Re: Observe the trend. It’s happening. Give it time.

On 08/03/2025 04:34, MarkE wrote:

On 7/03/2025 9:29 pm, Ernest Major wrote:

On 06/03/2025 00:45, MarkE wrote:

On 5/03/2025 3:31 pm, MarkE wrote:

Is there a limit to capability of natural selection to refine, adapt and create the “appearance of design”? Yes: the mechanism itself of “differential reproductive success” has intrinsic limitations, whatever it may be able to achieve, and this is further constrained by finite time and population sizes.
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Martin, let's stay on topic. Would you agree that there are limits to NS as described, which lead to an upper limit to functional complexity in living things?
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How these limits might be determined is a separate issue, but the first step is establishing this premise.
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First, natural selection is not the only evolutionary process. Even if one evolutionary process is not capable of achieving something that doesn't mean that evolutionary processes in toto are not capable of achieving that.

 Natural selection is the *only* naturalistic means capable of increasing functional complexity

Creationists have been known to argue that natural selection doesn't create anything; it merely selects what's already present. As an argument against evolution that's worthless; but as an observation it's true enough. Each step in functionality complexity originates from mutation, or recombination, or gene flow, and is subsequently fixed or not by natural selection or genetic drift.
For example Ron Okimoto (I think) recently mentioned that one flagellar gene is a truncated version of another, and results in the assembly of a tapered flagellum rather than cylindrical one. I can imagine that the tapered flagellum is advantageous, and was fixed by selection. It might be that the gene was duplicated and fixed by drift before a truncation mutation occurred, but as selection against excess DNA is effective in bacteria I suspect that it originated as a partial duplication of the gene, which was then selected. But note that the initial increase in complexity was caused by the mutation. Natural selection fixes this in a population, and as you have mentioned acts as a ratchet allowing changes to accumulate.
But you are assuming increases in functional complexity are adaptive. They could be neutral or slightly deleterious and fixed by genetic drift. I don't accept without question your panadaptationist/panfunctionalist premise.
Passing over the problems with defining an objective criterion for irreducibly complex systems, there are at least three classes of evolutionary paths to this. I think that coadaptation is the predominant one. This goes from non-interaction to facultative interaction to obligate interaction. Both steps could be fixed by either natural selection or genetic drift.

and genetic information.

Increases in functional complexity and genetic information are not the same thing. If you use a Shannon or Kolmgorov measure natural selection tends to reduce, not increase, information in a gene pool.

 All other factors have only a shuffling/randomising effect. In every case, NS is required to pick from the many resulting permutations the rare chance improvements.
 Without the action of NS, all biological systems are degrading over time.
 

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Second, you've changed the question. Evolutionary processes have limitations, but those limitations need not be on the degree of functional complexity achievable. Evolution cannot produce living organisms that can't exist in the universe. (You could quibble about lethal mutations, recessives, etc., but I hope you can perceive the intent of my phrasing; for example, I very much doubt that evolution could result in an organism with a volume measured in cubic light years.)
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Applying this to functional complexity, physical limits on how big an organism can be, and how small details can be, do pose a limit on how much functional complexity can be packed into an organism. But such a limit doesn't help you - humans are clearly capable of existing in this universe, so aren't precluded by that limit. You need a process limitation, not a physical limitation; I don't find it obvious that there is a process limitation that applies here.
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You say that the first step is establishing the premise. That is your job.
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That there are things that evolution cannot achieve (a classic example is the wheel, though even that is not unimaginable) doesn't not mean that evolution cannot achieve things that already exist; one of the reasons that ID is not science is it's lack of interest in accounting for the voluminous evidence that evolution has achieved the current biosphere.
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 The limits of NS are not simply due to physically possible organisms. It's much tighter constraint. The mechanism of "differential reproductive success" is a blunt instrument, rightly described as explaining the survival but not arrival of the fittest.
 To elaborate my hypotheses (not proofs):
 1. NS, along with any other naturalistic mechanisms, do not have the logical capacity to fully traverse the solution space, regardless of time available. Some (many) areas of the fitness landscape will be islands, local maxima, inaccessible via gradualistic pathways (e.g. monotonically increasing fitness functions). These are however accessible to intelligent design.

You are moving the target again. It is not legitimate to take the probably truism that evolution cannot reach all targets, and use that to argue that are limits to the degree of complexity that evolution can generate.

 2. The time/material resources of the universe allow exploration of only a small fraction of even the accessible solutions. Again, this constraint does not apply to intelligent design.

Also doesn't address the issue of whether there are limits to the degree of complexity that evolution can generate.
So far you have asserted that evolution can't account for the complexity of present day life. You haven't supported that assertion.
To give an example of a limit nearer than limits on organism volume and complexity density, genetic load places a limit on the size of functional genomes. Naively that places a limit on the amount of complexity that can be obtained. But that limit would again clearly be beyond what has been already obtained.
Looking more closely, genetic load can be reduced by decreasing the mutation rate, or by changing the distribution of selection coefficients. This can be expected to slow evolution, as it decreases the availability of new variation. But does the upper bound on complexity converge on a fixed limit (as in f(x) = x - 1/x) or does it continue to increase ever more slowly (as in f(x) = log x)?

 Does the burden of proof for these hypotheses rest exclusively with ID? Not at all. Naturalism, if being intellectually curious, honest, and open-minded, will ask the same questions and seek to answer them.
 

Your double standard is showing. You have been arguing that ID doesn't not need to ask questions about who, what, when, where, how and why. It's not quite breaking Augustine's dictum, but it has the same effect.
Anyway, people will select for research questions that they think can be productively addressed. (Do you expect people to put effort in researching exceptions to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics?) Research has been performed on evolutionary rates - the results are that evolution in the laboratory, under domestication, and in the wild can occur (and typically does) occur at rates well in excess of what is required to account for the fossil record.
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alias Ernest Major