“Likely” implies doubt but regardless, if you believe it occurred in the past, why couldn’t it happen again in the future through the same mechanisms? Give the bacteria some time, random mutations, natural selection and voila “elephant”! Or a “dinosaur”! If you really believe that nothing can prevent evolution from going on and on and on and on indefinitely, then why don’t you believe that the bacteria on/within your body would transform to elephants at some point in the future? What would prevent the transformation? Can you see the contradiction?
Yes, there is always a degree of tentativeness in any scientific statement. It's likely that matter self-organized into the first life (chemical evolution, or naturalistic abiogenesis) and then the tree of life including extinct forms (biological evolution).
The reason it is unlikely to occur on earth again is because we do not expect abiogenesis to occur in the presence of existing life. Abiogenesis occurred on pre-biotic earth with little free oxygen in the oceans or atmosphere. That world is gone.
a) The article provided a summary of the MS assumptions on page 2 (P#1236). Here is the quote of third assumption.
“Third, following genetic change, natural selection leads to particular gene variants (alleles) increasing in frequency within the population. Those variants are said to confer an advantage in terms of fitness on the individuals concerned, which therefore increasingly dominate the population. By this process and other mechanisms, including genetic drift and geographic isolation, new species can arise.”
Then the article concluded on the same page.
“All these assumptions have been disproved in various ways and to varying degrees,”
The claim was that all of the central tenets of evolution, which you refer to as MS (I presume that's short for modern synthesis) have been overturned. What I'm looking at these is the summary of one such central tenet followed by the claim that they have been disproved. Not here they haven't. Where's the falsifying argument for the claim in quotes? It's not here, and you know why I won't go to your link to find it if you can't summarize the argument in bullet points. That pretty much guarantees me that there will be nothing there, because even if you stumbled onto something worthwhile, how would you know that if you can't paraphrase it?
b) If you think the article above was not clear enough, here is another one,
2021 paper titled “Further illusions: On key evolutionary mechanisms that could never fit with Modern Synthesis” by Radomir Crkvenjakov and Henry H. Heng and was published on “ScienceDirect” said,
“
MS's key concept, that gradual accumulation of gene mutations within microevolution leads to macroevolution, requires reexamination”
Further illusions: On key evolutionary mechanisms that could never fit with Modern Synthesis - ScienceDirect
I still don't see an argument, much less the repudiation of every tenet of the theory.
c) Microevolution is basically about the adaptation process (not random) that we see in nature such as microorganisms resisting the drugs designed to kill them. Simple changes within a population occur due to change to the frequency of gene variants (alleles). “Allele frequency” of a population is not new or increase of information, but rather alterations to information/genes that already exist.
Macroevolution is about hypothesized changes that occur at higher taxonomic levels such as the evolution of new families, phyla or genera. I.e., changes that allegedly give rise to whole taxonomic groups over long periods of time. Such alterations are associated with vast increase of genetic info.
The DNA replication/synthesis is controlled by the cell’s DNA repair mechanisms, which proofread the DNA replication to maintain the integrity of its genetic code. Errors of the coding sequence are extremely low. If a random mutation escapes the proofreading mechanisms, in most cases it causes genetic diseases. Mutations can change DNA by deleting, damaging, duplicating, or substituting already existing information but cannot increase information. The vast majority of mutations are harmful or have no apparent effect.
The Macroevolution hypothesis is derived from the observed adaptation process, but to the contrary Macroevolution can neither be observed nor there is any mechanism that gives rise to a new taxonomic family.
Here's more - a summary of the scientific position followed by a claim with no connecting argument.
It’s relevant because you are the one who insisted that the ends of ring species are different species and you claimed it to be evidence of evolution. Simply, It’s not.
OK. I disagree, but don't see any value in arguing the point beyond that.
Pluto orbiting the sun is not an evolutionary process
Sure it is, just not biological evolution. Evolution refers to change. The entire universe is evolving all of the time. It all expands. It all moves. It all interacts with other aspects of reality as atomic nuclei evolve from hydrogen to heavier elements and the sun evolves into a red giant. "To roll out of," as in the new from the old. Pluto's old position becomes its new positions as it "rolls" from one to the other.
Five ages of evolution:
Material evolution - begins with the Big Bang resulting in galaxies of solar systems of heavy atoms and organic molecules
Chemical evolution - organic molecules evolve into life
Biological evolution - life evolves into the tree of life
Psychological evolution - animal life awakens and intelligence appears
Cultural evolution - language, civilization, and technology appear and begin to evolve.
You cannot equate a stable phenomenon that we observe and understand such as Pluto orbiting the sun with a hypothesis that can’t be seen, without a mechanism and contradicts observations as explained above.
I am equating them at least as far as the analogy goes. Biological evolution and Pluto orbiting are natural process that proceed without limit until life or Pluto no longer exist. You are dismissing this without cause. We have a mechanism for biological evolution. You resist seeing that, but that's a choice that doesn't change others' reality. Yes, speciation occurs. Yes, new taxonomic divisions can arise given sufficient time.
“Traditionally, researchers had proposed that mind or consciousness –
our self - is produced from organized brain activity.
However, nobody has ever been able to show how brain cells, which produce proteins, can generate something so different i.e. thoughts or consciousness. Interestingly, there has never been a plausible biological mechanism proposed to account for this.
Recently some researchers have started to raise the question that maybe your mind, your consciousness, your psyche,
the thing that makes you, may not be produced by the brain. The brain might be acting more like an intermediary. It's not a brand new idea. They have argued that we have
no evidence to show how brain cells or connections of brain cells could produce your thoughts, mind or consciousness.
The fact that people seem to have full consciousness, with lucid well-structured thought processes and memory formation
from a time when their brains are highly dysfunctional or even nonfunctional is perplexing and paradoxical."
Is There Life After Death? | The New York Academy of Sciences (nyas.org)
This still doesn't address my question, which was why should I believe that consciousness is not or cannot be an epiphenomenon of physical reality. Your words say it might night be. I agree. So what? You seem to have rejected materialistic interpretations with no argument.
If you acknowledge that physical processes don't imply consciousness, why you insist that consciousness is physical?
Again? Please try to understand that I do not insist that consciousness is a physical process. I just wrote that to you. Did you see it? If so, why didn't you address my reply then or at least assimilate it? One last time: no process reveals consciousness directly except our own conscious experience, which may be and seems to be an epiphenomenon of brains. I cannot look at any other matter and call it conscious with certainty, but I assume that all higher vertebrates are conscious. My dogs are. Parrots are.
It gets harder with reptiles. A lizard seems to look around and stalk insect prey, which seems to imply consciousness. Fish seem hypnotized or between sleep and wakefulness.
But these are all organisms made like I was from a fertilized egg and made out of the same materials. I can't comment at all on whether human appearing robots can be or are conscious. There is no test for it. Nor does it matter. I would treat such a machine with the same kindness, dignity, and respect that I would any conscious soul.
No matter how sophisticated a robot could be, but the input processing ability is limited due to the limitation of the hardware and software. The robot may have sensors for light, sound, temperature and even smell but it's merely data that get translated to the machine language and processed based on the specific programming. The output/actions are controlled by the program/software not through self-awareness /consciousness. The system cannot have qualia, feelings, or thoughts. And definitely, conscious experiences or concepts such as love, hate, happiness, sadness, pain, desire, beauty, ugliness, etc. have no meaning to the physical system.
You don't know that. Consciousness might arise from a certain density and complexity of information in inorganic systems. You have no test for when the machine wakes up if ever, and no basis to say that silicon cannot do for computers what carbon does for brains.
It’s totally supported by the fact (as clarified in the article above) that there are no known physical processes/mechanisms to account for thoughts/self-awareness/consciousness.
Not enough to call that support for a non-materialist metaphysics. It's an ignorantiam fallacy - if one can't show what is, he should assume it isn't.
I didn’t redefine anything. The article stated, “Cognition is a basic feature of life”. I didn’t select the word “cognition”, Shapiro did.
You're Shapiro when you quote him if you don't disavow any of it. You might not like that responsibility, but if you brought it here, it's your idea that you learned from Shapiro. In the words of the sage, "Just because you put it in quotes doesn't absolve you of responsibility for repeating it." - Anon.
