immortal

It has been objectively established that information is stored and recalled from the brain, but it is not established that information is generated in the brain. It is believed that information is generated by the mind but it is not known if the mind is a manifestation of the material brain or not. It is not testable.

This is a joint problem. It has not been established that the mind is separate from the material brain but it is also not established that the mind is a manifestation of the material brain alone.

Interesting speculation but it is outside science. Therefore this can not be used as an argument against evolution by Natural selection. Science tries to make models of the physical world which can ne testified.

I always thought from the beginning of this thread that if there is indeed a intelligent design process then it should be outside of science so it is definitely absurd to argue against evolutionary processes using this argument. It doesn't mean that we know all evolutionary mechanisms and there are no loopholes here. We should allow both kind of investigations.

Could you please give us a link to these recent experiments?

I actually read it here My link

I hope you can search the original article by yourself.

This might help you

"Thanks to Nature and The New Scientist. Further reading "Origin of quantum mechanical complementarity probed by a 'which-way' experiment in an atom interferometer," S. Durr, T. Nonn, G. Rempe, Nature vol. 395, p. 33. "An End to Uncertainty," Mark Buchanan, The New Scientist 6 March 1999, "Light's spooky connections set distance record," Mark Buchanan, The New Scientist, 28 June 1997."

I think we should stick to the copenhagen interpretation of QM. We can not use QM to describe what is happening at the slits when single photons are passed through it. We can only know where it has registered in the photographic film and we can make predictions about it. If we introduce a detector to see through which slit it has passed then we have destroyed the interference pattern.

Recent experiments indicate that the interference pattern is destroyed not due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. I think we really don't understand what we mean by measurement. What we need is an explanation of what is going on in the act of measurement.

Since they are not here to make their case, you will have to make it for them or agree to drop this line from your argument.

But still you can't ignore that hypothesis.

Then yours is a philosophical argument. We should stick to evidence.

If a theory firmly accounts for the reality it claims to describe the more we try to disprove it then more is our faith towards that theory.

To posit that all observed diversity is a result of evolutionary processes is a grand claim, some say it is an incredible claim. I think I have some small understanding of the complexity of the task these bombastic individuals embraced. In science one should take care when making claims they can't demonstrate.

Just because we can not have an empirical evidence of the process the theory describes it doesn't necessarily mean that the process doesn't account for it. We may know it indirectly.

For example:- We can not see the quarks present in protons but still we can know its presence indirectly by the way the protons interact with other charged particles.

There are a lot of researchers looking into what is going on. Others are summarizing and debating what the research means. I think we are in the debate.

May be my knowledge is outdated.

Ok I'll address this now.

 

Arguments based on reason alone generally take place in philosophy. I have asked for evidence and demonstration. What you described from neuroscience could be processing and storage of information as opposed to generation of the information.

This was not an argument based on philosophy infact it is a process which is going on as I am typing these letters. It is a well established objective process. Do some research in molecular neurobiology.

According to your terminology generation of information is nothing but eliminating all other possibilities and this is exactly what the physical brain is capable of doing. Even in computers the newly generated information is stored in memory before it is sent as the output. So the newly generated information is stored in brain and it clearly demonstrates the generation of new information.

In computers, thermal and electrical energy is used to process and store information, but the information itself is derived and inserted by the program and systems design which come from the designer. What objective process has been offered to determine if it is the material brain alone generating information from energy? The trouble with using biological systems to attempt to argue the ability of material only processes is that it has not been demonstrably established that biological systems have material as the sole source.

Again this is your problem not ours it is on you to show that in some instances biological systems require information source from somewhere else. You asked for how thermodynamic entropy substitutes for information entropy and we have demonstrated it and it is on you to show the instances where it fails.

People see in things what they want to see. It is a form of conformational bias.

I don't have to be bias on one thing. I have got no problem in accepting the requirement for design processes if it really exists and accounts for the reality as it is.

I don't think my time scale is off, though I have not spoken much about it in threads where you participated. I do agree selectable mutations are rare (research seems to confirm this) and I agree that multi-component structures require multiple neutral, unfavorable and selectable mutations by known evolutionary processes (also confirmed by research). Finally, I agree that time allows for additional probabilistic resources to provide opportunities for rare combinations to occur. However, there are two problems with making an appeal for more time.

 

The first issue is that evolutionary processes are also constrained by time. The geologic clock provides standard measures of the time available for these events to occur. Humans and chimps are posited to have evolved from an ape-like ancestor around 7 million years ago. Whales from a land dwelling mammal over a period of 10 million years about 50 million years ago. Both of these transformations are thought to require many thousands of substantive simultaneous or near simultaneous (even if interdependent) evolutionary pathways of tens and hundreds of steps (neutral, detrimental and selectable) based on observed and presumed genetic differences. Do you agree with these estimates and timelines? If you do do you begin to see the issue? I will contend that even a few million years is not enough time based on the measured progression of known evolutionary processes.

 

If you don't agree with let's take some time to agree on these points before proceeding.

I have no problem with the timelines or your estimates of it but I disagree with your claim that known evolutionary processes can not account for it.

I think I have addressed this problem earlier in this same thread. May be you have missed it.

I address it again.

Well one reason for the increased rate of evolution in mammals is given through Wilson's hypothesis it says that there is an internal pressure in mammals which forces them to interact with the environment in rather different ways and there by increasing the fixation of alleles through out the population. So the argument that only the rate of occurences of mutations determine the rate of evolution of organisms is not true. This internal pressure in mammals is linked to large brain sizes in mammals.

But once Cultural evolution kicked in the internal pressure in humans reduced and the biological evolution was in almost in a statis has the internal pressure was resolved very fastly with the development of memes.

And also from your examples one can see that both the humans and whales had the opportunity to exploit new ecological niches this ability had to come from earlier slight mutations but once it was conserved or established it is very much possible for them to have accelerated progression in evolution through positive selection.

One more thing is that you have to see the changes from the point of chromosomes also and the new processes like genome responses to shock discovered by geneticists.

I don't do it as often as I would like.

If there is a resonable evidence against your hypothesis then you have to withdraw that hypothesis.

Ok we can investigate this hypothesis as well to see if it has observable support at the level where you posit these transfers are supposed to occur.

Well it is not my hypothesis. This hypothesis was claimed by biologists who discovered the evidence that many of the genes involved in photosynthesis had different evolutionary histories.

Antibody binding sites are not derived by evolutionary mechanism though as I mentioned before. To extend it as an analog for evolutionary processes is flawed. but I don't find this relevant to the question we are discussing.

They may be interesting examples of protein interactions but the processes by which these binding sites are formed are not good analogs of evolutionary processes.

Yes I never gave you an evidence for the stepwise evolution of multi-component structures but it does give us the basic glimpses of how it might happen which keeps the mechanisms of evolution based on darwinian terms unpunctured.

First of all I reject your supposition because it follows from evolutionary theory that properly ordered backward pathways must result in organisms that are reproductively competitive in some way, but still, surely you don't believe that all or even most pathways from the recent past as short as 4 or 5 steps should be lost.

Most biologists agree that we might never be able to show the evidence requested by Michael Behe. I suppose you understand the complexity of the task involved here.

We have to take this seriously and put a dynamic system under observation and see what the hell is going on here rather than just quarreling with each other.

I will come back to this topic as it is my second issue and we may have better dialog if we stick to one at a time.

Well it was you who raised the issue and its your claim and we are quite happy to show you that your claim is wrong or flawed. We have disproved it by giving quite reasonable arguments.

You can take how much ever time you want and also I don't think that discussing two issues at the same time will affect the quality of our dialog. I hope you give a quick response to it since I have time constraints.

Biological systems contain with them pre-existing information encoded in the DNA sufficient to account for growth, development, management of cell function and reproduction and do so without any apparent net decrease in entropy. The issue comes in when one posits that new forms are derived by increasing the order and content of older forms. I don't see how embryonic development is an analog for posited evolutionary progression, it certainly does not duplicate or follow any genetic mutation pathway. Your claim above that these past pathways are lost certainly contradicts this new posit.

Well ofcourse embryonic development doesn't invovle genetic mutation pathways and don't think that I was that stupid to give this as an evidence for an evolutionary pathway.

This was my response to your request for examples of snapshots of evolutionary progression.

The less developed forms of the ancestors can be seen in embryonic development

They don't arise by observed evolutionary processes and I think they don't because the observed processes lack the necessary capability to derive the information required to facilitate change at this scale.

You can’t understand how it has evolved because your scale of how it works is wrong.

These multi-component structures require multiple neutral mutations to occur on both the interacting proteins which are very rare in nature but not so rare if we look at it in a scale of millions of years. Because most multiple mutations are screened off by NS.

Such a time scale is quite enough to accumulate information over time.

Other more capable processes seem to be required. I do not know if some unknown natural processes can or can't generate these systems but thus far, no natural system has been observed with this capability.

I do agree that self-organization is a problem in biology.

The research offered did not address natural selection. All selection in the research was done by the researchers. If you are suggesting that natural selection acts on biologically active peptides to form components of the complex multicomponent protein systems, I would be suspicious of that claim.

No I am claiming that individual subsystems evolved independently through NS and later it might be possible that they are incorporated to the genome through Horizontal Gene Transfer in which these same individual protein complexes are used in rather different ways to produce a new function in multi-component protein complexes.

If I understood the paper correctly, the substitutions were made to the peptide sequences but the antibody binding sites remained unchanged. However what I intended to say was that because the research involved an antibody and because antibodies are derived by processes that are not similar to evolutionary processes, the antibody is not a good analog to gene derived protein binding sites.

No, substitutions were made to the antibody also and their mutants were tested for different specificity. The antibody binding sites did change in some cases.

I think Immunoglobulins are a perfect example of multi-component proteins interacting with each other. Yes the antibodies are produced using recombination of different existing peptides but it doesn’t mean that single substitutions have no role to play; in fact these single substitutions might open a whole lot of new possibilities. The antibodies are produced by linking variable regions of different peptides and the variable regions themselves might be under single substitutions and also the peptides of antibodies may co-evolve.

Yes the organism which carries these genes will not have the antibody in the first place but they will have the wide range of resources to produce the required antibody

Yours is the traditional description of evolutionary progression which require stepwise pathways where the forward steps are advantageous over the previous steps given the environmental conditions in place when each step occurs and propagates. But if this were the case, then we should have observed several short 5-10 step evolutionary pathways in the 70 year search, and more to the point, researchers should be able to reverse engineer multitudes of these past pathways.

We can reverse engineer it only if the previous information is conserved for example in the link which I earlier gave to you showed how it was possible for insects to develop all their abdominal legs by tweaking their genome.

If the parts are evolved to such extent that they are co-related in such a way that removing one part makes the entire system to fail so in this case we can not do reverse engineering and know the function of the independent part as its previous information is lost or in the sense transformed.

And also too much selection on populations seem to indicate that it is on the verge of extinction. Do some research on Huia birds.

So if you want an evidence for 4 or more selectable steps in such short period of time you wouldn’t probably get it as NS will screen it off.

 

I'm not so sure. Devices that violate entropy laws also lack evidence that they function as described and those who promote them make this same argument on the basis that one cannot disprove the claim since improbable events can occur. In the evolutionary narrative, natural selection is ascribed capabilities similar to that of Maxwell's Demon. It is assigned a fitness function that slopes smoothly upward but no one ever bothers to explain what physical law allowed for this specific shape of function that allows it to override entropy laws as applied to order of all kinds.

This is in response for your request for how thermodynamic entropy substitutes for information entropy.

I quote since it is the collective work of many biologists.

“I suppose you know how neurons work. The neurons will have an active potential or the membrane potential in the form of Na+ and K+ ions. When we extract information our sense organs the nerve fibers will produce an action potential i.e. influx of Na+ and out flux of K+ ions. This action potential is coupled with Ca+ ions which activates a protein there by phosporylating some regulatory proteins which acts as a feedback given to the DNA of the neurons for the incoming signal .

And also these Ca+ ions stimulate the synaptic vesicles to release the neurotransmitters.

These synaptic vesicles are situated in the pre-synaptic region and they release these neurotransmitters to the receptors at the post-synaptic membrane. The action potential at the other end of the post synaptic membrane depends on the

1. The type of gate the neurotransmitter interacting with the receptor opens up .i.e. the type of ion entering the neuron membrane.

2. The number of neurotransmitters which signifies the strength of the signal.

The feedback signal which was sent to the DNA makes sure that these membrane proteins are synthesized and transferred to the end regions of the neuron to produce the synaptic branches or synaptic nodes or basically synaptic connections.

These synaptic connections determine the various ways in which the neurotransmitter reacts with the receptors in the post-synaptic membrane producing a specific signal. This is nothing but fine tuning.

So the neurons receive all signals which are impinged on it and transform it into a single output. This output signal’s action potential is coupled to the release of Ca+ ions which regulates the movement of contractile proteins actin and myosin and they control all your locomotion from speech to the letters which I am typing here now.

The incoming signal from the sense organs is fine tuned by the development of synaptic branches or synaptic connections to produce a specific output signal.

This is learning and this is in your terminology eliminating the other possibilities. This is acquiring information.

This was the work of Kandel and his researchers on learning and memory.”

Out of the various possible ways one can regulate the movement of actin and myosin the brain a physical device gives directions on how to regulate the movement of actin and myosin by eliminating all other possible regulations and there by generating information.

The thermodynamic entropy is nothing but the uncertainty in the dispersal of energy and physical devices like brain can effectively decrease the dispersal of energy of its molecules which is nothing but information represented physically by acquiring energy from outside and releasing heat to the surroundings there by increasing the net entropy of the system and the surroundings.

Do some research in molecular neurobiology.

Describing the alterations as an evolutionary pathway with selectable steps is incorrect since the antibody - peptide pairings do not appear to be biologically active and seem to be artifacts of the the research. but I don't know of any examples of snapshots of evolutionary progression as you have described. This article is interesting but it is clearly not an example of an evolutionary pathway.

The examples are right in front of you the fact that the information in the genomes is conserved and one can see when each genome has diversified.

You can see the snapshots from the development of the embryos.

Having now thought this through for some time, I can't draw any evolutionary conclusions from it.

you can't or you don't want to draw any evolutionary conclusions.

1. short peptides are not selective so chemically speaking we should expect the result that was observed. This is one reason why biological proteins are much larger to obtain selectivity.

If this is the case then why do you think that complex functions having multicomponent proteins can't arise using natural processes.

And also it is natural selection which selects these peptides and conserves their selectivity by inducing normalization selection or functional constraints. I mean that out of the variety of different selectivities possible evolution by NS selects those confirmations which provide a benefit to the organism.

2. Development of Antibody binding sites are not an analog for evolutionary derivation of binding sites. The process is completely different.

The paper indicated that different antibody binding sites arised by single amino acid substituions.

Am i missing something or can you describe what process you are talking about.

3. The system of antibody and peptide does not form a biologically functional system so its significance in biological development is unknown.

Well you can not expect evo by NS to produce a mouse trap at one go. The individual subsystems are not basically designed with an intent to build the overall complete multi-molecular system. The subsystem provide an evolutionary advantage or a function to the organism priorly which is in no way related to the

evolved new function.

This article was offered as a possible answer to a request for an verified evolutionary pathway of 4 or more contiguous selectable steps. Despite the 70 or so years of searching for such a pathway, none have been identified, indicating that the evolutionary narrative that all diversity is explained by evolution is not validated and alternative explanations should be considered including the ones offered in this thread.

Well lack of evidence does'nt mean that the process does not works. No one has disproved it that it will never work by that way.

The article clearly indicates that there are a series of neutral muations followed by a single big substitution which changes the confirmation between the peptides and if anyone wants to look at an evolutionary pathway of 4 or more selectable steps then they need those neutral mutations as it seems that the history of the organism or a population determines its future existence. So what we only see are the snapshots of evo by NS acting on the organism and conserving or accumulating the design.

When one say that we have to treat the entangled photons as a single system it means that the polarization of the pair of photons (for example - photons passed through a HV polarizer) will appear randomly as either H and V or as V and H on both sides of the measurement. They just appear that way because it is the allowed values of the quantum system. One photon's polarization value does not determine the value of the other photon they just appear randomly as it is the case in every quantum measurement.

for example if you pass a photon through a HV polarizer there is a equal probability for the photon to appear randomly as either H polarized or as V polarized. Now extending this case to the entangled photons they can randomly appear as either H and V or as V and H.

(H-horizontal, V-vertical)

steevey asked

But before the measurement, the spins respond instantaneously?

Well the copenhagen interpretation of QM tells me that it is wrong to describe a quantum system when it is not being observed. So without doing a measurement we can not know what the spins are doing.

Well this really changed the way I was thinking about disorder,thermodynamic entropy and shanon entropy. Thermodynamic entropy is normally interpreted as the extra Shanon information needed to describe the system. We can observe that a physical system is chaotic and disorder but now this really does'nt mean that there is an increase in thermodynamic entropy or the shanon entropy because if someone comes up with an algorithm of just 2 or 3 instructions which describes the physical system very effectively then one can easily see that increase in disorder does'nt necessarily mean increase in thermodynamic entropy as the amount of extra shanon information required to describe the physical system is very less.

The decrease in thermodynamic entropy can be compensated for the increase in entropy that takes place in the process of finding the algorithm.

correct me if I am wrong.

Cypress said

Perhaps if one could show that imported energy is transformed by the mind into information and thermodynamic entropy substituted for information entropy but even this is insufficient until one can show that the mind makes use of known physical processes and laws alone to perform this transformation and if this is the case then one could use these same processes to construct a machine that performs this same function.

No we don't use the imported energy for the production of information we actually use it to maintain the physical system representing the information in an organized state. We extract information from our surroundings via sense organs. Our brains act as detectors and it recieves the input from the sense organs and learns to give an optimized output by fine tuning the structures between the synaptic junctions. A lot of energy is used to organize the detector which is used to differentiate the incoming information and this is why the world appears more ordered to us as we try to reduce the thermodynamic entropy of other systems by extracting information from it and throwing a lot of heat outside to maintain a low entropy state.

A better question to ask is whether intuition are just mere guesses of brain or do we really access absolute truths present in their own realm.

Cypress said

Just as probability theory predicts that systems undergoing influence from physical only processes will over time migrate to a state with the highest probability distribution, so too would information under the influence of physical only processes. Thus thermodynamic systems relying on physical processes to transfer energy seem incapable of reducing the total system probability distribution to a state that is significantly less probable. Likewise physical systems seem incapable of generating significant amounts of new information.

I think what cypress is arguing is that as thermodynamic systems tend towards highest probability distribution i.e systems in which the energy is uniformly distributed and where there are no constraints on the degress of freedom for the molecules of a system. The system is said to be in an higher entopy state and more information is needed to describe the system as the uncertainity in finding the same microstate after some time is more.

Now applying the same meaning to brain one can argue that we should tend towards ignorance and loss of information rather than the increase in knowledge we normally see in humans. Since there are no constraints on the degrees of freeom for molecules representing information or knowledge in such systems one can argue how such systems can exist in a lower entropy state.

Now one can see that this argument is not true as the brain is not a closed system and it can extract energy from outside to maintain a low entropy state.

It's an 11 year old article and overly optimistic quote that is incorrect about the mechanism and impact of altering high level developmental controls. It is generally not a good approach to use incorrect information to argue your point.

Let us allow the hypothesis to be testified. It is incorrect to say that a hypothesis is incorrect with out allowing it for validation. We can not expect all the answers from a field which is a decade old.

Experiments indicate that mutative adaptations occur quickly when environmental change is introduced but while these adaptive changes seem to work to alter present function, they don't seem to act on the molecular systems that are precursors to novel function. The single exception being one and two step mutations to single protein systems such as enzymes. The vast majority of cell functional components are multiple molecular protein systems of ten to hundreds of coordinated, coherent well fitted parts, and controls to manage construction, function and maintenance.

 

But you have not offered a real example of accumulated mutations (of four or greater steps) leading to new function

 

Can you show that mutations to single component systems scale to the multistep mutations required for the vast majority of functional molecular systems at the cell level? One does not show that a particular tree is a cherry tree by pointing to the apples growing on it.

You are asking us to provide evidence for events which are so rare that it is highly improbable that it would have occurred at least twice or thrice from the time of origin of Homo sapiens to the present state.

An evolutionary pathway of greater than 3 or 4 steps requires multiple mutations to occur on both interacting proteins. This was Michael Behe’s argument in Darwin’s Black Box.

He argued that since each mutation had to provide a survival advantage in order for NS to produce new functions in Darwinian terms it is highly impossible to produce new functions which required multiple mutations in Darwinian terms as these mutations are screened off by NS before other mutations arise. I suppose this is what your argument is.

It seems that genes accumulate neutral mutations which do not really affect the structure or the functional phenotype of the proteins which it encodes. So genes can accumulate some neutral mutations with out the loss of molecular recognition between the proteins which it encodes and when a mutation occurs which affects the phenotype of the protein its structure is dependent on the previous neutral mutations it had accumulated over time.

The new structure can interact with other proteins with out loss of molecular recognition and can accept a conformational change which indeed may lead to the evolution of sub-system which is part of a bigger molecular system. This is true for other interacting proteins with in the system. This is not just imagination and in fact this is the model which my earlier link describes for the evolution of protein-protein interactions.

It is the unequal rate of molecular evolution which makes these events difficult to observe. But if we choose the right kind of dynamic system for our observation then it might be probable that our future generations might see how those complex molecular systems evolved.

Not excellent at producing new functional enzymes. The enzymes produced are generally very inefficient by comparison to most others. Functional enzymes are required for adaptation to changing environments as one of their functions is to break down chemicals that could otherwise be toxic. It is a weak argument to describe this as novel function in the sense I mean as all enzymes have the same basic function to act as catalysts.

I think evolution by NS will be quite satisfied to provide survival advantage to organisms by fine tuning the existing attributes of the molecules. Why would NS go on to build a new molecule which acted as a catalyst instead of giving directions to a molecule which is inherently a catalyst to produce the desired byproduct and there by giving an evolutionary advantage.

The duplicated intestinal enzyme in langur monkeys was efficient and functional to work under more acidic conditions than its former enzyme.

Not due to the complexity of the task, but because in molecular biological experimentation, it simply does not happen by the known evolutionary processes.

What evidence do you have to support that claim?

In the case of salmonella bacterium investigated it appears that all mutations were unfavorable. If it turns out that all adaptations to environment are at face value, unfavorable, then evolution should require an ever changing environment to lead the process of evolution.

Normally most of the mutations are unfavorable to an organism and if environment doesn’t provide a solution then it will certainly get extinct. If the growth of salmonella reduces by 0.5% due to unfavorable mutations and if this is a sufficient cause for the overall reduction of its fitness then god help salmonella.

The environment does not seem to be ever changing though instead it seems to be cyclical indicating that evolution should oscillate but return to the same place over and over. Observations indicate this is the case.

This is the reason why, there is a burst of evolution followed by a period of stasis. In case if you have observed the role of hsp90 mentioned in an article at the end of my earlier link you will see how this is working perfectly in Darwinian terms.

The current scientific process has blind spots that guarantee certain lines of investigations won't occur. I don't think that is "best".

I said it is the best possible way of investigation we have at the present moment until you show us an alternative investigation way which account for reality we can not consider your point.

Evolutionary theory does not seem to have much technological use. Modern medicine exclusively proceeds on the assumption that all biological systems have functional purpose. The evolutionary narrative is a gloss that not particularly useful in this process.

If this is the case then why pharmaceutical companies have to consistently look for new drugs if the older version was enough to keep the infections at bay.

Until we investigate the bacteria and look for how it had evolved the resistance to that antibody we can not be able to produce a drug with the right combination to strike the bacteria again.

It indicates that design is capable of generating the complex structures from scratch also. Soon Genetic engineers will demonstrate novel complex structures from scratch. Design is outpacing the evolution narrative by miles and miles and I suspect that if evolutionary biologists don't throw in the towel and begin to look for more capable processes, the race will soon be so lopsided, funding for the search may shift to design.

If someone indeed starts funding for design then where one would start looking for signs of design. Where do we begin or where do we start looking for it. What is the process for investigating it?

If you are looking for teleological causes then definitely this will be outside of science and therefore evolutionists doesn’t have to be disturbed by this as the funding for research based on scientific enquiry will not be affected.

A transcendental hypothesis may be true, but it is impossible to know.

Not all transcendental hypothesis are metaphysical. There are transcendental hypothesis where it is possible to know whether it is true or not.

We can make posteriori synthetic statements of the noumena world.

My link

Do you have an validated example or is this imagination? Every attempt thus far to generate new form by this method has failed.

I asked for an observed example and you offered speculation.The references I provided describe the reality of where this field has (not) progressed eight years later. I find that researcher are also guilty of overselling their ideas and offering misguided conclusions. The paper on evolutionary development seems to be a good example of that. I've seen statistical analysis of peer reviewed and published research papers that indicate over 50% of the papers reach incorrect conclusions.

Well I have briefly addressed this problem of speculation in my previous posts in this thread. But we can just know glimpses of how it might have happened right now. My linkAtleast this shows that it is not just a mere imagination of things. evo-devo is a new field and it is wrong to make conclusions on it just yet.

Not all reasearchers are like that the link above gives a complete description of the current status with out making any absurd conclusions.

It seems the author was overly optimistic.

There is nothing wrong in being optimistic as long as he does not make absurd conclusions. No one would propose a hypothesis and say "it may not work". It this optimism which has helped all of us to progress in science. The hypothesis can be under testification.

No it is not enough for just one slight mutation. New form requires multiple coordinated slight mutations, an uninterrupted stepwise evolutionary pathway of many mutations to be exact. In 80 plus years of looking for these pathways we have thousands of single step mutations, a small handful of two step mutations, fewer than five probable three step and zero greater than three steps. Perhaps you know of an observed multistep pathway greater than three steps. If evolution accounts for all observed diversity, we should by now be aware of thousands of examples of these multistep pathways in order for evolution to proceed in the allotted geologic time.

I think current molecular clock studies shows that some multi component structures are under fuctional constraints and have not changed much since millions of years. So how can you observe the changes on an observation scale of 80 years when the molecule complexes have'nt changed for millions of years.

Sickle cell trait is an advantage in an environment with Malaria so it is an example of how selection selects advantage even if the adaptation involves partial damage. It is an excellent example of how mutation which seems to damage function can provide adaptations to existing function. This is not an example of evolution leading to new function.

I have not said that accumulation of detrimental mutations will lead to positive selection by natural selection in producing new functions. I said that natural selection can effectively select existing bad gene complex by creating new functional relationships between these gene complexes and the environment and there by turning the bad gene into good gene.

Mutation and selection seem quite proficient at damaging function to defeat threats. These are adaptations of existing function that are examples of the single and double step mutations I previously spoke of that seem to go nowhere further than adapting existing function to environmental influences.

What your talking is preadaptation, evolution by NS not only provides adaptations to existing functions but it can produce new functions through positive selection of single protein components.

My link

I'll have a another look at this article and perhaps comment later.

I plead you to make an open analysis on that before coming to any other conclusions. I have a strange feeling that you might ignore this.

To be precise, I am saying that experimental molecular biology indicates that adaptations to existing function are observed and validated but there are no observed cases of multistep evolutionary pathways to precursors required to produce new forms and new functions outside the rare cases of one or two mutations acting on single component systems such as enzymes. The vast majority of cell functions involve multiple components usually more than ten parts plus a host of control components.

Lets make it clear, adaptations to existing function are observed and validated and also it is observed and validated that evolution by NS is excellent at producing new functions through positive selection of single component proteins.

The problem is the validation of complex multistep evolutionary pathways for the production of multi component structures. The theory is yet to develop a model for how protein-protein interactions can change conformations in time to create new functions for the organism.

We should be forthright about what is validated and what is not.

Yes saying that evolution by NS is a fact and it accounts for all diversity will be an oversimplified statement. Yes evolution by NS is a fact in explaining the origin of new functions in the form of single component proteins but fails to explain origin of multicomponent structures due to their complexity and this will take time to fix it.

Many on this site treat speculation about their favored explanations as fact just as you did with the researchers quote above.

Then your argument of all mutations are unfavorable is also not a fact. Lets allow both of these hypothesis to be tested at the floor test and which ever is testified will turn out to be a fact.

Some biologists may chose to explore material explanations while others may chose to explore other explanations. Why should we begrudge them of that?Many scientists are not open to alternative theories. Many on this site are close minded as well

Well in order to accept these alternative explanations you have to convince the scientific community that it can be testified.

As educated responsible citizens of the world we should not allow false belief systems to spread across our society. The current scientific enquiry is the best enquiry we have in that matter even though it may not answer all questions.

Gaps are gaps. You can't fill gaps with analogies and models. Rather than trying to fill them with just so stories, it would be better to admit they are weaknesses in the theory so that the readers will have an accurate view of where the theory is strong and where it is weak.

No gaps can be filled the fact that these testified models can be used to create various technological uses in various fields of science shows that our models do describe the phenomena accurately as we see it.

Yes these will be weaknesses of a theory until the gaps are filled with new explanations or models.

I have noted that genetic engineers are progressing and are now far ahead of evolution in terms of explanatory power for observed diversity

The ability to modify structures through intelligence does'nt explain anything about how those complex strucutes arosed in the first place and account for diversity.

Follow on studies of evolutionary development indicate that while mutations of these kinds dramatically alter development of the organism, the result is either normal unaltered organisms, weakened and severely deformed organisms or dead organisms but never a changed functional organism.

It is this big changes in the form of deformed organisms followed by slight fine tuning the structure through natural selection which gives them such adaptability so much that it looks like a perfect design solution for a specific problem to an external observer.

I don't see how. Please point to where the link does so and describe it for me.

There can be favourable mutations. I quote "The achievement is a landmark in evolutionary biology, not only because it shows how new animal body plans could arise from a simple genetic mutation". This is contrary to your statement that all mutations are considered to be unfavourable to the organism.

I don't see where I ignored any valid points. The word "most" was selected by the writer of the article. The research paper seems to indicate that all mutations investigated had a negative impact that was statistically equivalent. I don't see how the balance of your points are relevant. Please explain and show how natural selection would select mutations that are detrimental, as this is contrary to the premise.

Well I suppose definitely there is some difference between words "each and every" and "most" and between words "all" and "not very few". It is an established fact that most if not all mutations are unfavourable to an organism. But it is enough with one big rare slight mutation to provide a significant evolutionary advantage to an organism. What the paper provide is a new perspective on how the silent mutations can infact change the phenotype of an organism with out changing the structure of the protein. No where in your link it is stated that all mutations are unfavorable to an organism. As I said earlier if there is a negative effect then natural selection will effectively filter it out if it is affecting the overall fitness function of an organism with respect to an environment.

As for your question of how natural selection would select mutations that are detrimental. There are a few examples one example is the sickle cell anaemia in which an individual carrying two sickel cell genes have deformed RBC's and the individual will die from thrombosis. Now everyone can see this is a mutation that is detrimental but what's interesting is the next part this same sickel cell gene in an indivdual having only one sickel cell gene will be selected in a malaraial sensitive region because this deformed RBC's inhibit the malarial parasite to enter into it. If an individual has only one single sickel cell gene it does not affect the individual as it would have affected if he had two copies of the same gene.

This shows how natural selection makes a completely bad gene into an amazingly good gene in a different environment.

The peppered moth is an another example of this situation.

Please offer an example of a stepwise evolutionary pathway of 4 or more steps that proceeds as you described. In the 80 years that organisms have been observed in the process of adapting to environmental stress there should be countless examples, if what you describe is correct.

 

Neutral mutations seem irrelevant since they offer no selection advantage

Here is a paper which I think you are in better position than me to analyze it. It provides a simple model to explain how protein-protein interactions can evolve using step by step mutations My link

I find no reason why using this model evolution by natural selection produce complex multi component protein structures with specific functions.

And also at the end of the same article they show how even the accumulation of neutral mutations may provide an evolutionary advantage to the organism later. These neutral variations may provide the raw material on which natural selection can act.

I quote from the same link "The evolutionary usefulness of accumulating neutral mutations preparing for saltatory changes is underlined by the recent discovery that a heat shock protein (hsp90) suppresses the phenotypic appearance of morphological mutations in Drosophila under normal conditions. By masking a hidden reservoir of genetic diversity this facilitates saltatory morphological changes upon environmental change ".

I don't make this claim.

Ofcourse you don't make that claim but I just wanted to show how ignorance in this field can lead to such drastic conclusions and also misguideing the public or the layman by providing misinformation.

I'm not looking for loopholes, I am attempting to accurately portray the state of knowledge in this area. These are weaknesses in the theory and if we are discussing the merits of a theory we should also discuss the shortcomings. Why sugar coat it? Evolution nicely describes how organisms acquire adaptations but does not explain how novel form and function arises.

Are you claiming that evolution by natural selection only increases the efficiency of the existing novel forms but do not produce them in the first place?

We do know the state of affairs in this field. The gaps may be filled by biologists with in a decade or so there is no requirement for any alternative teleological assistence models right now.

Those who advocate for evolution as the explanation for how all observed diversity arose are bringing in a mountain of faith. It is absolutely not supported by available evidence. Noting similarities in organisms does not explain how the differences occurred and it is the differences that need to be explained.

No one has said "we advocate evolution as the explanation for how all observed diversity arosed". We do know the state of affairs in this field and we are open to any alternative scientific theory which addresses current problems in this field.

We are providing so many examples,analogies and models but nothing seems to satisfy you. It is fairly easy to point out loopholes but it takes some huge effort from biologists to fill these gaps.

I suppose in some other thread you have said that design is the process which provides complete explanation for all the observed diversity in geological time and also you have said that genetic engineers will create novel forms indicating the hand of design in this issue.

If this is the case why don't you provide a model for your design process? What is this design process? and why we have to give importance to this alternative version than to the current theory? Who were the designers before the genetic engineers?

Frankly, I didn't understand most of that.

It is may be because your area of expertise is different but I am not going to doubt your level of knowledge. May be my post was bit elaborative or may be I went offtopic at sometimes.

Would anyof you like to comment on the observation I made earlier ie anything that can design a universe might as well be called God.

You can't have design without a designer; if the designer isn't God, who is it?

As far as I can see that pretty much kills the idea of an atheist intelligent design theory.

If the argument was limited to this then we had no problem. You are absolutely right if there are any teleological design solutions then it has to come from god as all other possiblities are very unlikely. Here evolution by natural selection had to be relevant because they inserted some loop holes into this theory which is fair but ignored some well established truths just to impose faith in something else.

Even if there is a theistic intelligent design theory I am quite conviced that it will definitely be different from the scientific models that we have and it does'nt have to contradict or we don't have to attack science for that matter. It will be a completely different way of or view of investigating the nature as we know it.

 

Experiments in molecular biology indicate that the stepwise model of evolution accumulating favorable modifications is not happening. Trillions of trillions of organisms have been exposed to selection pressure and thus far there have been no examples of multistep pathways greater than three steps observed. Even the couple of three step examples included steps that were not favorable. One can point to several single and two step mutations that provide some adaptation advantage but do not progress any further. The illustration is interesting but it does not describe what is actually going on.

It seems that even the slight small mutations can induce big changes over an entire population. This link shows how microevolution is coupled to macroevolution. It does'nt always have to be a series of small favorable mutations that accumulates over time to produce complex structures.My linkhttp://biology.ucsd.edu/news/article_020602.html

This statement mischaracterizes the issue. Molecular studies seem to demonstrate that functional pathways don't exist at all, rather all stepwise routes involve unfavorable mutations that render natural selection incapable of preserving the unfavorable modifications that are later needed to generate new functional molecular components and cellular function controls..

Not necessarily. My previous link falsifies your statement and also there can be mutations that have a neutral effect on the organism.

Here is a report on one such study of the salmonella bacterium whereby the researchers employed a technique to generate mutations anywhere and in the genome. They found that regardless of the mutation each and every mutation had the same small negative impact on fitness of 0.5%. With no selection advantage the model you described becomes impotent because if one wants to posit that the accumulation of many mutations can bring about new function, then one has to maintain that the accumulation of negative impacts eventually makes positive and this is counter to your model.

I think you have come to your own conclusion by highlighting those points which suits your argument and completely ignoring other valid points. From your link it was stated that "doctoral candidate Peter Lind showed that most mutations reduced the rate of growth of bacteria by only 0.500 percent. No mutations completely disabled the function of the proteins, and very few had no impact at all." You have completely missed this point. Yes there may be some negative effects from the mRNA but it is left to natural selection to decide whether to keep it or eliminate it.

Evolution works by cumulative selection i.e accumulation of good designs. If there are negative effects from a mutation then Natural selection will effectively filter it out unless those mutations are not dominant and does not affect the phenotype of the individual.

No mutations are positive or negative and bad or good by themselves it depends on the environment that they are interacting with. What is negative in one environment can be completely turn out to be positive in the other. So yes accumulation of negative impacts may be positive in some other environment which may even go on to fix this variation through out the population. So its definitely not counter to my model.

Correct. However while we continue to look for natural processes that are more capable than the ones identified and observed today, Genetic Engineers are racing ahead with teleological process that do explain observed diversity. I find it interesting that many people prefer to be blind of that reality..

I don't know about others but I am not blind to that and I also don't know what is the problem with other mainstream biologists but my problem is that I am a student of engineering who loves biology too much and hence most of the times I have to think about things which are not deeply related to this topic and in the process I forget what I know or what I read previously about this field.

After doing some recall. Yes today the geneticists never look the genome of any population as before they say that the DNA in the genome are not as static as we assumed previously they are more dynamic with genes jumping around here and there and there by providing variations to populations in different ways apart from the single point mutations that we usually see normally.

Some of the terms and concepts they usually use are Molecular drive ,Transposition, Molecular coevolution and structured responses from genome to changes in the environment. So the genome is more dynamic than we previously thought so don't be surprised to see how the organisms survive this variations in the entire genome when even small single mutation can cause havoc in the system. It seems that these genome variations are fixed when these genomes interact with the environment differently. Its like the environment is providing a solution to a genomic problem.

Even though all these mechanisms are different from natural selection they influence the genome independently only upto a certain threshold point above which natural selection comes into the picture and introduces some constraints. So you can not completely eliminate evolution by natural selection from the picture.

It seems that you are also not agreeing on the concept of common descent through modification. I earlier read from a creationist website how he was trying to falsify this concept by starting to compare individual genes which provide specific functions to an organism through out the animal kingdom and made statements like this gene is 45% similar between a horse and a cow and said that this gene was most similar between humans and chickens. So he asked how we can accept common descent.

Definitely this is a serious error we don't try to establish descent with modification using single genes or gene families. A single gene may be in normalizing selection in one population and may be continuosly co-evolving in some other species. A gene may be more similar between humans and chickens compared with the same gene between humans and chimps because the gene in humans and chickens may be in a normalizing selection and has not evovled until it branched off at some point in history and whereas the gene in the chimp may be co-evolving with some other competing population of a difeerent species.

I think it is fair as long as you try to find loopholes that are their in the theory but its not fair to induce faith in something by completely ignoring a well established truth. We don't need scientific reasoning to have faith in something. Let's not bring faith to the level of science and by the way those teleological models of yours will definitely be very much different from the scientific models so if you want to accept a teleological model you don't have to attack a model which is based on science.

IMO they both co-evolved. But still I have to go with mitochondria because in the beginning there were anaerobic prokaryotes or ferementers and photosynthetic prokaryotes but these photosynthetic prokaryotes were able to produce glucose with out giving out molecular oxygen has a byproduct as they never used water to produce glucose and also these anaerobic prokaryotes were not that energy efficient as they were able to produce only 2 ATP molecules. It is also found that all three forms of life Eubacteria, Archae bacteria and eukaryotes were in existent near the end of archaean times and since eukaryotes had developed long before cyanobacteria started producing molecular oxygen this is irrelevant to the origins of mitochondria.

What we can speculate is that in the beginning the mitochondria might be a bacterial parasite like any other virus whose main aim is to replicate. It used the kind environment of the host to replicate itself but instead of destroying the host and migrating elsewhere, at some point in time those changes which helped to keep the host's environment organised and safe got selected and it become symbiont as it increased its chances of survival. Now this selection pressure of non-efficient energy production of the host also applied to the parasite and this selection pressure forced the parasite to invent oxidative phosphorylation which produces a total of 36 ATP molecules compared to 2 ATP molecules in anaerobic respiration.

Also I read that it is not that easy to produce glucose using natural processes as compared to oxydizing it. So those mechanisms like photophosphorylation and production of glucose using Melvin Calvin cycle had to be under immense selection pressure in order to discover it. I think this immense selection pressure came from the host's requirement for glucose to produce energy which had to come from a natural resource that was readily available.

From then on they might have exchanged their genes to remove burden on each other so that each concentrates on what it does best.

Is it impossible to know the noumenon? I don't think so. Kant's distinction between two forms or terms 'Phenomenon' - the world as it appears through the sense organs and 'Noumenon' - the world which is unknowable and helps the mind in producing the phenomenon according to Kantian terms is quite familiar to all of us. Kant argued that all our known knowledge had to arrive to the mind transformed through the sense organs. So the only knowledge we have is of the phenomenon. The things which appear around us or in the physical world are not the things that exist in the actual physical world (i.e. the noumenon world) they exist only in our minds and has to the exact nature of the actual physical world we will never know it according to Kant.

I argue that there is a new kind of observation possible in humans which helps us to interact with the noumenon world directly. In this new kind of observation the knowledge does not arrive through the sense organs to the mind. Here observation is possible with out using the sense organs. The mind will be in a new state apart from the sleeping, waking and being aware. To understand this you have to understand our model of the mind. In our model brain ! = (not equal) to mind. To us brain and mind are two different things.

Mind is normally modeled has a tightly held rope with one end tied to the sense organs and the other end tied to the platonic forms. It is completely wrong to model the noumenon in this way because the only way to investigate is through experience and these experiences are not the kind of things that we normally see in the phenomenon world and the language we use to describe our experiences can be misleading, as it is understandable that our language was developed for the world of phenomenon. But it is inevitable we have to do this in order to make others understand what we are speaking.

When the mind unconnects itself with the ties it has made with the sense organs we have a mind which is like a fallen rope with the other end connected to the platonic forms it is in this situation we are able to interact with the noumenon world. Now how do we know it is really the noumenon world that we are seeing?

It is not a hallucination as the subjects who experience are quite normal and healthy and are not subjected to alcohol or any other kind of drugs and these noumenal experiences are not the kind of normal experiences that we normally see in the phenomenon world. One more important thing is that the experience always seem to occur only when the subject is in the process or perfroming the method to interact with the noumenon world and not at other times and hence this is not hallucination.

It is not an optical illusion. These experiences are not kind of things that appears when you switch on or switch off inputs to your sense organs and more importantly we should note that we are observing with out using the sense organs. These experiences are really rare and it is not the kind of thing that appears when you give inputs to your sense organs and the brain interprets it differently.

It is not an experience that is produced by stimulating some part of the brain. If it is then I will provide a test. The subject who has experienced the noumenon world has to be under stimulation if you are able to produce the same kind of pictures that the subject has already experienced then my argument will be wrong. But I bet you can't. However we can produce consistent observations i.e all subjects will see identical descriptions or experiences of the noumenon world.

It is not an experience created by the mind. If we assume that all the experiences that we experience are created by the mind then from where did the mind came from there has to be a basis for the mind and the noumenon world is the basis. This is established by the fact that the subjects have experienced or seen the structure of the mind as it is. Which I discussed before by giving a model.

To those who are wondering that how it was possible for me to look this issue from all angles was because this argument was under disscusion in the chat room. I posted here so that many people look at it and as all people will not be available at the same time.

Whether is this science is a different issue. One thing which troubles me from being to describe this as science is that we can not make predictions as to when the experience will happen. There is no math here and that may be the single reason others might not give importance to this but this is definitely not metaphysics.

I am neither going to argue this using scientific models nor i will try to reduce this to exact science. The models of noumenon world are very much differnt from the models of science and it is not surprising to see this because one talks about phenomenon and other about noumenon

It just provides us with a possible new Worldview and I think just scientific models are not sufficient to describe the universe completely we need these noumenon models but there are no one to one correspondance between the phenomenon and the noumenon models. Its completely different and if this is the new physics that Roger Penrose is looking for then everyone have to be prepared for big surprises.

This reminds me of the Shakespeare's problem. A monkey is given a typewriter and it is asked to type the word SHAKESPEARE consisting of 11 alphabets. Now if the monkey starts typing randomly it is very unlikely that it is going to type the word SHAKESPEARE at one go or at one single attempt but if we intoduce a certain constraint that if the right alphabets are in the right places then the slots will be set to default and the monkey continues to randomly type for the remaining slotted locations. For example: if the monkey type it as

S G I M E Z H U L R F

Then the alphabets S, E and R are the right alphabets at the right position so we keep them up and try to jumble the rest. So it is very much likely that we are going to type the word SHAKESPEARE given enough time. Hence evolution works by accumulating good designs and it is therefore a better search routine than a random one. This example might be misleading it looks like as though evolution has some predestined purpose to get the word Shakespeare it was just an example to show that how selection pressures operate to produce macro forms by accumulating good designs.

The question of whether this mechanism was sufficient to explain all diversity on earth with in the geological time line is a difficult thing to answer without doing some research on this. If it is shown that current mechanisms satisfily explains the origin of the diversity on earth with in the geological time line then there may be only a slight but difficult problem in itself to show how those complex structures aroused using natural selection in darwanian terms but it will certainly upheld evolution by natural selection has the right explanation. If it is not able to show then your need for teleological assistence will come into play but this model itself is not going to explain any thing about how these diversities appeared. We might have to look for an alternative way to move forward.

In the above example we can get snapshots of how the word Shakespeare appeared for example at one point in time it can look like

S G I M E Z H U L R F

it may transform into this after some time

S Q U K E W P J A R B

Or at the present moment to this

S H A K E S P E A R E

It looks quite easy in this example to see how invidual snapshots got diversified or took pathways and also it was easy to see the selection pressures that were there at different times. With this it is easy to show in steps how it evolved into the present form. But considering the complex multi component structures that we see in biocosms and with out a possible simulation of the pathways it took to arrive at this point from another prior structures it is valid to say that it is very difficult to explain the origins of these structures on the basis of evolution by natural selection in Darwinian terms.

So irrespective of the result or the conclusions of the research we need new theories here and what that theory might be, we need to be patient and look out for the latest trends in this field

cypress, on 4 November 2010 - 08:06 AM, said:

When you consider the small estimated total number of mammals that have ever existed in the relatively short time inferred from the fossil record along with the millions and millions of substantive molecular differences amongst all the present mammals as compared to the trillions of trillions of billions of bacteria and microscopic parasites in a single generation of these organisms and the scare few examples of one and two, and just the two or three known three step examples of adaptations and one begins to see how poorly supported the current theory really is.

Well one reason for the increased rate of evolution in mammals is given through Wilson's hypothesis it says that there is an internal pressure in mammals which forces them to interact with the environment in rather different ways and there by increasing the fixation of alleles through out the population. So the argument that only the rate of occurences of mutations determine the rate of evolution of organisms is not true. This internal pressure in mammals is linked to large brain sizes in mammals.

But once Cultural evolution kicked in the internal pressure in mammals reduced and the biological evolution was in almost in a statis has the internal pressure was resolved very fastly with the development of memes.

Why we needed Punctuated Equillibruim if both Palaeontologists and geneticists agreed with each other. Palaeontologists argue that there is a sudden burst of mutations followed by a period of statis. Both of them explain very well about the period of statis but the question is why there is a sudden burst of mutations which give rise to random forms when geneticsists have observed only gradual mutations in the genome and how it can be coupled with the genomic or the molecular changes in the organism. Is it impossible to couple molecular evolution --> to microevolution --> to macroevolution with the current scientific data or if it is'nt then how the new synthesis might look like. Most evolutionary biologists will agree that we need new theory here.

One more thing is that if we rewind the tape of evolution and run it again it is very unlikely that we are going to see the same present identical forms, in the same way if an experimenter tries to repeat the experiments of an another biologist it is very unlikely that he will see that the bacteria under examination will use the same or identical pathway or design solution to obtain a specific function. Now the conclusion is that we can only see evolution in action but we can not see that evolution by natural selection will always come up with the same design solution. So as the other member said it is very diificult to see exaptation. We can not completely or fully explain how all the diversity that we can see evolved with in the geologic time line we can only make speculations of it. In that case fossils only shows us when these designs got accumulated through the history of geology but it does'nt shows us the pathway on how the designs aroused in the first place.

For example we can not say with total vigor that the bacterial flagella was a secondary adaptation of a priorly known form which gave the bacteria a survival advantage. We can only see the bacterial flagella but any comment on its origins will be speculation only.

Well both Intelligent Design and the multiverse theory carries a lot of metaphysical baggage in it. Hear this from the revised views of John Wheeler himself "I confess that I have reluctantly had to give up my support of that point of view in the end -- much I have advocated it in the beginning--because I am afraid it carries too great a load of metapysical baggage".

Frankly speaking Intelligent Design does not even convince a true Theist to believe in this model. Just as you argued that there are no empirical observations for evolution by natural selection to see it in action similarly there are no empirical observations for ID to see it in action. If even it has to be accepted has a theory it should be available for testification. With out a possible testification or an empirical evidence the question of Who those Intelligent Designers are? and How are they capable of finding out those complex design solutions will remain unresolved forever. Which really does not satisfy me.

I realized that the same should apply to people as well. So then the Godel sentence for God would be,

"God cannot prove that this statement is true" or, if you prefer, "God does not know that this statement is true"

 

If you think about it, those statements are true, but only so long as God does not know/prove them. But if He does, then God has a contradiction (ie God would be mistaken).

 

Of course, the same goes for you and me. For example,

"I do not know that this statement is true"

 

I'm not sure what exactly to make of that. I realize that it must be true so long as I don't know that, but it seems strange. Maybe I'm just confused

 

Well yes these self referential statements are quite weird and it can get on to your head if you continue to think on that. But the best part is that we get the fruit in the form of solution for thinking hard on it.

The thing which interested me was this statement "I do not know that this statement is true". Now let assume G = "I do not know that G is true". Now if i know that G is true then the statement "I do not know that G is true" is false. So IF I know that G is true then I know that G is false so I really don't know that G is true. So the statement "I do not know that this statement is true" is true and Hence "I know that G is true". I think the same thing applies to God.

"We know something that God already knows".

A similar discussion is going on in another forum so interested members can follow to this link.My link

If that is the case, would he not have proved that a UTM must be capable of lying or refusing to answer a question (as otherwise it could not be a UTM)?

Of course a UTM which speaks a lie is not a UTM. But Godel's incompleteness theorem proved that a UTM is not truly universal. Godel's incompleteness theorem did not speak anything about the correctness of UTM. We have to believe in the UTM that it always says correct answers. It is same as how you believe in a theory the more we fail to disprove the theory the more we are going to believe in that. In the same way we are going to believe in a axiomatic system if it continues to give consistent answers. As you know we are not going to completely eliminate the theory as we progress in science, we may just add something to the theory or the theory itself may become a sub-case for a whole new larger theory for example -the Newton's law of gravity is a sub-case in Einstein's general theory of relativity. If this was'nt the case then no one would have had belief in science.

Now if we apply the same argument of yours to humans, even though we are capable of making false statements (i.e. a lie) and say that "G is true" we know that we are lying and understand that G is true even though we know that it will become a lie if we say it provided that we can not make false statements. Now the question is can a UTM understand that when it says that "G is true" which makes 'G' a false statement, then G turns out to be a true statement provided that the UTM can not make false statements and we firmly believe in it.

So the statement "G is true" is a fundamental truth which we humans somehow can grasp. Godel proved that not all parts or systems in mathematics is complete.

Well i am a layman not a mathematician so i found a link which gives the proof of the godel's incompleteness theorem from a layman's

perspective.

Here's the link

My link

I quote a paragraph from this website

"The proof of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem is so simple, and so sneaky, that it is almost embarassing to relate. His basic procedure is as follows:

Someone introduces Gödel to a UTM, a machine that is supposed to be a Universal Truth Machine, capable of correctly answering any question at all.

Gödel asks for the program and the circuit design of the UTM. The program may be complicated, but it can only be finitely long. Call the program P(UTM) for Program of the Universal Truth Machine.

Smiling a little, Gödel writes out the following sentence: "The machine constructed on the basis of the program P(UTM) will never say that this sentence is true." Call this sentence G for Gödel. Note that G is equivalent to: "UTM will never say G is true."

Now Gödel laughs his high laugh and asks UTM whether G is true or not.

If UTM says G is true, then "UTM will never say G is true" is false. If "UTM will never say G is true" is false, then G is false (since G = "UTM will never say G is true"). So if UTM says G is true, then G is in fact false, and UTM has made a false statement. So UTM will never say that G is true, since UTM makes only true statements.

We have established that UTM will never say G is true. So "UTM will never say G is true" is in fact a true statement. So G is true (since G = "UTM will never say G is true").

"I know a truth that UTM can never utter," Gödel says. "I know that G is true. UTM is not truly universal."

If we put a little bit effort we can know or understand that G is true. Now if we apply the same argument on ourselves for example,

let G = " I will never say G is true". NOW if someone asks me whether G is true or not.

if I say that G is true then the statement which I made earlier is false and hence G is false. Therefore I know that G is true provided that I can not make false statements. What's the difference?

Even though both humans and machines can't say that G is true when we can not make false statements. We has humans know or understand that G is true but the machine does not know that G is true as there is no systematic procedure to obtain the result that G is true. So the way humans think and understand is very different from the machines. Don't you think that this argument opens up the world of plato. I know that this is metaphysics but when there is a strong and valid argument we may have to withdraw our hypothesis. Ofcourse an another argument would be that there may be other axiomatic systems which helps us to prove that G is true which we don't know yet