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

On 16/03/2025 9:51 am, Ernest Major wrote:

On 14/03/2025 04:57, MarkE wrote:

On 14/03/2025 12:18 am, Ernest Major wrote:

On 13/03/2025 11:17, MarkE wrote:

On 12/03/2025 9:31 am, Ernest Major wrote:

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.

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

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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and genetic information.

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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.

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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.
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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.
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To elaborate my hypotheses (not proofs):
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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.

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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.

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I'm not claiming a limit the degree of complexity that evolution can generate, but rather the extent of of the solution space.

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"Would you agree that there are limits to NS as described, which lead to an upper limit to functional complexity in living things?" - MarkE, 5th March 2025. (Quoted by MarkE on the 13th March 2025 - see above.)
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To recap different contributing factors to an upper limit in functional complexity in living things in relation to natural selection:

 You were being invited to address your vacillation about whether you claim that there is an upper limit to the amount of functional complexity that evolution can generate.

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1. Fitness landscape
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If the fitness landscape has unreachable islands (local maxima sparsely distributed in a plain), then if some of these represent "solutions" of greater functional complexity than those in local maxima accessible to NS, this implies an upper limit, lower than that of all physically possible organisms.
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This is conditional, as indicated by the two 'if' statements it contains.
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 Fitness landscapes are often illustrated as two-dimensional surfaces. This makes it easier to visualise them, but also makes it easy to imagine isolated peaks of fitness. Real fitness landscapes have much higher dimensions and also shift with time (changing environments). The mathematics may well be beyond me, but at first sight it would seem that the more dimensions there are the greater likelihood of there being an upwards path in at least one dimension. And then there's the effects of changing environment, making the likelihood of there being an upward path in a least one dimension at some time.

Agree that fitness landscapes may be multidimensional and are changing with time. I'm uncertain as to how this impacts available pathways. Mathematically difficult as you say; best I can offer is some computer simulation.

 The existence of the biosphere is indirect evidence that fitness space is sufficiently connected. The slowness of evolution across geological time (compared to rates that can be observed in the present and recent past) is evidence that it is not pervasively connected.
 As you say, that disconnected parts of fitness space are systematically biased towards greater functional complexity is only a conjecture.
 

No such constraint applies to an intelligent designer with access to the entire solution space.

 Different constraints apply to an intelligent designer with access to the entire solution space. Evolution has no problem in identifying peaks, but may have problems finding paths towards them. An intelligent designer may less constrained by paths, but has the problem of telling whether a particular design sits on a peak.
 I think you've found an argument that life is not intelligently designed.
 Consider organisms using different proteinogenic amino acid repertoires. In the current biosphere some bacteria have added pryolysine, there's a kludge for selenocysteine, a variety of post-translational modifications (e.g. hydroxyproline in collagen; there's actually more hydroxyproline residues in the human body than of several canonical amino acids), and minor changes to the genetic code in organelles and bacteria with small genomes (and in ciliates, which I do find weird), but no organisms with markedly different amino acid repertoires. This is because changing the genetic code is difficult, to say the least. I don't believe that such organisms are not accessible to evolution, but they are disconnected from the current biosphere - to evolve them you'd have to go back to a simpler, now outcompeted and extinct, form of life.
 As you say your intelligent designer is not under that constraint. So their absence is evidence against your intelligent designer.

You're saying this points to common descent, because a designer would have freedom to use markedly different amino acid repertoires, each optimised for different classes of organisms?
This is an area of uncertainty/limited knowledge for me personally. Behe, for example, accepts common descent but argues for the necessity for designer input to guide evolution. One explanation might be the canonical set is in fact generally optimal.

 

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2. Time available
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If the time/material resources of the universe allow exploration and discovery of only a fraction of even the accessible solutions, this places another upper limit on the functional complexity that could be realised.
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Again, this constraint does not apply to an intelligent designer.

 Claims that evolution can achieve X, and claims that there hasn't been enough time for evolution to achieve X, are not the same thing. I wish you'd stop conflating them.

Not clear on your objection? I'm saying that even if NS could achieve X in principle, but is too slow to so in the available time, then this is another upper limit on functional complexity for NS.

 I has previously mentioned to you that rates of morphological evolution far in excess of those required to account for change in the fossil record have been observed - consider dogs, pigeon and cabbages, or maize, for example.

Aren't you begging the question here by assuming evolution?
And the changes observed through selective breeding are largely due to filtering of existing alleles. In fact, that such large morphological variations can be produced through allele shuffling alone should be cautionary: fossils of supposed transitional forms may be simply allelic variants.

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3. The intrinsic capacity of NS
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The mechanism of "differential reproductive success" is, I contend, a blunt instrument. How blunt is of course at the heart of this debate, and a topic with many facets.

 That doesn't seem to be a 3rd claim.

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None of these are claimed as a disproof, but rather for scoping and clarification.
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Would you agree with this logic/structure?
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 Petītiō principiī is generally accounted a fallacy. You are postulating that evolution is incapable of accounting for the biosphere as support for a claim that evolution is incapable of accounting for the biosphere.

No, to be clear, I'm saying these are different categories that MAY exclude NS as a viable explanation if demonstrated. Demonstrating this for any of them is ongoing.

 There is voluminous evidence for the factuality of evolution. (Literally billions of observations and mountains of evidence.) Postulating a silver bullet that overturns all this evidence doesn't cut it as an argument; you actually have to produce the silver bullet.
 

The Third Way (no friend of creationists) claims that "some Neo-Darwinists have elevated Natural Selection into a unique creative force that solves all the difficult evolutionary problems without a real empirical basis."
https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/
My contention is that within naturalistic explanations, natural selection is the ONLY available and "unique creative force that solves all the difficult evolutionary problems".