Some creationists have established this silly boundary: little bits of evolution could happen, but not lots of it. So a species of bird could come to have a longer beak, an species of elephant a trunk, or a species of monkey a new color of fur. This could even happen in just a few generations. But that these small changes could never add up to make a new species. This is somewhat like saying that a car could drive a few blocks, but surely it could never drive across a country.
As today’s New York Times reports, one creationist should prepare to eat his hat:
[Creationist] Dr. Behe, however, said he might find it compelling if scientists were to observe evolutionary leaps in the laboratory. He pointed to an experiment by Richard E. Lenski, a professor of microbial ecology at Michigan State University, who has been observing the evolution of E. coli bacteria for more than 15 years. “If anything cool came out of that,” Dr. Behe said, “that would be one way to convince me.”
Dr. Behe said that if he was correct, then the E. coli in Dr. Lenski’s lab would evolve in small ways but never change in such a way that the bacteria would develop entirely new abilities.
In fact, such an ability seems to have developed. Dr. Lenski said his experiment was not intended to explore this aspect of evolution, but nonetheless, “We have recently discovered a pretty dramatic exception, one where a new and surprising function has evolved,” he said.
Dr. Lenski declined to give any details until the research is published. But, he said, “If anyone is resting his or her faith in God on the outcome that our experiment will not produce some major biological innovation, then I humbly suggest they should rethink the distinction between science and religion.”
Of course, Dr. Behe has just established a silly goal post. I suspect that he’ll move that goal post once Dr. Lenski’s E. coli findings are published.
You misrepresent creationist’s ideas on the matter.
The criteria is not the size of the evolutionary but whether info is added or lost.
There hasn’t been evolution where information has been added to the genetic record. There has been evolution where information was subtracted from the genetic record.
If evolution has such strong evidence in favor, do you really think that you need to stoop to misrepresenting our views?
(I’m inclined to think that this was an intentional misrepresenation because of the discussions we have had in which I have explained this. I would love to be wrong on this inclination of thought.)
Dembski might move the goalposts. But Behe probably would not.
I’ve had the opportunity to hear Behe present his version of ID at Catholic University. His basic premise is “irreducable complexity” being the standard for intelligent design, rather than Dembski’s approach (i.e. if you can’t explain it, God musta done it).
We’ll see.
“You misrepresent creationist’s ideas on the matter.”
Maybe not your own personal views, but plenty of big-time creationists have in fact espoused the position which Waldo criticizes, so you can hardly accuse hiom of misrepresnting anything.
“The criteria is not the size of the evolutionary but whether info is added or lost.”
That’s an even more goofy criteria. Information is demonstrably added to gene pools and even individual lineages all the time, demonstrably in the lab and by inference and observation in the wild. When bacteria evolved the ability to digest nylon, where do you think the underlying genetic information to do so came from? Bacteria reproduce asexually. It can only have come from a new mutation (or a series of them).
In fact, you belie an even deeper misunderstanding as to what evolution and information theory are, and how they interact. A particular non-random slice of a population dying out (i.e. natural selection) is by definition an increase in information in the total gene pool. Variation (which continually arises through mutation, most of which are random noise, neither beneficial nor harmful) provides noise. Selection is specified information taken out of that noise. Every time a particular non-random slice of a generation in a species survives, information has been transfered from the environment to the gene pool. That’s the very basis of how evolution functions: the environment provides a selection pressure by favoring some traits over others, and that pressure is then imprinted onto the surviving gene pool.
You misrepresent creationist’s ideas on the matter.
The criteria is not the size of the evolutionary but whether info is added or lost.
Creationists can’t seem to agree on their ideas, Hans. :) Some say the earth is 6,000 years old, some 10,000 years old, some 6,000,000 years old. Some say dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark, others say that they died off 65M years old. Some say that man is exactly as man was made initially, others say we evolved in some way. And so on.
Were I claiming to represent your views, no doubt I’d be wrong, as I know your views to be otherwise. But there are no shortage of creationists (old-earth, mostly) who are forced to concede the existence of microevolution (look no further than farmers or breeders for that) but refuse to believe that many small changes could add up to big ones…though for reasons that they can’t really explain.
Shaun, I don’t know (or know of, in any meaningful way) Behe, so I actually modified my initial draft (“no doubt he’ll move that goal post”) to something less presumptuous (“I suspect that he’ll move that goal post”). I’m glad to hear that he’s a stand-up guy.
Waldo, I realize that different creationists/ID’ers believe differently, but I haven’t seen the place where Dr. Behe necessarily bears out your characterization of him:
I don’t know what Dr. Behe said exacly, because the NYT didn’t quote him exactly. The NYT characterized him thusly:
It’s possible that Dr. Behe said, “I believe that micro-evolution can occur, but macro-evolution, where information is added to the gene pool, doesn’t happen.” That hypothetical quote is totally consistent with the creationist viewpoint. If that hypothetical quote is what he said, the way the NYT characterized his quote is misleading. They would have been technically correct in it, but would have conveyed the wrong idea. Before I can say much more, I would need to know exactly what Dr. Behe said.
I was quick to criticize and may have been too quick to do so. I’m sorry if I was. If indeed Dr. Behe believes the way that the NYT has made him out to believe, this post is well-deserved.
I believe that you’re interpreting the NYT’s characterization of his comments more narrowly than they did. Behe is described as saying that small changes are possible, but not big ones. You interpret those comments as meaning that he believe that no additions (or only small additions?) can be made to E. coli. It’s altogether possible that’s what he means, although I must admit that I’m not aware of a no-new-evolution-in-DNA movement among creationists that would make that likely.
I was quick to criticize and may have been too quick to do so. I’m sorry if I was.
You’re no stranger to me — no slight was perceived. :)
posta! You’re the guy (or gal) I’m looking for! I haven’t been able to find a single concrete example of that! Please show me!
You misunderstand me. I am not talking about an increase in the quality of the gene pool. I am talking about the physical addition of information. Think about it. There’s a big difference.
A slug doesn’t have the genetic information required to build a limb. That information needs to be literally added to the slug’s DNA before it can be changed into a frog (I know it’s probably not a frog, but it’s the principle that’s important here), or whatever is next on the common descent chart. (By the way, I have been trying to get my hands on a common descent chart, but can’t find one. I was always hopeless on Google. If anyone could point me to a common descent chart, that would be great.)
I understand that and agree with that. Notice what you said: “by favoring some traits over others”. It’s favoring (according to the environment) traits that are already in the genes. It’s not adding information! It’s deleting information! Deleting information can be helpful to refine already created creatures to their present climate, but it can’t cause common descent. You can’t get from a slug to a giraffe by deleting information.
Waldo: I have a bit of a headache thinking about it and thus will refrain from any more hypothesizing. I would be very interested in exactly what he said, however.
“posta! You’re the guy (or gal) I’m looking for! I haven’t been able to find a single concrete example of that! Please show me!”
Ok. But first, let me ask you: have you ever actually sat down and read through biology journals? Do you keep up with the articles and experiments described therein? If you haven’t, then I really think that you should start questioning your certitude that you even know what you are talking about. The reality is that what you claim never happens is something so pedestrian that it’s rarely published in journals devoted to evolutionary theory anymore unless its something truly noteworthy, being instead consigned to journals on more general biochem. To pick an example at random, there’s B.G. Hall “Evolution on a Petri Dish. The Evolved B=Galactosidase System as a Model for studsying Acquisitive Evolution in the Laboratory” Evolutionary Biology 15 (1982) (boring title, no?) In this experiement, they selectively deleted a structural gene that controled the enzyme galactosidase and then saw if the bacteria could find a way to survive in a lactose rich environment. They did: and most interestingly enough, the mutations involved to “repair” the missing function were distinctly different from the structure that had originally existed in the bacteria. That’s really only the start of the story on that series of experiments, but it’s good enough for now, for one concrete example. Mutation in the observed bacteria altered genes to not only to produce a new way of breaking down lactose but also to switch this new process on and off when triggered by the prescence of lactose.
And that’s just a single example from more than two decades ago. There are articles published, probably hundreds each year that not only describe such events, but in most cases take such events as a matter of course, being far more interested in the particular functionalities observed and what they tell us about how certain proteins work (which is often of more interest than how they evolved).
You can, perhaps, then understand why most biologists, when told that information is never added to genes, are simply stunned in disbelief by such a bizarre claim.
“You misunderstand me. I am not talking about an increase in the quality of the gene pool. I am talking about the physical addition of information. Think about it. There’s a big difference.”
Greater minds than ours have thought about it, and you are mistaken. What you need is a real definition of information. Information certainly can be measured in terms of whats in the genes of a specific individual, and the descendants of that individual (to make it simpler, we can just talk about bacteria, where generally the only factor of change is mutation) can and do, as I explained, end up with different informational content. But in terms of evolution, information is actually better measured in terms of the total gene pool: what’s out there. We can think of the differences, the variations, as something akin to random noise, and so they are, given that they ultimately all occur because of mutation and sexual recombination and other such factors. What evolution does is pick out a particular slice of traits and genes from this pool. In doing so, the information content of the gene pool is increased, in a very real sense: information about the environment is now imparted onto the gene pool, onto that previously random assortment.
Also, there is no such thing as “quality” to the gene pool. Particular genes are not of greater or lesser quality on any absolute scale. They are only more or less suited to a particular environment.
“A slug doesn’t have the genetic information required to build a limb. That information needs to be literally added to the slug’s DNA”
Of course (though there’s no reason to think that slugs are likely to grow, in specific, limbs). So?
“That information needs to be literally added to the slug’s DNA before it can be changed into a frog (I know it’s probably not a frog, but it’s the principle that’s important here), or whatever is next on the common descent chart.”
Keep in mind that slugs and frogs are both modern animals. They share a common ancestor: one is not “next” in a line of descent. They are both equidistant from their common ancestor in time, and there is no reason to expect them to develop specifically towards or away from each other.
“I understand that and agree with that. Notice what you said: “by favoring some traits over others”. It’s favoring (according to the environment) traits that are already in the genes.”
Yes, but that doesn’t mean that there is no increase in information. By weeding out some genes and favoring others in the total population, it _specifies_ particular things about the environment: orders them in a _particular_ way. That’s the very definition of an information increase. And that’s what population genetics is all about.
“Deleting information can be helpful to refine already created creatures to their present climate, but it can’t cause common descent. You can’t get from a slug to a giraffe by deleting information.”
You can by deleting all the constant additions to the genome of each generation that do not tend towards giraffeness. Think of it like a sculptor that is constantly refining a vision as clay is continually randomly added to his work. The additions are random, but by selection, he keeps what he wants and cuts away what he doesn’t. Chaos plus a specific set of pressures = an specifically ordered result. Now in terms of evolutionary history, there is no reason to think the deletions have any long term goal in mind, which is where the analougy breaks down.
But back to the useful example of directed evolution (useful because we’ve observed in within our own history), how do you think different dog breeds came to be? The “information” for the traits of a beagle was not present in the ancestral wolves from which all domestic dogs were bred. And though humans intentionaly bred for particular characteristics, they didn’t create the underlying genes: they didn’t even know they existed! They simply selected from the variations that cropped up.
“It’s possible that Dr. Behe said, “I believe that micro-evolution can occur, but macro-evolution, where information is added to the gene pool, doesn’t happen.” That hypothetical quote is totally consistent with the creationist viewpoint.”
As Waldo noted, there is no single, consistent creationist viewpoint. There is a broad range of claims, from theistic evolution to ID to young earth creationism.
posta, that was really, really interesting. You make me wish I was much smarter. :)
It is clear that you, like I, have had your internet rhetorical skills forged by the red-hot fires of Slashdot. :)
I’m sorry, I wrote this earlier:
Creationists can seem to agree on their ideas, Hans.
I meant:
Creationists can‘t seem to agree on their ideas, Hans.
I’ve corrected it in the original comment.
I think what Hans seems to be saying with his “information can’t increase” argument is that an animal (or plant, or whatever) can’t suddenly have physically more DNA. But of course that is wrong on two levels: First, there are well documented mutations that add base pairs, and second, that’s not what information is anyway. If there’s a section of DNA that does nothing, and then it mutates so it does something, that’s an increase in the amount of information encoded, even if the total amount of DNA is constant.
If I’m misunderstanding what you mean by information, please explain. I don’t think you have clearly stated a definition, though.
And defining information properly (by which we mean, defining it in a very specific, as opposed to a vague, way) is key to this particular discussion. The information content of something CAN increase with only deletion (though BOTH addition and deletion, as well as duplication, are at work in evolution), but you have to understand what we are measuring when we measure “information” to see why. Information theory is tremendously complicated, which is one reason why frauds like Dembski like it so much: they can speak in a language of mathematical symbolism that most laypeople can’t follow. They can make specious arguments without anyone other than an expert beign able to point out the discontinuity between their math and the things they are purporting to describe. And, luckily for them, most experts generally spend their time figuring out even MORE complex mathematically puzzles rather than refuting people like Dembski for the good of the public.
Ok, replace slug with whatever ancestor the frog had. I told you that I don’t have the (latest edition of the) fictious common ancestor charts memorized.
—
I’m working on doing some more reasearch on that bacteria/lactose study you mentioned.
“Ok, replace slug with whatever ancestor the frog had. I told you that I don’t have the (latest edition of the) fictious common ancestor charts memorized.”
Sure, but it’s a common misunderstanding that some modern creatures are ancestral to others, higher or lower on some chart of relation.
Sure, but it’s a common misunderstanding that some modern creatures are ancestral to others, higher or lower on some chart of relation.
eg: “Humans are descended from apes.”