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Author | Topic: Wright et al. on the Process of Mutation | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
zi ko Member (Idle past 3620 days) Posts: 578 Joined: |
You apparently do not require evidence for what you believe. You only require that you want to believe it, at which point you construct a rationale that makes sense to you but whose illogic is apparent to everyone else. As Feynman said, the easiest person to fool is yourself.
At least i am honest to state that what i am saying about innate intelligent is without evidence, while you believe man has been created by pure chance, again with no evidence whatsoever. Which of us two seem to fool himself more?
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Taq Member Posts: 9973 Joined: Member Rating: 5.7 |
while you believe man has been created by pure chance, Where did Percy ever say that?
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Percy Member Posts: 22392 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
zi ko writes: At least i am honest to state that what i am saying about innate intelligent is without evidence, while you believe man has been created by pure chance, again with no evidence whatsoever. So you understand that your thinking is fallacious, but you justify it because you believe my thinking is also fallacious. Well, all I've got to say is thank God two wrongs make a right. Oh, wait a minute, they don't.
Which of us two seem to fool himself more? Well, apparently you're not fooling yourself about your fallacious thinking, since you understand it's fallacious, but you are fooling yourself about what I believe. I don't believe man was created by pure chance. I believe all life on Earth came about through a lengthy process of mutation, remixing and recombining of variation, and natural selection. You seem to be having a difficult time understanding that natural selection is not random. It isn't directed, there's no goal, but it is certainly not random. Do you have anything to say about the topic? --Percy
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shadow71 Member (Idle past 2934 days) Posts: 706 From: Joliet, il, USA Joined: |
Percy writes:
I don't believe man was created by pure chance. I believe all life on Earth came about through a lengthy process of mutation, remixing and recombining of variation, and natural selection. You seem to be having a difficult time understanding that natural selection is not random. It isn't directed, there's no goal, but it is certainly not random. First of all, how did Life on Earth come about?How did this lengthy process of mutation begin? What exactly is your definiltion of Natural Selection? Did natural selection just happen? What is your defintion of "natural"? Did nature just come into being? You can't just say, well that is not a question for Evolution. It is the most crucial question there is. Please show me the "DATA" for the statement:
Percy writes:
You seem to be having a difficult time understanding that natural selection is not random. It isn't directed, there's no goal, but it is certainly not random. Thats a belief isn't it Percy? It's your faith in Nature.
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Percy Member Posts: 22392 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
shadow71 writes: First of all, how did Life on Earth come about?...etc... Could you at least pretend to be interested in the topic?
You can't just say, well that is not a question for Evolution. It is the most crucial question there is. Well, then why are you wasting time in this thread? Get over to Proposed New Topics and propose a new thread for this most crucial question. --Percy Edited by Percy, : Grammar.
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zi ko Member (Idle past 3620 days) Posts: 578 Joined: |
Look up the term "conflation". This is what you are doing here. Again and again we have said that MUTATIONS are random with respect to fitness. Nowhere do we say that EVOLUTION is random. Mutation and evolution are two different things. Mutation is just one mechanism within the larger process of evolution. This larger process also consists of natural SELECTION. Selection, by the very definition, is NOT RANDOM.
I understand that current theory has a (superficially ?) powered logical form for evolution entirely mechanistic and simple: Random mutations- natural selection and we have solved the problem of life evolution. But there are some nags here.fe.c 1.The number of random mutations needed for a succesfull phenotype or genotype advance. Mathematicians think they are needed many more than the given time permits (even millions of years). 2.The instinct formation.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Percy Member Posts: 22392 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
Hi Zi Ko,
This thread is about whether the Wright paper presents evidence of directed evolution. The sufficiency of mutation to provide adequate variation and the evolution of instinct are not the topic of this thread. You and Shadow have raised many off-topic issues and questions, and you can discuss them as much as you like, but you need to find threads where they would be on-topic, or you need to propose topics for them over at Proposed New Topics. --Percy
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Taq Member Posts: 9973 Joined: Member Rating: 5.7 |
I understand that current theory has a (superficially ?) powered logical form for evolution entirely mechanistic and simple: Random mutations- natural selection and we have solved the problem of life evolution. But there are some nags here.fe.c 1.The number of random mutations needed for a succesfull phenotype or genotype advance. Mathematicians think they are needed many more than the given time permits (even millions of years). 2.The instinct formation. Two things: 1. This has nothing to do with this thread. This thread is focusing on a single paper, and how the data demonstrates the randomness of mutations (not evolution). 2. You have not acknowledged the mistakes that I have pointed out. You keep saying that evolution is random. It isn't. Trying to change the subject does not make this mistake go away.
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Kaichos Man Member (Idle past 4488 days) Posts: 250 From: Tasmania, Australia Joined: |
Hi Percy.
This is off-topic, but you lead me here, so mea non culpa.
thank God two wrongs make a right. Oh, wait a minute, they don't. No, but three can. You are meant to turn right, in stead you turn left. Three times. You're going right. Okay, that's frivolous but I'm just warming up.
I don't believe man was created by pure chance. I believe all life on Earth came about through a lengthy process of mutation, remixing and recombining of variation, and natural selection. So although mutation, remixing and recombination are clearly random, natural selection isn't?
...natural selection is not random. It isn't directed, there's no goal, but it is certainly not random. But surely the conditions bringing about selection are random. Heat, cold, wet, dry, plentiful food, little food, intense competition, little competition, intense predation, little predation- the list is endless. If the conditions deciding selection are random, how can selection itself not be random? Are you seriously suggesting that a random cause can have a non-random effect? And of course, the longer we make that list of random causes, the more obvious it becomes that selective fitness can best be described as ...luck. Which, at the risk of annoying you, brings us back to the position of our old mate Kimura."When man loses God, he does not believe in nothing. He believes in anything" G.K. Chesterton
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Percy Member Posts: 22392 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
Hi Kaichos Man,
Your position is that evolution could not possibly produce adaptation to the environment because it is random. But it is only mutation and allele remixing that are random. Selection is specific to the environment. AbE: I should add that mutation is usually completely random with respect to producing adaptations to the environment, while remixing through either non-sexual conjugation or sexual reproduction is operating on alleles that have already passed through generations of selection. --Percy Edited by Percy, : AbE.
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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
But surely the conditions bringing about selection are random. Heat, cold, wet, dry, plentiful food, little food, intense competition, little competition, intense predation, little predation- the list is endless. Hi Kaichos Man, What you have produced here is a list of variables (temperature, humidity, predation, food supply), can you provide us with your rationale for considering them all to be random variables? I'm a bit worried about where you must live that all of these factors are random from day to day. I have to say that I have yet to encounter a pride of lions coming down the street so little predation is pretty consistently the norm round my way. It must be hell going out without any idea of whether you are going to find a desert or a flood outside your door, but I guess it is only to be expected in a world where a capricious god turns the weather on and off at whim regardless of the natural order of the world.
Which, at the risk of annoying you, brings us back to the position of our old mate Kimura. It so totally doesn't, at least not in relation to any position that Kimura actually held. His position as a popular source of misconceptions for creationists, perhaps. TTFN, WK
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 284 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Which, at the risk of annoying you, brings us back to the position of our old mate Kimura. Really? Glad you could join us.
Although much progress has been made in biology since Darwin's time, his theory of natural selection still remains as the only scientifically acceptable theory to explain why organisms are so well adapted to their environments. (Kimura, The neutral theory of molecular evolution, Chapter 6) We cherish Darwin for we owe to him our enlightened view of the nature of living things, including ourselves; our civilization would be pitifully immature without the intellectual revolution led by Darwin. (Kimura, The neutral theory of molecular evolution, Chapter 1) So if you've really come round to "the position of our old mate Kimura", let me be the very first to congratulate you.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 284 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
But surely the conditions bringing about selection are random. Heat, cold, wet, dry, plentiful food, little food, intense competition, little competition, intense predation, little predation- the list is endless. For example, in the Arctic Circle, the snow is sometimes hot and sometimes cold, sometimes black and sometimes white. So why are polar bears all white and well-insulated? Clearly natural selection has nothing to do with it, so it must be the will of God. Or rather the whim of God, since he could just as well have made them black and naked, and that would have fitted them just as well or badly to their ever-changing environment.
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Taq Member Posts: 9973 Joined: Member Rating: 5.7 |
So although mutation, remixing and recombination are clearly random, natural selection isn't? Nope, it isn't. Let's use the Wright et al. paper as our example since it is the topic of this thread. In this study they consistently ended up with colonies of bacteria with a specific mutation in the leuB gene. This mutation only occurred once very 500 million cell divisions, and yet those 1 in 500 million oddballs were the only ones growing on the plate every time. The other 499,999,999 bacteria did not grow on that plate. Obviously, you can not get this consistent result with a random process.
But surely the conditions bringing about selection are random. Random with respect to what?
If the conditions deciding selection are random, how can selection itself not be random? Natural selection is not random with respect to fitness. The most fit individuals within a population have a higher probability of passing on their genes.
Are you seriously suggesting that a random cause can have a non-random effect? Are you saying it can't? If you randomly add antibiotics to random bacterial cultures you still get non-random selection of antibiotic resistant mutants.
And of course, the longer we make that list of random causes, the more obvious it becomes that selective fitness can best be described as ...luck. It is best described as being fitter and therefore having a higher probability of passing on your genes.
Which, at the risk of annoying you, brings us back to the position of our old mate Kimura. You mean the guy who described the random nature of neutral mutations compared to the non-random nature of mutations under selection? ABE:
[quote]The neutral theory asserts that the great majority of evolutionary changes at the molecular level, as revealed by comparative studies of protein and DNA sequences, are caused not by Darwinian selection but by random drive of selectively neutral or nearly neutral mutants. The theory does not deny the role of natural selection in determining the course of adaptive evolution, but it assumes that only a minute fraction of DNA changes in evolution are adapative in nature, while the great majority of phenotypically silent molecular substitutions exert no significant influence on survival and reproduction and drift randomly throught he species--Kimura, (not sure on the specific source for this since I am pulling it from a Google Books preview of a secondary source). Edited by Taq, : No reason given.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 284 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
The neutral theory asserts that the great majority of evolutionary changes at the molecular level, as revealed by comparative studies of protein and DNA sequences, are caused not by Darwinian selection but by random drive of selectively neutral or nearly neutral mutants. The theory does not deny the role of natural selection in determining the course of adaptive evolution, but it assumes that only a minute fraction of DNA changes in evolution are adapative in nature, while the great majority of phenotypically silent molecular substitutions exert no significant influence on survival and reproduction and drift randomly throught he species--Kimura, (not sure on the specific source for this since I am pulling it from a Google Books preview of a secondary source). It's the first paragraph of the Introduction to The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution. I guess when Kaichos Man was studying up on Kimura's ideas, he didn't get quite that far through the book. Indeed, he must not have gotten all the way through the Preface, where he'd have read: "[Darwin's] theory of evolution by natural selection has been the great unifying principle of biology." Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
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