Dawkins has no answer

Enter E. coli and the LTEE, an experiment that procedurally sounds very simple. What Lenski did was to found 12 populations of E. coli from two clones. Once the cultures were started, his team took part of each culture every morning and diluted it into some fresh DM25 medium, a minimal medium containing 139 µM glucose and 1.7 mM citrate. Now, E. coli loves glucose, but one of the defining characteristics of the species is that it cannot take up citrate in an aerobic environment. There is citrate inside a bacterium (as an intermediate in a metabolic pathway), and there is citrate outside the bacterium, but what is outside cannot come in. And that is how things stayed for more than 30,000 generations. A number of differences in appearance and other properties have been noted, but for a very long time the ability to eat citrate did not evolve.

Eventually, shortly after the 33,000th generation, random mutations in one of the populations gave its bacteria the ability to transport the more-plentiful citrate across their membranes. Over a very few generations, the maximum density of the cultures exploded as the bacteria gained access to the more-plentiful food source. By itself, that's pretty cool, as it represents laboratory observation of a mutation that changes a defining characteristic of a species. But this new ability also made it possible to test the importance of the previous mutations.

You see, Lenski's lab had taken samples of their E. coli every 500 generations and frozen them in glycerol at -80 °C. This sounds harsh, but this kind of deep freeze allows them to resurrect these populations for future study. And that's just what Lenski's researchers did. They pulled the samples out of deep freeze and replayed evolution for ~3700 generations for each of them, testing to see whether the ability to transport citrate under aerobic conditions evolved again.

If pre-existing context is not particularly important, one would expect that there would be some low probability of evolving citrate transport that was equal for all previous generations. On the other hand, if Gould is right, then there would be essentially no chance of evolving citrate transport for early populations, and then after some potentiating mutation occurred, a higher chance for later populations. Blount et al. show that the latter is the case. In their replays, citrate transport never evolved in populations earlier than the 20,000th generation, and only appeared regularly in replay experiments after the 30,000th generation. This would suggest that some potentiating mutation occurred before generation 20,000 that provided a genetic context in which subsequent mutations could produce citrate transport.

Obviously, one suspect for this mutation would be a change in the DNA reproduction machinery that made subsequent mutations more likely in general. It's true that some of the other populations in the LTEE had enhanced mutation rates, but not this one. A subsequent experiment tracking mutations in another gene showed no difference in mutation rate between the ancestors and the potentiated clones. So the answer is more complex. Unfortunately, the authors do not yet know exactly what mutation occurred in this time frame to potentiate citrate transport. However, our ability to examine the genes of bacteria has increased significantly since the LTEE began. Full-genome sequencing of these bacteria (now underway) should give us some powerful insights into the evolutionary history of this population.

So, would evolution play out the same way if we rewound and started again? These results suggest that it would not, and historical contingency is likely to be the case for many systems. However, it may also be true that some particular characteristics are so constrained, or confer such an enormous selective advantage, that life will take these avenues no matter what. In the case of citrate transport, the existing genetic context appears to be very significant, but generalizing this observation to other systems may not be valid. Nonetheless, Gould's point is proved even if contingency is a property of some systems. The Lenski experiment shows him to be in the right, even if it took 20 years to do it

"In the first experiment, the fly was selected for a decrease in bristles and, in the second experiment, for an increase in bristles. Starting with a parent stock averaging 36 bristles, it is possible after thirty generations to lower the average to 25 bristles, "but then the line became sterile and died out." In the second experiment, the average number of bristles were increased from 36 to 56; then sterility set in. Mayr concluded with the following observation: Obviously any drastic improvement under selection must seriously deplete the store of genetic variability . . The most frequent correlated response of one-sided selection is a drop in general fitness. This plagues virtually every breeding experiment."—*Jeremy Rifkin, Algeny (1983), p. 134.

"A review of known facts about their ability to survive has led to no other conclusion than that they [the mutated offspring] are always constitutionally weaker than their parent form or species, and in a population with free competition they are eliminated . . Therefore they are never found in nature (e.g. not a single one of the several hundred [types] of Drosophila mutation), and therefore, they are able to appear only in the favorable environment of the experimental field or laboratory."—*H. Nilsson, Synthetische Artbildng (1957), p. 1186.

All you have to do to prove me
wrong is to show me where material in this universe organizes itself
very far beyond the lowest levels of functional/informational
complexity without the existence and assistance of pre-established
complexity at that level or greater. If you do this, I will become
like you are. So far though, I have only been able to see matter
organize itself only slightly beyond its original level of functional
complexity if and only if it started out at a very low level of
complexity. Going from a higher level of complexity to a brand new
kind of function at that level or greater simply doesn't happen in
this universe.


For example, evolution can happen between 3-letter words very easily
because, although they do carry a fairly high degree of specificity,
they are coded for by a relatively short sequence of letters. This
creates a ratio of meaningful vs. meaningless of about 1 in 7
potential 3-letter words in the English language system. But what if
the minimum sequence requirement for a particular function was
7-letters? Now the ratio of all 7-letter sequences to include 1, 2,
3, 4, 5, and 6 letter words is around 1 in 250,000. Getting from one
meaningful 7-letter phrase to a different meaningful 7-letter phrase
requires, on average, a fairly long random walk through 250,000
meaningless options. The evolution between 7-letter phrases slows
down significantly when compared to the evolution between 3-letter
phrases.


Just try a little experiment yourself. Start with a short 2 or
3-letter word and see how many words you can evolve that require
greater and greater minimum sequence requirements. No doubt you will
quickly find yourself coming to walls of meaningless or non-beneficial
potential options that separate you from every other meaningful and
beneficial option. Now, the only way to get to a new meaningful much
less beneficial option is to cross the meaningless/non-beneficial gap
of separation. Random walk is all that you have to cross such a gap
and that is a big big problem (Genetic evolution works the very same
way).


Without some sort of outside pre-established guidance, such a random
walk quickly works itself into the trillions upon trillions of years
of average time at fairly low levels of specified complexity. Natural
selection is no help here since nature cannot tell the difference
between equally non-meaningful/non-beneficial options. Nature only
recognizes meaningful changes in the function or expressed information
content of a change in the code that caries that information. Such a
process of random evolution has even been given a name called,
"Neutral Evolution". Again, the problem is that neutral evolution
doesn't make new functions; it only makes new meaningless phrases.



Be the reality an all-powerful eternal God or
an all-powerful, eternal, mindless Quantum Vacuum, both concepts are
completely beyond human understanding

No they are not. The QV is a theoretically sound physical manifestation of
well known physical phenomena. Just because you personally do not understand
it does not mean it is unknowable or mysterious.



No one understands how QV could have created the big bang. It isn't
even a testable hypothesis much less a theory of origins. Certainly
you cannot explain this concept nor can you propose any other purely
natural non-intelligent process to explain what we see in this
universe.

Again, there are only two options: An Eternal Pre-existing Creative
Intelligence vs. All Other Non-intelligent Creative Processes.


So far, the evidence is clearly in favor of the intelligent design
option for everything in this universe because the other option simply
has no evidence beyond the very lowest levels of
functional/informational complexity. Many people confuse chaos with
complexity here, but this is not the form of complexity that I am
talking about in the present sense. Informational complexity is far
different from chaos or chaotic complexity. Again, informational
complexity simply does not come about beyond the lowest levels of
complexity without the input of pre-established informational
complexity that is at or above the level of complexity found within a
newly formed system of complexity.


That is how we can tell if something was intelligently designed or
not. The detection of intelligent activity is dependent upon two
things. In order to detect intelligence one must first be aware of
the potential of intelligence at a certain level or beyond. But, this
knowledge alone is not enough to clearly detect the workings of
intelligence. For example, if I were to go out to the desert around
where I live and find an amorphous rock on the ground, could I
automatically and reasonable assume intelligent design as the origin
for the form of this rock? Certainly not even though it could have
been intelligently and deliberately formed. Certainly its form is not
beyond the abilities of human intelligence to create - right?
However, I also know that its form is not beyond the abilities of
mindless non-deliberate processes to create as well. So, in order to
detect the workings of high intelligence without a doubt, I must not
only know the potential of such levels of intelligence, I must also
have some idea of the limits of mindless non-directed non-intelligent
processes.


For example, if I walk by a house in the morning and find a window
broken I can rationally assume either a mindless or mindful cause for
that broken window as both processes could give rise to such a
phenomenon. However, if I were to walk by this same house in the
evening and find that this window had been fixed, could I rationally
assume anything other than a mindful cause?


The same is true of any other phenomenon. If a given phenomenon goes
significantly beyond anything that any mindless processes has ever
done without the input of higher pre-established information in the
form of a mind or pre-established order, I can effectively rule out a
mindless cause for its origin. Then, since a mindful cause can indeed
explain many phenomena that mindless causes cannot explain, it is
perfectly reasonable to invoke a mindful cause as involved with the
production of such phenomena.



- "beyond searching out". And
yet, one of these concepts must in fact be true. Even though we
ultimately cannot understand how we came to be, we can in fact see
evidence that supports one of these two options.

As I noted before, our universe is indeed so perfectly balanced


If it's so "perfectly balanced" how come SETI still hasn't found another
intelligent life form? If it were "perfectly balanced" for life, we should
be swimming in alien monsters. If it is so "perfectly balanced" how come
only one out of tens of millions of species to have lived on the earth is
"intelligent"? Life on earth is believed to have begun about 3.6 bya, less
than 1 billion years after the earth formed. On the other planets, which are
all just as old as the earth, there does not seem to be any life, nor is
there good reason to believe that there ever was life. Earth forms, bam!,
there's life, but nada on all the other planets after all this time.



That is because life simply does not evolve without a higher
intelligence or order creating it. Life doesn't exist on the very
very few other planets that we have been able to explore because it
wasn't created there like it was created here. It is as simple as
that. . groups.google.com...