Darwinism Cannot Explain The Peacock

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.

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.

Who cares? Gravity would work the same way if a poet or a pig farmer wrote the equations. Einstein was a patent clerk, does that mean government bureaucrats discovered relativity? (this in the days when scientist were called scientists and everything)

Your argument is inane. I don't care what Galileo or Newton were called during their lifetimes. If they used the scientific method to explore how things worked, I can use today's language to say that they were scientists.Alternatively one could note that you need not be recognized as a scientist to conduct scientific investigations.

Or patent clerk. *I guess we should keep our day jobs.Edited by 1.61803, : added *

Hi, Arriba. Again, the control group was captured. The study began with 11 experimental males and 11 control males. Most of the control males did not lek or mate, so they included data from males outside of the original study design to serve as additional controls. These males were not captured over the winter, but they had been captured in previous winters, and the data collected over those previous years showed that capture during the winter had no effect on mating success in the subsequent mating season. Dakin's group also included a meta-analysis of all studies done on eyespot number in feral peafowl populations. In this analysis, it was concluded that natural variation in eyespot number had no impact on female preference; but, deviation from the natural range in eyespot number did impact female preference.Interestingly, the natural range of variation seems to be largely due to damage, rather than to genetics. So, selection on that scale would not be meaningful for evolution, anyway. You mean you haven't even read the papers yet!?I have access to all the articles listed via institutional subscriptions, and I've read them all except Petrie's rebuttal. Good grief! I didn't realize I was so desperate to procrastinate writing my dissertation! Now I feel guilty.Did you at least read Takahashi et al. (2008), before lauding it as a grand refutation of Darwin's peacock hypothesis? Petrie is listed as the second of four authors on that manuscript. In my experience, that means she was neither the mastermind (last author) nor the actual writer (first author) of the paper, but an invited co-author. But, maybe bird people do that differently from bug people.Still, you're reading too much into it, which is a bad sign.
Admittedly, my choice of procrastination fodder might also be a bad sign, so perhaps it's time for me to drop it and get back to my work.

You're kidding, right? You accidentally posted that here instead of the Humour forum, didn't you? You can't be seriously suggesting that something doesn't exist until it's defined in the dictionary.Newton and Galileo were scientists because they did science. It doesn't matter what they were called.

And before that the term was "cultivators of science". That has to be the stupidest argument I have heard in a long time.

And yet it falls to me to point out that Ioannidis was describing data-mining, and to you to be wrong about it.But this is by-the-by. My point, which you have not attempted to dispute, is that Ioannidis' figure was calculated, whereas your figure for P(H) was simply made up to reflect your biases. As I have pointed out, the study of mathematics does not include a study of your personal prejudices. Mathematicians are not interested in how biased you are, even if you quantify it.

Also, we know for a fact that he wasn't a vertebrate, since that word was only added to the dictionary in 1826.You silly little man.

I think you are solidly missing the point.We have a test (let’s forget about HIV for a second) that tests for a disease. Let’s call it test A.We know this test is 99.5 percent accurate because we’ve compared it against another test (let’s call it test B) and it agrees with it 99.5 percent of the time in controlled clinical trials.But how do we know test B is accurate? I suppose you tested that test against test C, which was in turn validated against test D, and that was validated against test E, ad infinitum.That’s what we call an infinite regress.Nor does your logic eliminate the possibility of false positives being reported. We can imagine a researcher who is investigating some 300 medications to see which ones are effective against a certain ailment. In reality none of them are effective. Yet he will still find that, on average, 15 will reach a 95 percent confidence level on by chance alone. If some or all of those get published then he will have a method that is 95 percent effective yet published results that are 100 percent wrong.

You said, If it is deleterious it will be selected against.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.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.

Ok, as you’ve said, Einstein was a patent clerk. Yet you decided to give the credit for his invention to science, as opposed to Judaism, or Deism, or the patent office. You have made no justification for this. Why should I accept it?

First of all, there is no such thing as the scientific method.If you are referring to hypothetico-deductive reasoning, that was invented by William Whewell, who is the same guy who decided upon the word scientist.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. In fact, it’s not empirical at all. Yet you choose to give science the credit. Why is that?

As you said yourself, variation in eyespots is invariably due to damage.Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that we are living some 50 years ago and we capture an ex-Nazi concentration camp director. While we are speaking to him he informs us that he has proved that Jews have big noses because of sexual selection.While we carefully suppress our doubts even that Jews have big noses, we ask for more details and he reveals his experiment.Step 1. He divides the male Jews into two groups.
Step 2. He amputates the noses of half of the male Jews.
Step 3. He observes their reproductive success.
Step 4. When enough control group Jews don’t mate he takes Jews from a different concentration camp.
Step 5. Noting that those with amputated noses have less reproductive success when compared to those from the other concentration camp, he feels convinced that he has proved his theory of sexual selection.Question to you: Are you convinced? I’m not. If you don’t find that method convincing then why do you think mutilated peacocks prove sexual selection in peacocks?