What goal posts. It is a fact that we are physically weak. Our bodies are poorly designed and are injured very easily.
And the point is that we never had superior strength or eyesight. The advantages we had in an evolutionary game were that we mutated to compensate for weakness not to overcome it.
The poor design elements of the human body prove that. We as humans have the most fatal baby delivery design of all the animals on the planet. In fact before advances in medicine more woman died in child birth than any other way. You're telling me your god intended this? If your god really wanted you to go forth and multiply then why not design a woman's pelvis to accommodate child bearing with less danger?
Or is it more likely that we evolved larger craniums in respect to body size and that made child birth dangerous. The adaptation to accommodate a babies larger cranium like the fontanelles that allow the bony plates of the skull to move are imperfect at best but just good enough to give us an edge.
oh boy, i am not gonna beat a dead horse.
And you totally blew off my question why didn't Natural Selection make sure we maintained the superior strength,superior eyesight,and superior land speed ,if we evolved ?
You're assuming we evolved from creatures that had superior strength etc.
Not a valid assumption at all.
No why would those features be targeted by Natural Selection? it makes no sense with what you say Natural Slection does. I have already explained why most mutations will be deleted after a few generations unless both parents carry the same defective Gene.
It is a faulty view to assume a mutation can take over a Gene pool that is rediculous.
Here, since you don't trust me, read what fellow evolutionist has to say about your view.
Lee Spetner/Edward Max Dialogue
Dr. Lee Spetner
continuing an exchange with Dr. Edward E. Max
© 2001 L.M. Spetner. All Rights Reserved.
fter I posted my critique of Edward E. Max’s essay, Max posted our dialogue with additional comments to my responses. The order of topics in his posting does not correspond exactly to the order of my posting, but both postings are fairly accurate representations of our dialogue. The following is my latest response (23 May 2001) in a form that reproduces his posting into which I have inserted my comments. I have identified each of our statements as he has reproduced them by putting our names in boldface followed by a colon. My new comments are inserted into the text in small caps inside square brackets and identified by "LMS".
Introduction
Spetner: I am writing this essay in response to a request from Edward E. Max to comment on his posting The Evolution of Improved Fitness (updated July 12 1999). His essay is an attempt to defend evolutionary theory against attacks by creationists. Although Max scored some points against some alleged creationist arguments, he failed to defend Darwinian evolution against my attack on it in my book Not By Chance. He did not mention my book in his posting, but he referred to my book in his request for my comments. I shall also take this opportunity to clarify some issues in my book about which some readers have written me.
The principle message of evolution is that all life descended with modification from a putative single primitive source. I call this the grand sweep of evolution. The mechanism offered for the process of modification is basically the Darwinian one of a long series of steps of random variation, each followed by natural selection. The variation is generally understood today to be random mutations in the DNA.
That primitive source of life is assumed to be sufficiently simple that it could have arisen from nonliving material by chance. There is no theory today that can account for such an event, but I shall not address that issue here. That is for another place and another time. What is relevant to this discussion is that the requirement that life arose spontaneously sets, at the very least, a stringent upper limit on the complexity and information content of the putative first organism that could reproduce itself, and thus serve as a vehicle from which to launch Darwinian evolution. The issue I address here is the alleged development of all life by the Neo-Darwinian process of random mutation and natural selection, starting from a sufficiently simple beginning.
Despite the insistence of evolutionists that evolution is a fact, it is really no more than an improbable story. No one has ever shown that macroevolution can work. Most evolutionists assume that macroevolution is just a long sequence of microevolutionary events, but no one has ever shown it to be so. (Those few evolutionists who hold that macroevolution is really different from microevolution have changed their story several times since they first came out with it, and their mechanism is so fuzzy that I cannot tell what it is. John Maynard Smith seems to be of a similar opinion.)
For the grand process of evolution to work, long sequences of “beneficial” mutations must be possible, each building on the previous one and conferring a selective advantage on the organism. The process must be able to lead not only from one species to another, but to the entire advance of life from a simple beginning to the full complexity of life today. There must be a long series of possible mutations, each of which conferring a selective advantage on the organism so that natural selection can make it take over the population. Moreover, there must be not just one, but a great many such series.
The chain must be continuous in that at each stage a change of a single base pair somewhere in the genome can lead to a more adaptive organism in some environmental context. That is, it should be possible to continue to climb an “adaptive” hill, one base change after another, without getting hung up on a local adaptive maximum. No one has ever shown this to be possible.
Now one might say that if evolution were hung up on a local Maximum, a large genetic change like a recombination or a transposition could bring it to another higher peak. Large adaptive changes are, however, highly improbable. They are orders of magnitude less probable than getting an adaptive change with a single nucleotide substitution, which is itself improbable. No one has shown this to be possible either.
Moreover, as I have noted in my book, the large mutations such as recombinations and transpositions are mediated by special enzymes and are executed with precision - not the sort of doings one would expect of events that were supposed to be the products of chance. Evolutionists chose the mechanism of randomness, by the way, because we can’t think of any other way beneficial mutations might occur in the absence of a law that might govern them. Genetic rearrangements may not be really random at all. They do not seem to qualify as the random mutations Neo-Darwinists can invoke whenever needed to escape from a local adaptive Maximum.
Evolutionists can argue, and rightly so, that we have no way of observing long series of mutations, since our observation time is limited to a relatively short interval. Our genetic observations over the past 100 years are more like a snapshot of evolution rather than a representative interval in which we can search for the required long series of changes. But our inability to observe such series cannot be used as a justification for the assumption that the series Darwinian theory requires indeed exist.
Max: I agree that there are no definitive examples where a macroevolutionary change (such as the development of cetaceans from terrestrial mammals) has been shown to result from a specific chain of mutations. And I agree with your further comment that “we have no way of observing a long series of mutations.” But you go on to say that “our inability to observe such series cannot be used as a justification for the assumption that the series Darwinian theory requires indeed exist.” An equally reasonable conclusion, in my view, would be that our inability to observe such series cannot be used as a justification for the assumption that such a series of mutations did NOT occur.
Spetner: Now Ed, that’s ridiculous! Those two statements are not symmetrical. I don’t have to assume the series did not occur to make a case for the inadequacy of NDT. You, who are basing your theory of evolution on the occurrence of such a series, are required to show that it exists, or at least that it is likely to exist. You are obliged to show an existence. I am not obliged to prove a non-existence.
[LMS: IN MAX’S POSTING HE MOVED THIS REMARK OF MINE TO A LATER POINT IN THE DIALOGUE. I ORIGINALLY HAD IT HERE, AND HERE IS WHERE IT BELONGS.]
Max: In the absence of conclusive data defining such a series, if we want to distinguish between various hypotheses to explain the origin of species we must rely on other data, such as from various laboratory model systems that show adaptations in short enough timeframes that we can observe them. Then we must extrapolate as best we can the information learned from these model systems to the questions of species origins. This extrapolation from laboratory model systems to systems unobservable in the laboratory is the method of science common to medicine, astronomy, chemistry, meteorology, physics, etc.
I think there is some semantic confusion here about the word “justification” in Spetner’s sentence “But our inability to observe such series cannot be used as a justification for the assumption that the series Darwinian theory requires indeed exist.” He is correct that acceptance of the NDT implies the belief that a series of successive mutations (including duplications and translocations) occurred in the evolution of an ancient primitive genome into the complex genome of a modern species. Because we can access only genomes of modern (or very recent) species, we can never obtain the direct evidence—i.e., a complete list of those mutations—that some anti-evolutionists (e.g. Behe) seem to think would be necessary to support NDT.
[LMS: MAX’S STATEMENT HERE IS A DISTORTION OF MY ARGUMENT INTO AN EXTREME POSITION. I NEITHER SAID NOR IMPLIED THAT EVOLUTIONISTS MUST “OBTAIN...A COMPLETE LIST OF THOSE MUTATIONS” REQUIRED FOR NDT. I DO MAINTAIN, HOWEVER, THAT THEY SHOULD AT LEAST ACCEPT THE RESPONSIBILITY OF SHOWING THAT NDT IS REASONABLY SUPPORTED BY EVIDENCE. THEY HAVE NOT DONE THAT. THE MECHANISM OF NDT CONSISTS OF TWO BASIC STEPS. AN ADAPTIVE MUTATION MUST BE ACHIEVED, AND THEN NATURAL SELECTION MUST OPERATE TO ENABLE IT TO TAKE OVER THE POPULATION. EVOLUTIONISTS ARE OBLIGATED TO SHOW THAT BOTH THESE STEPS ARE REASONABLY SUPPORTED BY EVIDENCE IF THEY ARE TO MAKE A CASE FOR NDT. MOST OF THEIR EFFORTS ALONG THESE LINES HAVE BEEN LIMITED TO ARGUING FOR NATURAL SELECTION. THEY USUALLY DO NOT DEAL WITH THE PROBABILITY OF ACHIEVING AN ADAPTIVE MUTATION. THEY MERELY ASSUME ONE WILL BE AVAILABLE WHENEVER IT IS NEEDED.]
In the absence of such direct evidence, it seems pointless to argue which side is “obliged” to provide what indirect evidence; certainly neither side can hope for anything close to “proof.” Although Spetner denies that he is “obliged to prove a non-existence” of such a chain of mutations, his whole effort in the correspondence seems to be directed to just that aim. Evolutionists have the job of defending the reasonableness of such a series of mutations. I believe that Spetner would agree with this.
[LMS: RIGHT. EVOLUTIONISTS DO HAVE THAT JOB AS AN OBLIGATION, AND THEY HAVE FAILED TO FULFILL IT. I AM NOT OBLIGED TO PROVE A NON-EXISTENCE. BUT IN MY BOOK, I HAVE MADE A GOOD CASE FOR THE UNREASONABLENESS OF THE EVOLUTIONISTS’ TACIT ASSUMPTIONS OF THE UNIVERSAL AVAILABILITY OF ADAPTIVE MUTATIONS, AND I HAVE GIVEN SOME OF THOSE ARGUMENTS IN THIS DIALOGUE.]
Spetner: But the argument against Darwinian theory is considerably stronger than that. The theory requires there be a vast number of possible point mutations which, coupled with natural selection, can produce the evolutionary advances that could produce the grand sweep of evolution. Because there must be a large number of qualifying mutations, at least a few of them should have been observed in some of the many genetics laboratories around the world. All the mutations in these long series must not only confer selective advantage on the organism but they must, on the average, also contribute to the information, or complexity, increase that surely distinguishes present-day life from the putative primitive organism.
These mutations must have whatever characteristics are necessary for them to serve as elements of the grand sweep of evolution. Thus, for a mutation to qualify as a representative member of the required multitude of long series that are supposed to produce evolution, it must bring new information not just to the genome of the organism, but the information must be new to the entire biocosm. The horizontal transfer of a gene from one species to another is not information new to the biocosm. To show evolution in action, one must at least demonstrate examples of a mutation that can serve as a prototype of those required by the theory. Such a mutation must be one that could be a contributing member of a series of mutations that could lead to the vast increase in information required by the theory. Thus, for example, a mutation that disables a repressor gene causing a constitutive synthesis of an enzyme might be advantageous to an organism under special circumstances, but the disabling of a gene does not represent the mutations required by the theory.
Max devotes a good portion of his essay to refuting what he calls the “creationist” argument against evolution. Although some opponents of evolutionary theory may have advanced the arguments he attacks, those arguments are in large measure straw men that Max busies himself with refuting. If some creationists have claimed that all mutations are harmful, they would be wrong, but Max’s observation that there are mutations that are beneficial, while true, is hardly a telling argument for evolution.
The B-Cell Hypermutation Model
Max: The next major point of discussion in the correspondence has been about how well the model of immunoglobulin gene somatic hypermutation in B cells serves as an analog to genomic mutation in evolution. The following section contains the salient points of our exchange about this question, beginning with Spetner’s initial response to my essay on Talk.Origins.
Spetner: Max’s pièce de résistance was the somatic mutations in B lymphocytes (B cells) of the vertebrate immune system as examples of random mutations that add information. He implied that Evolution could follow this method to achieve baboons from bacteria. I agree with him that these mutations add information to the B-cell genome. I also agree that they are random, but they are random only in the base changes they make; they are not random in where in the genome they can occur. More important, I do not agree that the grand sweep of evolution could be achieved through such mutations.
Although the somatic mutations to which Max referred are point mutations that do indeed add information to the genome of the B cells, they cannot be applied to Darwinian evolution. These are not the kind of mutations that can operate as the random mutations required by NDT that can, through chance errors, build information one base change at a time.
For one thing, the rate of the somatic mutations in the immune system is extremely high - more than a million times normal mutation rates. For this reason they are called hypermutations. If an organism had a mutation rate that was even a small fraction of this rate it could not survive. For a second thing, the hypermutations in the B cells are restricted to a specific tiny portion of the genome, where they can do no harm but only good. The entire genome of the B cell could not mutate at this rate; the hypermutation must be restricted only to the portion that encodes selected portions of the variable part of the antibody.
The mutation rate of the hypermutating part of the B cell’s genome is about one per thousand base pairs per replication (Darnell et al., 1986, Molecular Cell Biology, Scientific American Books, p. 1116.), and it can be as high as one in 500 base pairs per replication (Shen, 1998 Science 280: 1750). These rates are incompatible with Darwinian evolution. If an organism’s genome were to mutate at this rate, there would be, on the average, about one mutation in every gene, with a high probability that many of them would be fatal for the organism. No, Darwinian evolution could not occur with such rates.
These high rates are essential for the working of the immune system. In each replication of a B cell, about 30 of the 300 or so gene regions encoding the CDR’s will have a mutation. A lower mutation rate would make for a less efficient immune system. The high mutation rates, so necessary for the immune system, if applied to an entire organism for evolutionary purposes, would be fatal many times over.
Note that these hypermutations are limited to a restricted portion of the genome. Moreover, the hypermutations are mediated by special enzymes. Thus, although the hypermutations are random in the changes they make in the bases of the genome, they are not random in the positions in which they occur. They occur only in the small region in which they are needed, and occur there through enzymes that apparently play only that role. Furthermore, they occur only when they are switched on by the controlling mechanism of B-cell maturation. Thus it is clear that the hypermutations in B cells cannot serve as a prototype for the random mutations required for NDT.
Please read rest of article here,DR Spetner. totally blows the theory you're defending out of the water.
Dr. Lee Spetner's continued exchange with Dr. Edward E. Max
