The perplexing Dawkins I had in mind in an earlier post is perplexing because although he convincingly comes across as a genuine seeker of truth, who really wants to know what is true and doesn't want to fall into the trap of accpeting anything just becaue he likes it or it is comforting and so on, nevertheless sometimes seems to do just tht. That is, I find a lot more of tht kind of thinking in his remarks than I do scientific thinking at some oints anyway.
Just to start wsith the religious side of his thinkintg, he often seems to be saying that he rejects Christianity simply because he hates it. The Old testament, he says, is a nasty bpiece of work, and sometimes he even goes on from there to say how could anyone believe that? It's easy to get caught up in simply trying to point out to him that there were good rational reasons for some of the things he considers to be nasty and unworthy of beolief, , but that's to overlook the fct that he's not really being scientific when he makes such a remark, not really being wholly dedicated to the truth. He doesn't like it. At all. And often sounds as if tht's his main reason for rejecting it. Atheists often give similar reasons for rejecting it: it's primitive, it's Stone Age, we've outgrown that sort of thing. What does that have to do with whether it is true or not>
Anyway. Then there is the way he talks about natural selection as the way evolution proceeds freom oneme chagne to another, one species to another. When Darwin came up with tht idea it was very creative and interesting. I thought so when I read the Origin yers ago. I thoguht Darwin was quite right about most of what he said, he was an elegant thinker and considered all the arguments against him and so on and so forth. he makes a compelling case just be the mere logic of it, for natural selection as the driving force of evoltuionj.
But the problem is, for him and for Dawkins, that it remaisn only a logical and interesting idea. Neither of them tries to trace out how it works in realityh. Perhaps there is the excuse that it takes too much time and you can't spell out things over such long periods of time. No, but surely can describe a mechanism, a way it would work if it works. Which is what I've been trying to do when I try to imagine first what it hs to work on and how tht got there. Has to be a gene or bunch of genes, have to gebe dgenes related to the same part of the anatomy tht is being evolved, like tht eye that evoltuionists like to imagine coming together from all the farflung parts of the taxonomic tree into one evolutionary lineage from primtiieve to complex. How does each stage get creted in the first place in order to be seected?
See, he really doesn't think about all that. but that's what he has to think about, it seems to me, if he really wants to be scietnifc about this sucjbect. Because otherwise all he's got is this assertion that it must be natural selection becaue it's such a logical idea. Could it really work in reality just gets buried in that glow of seeming certainty. That's not science.
So I just heard him in another interview conuecturing that the genome of every creture must show its history of previous evolutonary changes, the environments it's had to cope with and all of that. But HOW it shows all that he doesn't even guess at. Where in a given genome sdoes he see this for instance> What in the genome can he point to that obviously had to have come down through the previous history of the animal's eovlution? No, it remains a pleasant plausibiltiy.
I really would expect a true scientist to see that this is all they have for evolution. Really. But of course I'm expecting it a hundred yeras later after it's been set in concrete as a fact, which it isn't.
Do new genes get created and inserted into genomes? At what rate? Can that be shown or is it just a theory? Surely you'd need new genes. You can mutate old genes all you like and never get anyhthing outside the trait package of the species in which they occur. variations on those traits, sure, but new traits? Uh uh. But they come back with assertions that ti is so and you are just stupidly not seeing how it must be so. Just add millions of years of time and magically it will all come together for you. We don't need to know HOW it comes together, we just know that with enough time it will. Because natural selection is such a beautiful idea, so appropriate to thetask, etc etc etc.
actually it isn't and I have to repeat this heare too. When Darwin was breeding pigions and thinking about domestic breeding as the model for the mechanism of evolution, meaning natural selection, he was assuming that change is change, that you coudlgogo from the poufed out chest of the pigeon to something other than a bird given enough timje, just by the continuing selection of traits as they pop up in the organism. Buut the traits he was working with are already there, they belong to the bgenome oftha tspecies. once they are there you can select for them. That woujld be true in the wild too. The traits that arleady belong to the creatioure, even new traits that turn ujp because of a new set of gene frequencies due to migration away from the orginal population, if the trait is there it is already in the genomoe itis part of the creature's geneit package . ot os wjat ,ales tjat it iw what makes that creature that creature, that species that species.
Nothing ielse is going to turn up to select from than traits that are already part of the species. Of it if does happen you have to say how it does and show how it does, you can't just assert that it does. Because how we know that each creatuer ehas its own genome. Its characteristics are all formed from bcobinations combint combinations of those traits, the genes for those traits, the alleles for those traits, that are already there.; For evolution you need something completely new and outside the creature's genome. Don't just assume mutation can accomplish that. Mutations works on what is alreayd there, it changes an existing gene, it doesn't have anythingelse to work on. Where is it going to get that something else to work on?
These are the questions the scientist, it seems to me, needs to me to be thinking about, and not just relying on a beautiful theory and calling it fact.
_Later Forgot___mention that Dawkins said he thinks the genome as it evolves would be like a palimpsest, a writing over as it were of the former information that has become irrelevant, but of course thta raises the uestionj again, the same question, where does the information come fro to create this brand new genome? How does it arise? In what incredments? At what point in the organism itself if tht is of any importance. You are getting somet completely new, right? You aren't just getting repurposed genes, and how could you anyway? Every time you mtuate a gene, you gestroy the gene's function thta preceded the mutation. You kill the old organism bit by bit if you suplant its genes with new materioal over and over and over, and you kill it even before the new geneitc code has been selected, much of which wouldn't be selected anyway , given the probabilties invovlved. Already I think it out to this imossiblity . Can Dawkins come up with a way it could work?_But he doesn't go in that direction, again he is apparently content to assume that evolution is true, that natural selection works as beautifully as he imjagines it does, so therefore it must be possible for a whole genoe to be gradually overwritten as it were by a completely new one. Far as I can see you can't even get one gene to be successful overwritten by another let alone a whole genome with all its separate chromoseomes and thousand upon thousands of tgenes, keeping those which work I suppose and acquring rprecisely the ones you need o get a brand new organism that works as well as the previous one but is a completely new creature. Isn't this ijust a cmonumnetla pip dream Mr. D?
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