re: #185 docjay

Salamantis at #182 & 183. Found out where you the rabbit example - it’s from population geneticist Robert Haldane (and later picked up by Richard Dawkins). In any event, if you actually found a rabbit in pre-Cambrian strata, would you really reject Darwinism, or would you try to figure out how the rabbit got there?

I could not see some advanced race time-traveling a rabbit back into ancient strata, so I would have to view a rabbit fossil in the PreCambrian as counterfactual empirical evidence falsifying the theory; then it would be a matter of seeing what could and could not be salvaged from it in light of the new evidence, and where new investigations were warranted in order to develop novel understandings that the theory evidently lacked. I’m no dogmatist; I follow where the empirical evidence leads.

But coming back to falsifiability, there are two parts to the Darwinian model. The first is random variation, or as Ernst Mayr rephrased it, random mutation. (Correct me if I am wrong on that.) The second is survival of the fittest.

There is no such thing as ‘fittest’ in the general sense in evolutionary theory, any more than there is ‘progress’. The genetic mutations (they are changes but not progress) that allow the organisms in question to more efficiently exploit their particular ecological niches, with their particular sets of predators, parasites, food sources, and climate parameters, are the ones that are environmentally selected.

When we look at the first part, we actually never observe a favorable random mutation. Indeed, Lynn Margulis, a Darwinist (of sorts) said as much.

Richard Lenski’s e coli spontaneously evolved an ability to metabolize citric acid that other e coli do not share. The addition of a food source to an organism’s repertoire must be considered to be favorable. And since Lenski preserfed some of those e. coli in cold storage pre-mutation, he can run and re-run that mutation at will in the laboratory uder controlled conditions.

myxo.css.msu.edu

So you are wrong about favorable random mutations having never been observed, as are all others who assert it. Of course, what they’re looking for are such mutations in sizeable animals, not microorganisms, but here, too, a population of lizards has recently evolved a digestive structure better suited to digest available food than the one they had before.

sciencedaily.com

Then we have Marc Kirschner’s book, The Plausibility of Life. and it too rejects random mutation (see pp. 13-14). Instead, it recasts the Darwinian model as being plausible based on the first cell’s having everything needed for future development (and that itself raises all kinds of questions).

They did indeed have all that was required for future development; a high but imperfect genetic copying fidelity that allowed stable species to be established, yet also allowed for evolutionary change in response to changes in their selecting environments. But to claim that the template for human beings already resided in the genomes of single celled organisms is utter insanity. The genes just aren’t there in contemporary examples. And to think that ancient single-celled organisms possessed not just the template contained in the 3 billion base pair human genome, but also the templates of all of the other organisms that evolved from them, is utterly irrational - as utterly irrational as it would be to think that all the present species sharing the artifactual retroviral DNA sequences that they do were created separately and lack common ancestors.

to be continued…