Ah, the in tray is full again …
First, it isn’t “my” theory, it’s the product of the two scientists I named in my relevant exposition.
Second, in case you failed to understand this, the braneworld is postulated as having existed into an infinite eternal past.
Though I’m already anticipating you summarily rejecting this idea, whilst clinging to the idea that a merely asserted cartoon magic man existed into an infinite eternal past, despite this requiring that your cartoon magic man spend eternity twiddling its thumbs, then suddenly at one monent deciding “Oh, let’s poof a universe into existence”.
I already dealt with this in a previous post, or did you fail to read my exposition on the interesting nature of the problem of determining species identity?
At bottom, species identity isn’t magic, it’s simply the data informing us of the reproductive status of the population in question. That, ultimately, is IT. Of course, biology has a habit of being messy in this regard, and throwing up examples that don’t fall neatly into convenient pigeonholes - ring species being possibly the canonical example thereof, but that doesn’t invalidate the concepts in question, it merely informs us that the concepts are special cases. But I’m used to observing this sort of failure of understanding on the part of people who need a cartoon magic man in their lives.
Except that as I already told you in that previous post, speciation is NOT a matter of one organism “turning into something else”. Drop this canard once and for all.
The only reason, at bottom, that we think of say, cats and dogs as being purportedly “separate”, is because humans have a habit of relying upon visual cues, including ones that are actually superficial, which is part of the underpinning of racism, for example. What actually matters, namely the underlying molecular basis, tells us that cats and dogs are merely divergent offshoots from a common ancestor, one which quite possibly looked completely different in life, from either of the two modern lineages it spawned. Indeed, given that organisms resembling modern cats did not appear until around 35 million years ago, in the form of Proailurus, this means that there existed mammals before that time that didn’t resemble modern cats, but one of those mammals must necessarily have given rise to the Felidae lineages.
All that happens, at bottom, is that a lineage gives rise to offspring, some of which move into a new niche, and then start diverging from their ancestors as a result of such processes as assortative mating. They don’t “turn into something else” because they retain the ancestry in question. They may acquire new features that cause naive humans to think they’ve “turned into something else”, because naive humans like easy categories to work with, but your canard is a non-problem for biologists how actually bothered to learn something about this.
Oh, and I’ve already dealt with your canards about “information” in this previous post. The moment the state of a physical system changes, that system provides us with new information by definition.
Poppycock. See above.
Guess what, Looby Loo? Life IS chemistry writ large. Millions of chemical reactions are taking place in your body right now, and if some of those reactions STOP, then you DIE.
Furthermore, in case you failed to receive the memo, vitalism was killed off back in 1828 by Wöhler, when he launched organic chemistry.
What an utterly fatuous and palsied misunderstanding of the science.
Apart from the fact that it’s been demonstrated in the laboratory, that RNA strands can replicate and undergo Darwinian evolution long before we reach anything as sophisticated as a cell, there’s also this little matter for you to ponder. Namely, ask a chemist to provide two samples of pure glucose, one from a biological source, the other produced by laboratory synthesis. You won’t be able to tell them apart, and both samples will appear to be “non-living” to every observer.
Likewise, if I provide you with two samples of insulin, one generated by a living organism, and one synthesised using Merrifield peptide synthesis in a laboratory, you won’t be able to tell which is which.
Life isn’t a magic spell cast by a cartoon magic man, it IS chemistry.
Only to the naive.
Oh, and your fatuous “why can’t we bring a dead man back to life?” canard is precisely that - a canard, and if you need a 10,000 word dissertation on why this is so, then you merely demonstrate once again that you slept through your science classes.
And here we have another canard.
Mutations are changes to a gene sequence, and not all of them are “mistakes” by any reasonable use of the term. First of all, thanks to the redundancy in the genetic code, there exist what are known as synonymous mutations, which leave the final protein coded for unaltered. An organism can acquire any number of synonymous mutations from its ancestors, and its fitness remains unchanged.
However, even non-synonymous mutations can be neutral. The existence of a large number of different sequences for the insulin gene across the vertebrates illustrates this nicely. what is selected for isn’t sequence, but function. If several million sequences can perform the requisite function successfully, mutations aren’t a problem (as biologists of course already know) and even a gene subject to high degree of conservation can vary, if the function space permits.
Indeed, when Motoo Kimura launched neutral theory in a seminal paper in 1989, he also provided us with a neat molecular test, that allows us to determine whether or not a gene has been subject to drift, purifying selection, or positive selection. Let N be the number of non-synonymous mutations that the gene has acquired in its history, and S be the number of synonymous mutations it has acquired. Then compute
α = log(N/S)
if α is close to zero, then the gene has been subject to neutral drift. If α is significantly negative, then the gene has been subject to purifying selection and is highly conserved. If α us significantly positive, then the gene has been subject to positive selection, possibly yielding a new feature in the organism inheriting it.
Oh, and as for the matter of refuting the creationist lie that mutations cannot generate new features, first of all, this neglects the role of selection in evolution, the part that creationists always omit. Biologists have understood ever since genetics was first established as a properly constituted scientific discipline, that deleterious mutations are a dead end, and no one who paid attention in a biology class thinks otherwise. On the other hand, all those neutral mutations, that have no effect on the fitness of an organism, will be passed on to future generations the moment the inheritors thereof produce offspring. There’s no magic barrier preventing this from happening.
Better still, the moment advantageous mutations appear, selection will act in such a manner, that the inheritors thereof will produce more offspring than their coevals, and that mutation will become, over time, more and more firmly established in the population, as the number of offspring inheriting the mutation increase over time. Indeed, one favourite example of mine centres upon Antarctic Notothenioid fishes, which in their distant past experienced a gene duplication event. The gene for trypsinogen, a digestive enzyme produced by the pancreas, was duplicated in the ancestral fishes, and as a consequence, the duplicated copy was free to undergo mutation without affecting the fitness of the fishes. So long as one copy of the gene was subject to purifying selection and continued working as usual, the other copy was a free-fire zone for whatever mutations it was capable of undergoing.
Now, for a long period of time, that mutated copy didn’t code for anything particularly special, just another protein that floated aimlessly about in the bloodstream of these fishes. But, at some point, those mutations accumulated to the point where they produced a protein that did turn out to be special, because it allowed those fishes to move into colder waters without their blood freezing. This allowed the Notothenioids to move into Antarctic waters, and take advantage of new, previously inaccessible food sources. Whereupon positive selection started acting upon those that did move into those waters - those that lost the antifreeze glycoprotein after the move to Antarctica died out, and those that kept the antifreeze glycoprotein after the move continued prospering in their new home.
This isn’t difficult to understand, at least for those of us who haven’t had our brains palsied by magical thinking, and cartoon magic men from goat herder mythologies. Indeed, at bottom, selection is nothing more than the action of environmental variables, to determine which variations work and which don’t at a given location and time. And, because those environmental variables are variables, the question of what works can also change with time. We’re about to find this out on a grand scale thanks to climate change, but I digress.
Those 1½ million peer reviewed scientific papers aren’t “opinion”, they document fact. Do learn this elementary lesson, before embarrassing yourself even more before the current audience.
And this has happened because REAL WORLD DATA has informed us that said opinion is wrong. What part of this elementary concept do you keep failing to understand?
Oh, and when we have a large body of empirical data supporting a postulate, we’re not dealing with “opinion”. Another elementary concept you need to learn quickly.
Oh look, boys and girls, it’s PROJECTION TIME!!!
The fact that scientists spend time trying to break ideas in their work, on its own demonstrates that you’re merely regurgitating a tiresome creationist lie.
Indeed, numerous scientists gained their Nobel Prizes precisely by this means.
By the way, I don’t need evolution to toss your cartoon magic man into the bin. All I need is the fact that your cartoon magic man is constructed to possess mutually contradictory properties, and is associated within the requisite mythology with absurd and nonsensical assertions, that no genuine god type entity would touch with a barge pole 50 light years in length.