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Author Topic:   Darwinism Cannot Explain The Peacock
Taq
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Posts: 9970
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.6


Message 4 of 165 (688783)
01-25-2013 11:39 AM


My first reaction is to ask how successful peacocks are when they have no train at all. Any numbers on that?

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Taq
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Posts: 9970
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.6


Message 10 of 165 (688793)
01-25-2013 12:36 PM
Reply to: Message 7 by Bolder-dash
01-25-2013 12:15 PM


Re: The story is not complete.
In other words, if you posses a trait which makes you appear more fit, regardless of whether or not it ACTUALLY made you more fit, or if it even made you less fit, but it can fool people, you will pass on that fake fitness indicator.
This trait would be outcompeted by another trait that produced the same display but did not lower fitness in other areas.

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Taq
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Posts: 9970
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.6


Message 15 of 165 (688800)
01-25-2013 1:03 PM
Reply to: Message 14 by Bolder-dash
01-25-2013 1:00 PM


Re: The story is not complete.
Peacocks seem to believe otherwise.
How so?

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Taq
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Posts: 9970
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.6


Message 20 of 165 (688806)
01-25-2013 3:03 PM
Reply to: Message 16 by Bolder-dash
01-25-2013 1:07 PM


Re: The story is not complete.
You can claim that any trait which is better suited for fitness will get passed on, but then if one asks why peacock trains would get passed on, you will say, well, because obviously it must be better suited for fitness.
If a trait reduces the reproductive success of those carrying it then it would disappear from the population. This is simple logic.

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Taq
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Posts: 9970
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.6


(3)
Message 101 of 165 (689425)
01-30-2013 4:16 PM
Reply to: Message 65 by Arriba
01-28-2013 1:08 PM


Re: The story is not complete.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the effect, he said. But the worst part was that when I submitted these null results I had difficulty getting them published. The journals only wanted confirming data.
This is actually one aspect of peer reviewed journals that many scientists have complained about. What we really need are journals that publish just negative results. Sadly, a lot of labs follow the same dead-ends because no one publishes failed hypotheses. There are a few papers that do get published based on negative results, but these are usually related to long standing hypotheses such as sexual selection in peacocks.
Personally I feel that this example is very relevant because it is about what we are talking about: Sexual selection and its supposed confirmation. Sure it gets confirmed - because of selection, reporting, and publishing bias. So what does that prove except that scientists are very good at finding the results they want/need to find? Little by little other studies that confirm it but with lesser and lesser strength will appear until the purported effect will only exist as a myth in the minds of militant evolutionary apologists in debate forums such as this one.
And yet you are able to point to published papers that challenge the perception that every feature of the peacock train is under sexual selection. So much for that bias.
Natural selection is, at best, a tautology. Anyone can state that the fittest will survive as long as you can define what "fit" means after you know who does and does not survive.
As algebra demonstrates, tautologies can still be true. Want to find out who owns the fastest car? Then allow them to race each other and see who wins. Natural selection is a fact in the same way that other tautological observations are facts.
The theory part is in determining if this observed mechanisms is responsible for the biodiversity we see today. To test this idea we compare genomes and look for patterns of selection between genes and different regions of the genome. This is not tautological. We can predict what natural selection should look like when we compare genomes, and we do find that signal.
I must say, though, I admire your faith that somehow somewhere science will complete the story. It's touching in its naive simplicity.
Your faith seems to be supported by the idea that science will not find an answer.

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Taq
Member
Posts: 9970
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.6


Message 108 of 165 (689598)
02-01-2013 11:21 AM
Reply to: Message 104 by Arriba
02-01-2013 9:47 AM


Re: The story is not complete.
It's not that tautologies are often true - tautologies are always true they're just not very useful.
Are you saying that Algebra is not useful?
Scientists have found the observation of natural selection to be very useful. It allows them to detect sequences in genomes that are under selection, just as one example. Another example is SIFTER, an algorithm that uses the tautology of natural selection and speciation to determine the function of proteins:
We present a statistical graphical model to infer specific molecular function for unannotated protein sequences using homology. Based on phylogenomic principles, SIFTER (Statistical Inference of Function Through Evolutionary Relationships) accurately predicts molecular function for members of a protein family given a reconciled phylogeny and available function annotations, even when the data are sparse or noisy. Our method produced specific and consistent molecular function predictions across 100 Pfam families in comparison to the Gene Ontology annotation database, BLAST, GOtcha, and Orthostrapper. We performed a more detailed exploration of functional predictions on the adenosine-5′-monophosphate/adenosine deaminase family and the lactate/malate dehydrogenase family, in the former case comparing the predictions against a gold standard set of published functional characterizations. Given function annotations for 3% of the proteins in the deaminase family, SIFTER achieves 96% accuracy in predicting molecular function for experimentally characterized proteins as reported in the literature. The accuracy of SIFTER on this dataset is a significant improvement over other currently available methods such as BLAST (75%), GeneQuiz (64%), GOtcha (89%), and Orthostrapper (11%). We also experimentally characterized the adenosine deaminase from Plasmodium falciparum, confirming SIFTER's prediction. The results illustrate the predictive power of exploiting a statistical model of function evolution in phylogenomic problems. A software implementation of SIFTER is available from the authors.
The algorithm has a 96% success rate in predicting protein function. I would call that useful.

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Taq
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Posts: 9970
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.6


Message 110 of 165 (689602)
02-01-2013 11:28 AM
Reply to: Message 103 by Arriba
02-01-2013 9:45 AM


Re: And May God Have Mercy On Your Soul
Now let us suppose that the investigators manipulate their design, analyses, and reporting so as to make more relationships cross the p = 0.05 threshold even though this would not have been crossed with a perfectly adhered to design and analysis and with perfect comprehensive reporting of the results, strictly according to the original study plan.
I have read papers where the statistics are very strained. Those papers are not well received by the scientific community. Also, any statistical correlation will need to be followed by further research that actually demonstrates a causal link. That's how it works. It's not as if a P value of 0.05 means that scientists are forced to accept the conclusions. It merely means that the data has met the lowest standard for being considered.
Using your example, there are hundreds of thousands of potential targets for research in schizophrenia, and this assumes that there even is a genetic risk factor. So which ones do you focus on? First, you need to whittle down the numbers. That is what these studies are doing. They are looking for potential candidates for further research. The strength of these targets is predicated on the strength of the correlation.

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Taq
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Posts: 9970
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.6


Message 111 of 165 (689603)
02-01-2013 11:30 AM
Reply to: Message 105 by Arriba
02-01-2013 9:51 AM


Re: The story is not complete.
You greatly mistake the situation. If you had bothered to read the post (or been capable of understanding it) you would realize that we are saying that only one person took the exam and got a positive result. We then took a calculator and worked out the likelihood that this positive result was false and got a number well over 90 percent. Then we concluded that a test that was 99.5 percent accurate was not a panacea to all problems involving false positives.
If the test is 99.5% accurate this means that only 5 people out of 1000 who were positive for HIV tested negative, and only 5 people out of 1000 who were negative tested positive for HIV. That's what those numbers mean.

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Taq
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Posts: 9970
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.6


Message 121 of 165 (689853)
02-05-2013 10:47 AM
Reply to: Message 118 by Arriba
02-05-2013 9:04 AM


Re: The story is not complete.
Imagine that you are feeling sick and you go to a doctor. The doctor draws some blood and you see him again in a few days. He says, "We ran a bunch of tests, but everything came back negative." So you go to another doctor. He tells you the same: that he'd run some tests, and they all came back negative. The third doctor, however, tells you that you've tested positive for HIV. Now it's entirely possible that the other doctors also did a standard test for HIV and you came back negative twice but they didn't tell you. They just said they'd run some tests and they'd all come back negative. You didn't get an in-depth report on exactly what tests had been run because you didn't think that negative results were important. Well, they are important - very important.
That is not how the accuracy of the tests are determined. The ELISA test is compared against PCR tests which are the gold standard for HIV detection. This is done in controlled clinical trials.

This message is a reply to:
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Taq
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Posts: 9970
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.6


(2)
Message 122 of 165 (689855)
02-05-2013 10:52 AM
Reply to: Message 120 by Arriba
02-05-2013 9:06 AM


Re: And May God Have Mercy On Your Soul
According to evolutionary theory once, a very long time ago, peacocks had normal, small tails. However, by chance, a certain peacock had a larger, more ornate tail and the peahens just creamed their little non-existent panties for him and he had greater reproductive success. Over time and further similar incidents the peacock tail has evolved into what it is nowadays. This belief has been widely preached among the evolutionist faithful since 1859.
However, it had never been scientifically tested. Why bother? Faith should be enough for the acolytes, shouldn't it?
If it is not being selected for, why is the trait dominant in the population? If it is deleterious it will be selected against.
The fact that the trait is dominant in the poplation demonstrates that it is resulting in increased reproductive success. Now the problem is figuring out why that is.

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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Taq
Member
Posts: 9970
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.6


Message 150 of 165 (690635)
02-14-2013 6:11 PM
Reply to: Message 132 by Arriba
02-14-2013 3:00 PM


Re: And May God Have Mercy On Your Soul
Let’s talk about guinea pigs. As you may or may not know, guinea pigs used to synthesize vitamin C. Now they no longer do. In fact they must receive vitamin C supplementation or they will experience rough hair coat, lack of appetite, dental pain, delayed wound healing, lameness, and an inability to fend off infections.
Then how do they survive in the wild? How do we survive without producing our own vitamin C?
Now according to your faith in neo-Darwinism this must somehow not be deleterious because it is universal in the gene pool. I should very much like to hear your explanation as to why that is.
In the wild, guinea pigs have enough vitamin C in their diet that they no longer need to produce their own. Therefore, mutations which knockout the de novo vitamin C synthesis pathway do not affect fitness.

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Taq
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Posts: 9970
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.6


(1)
Message 151 of 165 (690636)
02-14-2013 6:23 PM
Reply to: Message 134 by Arriba
02-14-2013 3:02 PM


Re: Unprovable Postulates
First of all, there is no such thing as the scientific method.
Now you have gone into full denial mode.
Additionally, I should like to point out that Einstein came up with his theory of relativity by imagining himself riding on a beam of light. This is not part and parcel of the so-called scientific method.
I guess you are unaware of all the scientific experiments that have been done to verify the theory of relativity? Again, you appear to be in full denial mode.

This message is a reply to:
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