Re: Shall we get rid of our junk?



Larry Moran wrote:-

> Most of the current "controversy" comes from hard-core
> adaptationists. They just can't accept the idea that a large amount
> of evolution may not be due to natural selection. It goes against
> everything that they stand for so they make up just-so stories
> to explain the selective advantage of junk DNA. (Or, they claim
> that there's some secret selective advantage that we haven't yet
> discovered after 35 years of looking.)

JE:-
The above represents Dr Moran's favorite straw man. So called "hard-core
Adaptationists" have absolutely no problem accepting that large amounts of
heritable variation are produced by just random processes such as mutation
or random sampling error. What they violently object to is calling any of
this random variation "evolution" because it utterly destroys the necessary
and critical separation of heritable random variation from non random
evolution reducing testable evolutionary theory to just a non testable
dictate, i.e. to the status of witchcraft. If any random change can validly
constitute evolution in its own right without the non random process of
natural selection being required to act then evolution becomes reduced to
just irrefutable nonsense. Evolution is any NON random gene frequency change
is a deme and most definitely not "any gene frequency change in a deme".

Because Moran et al still refuse to separate random from non random (where
this separation has always been basic to the sciences) they cannot
distinguish refutable patterns of 100% NON random evolution from non
refutable patterns of random variation repeating the error of the early
mutationists. For a while they disastrously replaced non random Darwinian
evolution by natural selection with their brave new world of evolution via
random mutation after Muller's discovery of the process of mutation. It
seems history keeps repeating itself (at public expense).

Regards,

John Edser
Independent Researcher

edser@xxxxxxxxxx






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