us in an emergent manner or through a static blueprint are the same thing. Someone had to create the laws, the genetic algorithm idea itself and all of these components and the environment for it to operate within never mind things like colors, matter etc. Evolutionists cant see the forest for the trees.
Then that's not believing in creationism, that's believing in evolution. You wouldn't "not believe in fusion theory" because you believe God created the sun through the process of inventing a universe that sustains nuclear reactions. You would just believe in fusion, as a part of God's creation.
This is unknown and a quite anthropomorphic view on the universe. Just because we can create things doesn't mean we ourselves were created, even in the way you're talking about in the First Mover argument.
In order to evolve such a system all you need is for the separate components to be useful. A cell laying still and multiplying is useful enough, so that is the baseline. Then adding a flagella to move randomly so it can move away from its waste product and keep hitting new nutrients is also useful. From there it can start to detect waste and move when it is near waste and stop moving when it is near food. Then yo just continue such steps, not very hard to imagine compared to imagining macro evolution.