It seems to me that once a series of mutations in a primitive light-sensitive organ yielded an advantage, the natural selection of generations of the mutating organisms would proceed to a stable “local maximum” advantage. That stable point might be a much more advanced light-sensitive organ.
We know that selection can make obvious changes in species in decadal time-scales, so I find it plausible that large changes can happen in one or more “spurts” that are unlikely to be captured in the time scales of the fossil record.
And we still have examples of such primitive light-sensors, such as the infra-red “pits” of pit vipers.
I reject the ID proposition that absence of evidence (for a particular complex organ’s evolutionary path) is evidence of absence (that it wasn’t evolution at all). The fossil record has huge time scale gaps, in part due to the recycling of large swaths of the earth’s surface back into the mantle. (Subduction zones, anyone?) It is plausible that the fossil record for the evolutionary “spurts” leading to complex eyeballs happened to have been destroyed by such processes.
This is a hugely important consideration. The “fossil record” consists of a randomly-selected, extremely sparse sampling of everything that has lived on Earth, with preservation dependent upon a very special set of conditions that are rare and survival to the present time and accessibility dependent upon the random processes of geology and continental drift. Entire classes of organisms, for example marine invertebrates, are only rarely fossilised. We would know little about the Cambrian Explosion were it not for the extraordinary circumstances which caused the Burgess Shale and a few similar deposits to form and be preserved.
Trying to read the “story” of the development of life on Earth is like trying to figure out the plot of a thousand page novel from a handful of pieces grabbed at random from the results of running it through a paper shredder. What we can see is that overall structures, such as the bones of mammals, are strongly conserved across species with very different morphology, with the bones being adapted for different purposes. This provided strong evidence for common ancestry and diversification into multiple species long before analysis of genomes. The discovery that genes are, themselves, strongly conserved has only strengthened this argument.
Certainly, the absence of evidence is not evidence of the non-existence of such evidence. But it is a call for modesty on the part of the proponents of Darwinism. It is hardly good science to claim that the theory is correct but the supporting evidence has been destroyed.
Natural processes can be (and have been) greatly accelerated through human intervention. If someone could demonstrate the reverse evolution of a bird into a dinosaur within a reasonable span of generations, the evolutionary case would be closed. Until then, let’s all try to keep open minds. We know a lot, but we still know less than we think we do.
I have not read or listened to Meyer’s work. But I wonder if the absence of evidence is not just an artefact of the very short timescale over which this question is investigated? Assuming it takes millions of years for new species to evolve, would we really have sufficient data over a relatively short period of time over the “modern” period of our own species presence on Earth to make a definitive call on whether new species can evolve?
In both Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt, Meyer deals with this issue exhaustively. Here is a video in which he discusses this with several intellectuals. Well worth an hour or so.
I have to admit the fashion choices of the guy with the gold-handled cane (David Berlinski) does not inspire much confidence, however right or wrong he may be.
I’m only coming back here to post a reply I saw from another thread discussing BRICS - And not replacement but I thought fitting for the conversation here because, well:
The decline of whatever is referred to by the notion of “West” started in its very inception. The idea of the “west” is based on an hypocritical premise of superiority and on the creation and exclusion of the other as an inferior sub-human/culture/value. This premise is violence itself as it can only exist by continually creating divisions. It maintains its hyped existence by enforcing the fragmented, uprooted and divided “sub-cultures” to emulate itself. In this sense, what you refer to by emulate is the “western” folly of playing a god as in “I have created you in my own image*“* . It is intrinsic need of every culture to maintain its integrity and nurture its roots, and not to be uprooted nor to imitate/emulate the other. In terms of resources, the “west” hardly has enough to support its own material existence and thus the “other” must remain solely its plantation . Plantation and enslavement of the other are in the very root, and are inseparable for what the antagonistic notion of the “West” and the “reset of the world” stands for. The birth of BRICs is simply part of the natural development of history, as there is no such thing as sub-human or sub-culture.
I guess I am missing the point here about the BRICS:
Portuguese Brazil was one of the great importers of African slaves – and had little time for the indigenous people.
Russia might get a pass – since the term “slave” comes from “slav”, the forest people whom those righteous Scandinavians enslaved, used as beasts of burden to transport goods to Byzantium, and then sold those abused slavs in the slave markets there.
India gave the world the Untouchables – a very definite treatment of fellow humans as sub-human. Its caste system was all about enforcing sub-cultures.
China’s Mongol conquerors definitely created sub-cultures in which the Mongols ruled over the Han.
South Africa? Seriously? With its history of wars in which the English tribe beat down the Dutch tribe and ancient African tribal conflicts continue up to the current day?
Perhaps hypocrisy is a common thread throughout all of humanity – as is putting idealized versions of other societies on a pedestal?
Is this a parody?
Lemme ask ya sump’n: what date or era do you have in mind as the “inception”of “the West”?
Once I know that, I can proceed to discuss this rant. (Although @Gavin did a good, and very civil, job.).
Then we’ll talk about the “western folly of playing a god”.
Thank you for sharing. I watched and listened to the interview over the weekend. Personally, I seem to get subtler arguments a lot more easily through listening than watching the video.
It was good to have a mix with Gelernter (cs/math), Berlinski (math/philosophy), and Meyer (geophysics / philosophy). But the mathematical argument was buried in the interview a bit, which was built mainly as a discussion piece on Gelernter’s article.
To summarize, my understanding of the so-called mathematical argument is that it uses combinatorial complexity reasoning anchored by the following:
Species differentiation boils down to new proteins
New proteins can be thought of as (more or less) “long” random chains of aminoacids, with each “position” potentially taking on one of up to 20 discrete base pairs
Since typical proteins have anywhere between 150 and 250 “positions” in the chain, the total universe of possible combination is approx 20^150 which is on the order of 10^195. For reference, we estimate there are about 10^80 atoms in the Universe
The rate of “functional” folds within the protein sample space is exceedingly small (according to research by Douglas Axe, only 1 in 10^77 randomly mutated proteins fold to actually serve some sort of useful purpose)
In essence, the argument goes something like this: for evolution to “generate” a new protein, random mutations would have to hit a “useful” change which happens with vanishingly small probability (10^-77) out of an exceedingly large universe of possible outcomes (10^195).
But this argument is not very convincing for me as it seems to imply each “new” protein would have to start from scratch as an independent experiment taken out of the overall universe of possibilities. I’ve seen this referred to as the post-hoc probability fallacy.
Lastly, the video interview combined (at least) three dimensions: disputation/debate about Gelernter’s position, Darwinism as a modern religion, and actually present the so-called “mathematical argument”. I think this dilutes the presentation of the mathematical argument and subtly gives it more credibility by shifting the focus to possible implications assuming it were correct.
I came across it used by Bailey in the evolution debate context.
He also deployed an identical example in a financial context (source). In that article, he credits Steven Pinker with introducing the argument in his 2021 Rationality book.
Here is an excerpt from Chapter 4 in Pinker’s book:
[…] another family of probability blunders: confusing prior with post hoc judgments (also called a priori and a posteriori). The confusion is sometimes called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, after the marksman who fires a bullet into the side of a barn and then paints a bull’s-eye around the hole. In the case of probability, it makes a big difference whether the denominator of the fraction—the number of opportunities for an event to occur—is counted independently of the numerator, the events of interest. Confirmation bias, discussed in chapter 1, sets up the error: once we expect a pattern, we seek out examples and ignore the counterexamples. If you take note of the predictions by a psychic that are borne out by events, but don’t divide by the total number of predictions, correct and incorrect, you can get any probability you want. As Francis Bacon noted in 1620, such is the way of all superstitions, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, or divine judgments.
Or financial markets. An unscrupulous investment advisor with a 100,000-person mailing list sends a newsletter to half of the list predicting that the market will rise and a version to the other half predicting that it will fall. At the end of every quarter he discards the names of the people to whom he sent the wrong prediction and repeats the process with the remainder. After two years he signs up the 1,562 recipients who are amazed at his track record of predicting the market eight quarters in a row.56
Though this scam is illegal if carried out knowingly, when it’s carried out naïvely it’s the lifeblood of the finance industry. Traders are lightning-quick at snapping up bargains, so very few stock-pickers can outperform a mindless basket of securities. One exception was Bill Miller, anointed by CNN Money in 2006 as “The Greatest Money Manager of Our Time” for beating the S&P 500 stock market index fifteen years in a row. How impressive is that? One might think that if a manager is equally likely to outperform or underperform the index in any year, the odds of that happening by chance are just 1 in 32,768 (215). But Miller was singled out after his amazing streak had unfolded. As the physicist Len Mlodinow pointed out in The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, the country has more than six thousand fund managers, and modern mutual funds have been around for about forty years. The chance that some manager had a fifteen-year winning streak sometime over those forty years is not at all unlikely; it’s 3 in 4. The CNN Money headline could have read Expected 15-Year Run Finally Occurs: Bill Miller Is the Lucky One. Sure enough, Miller’s luck ran out, and in the following two years the market “handily pulverized him.”57
Ridiculing “conspiracy theories” is usually done by people who, operating under malincentives, self-organize vast patterns of malignant behavior to acquire power and who lack the ethics to use that power to correct those malincentives.
In a dream world it is RFK vs Trump. One headline would be about Hitler reincarnated and the other would be about crazy anti-vax. Obviously Hitler reincarnated is better than the anti-vax dude in the eyes of the media.
What are the odds on RFK? The bet I would like to take is either he will win it all or be in a casket.
The old suicide with two shots to the back of the head. Maybe a crazy MAGA extremist that happens to be a transgender and gave money to Biden’s campaign and was on the FBI’s watch list and a former contractor for the CIA shoots him. Orange man bad put him up to it and if he wins will be impeached. If you question the cause of death, you are a conspiracy theorist and will lose your right to vote.
The 2 layers of rhetorical/psychological obfuscation one must come to terms with in order to place the fate of the Amerindians in perspective:
There is a fundamental difference between war waged by aggression and war waged by fraud that the “Nonaggression Axiom” folks obscured with their rhetoric: If your conquest depends primarily on force then communicating terms is still viable, but if the war is waged by fraud (e.g. the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the Reagan Amnesty of 1986,…) words have become meaningless and negotiation fruitless.
From about the Cambrian Explosion up until about 6 million years ago, allocation of resources within a species depended as much on individual male force – including its initiation – as it did on individual female choice of which genes would make it into the next generation. But, as evidenced by the fact that the 1000AD Icelandic Althing outlawed single combat as the appeal of last resort in dispute processing (holmgang) AND adopted JudeoChristianity as the official State religion – civilization depends on protecting positions of trust and authority from challenges by young men to single combat.
The Nation of Settlers was primarily of north and western European origin – the last of Europeans to be civilized and therefore the most prone toward protecting the fertility of young men* via single combat to the death. That’s why it re-emerged in The New World among them in all classes – not just the aristocracy. It is also why it remained an institution until that “gentleman’s war” between the States.
As for fraud, accusations against The Nation of Settlers that they violated treaties with the Amerindians are as rhetorically powerful as they are unfair and, indeed, are of a piece with the war by fraud called The Great Replacement. If the The Nation of Immigrants utilized fraud to only the degree that The Nation of Settlers utilized fraud against the Amerindians, there would have been absolutely no contest, and the electorate would have been far less prone to support the grotesque centralization of social policy now threatening to reignite a fratricidal Thirty Years War within the West. But there is another rhetorical fraud in this accusation against The Nation of Settlers: The implicit accusation that The Nation of Settlers were more prone to war by fraud than the Amerindian nations. They were not.
*The folks at VDARE never took seriously my advocacy of an immigration policy consistent with NW European individualism: Admit only immigrants that would have been admitted to a society with single combat in nature as the appeal of last resort in dispute processing, i.e. high value young women, single and childless (implicitly admitting wives and children of citizens). As politically impractical as this policy might be, its advocacy would be a decisive deterrent against the accusations of “white supremacy” leveled at immigration restrictionists – and make people think about the foundation of civil society. The failure to understand the foundation of civilization is the primary cause of the cycle of civilization.