[_ Old Earth _] Can evolution prove increased information in the genes?

[Dave Slayer]

Can evolution prove increased information in the genes? In other words, if apes eventually evolved into humans, wouldn't they have needed to somehow gain additional human genes to make them fully human? And if so, why aren't more apes turing into humans? You would think if it happened once it could happen again.

What if a parrot could eventually evolve into an alligator or an elephant? Wouldn't there need to be genes in the DNA for that to happen? If so, how would they be acquired?

 

[VaultZero4Me]

Can evolution prove increased information in the genes? In other words, if apes eventually evolved into humans, wouldn't they have needed to somehow gain additional human genes to make them fully human? And if so, why aren't more apes turing into humans? You would think if it happened once it could happen again.

What if a parrot could eventually evolve into an alligator or an elephant? Wouldn't there need to be genes in the DNA for that to happen? If so, how wold they be acquired?

If any of the bold text happened, it would invalidate evolution.

 

[Dave Slayer]

Can evolution prove increased information in the genes? In other words, if apes eventually evolved into humans, wouldn't they have needed to somehow gain additional human genes to make them fully human? And if so, why aren't more apes turing into humans? You would think if it happened once it could happen again.

What if a parrot could eventually evolve into an alligator or an elephant? Wouldn't there need to be genes in the DNA for that to happen? If so, how wold they be acquired?

If any of the bold text happened, it would invalidate evolution.

How so? My question is this, perhaps you could give me a good answer. If apes are ancestrial to humans, does that mean humans were apes at one point? Didn't apes slowly turn into humans over millons of years?

 

[VaultZero4Me]

[quote="Dave Slayer":3bg4xx57]Can evolution prove increased information in the genes? In other words, if apes eventually evolved into humans, wouldn't they have needed to somehow gain additional human genes to make them fully human? And if so, why aren't more apes turing into humans? You would think if it happened once it could happen again.

What if a parrot could eventually evolve into an alligator or an elephant? Wouldn't there need to be genes in the DNA for that to happen? If so, how wold they be acquired?

If any of the bold text happened, it would invalidate evolution.

How so? My question is this, perhaps you could give me a good answer. If apes are ancestial to humans, does that mean humans were apes at one point? Didn't apes slowly turn into humans over millons of years?[/quote:3bg4xx57]

Here is an attempt at an analogy.

Sugar, flour, and eggs.

These basic ingredients can be combined in different ways to form various desserts by mixing with different proportions, and adding a few different ingredients.

But, pies, cakes, doughnuts, and cookies all share some common ingredients.

Now, once they are complete, you can do even more stuff to them to make a new desert. Maybe a desert that resembles the others, like maybe add some icing to the cookie or put chocolate chips on top of your cake, but it's not quite the same.

You can't turn a cake into the same cookie.

You can't turn a cookie back into an egg.

Now, again this is an analogy, so its not quite a perfect example.

Gorillas and humans share a common ancestor, cake and cookies share some common ingredients.

Gorillas will not turn into humans, cakes won't turn into cookies.

Gorillas and humans won't evolve back into their ancestors, cakes and cookies can't be turned back into eggs or raw flour.

 

[John]

But Sugar, flour, and eggs will stay Sugar, flour, and eggs forever unless some intelligence steps in to make the cake and cookies. :eyebrow

 

[VaultZero4Me]

But Sugar, flour, and eggs will stay Sugar, flour, and eggs forever unless some intelligence steps in to make the cake and cookies. :eyebrow

Well then you are arguing intelligent design, and not against evolution itself.

But lets pretend the eggs, flour and sugar don't spoil, and you set them out in the same spot for millions of years. One day by sheer chance, and earthquake breaks the eggs, and shakes up all the ingredients.

Many years later, after wind storms, a few more earth quakes, the ingredients, minus some percentage that was lost in the chaos, are mixed really well.

Eventually a tree topples over near the ingredients, and many years later lightning strikes the tree and sets it on fire. The mixed ingredients are really near the flames, and surrounded by rocks. These rocks heat up to such a high temp, that it cooks the ingredients into one ugly imperfect cake.

Ta da. Natural forces and random chance created a dessert out of the ingredients over millions of years. There could of course be a designer who set up all of the natural forces, and put all the ingredients together while not interfering with the evolution of the cake. That would still leave natural forces making the cake, just a designer for the natural forces who knew that it would set all of these events in motion and produce the dessert.

You could break the millions of years up and each segment you would have something quite different from the dessert we get on the final day. At no point will the dessert have any chance of reforming the original ingredients, or turn into ice cream that was formed thousands of miles north from natural chance luck + some similar ingredients and a few different ones.

You will likely even have some other desserts that sprout off from some of the spillage while making the cake. Maybe some pure sugar gets blown into an indentation on the rock. It rains one day, followed by a scotching hot day. This cooks it into rock candy.

Some egg spills onto another area and makes a fried egg on the hot stone the same day.

The fried egg and the rock candy would share a common ancestor with the cake, but no share a common ancestor between each other. Ones egg + nature, the other is water + sugar + nature

 

[John]

Now your arguing probability. The odds for those events are incredibly high, also we have other problems like where did the sugar, eggs and flour come from. Its the same old story just told in a kitchen.

:rolling

 

[VaultZero4Me]

Now your arguing probability. The odds for those events are incredibly high, also we have other problems like where did the sugar, eggs and flour come from. Its the same old story just told in a kitchen.

:rolling

Not really.

We are talking really, really, really long time spans. All of recorded human history compared to this time span, is like the length of your hair (which looks to be as short as mine :D ) compared to the distance across the US.

Small probabilities become not so small given enough time. It really is true that a monkey will type Moby Dick by hitting random keys on a type writer for a long enough period of time. That seems strange to the mind, but mathematically speaking, it is true.

As for where did the sugar, eggs, and flour come from, that is philosophical. Just like where did the seeds of life come from.

You and I can differ on those philosophical views while totally agreeing on the process after the ingredients + natural forces got there. This would be like The Barbarian and I. Total opposites on everything before life started, yet on the same page after it started (even though he is way over my head with his understanding of the biological sciences. I need to google a lot when reading his posts."

One is explored scientifically (evolution) while the other can not be explored that way (God or no God).

 

[John]

Small probabilities become not so small given enough time. It really is true that a monkey will type Moby Dick

But here we are not talking "moby dick" we are talking monkeys typing all of Hamlet.

 

[VaultZero4Me]

On that monkey note (then im of to bed), think of it this way.

If you sat a type writer in front of a monkey, what is the chance that he will type the sentence "I am fun."

To make it simple lets say it doesnt have to be in caps, and the type writer only has the alpha bit, space bar, and the ". ? !" keys.

Its late so I will likely make some mistakes here lol, but thats 30 keys I think.

The first key he needs to hit is the "i". Therefore its a 1/30 chance he will hit it.

After that, he needs to hit the space bar, the letter "a", and so forth. Eventually needing to hit a sequence of 9 keys to get it right.

If I remember my stats right, thats (1/30)^9. Thats a 5.08x10^-14 % chance that he will do that sequence as soon as you sit him down. Pretty darn low.

Lets give him a typing speed of 90 letters, or key strokes per min. Thats 10 chances per minute to type that string.

How long will it take at that speed and chance to have a 50% probability to type the sentence?

I think the math goes (5.08x10^-14)x=50
50/(5.08x10^-14)=x
983.25 trillion tries

at 10 tries per minute, thats 98.325 trillion minutes --> 1.63 trillion hours --> 67 billion days --> 18 million years.

Now, I am sure there is some major error I made in this, and please someone correct my mistakes. Its 2:30 am where I am and I should of been asleep 3 hours ago. Brains tired so I won't take offense to my mistakes.

The concept is there.

We can see from this that to type Moby Dick will take an extremely large amount of time. I wouldn't even want to guess at it. Not to mention a monkey who ages pretty well.

Concept is strange, but it works mathematically. That is the nature of much of our universe.

 

[VaultZero4Me]

Small probabilities become not so small given enough time. It really is true that a monkey will type Moby Dick

But here we are not talking "moby dick" we are talking monkeys typing all of Hamlet.

I meant the whole book "Moby Dick".

Doesn't matter if its a 2 letter word, or the entirety of everything ever put to paper.

Math says its true.

 

[VaultZero4Me]

One last thing.

Instead of just waiting for that one sentence, lets say he can type any grammatically correct sentence 3 words or longer.

That will reduce your time considerably.

Or, for the whole book example, any book ever written, or a new book.

It is starting to resemble more if what the example relates to. Evolution.

 

[VaultZero4Me]

Apparently I can stop posting right now and go to bed like I should.

Just wanted to bring back my dessert analogy in line with the OP.

When people speak on complexity or information theory in regards to evolution, such as Behe, the terms used are so opaque that it can be molded as they wish to support their claim.

They never define anything in order to accurately support their thesis.

For instance, with my example, I can say that the cake is more complex than the original ingredients. This supports my thesis that nature can add complexity or information. Wouldn't you agree that the taste of a cake is more complex and rich than tasting the ingredients? Doesn't it look more complex?

But Behe could argue that no new information or complexity was added because its just the original ingredients combined and heated. In fact he can argue that the original ingredients were more complex, ie info was lost. In the original state there was order and separation into groups. The eggs were a cylinder shape, the sugar was crystal, and the flour was powdery. The events caused the sugar to melt, the yolk to mix, and the flour to rise. All in one big heap of gunk.

Terms and criteria need to be set so the thesis can be supported or rejected. This is one of the major complaints against Behe's book. Everything is so loosely used and flip flopped around, that the book is basically worthless. He can use his terms as he wishes to support his already set conclusions.

 

[coelacanth]

Small probabilities become not so small given enough time. It really is true that a monkey will type Moby Dick

But here we are not talking "moby dick" we are talking monkeys typing all of Hamlet.

Evolution is not an entirely random process. It depends on the NONrandom survival and biotic potential of randomly occuring mutations. Simulations similar to this idea of written text have been done, and are quite interesting to watch how quickly complex ideas can be arrived at - in the form of a sentence - using simulated natural selection and computer generating. A computer trying pure randomness and working orders of magnitude faster than the one simulating natural selection can't even begin to compete.