from Hacker News

Do we need a new theory of evolution?

by superbaconman on 7/3/22, 3:38 AM with 4 comments

  • by dataangel on 7/3/22, 6:55 AM

    The examples in this article are bad. The eye is a classic "example" of something that "couldn't appear all at once" that creationists love to cite but it's not hard to imagine at all. You start with one light sensitive cell. Why would it be light sensitive? Random mutation makes a protein that happens to just by laws of physics react when light hits it. Then it turns out if you have more than one cell like this you can sense the direction of the light, that seems useful, then you can tell the direction better if you have a lens, then you get cells that can detect different wavelengths of light, etc etc etc.

    Likewise they bring up radiation experiments causing "big changes all at once" but they're actually small changes. Imagine computer code with a loop that runs 4 times to make 4 legs. Changing that number to 5 is a small change, but you get a whole extra limb! Also code is often "commented out" rather than deleted, and uncommenting to bring back ancient traits is also a small change. For example you can make a small change to chicken DNA and they will grow teeth, because all of the genetic code for teeth is still present from when they were dinosaurs, just not activated.

  • by tus666 on 7/3/22, 4:17 AM

    > For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place. Nor does it adequately explain how such delicate and easily disrupted components meshed together to form a single organ.

    Err yes it does. It's called random mutation. One day a critter was born with something lens like in front of it's light sensitive cell. That allowed it to utilize light slightly better than other critters, and it reproduced far more, sending it's DNA down the evolutionary chain. The result is superior models of critters reproduced with other different superior critters, produced super-critter kids, who then mutated and reproduced themselves.

    Repeat millions and millions of times.

  • by missedthecue on 7/3/22, 5:27 AM

    Interestingly they don't name the phenomenon they describe with the eyeball. The concept is called "irreducible complexity" and applies to lots of other different areas, such as wings and the flagella of bacteria.

    To quote Darwin, it seems "absurd in the highest possible degree" to posit that a fully functioning set of wings + the necessary fine motor skills and brain function required to effectively utilize them would ever evolve in just one generation, but a partially evolved wing one generation on the way to becoming the wings we see today would be a liability more than a benefit. Just a useless flappy dead-weight which would quickly cause the owner to fall prey to hungry predators.

  • by r721 on 7/3/22, 5:18 AM