No amount of research can corroborate the ultimate source of every beneficial mutation involved in the process of evolution.
Why? Unless we develop some sort of time-travel I don't know that we'll ever be able to specifically document every instance of beneficial mutation, but the process is conceptually valid, as made predictions which have been substantiated and still holds true. Why can the theory not explain how we've arrived at this point over billions of years of evolutionary development?
I admit that my wording was a bit flippant, but what I am questioning is the bland presumption that any amount of the highly complex and specific complexity found in life forms, and particularly in human life, can have been generated by the crude natural selection process based on random mutations.
Bland presumption? Quite apart from that rather judgemental 'bland' - there is nothing 'bland' about the simultaneous simplicity of the mechanism and vast wealth of variety that it produces - I reiterate that this is not a presumption. It's a deduction from the available evidence, which has been supported by one of the most comprehensive and rigorous sets of evidence that we have in the scientific communities. Natural selection, as a process, is not 'crude' - it's simple, but given that it can produce not only a human species capable of causing long term climatoligical changes on a planetary scale, but also communicable bacteria that could potentially wipe out that human species in a matter of weeks, it is far from 'crude'.
Is there no limit to what can be achieved by such a "trial and error" methodology?
In the short term, innumerable limits. In the long-term, who knows?
It is not that I do not like the outcome, it is a question of realistic probability.
If you want to revert to probability then you need to show your working, but I already suspect that whilst you might have an accurate grasp of the chances of a neutral or beneficial mutation occuring in any particular reproductive cycle, I suspect that you vastly underestimate the number of those reproductive cycles that occur over the billions of years that we're considering.
There has to be a finite number of possible mutations, and there is a finite time over which the selection process can take place.
There have been a finite number of mutations take place, from a larger (but, yes, still finite) set of potential mutations. Yes there is finite time - consider, though, that bacteria reproduce in some instances on an hourly basis. Over 3.7 billion years that's an unfathomable number of opportunities for one bacterium, but now we have to consider billions of bacteria of each species. Billions of years of billions of hours for billions of species... People are exceptionally poor at comprehending very large numbers, and at intuiting chance, and combining the two is just a recipe for mistakes.
It is not possible to get realistic probabilities for it all to happen through random unguided events, but we can speculate on how feasible such a scenario would be. I know of several highly qualified scientists who have had the courage to raise such questions - and had to suffer unwarranted ridicule and character assassination for doing so.
You've just explained why. You can't claim that you're doing science if your premise is 'I don't have the data to support this personal incredulity'. They can be eminent scientists as much as they like, but that stops when they stop doing science, at which point they're just as fallible as the rest of us.
It is a valid question.
It is, yes. But when the answer is 'there's nothing to suggest that the established explanation is wrong' your response is to believe that your intuition trumps centuries of parallel research by thousands of the most rigorously fact-checked scientists across the world.
Surely the demonstration of our ability to have conscious control of our thought processes lies with the outcome.
Surely the demonstration of the limitations of human self-awareness show that your 'demonstration' is at best questionable. The unavoidable subjective understanding of our own experience is an unreliable indicator, and when it's objectively studied it is only shown consistently to become even less reliable.
It is a mystery to me how anyone can presume that their ability to contemplate facts and draw validated conclusions can all occur in their subconscious without any form of conscious control.
Again, it's not a presumption, there are studies of brain activity that show the sequence events happen in, there are logical considerations that show thoughts have to emerge into the concsiousness from somewhere. Consciousness is a response to stimuli, not some unmoved mover.
Even this act of presumption would have to be consciously driven.
I tried hard to find one word in that sentence that I could support, and I think I can accept that it's an act. Presumption, consciously and driven are all unwarranted, and I can't even support your use of 'even' to try to undermine any potential counter. You can't merely assert that something 'has' to be, you have to logically demonstrate it, and your entire attempt always winds back to 'there is this rational explanation that I can't find a logical hole in so I have to just fall back on the fact that I have personal incredulity'.
I cannot 'prove' beyond all doubt that consciousness is an entirely material, physical process, just as I cannot prove that evolution is entirely unguided by some supernatural entity. However, science has adequately demonstrated, and repeatedly verified the conclusion, that both of those concepts are entirely plausible and consistent with the available evidence, and you not being able to accept that isn't sufficient to throw science out the window.
O.
