Real Science Friday: ReMine on the Origin of Sexual Reproduction

[Jefferson]

ReMine on the Origin of Sexual Reproduction

This is the show from Friday, July 27th 2012.

SUMMARY:


Photo: Trudy Wilkerson

* RSF Interviews Walter ReMine Pt. 3: The origin of sexual reproduction is inexplicable to Darwinists. Real Science Friday's Bob Enyart and Fred Williams interview electrical engineer and information expert Walter ReMine to show the failures in evolution theory. ReMine's classic book, The Biotic Message, includes a discussion of the "crisis" admitted by leading Darwinists who lament that after 150 years of trying, evolutionists have been unable to even theoretically explain the origin of sexual reproduction.

* ReMine Quotes Dawkins: "Sexual reproduction is analogous to a roulette game in which the player throws away half his chips at each spin. ...the existence of sexual reproduction really is a huge paradox."

* ReMine Quotes Kitcher: "One problem is the existence of sex. ... Despite some ingenious suggestions by orthodox Darwinians there is no convincing Darwinian history for the emergence of sexual reproduction."



* ReMine Quotes Smith: "The origin of the sexual process remains one of the most difficult problems in biology."

* ReMine Quotes Michod and Levin: "A survey of evolution biologists would doubtless come up with a consensus that... the origin and maintenance of sex is a 'big' (maybe the 'biggest') unsolved problem in evolutionary biology. ...there is no consensus about where its solution lies. ...no clear solution emerges."

* Levels, Levels, What Level's Selected?: Charles Darwin proposed that if the individual organism was more fit, then natural selection would "select" that individual to help mold future generations. But as evolutionary thought continues to run into brick walls with its naive mechanisms, the theory becomes increasingly complex and convoluted. Today, rather than Darwin's naive natural selection working on the most fit individuals, evolutionists claim that contrary methods of selection work by selecting gene selection, individual selection, kin selection, species selection, group selection, truncation selection, and even clade selection.



* Neutral Evolution vs. Adaptive Evolution: Because adaptive evolution must be spurred on by beneficial mutations, the cost of substitution is extremely high and imposes a severe speed limit on the growth of a new trait among a population. This problem was named after one of the world's most famous evolutionists who first identified it: Haldane's Dilemma. To get around this problem, it is claimed that most evolution is not adaptive, but merely neutral. Here's Bob Enyart's attempt to explain why neutral evolution could occur more quickly than adaptive evolution:

"To get ten mutations that are neutral on one chromosome would require about ten or more mutations. But because of the miniscule percentage of mutations that are beneficial, to get ten beneficial mutations on one chromosome might require 10,000 or 10 million mutations. Yet as admitted by all sides, that much random change would destroy the organism. So, only neutral mutations can propagate quickly, because theoretically they could all occur on one small stretch of DNA and could therefore all be inherited together. The problem for Darwinism, however, is that neutral mutations would waver between being beneficial and being harmful, and thus they ultimately increase the cost of substitution. Therefore, they do not get around Haldane's Dilemma."

* RSF's Dinosaur Soft Tissue Page Constantly Updated: Our DinosaurSoftTissue.com single page is the web's most complete catalog of peer-reviewed journal papers confirming the existence of original biological tissue from dinosaurs! Since last week, there's now more in the Carbon 14 section of the page to explain why the presence of 14C, which decays in only thousands of years and not millions, is powerful and as-yet unanswered evidence for the "Jurassic Era" being only thousands of years ago!



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[Alate_One]

Yes you can keep quoting "evolutionists" (really quote mining) and ignore the mountain of actual experiments done on the origin and maintenance of sexual reproduction.

It's a complex issue certainly, but pretending the scientists are clueless about it is simply wrong.

Here's a review from 1990 explaining the maintenance of sex as a defense against parasites.

Then there's the wiki article which if simply filled with references to scientific articles.

 

[The Barbarian]

RSF Interviews Walter ReMine Pt. 3: The origin of sexual reproduction is inexplicable to Darwinists. Real Science Friday's Bob Enyart and Fred Williams interview electrical engineer and information expert Walter ReMine to show the failures in evolution theory.

An electrical engineer. How biological.

ReMine's classic book, The Biotic Message, includes a discussion of the "crisis" admitted by leading Darwinists who lament that after 150 years of trying, evolutionists have been unable to even theoretically explain the origin of sexual reproduction.

It's not much of a mystery. Sex first appears as a simple conjugation of prokaryotes. They exchange bits of DNA and separate.

It's an optional thing, not necessary for reproduction, but in changing environments, it's pretty useful, as it increases variation. It's partially how antibiotic resistance spreads, and it's the way that the nylon gene, once evolved, was so quickly spread among bacteria.

So that's not an issue. Sex, in many environments, increases variation and thereby the survival of the population. Why it evolved isn't at issue.

Mathematically, it's a little hard to say why it's so often an obligate process (mostly in animals). But of course, what we don't know isn't evidence that there's nothing to know.

Many invertebrates retain sex as an optional form of reproduction and can reproduce in other ways. Even some vertebrates reproduce asexually.

Remine doesn't know much about biology, if he's unaware of all these facts.

And since information theory is used routinely by population geneticists, it seems he doesn't know much about they way information applies to biology.

Claude Shannon founded information theory in the 1940s. The theory has long been known to be closely related to thermodynamics and physics through the similarity of Shannon's uncertainty measure to the entropy function. Recent work using information theory to understand molecular biology has unearthed a curious fact: Shannon's channel capacity theorem only applies to living organisms and their products, such as communications channels and molecular machines that make choices from several possibilities. Information theory is therefore a theory about biology, and Shannon was a biologist.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1538977/

Some of the ways information theory can explain evolutionary processes in biological systems can be found here:
http://www.ccrnp.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/

(quote mining deleted)

Let's deal in facts this time.

 

[Stripe]

Yes you can keep quoting "evolutionists" (really quote mining) and ignore the mountain of actual experiments done on the origin and maintenance of sexual reproduction.

And you can not listen to the show and comment upon it like you have.

It's a complex issue certainly, but pretending the scientists are clueless about it is simply wrong.

Get back to us when you've listened to the comments made in the show. :up:

Here's a review from 1990 explaining the maintenance of sex as a defense against parasites.

:chuckle:

Then there's the wiki article which if simply filled with references to scientific articles.

And here's a link where you can get all the well-researched responses.

An electrical engineer. How biological.

A logical fallacy. How evolutionary.

It's not much of a mystery. Sex first appears as a simple conjugation of prokaryotes. They exchange bits of DNA and separate.

Please explain your use of the simple present tense.

It's an optional thing, not necessary for reproduction, but in changing environments, it's pretty useful, as it increases variation. It's partially how antibiotic resistance spreads, and it's the way that the nylon gene, once evolved, was so quickly spread among bacteria.

Another one who didn't bother to listen to that which he wants to dismiss without consideration. :chuckle:

Why it evolved isn't at issue.

:rotfl:

Right you are. Because it didn't evolve.

Mathematically, it's a little hard to say why it's so often an obligate process (mostly in animals). But of course, what we don't know isn't evidence that there's nothing to know.

Barbarian neglects, of course, to explain his math. :chuckle:

Remine doesn't know much about biology, if he's unaware of all these facts.

More logical fallacies.

Let's deal in facts this time.

Wake us up when you're willing to talk some.

Relevant ones, of course.