Does the Darwinian theory require modification or replacement?

In a court of law, attorney arguments and interpretation of data are not evidence, and the trier of fact is not to give anything the attorney says evidentiary weight.Also in a court of law, would not presenting an expert via his papers violate the Confrontation Clause?Edited by NoNukes, : Add Conf Clause

Yes, you are wrong. I'll repeat that last sentence with emphasis added by me.

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Regardless, a mechanism that limits an increase in mutation rates to genes that must mutate in order to overcome prevailing conditions of stress would surely be beneficial and therefore selected during evolution.

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Wright says that the mechanism for generating non-random mutations is beneficial. In other words, the presence of mechanisms for non-random mutations is itself a product of mutation and selection (and most likely evolution of the neo-Darwinist type). She definitely does not say that the generated mutations would be surely beneficial.You are reading a paper describing natural processes. If something "seems to saying" otherwise, you need to dig harder to be sure. I'll admit to having understood the paragraph as you did the first time I read it.

That's right. But presenting the evidence without the expert, as you are doing here, would be improper in court.My question is, why are you trying to justify yourself by appealing to courtroom procedures when you aren't even following them?

I know how you interpret it. But your interpretation is facially incorrect. Wright says, quite unambigously, that it is the mechanism for generating the non-random mutations that is clearly beneficial. She also says that most mutations are deleterious and does not disclaim that characterization for the mutations produced by her method.Wright's point is instead that the deleterious effect of mutations is limited to specific portions of the genome. This is also stated unambigously in the same paragraph. So what? The point of the paper is to propose an alternate naturalistic process and Wright clearly does propose exactly that.

I don't think shadow71 meant anything like that. He just means to wish us well until he returns.

Yes. He seems to believe that others understanding of court room procedures are on par with his own understanding of science. He isn't the only lawyer posting here.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I see your point. On the other hand given knowledge of how you feel, I think I'd find your wish more amusing than offensive. But I suspect my wife would not be amused.In any event, given shadow71's follow up, I am no longer inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on this point.

And I charge all men and women, from sea to shining sea, be they Yank, or Johnny Reb, to join me in keeping the English language safe for America. Respond to each and every use of "milliard" with "what's that about a duck?". And for shizzle, be wizzle of spell checkers that accept that goofy "our" in "or" words.It's the least we can do really until the OP returns to the thankless task of misreading science papers.

No that is not what I said and it's not what Wright said. You are simply repeating your own bogus interpretation and attributing it to me.What Wright says is that a mechanism for generating non-random mutations, where said mutations may be beneficial, neutral, or deleterious, but where said mutations are confined to particularly parts of the genome, is a beneficial mechanism and will be selected.Wright says the same thing more than once in the paper.

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Evolution depends upon events that enhance mutation rates, thus increasing the supply of variants from which the fittest are selected. Therefore, the word mechanism in the present context will refer to the circumstances affecting mutation rates.

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Get it now? The genetic engineering mechanism is a beneficial mechanism even if it generates mutations that are beneficial, neutral, or deleterious. Natural selection then cleans up.Wright is pretty clear about what non-random means. And it does not mean planned.

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By the neo-Darwinian definition, a mutation is random if it is unrelated to the metabolic function of the gene and if it occurs at a rate that is undirected by specific selective conditions of the environment.

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So non-random would mean any mutation occurring at a rate directed by the environment or a mutation at some limited portion of the genome and having at least some relation to a metabolic feature of a gene. But the mutation themselves may still be deleterious, beneficial, or neutral with respect to fitness.Even if you disagree with my interpretation of Wright, surely you can see that I don't agree with your self-serving misrepresentation of my words. Please let me know if my meaning is still unclear, or if there is some doubt about my reading of Wright. Not exactly. It's about whether it should be modified or replaced with the nonsense you propose. I doubt most of us would bother with this discussion if the question was merely whether Dr. Wright or Dr. Shapiro disagreed with other scientists.From the OP with my emphasis added. Finally, you have yet to show how this mechanism might work in higher animals. How does starvation result in mutations that make cheetahs run faster or give hawks more acute vision? Until we deal with that, then even the mechanisms you believe exist in bacteria are merely additions to current theory and not a replacement.

It's simple. Barbara Wright and Shapiro are not their papers.Assuming that we are confined to court room procedures, you cannot present lab test results identifying the white powder found on the defendant as cocaine without presenting the testing scientist for cross examination. You cannot substitute an affidavit for the testing scientist. You have to produce the scientist, and we get to ask him what he meant.Similarly, courtroom procedures will not allow you to present Wright's paper without putting Wright on the stand. That procedure, as you've acknowledged, violates the Confrontation Clause.We want to check your interpretation against what Wright actually says, but when we ask what you Wright means, we just get your interpretation. That's pretty unsatisfying partly because you are not a scientist and because you make pretty obvious mistakes in interpretation, always in your own favor.When we ask you to show us how Wright's data matches your interpretation which appears to differ from Wrights (or Shapiro's), you pretend to be using courtroom procedures and are that you are merely offering your closing statement which again is just your misinterpretation of Wright and/or Shapiro. But you admit that your closing statement is not evidence. So where is the evidence?The answer to the question "what else could I do" is show us data that indicates that the mechanisms Wright and/or Shapiro describes produce mutations that are not random with respect to fitness. I don't believe you can do that using the data in those papers, because neither author makes that claim. The attempt might be enough to force even you to notice your mistake.Of course the real problem is that you probably cannot even attempt what's been requested of you. You cannot even respond to Taq's showing that the mutations are random with respect to fitness because you don't understand the data.And that's how life works outside of the court room.Court room procedures are not necessary here. They are just a poor fit for a debate. So don't pretend you are using them when you are not even doing so.

I could not find a free copy of the paper you cited, but my impression from reading another of Zheng's papers is that Zheng is skeptical of the evidence presented for directed mutations.Here is an excerpt from his paper "Mathematical Issues Arising From the Directed Mutation Controversy"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...s/PMC1462533/pdf/12750347.pdf

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This article does not attempt to refute the directed mutation hypothesis. However, from a mathematical point of view, this article suggests that some of the evidence accumulated to date to support the directed mutation hypothesis is weaker than was originally thought and may be invalid. In summary, we have offered several conjectures to explain some of the evidence.

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As AZPaul3 has pointed out, null hypothesis does not mean what you appear to think it means. I highly doubt that you have actually read anything more than the summary of the Zheng's paper, and you've misinterpreted even that. What event might that be?

Of course your summary of Darwin's theory is completely wrong.Darwin's theory is descent with modification. Darwin does not identify a source of modification in Origin of Species. In fact, Darwin knew nothing at all about genetics. I don't think Dawin would have taken much issue with a neo-Lamarkian approach to variation.Perhaps you'd have been a bit closer to the mark if you said "modern synthesis" instead. But even modern synthesis is not the current state of the theory of the evolution. More accurately, you'll continue to misread scientific papers looking for a places to insert your personal theology. In the future, I expect you'll do it without correction from others. Your pretended reading of Zheng's work was pathetic. So now you are Einstein, toiling away in the patent office?Your ignorance of the topic of biology is a handicap and not strength. Don't you think it would have been a good idea to become familiar with the current state of evolutionary theory before beginning to insist that it was all wrong?

No one should agree that the hypothesis of random mutation is neither true or false based on this paper or its summary.What you actually said about Zheng earlier is that if Zheng is correct there may be no evidence for random mutations. Your statement was wrong, and in fact nearly backwards. Can you even acknowledge that before you shift the goal posts to demand proof rather than evidence?And apparently you still don't understand what a null hypothesis is. The null hypothesis is a test hypothesis used to show (to some degree of confidence) that your actual hypothesis (in this case directed mutation) is meaningfully demonstrated by the data. The task for the scientist is to either refute the null hypothesis (H0) or to give up on the alternative hypothesis.An accurate statement would be that if Zheng is correct, there may be little if any evidence for directed mutation. Of course to state what Zheng actually found in detail would require reading the paper, and I haven't done that.Your response regarding Qi Zheng's paper seems a bit coy. Have you read anything other than the summary of Zheng's paper? I can find the summary for free on the web. Edited by NoNukes, : remove bad subscript tags

But as I demonstrated, Zheng admitted no such thing. You simply are unable to accurately read scientific papers. Even the directed mutations that we've discussed so far are random with respect to fitness.Edited by NoNukes, : soften a bit

Nice slight of hand. But your "this scientist" reference was to Zheng and his paper and not to Cairns and "Origin of Mutants".