natural selection is wrong

Dear Syamsu,The very fact that you think that shows how little you understand. If you think that a equals b is neccessarily the same as a is greater than b then you not only don't understand evolution, you don't even understand simple maths. That isn't what I said you silly person!!!! It can be built up, but the very process of all your building up means that you are simply recapitulating the methods of natural selection. if you are using it to compare variants in terms of reproductive fitness then how have you removed the problems that you associated with the notion of comparative reproductive fitness? You don't build things up into a subset!!! And if you have an individual theory surely you must use it as many times as there are individuals in the population, noting what variant they are, and then divide by the number of the whole population. Which, strangely enough would give you a proportional figure, so you would basically be looking at the gene frequency. And to make it easier to do in practice why not take a random sample rather than the whole populatin and extrapolate from that. Any of this starting to sound strangely familiar yet?All you are doing now is reinventing the wheel. At least when you were just trying to change the language natural selection was framed in your argument made sense, I may not have agreed with it but it made sense. Now you have managed to slew your 'individual theory' round to such an extent, in order to actually be relevant to evolution, that you are simply coming up with natural selection all over again.TTFN,WKThis message has been edited by Wounded King, 06-21-2004 02:17 PMThis message has been edited by Wounded King, 06-21-2004 02:18 PM

What point would there be in me 'writing a conclusion' it would just be like the hollow declarations of victory people make before hightailing it out of a thread. What I am interested in is actually understanding the particulars of your theory. Your reluctance to get down to brass tacks and actually discuss your theory in detail and indeed to instead veer off onto further attacks on Darwin are why the dabate seems to be going round in increasingly vacuous circles. I realise that your theory is not ostensibly the topic of this thread but you are the one that opened that can of worms. We don't seem to be deviating enough to raise the mods ire though.I agree that we seem to have an unbridgeable gap as to our understandings of what the paper means, I fear people reading this thread would be best off just reading the paper and making up their own minds rather than trying to extract much from our respective diatribes.If I opened a thread specifically to discuss your theory do you think you could actually focus on discussing its methods and particulars rather than just having another bash at discrediting Darwinism?TTFN,WK

Well now I just feel like a performing seal, *arf* *arf*.

Dear Syamsu, But any natural selection story is not neccessarily now a neutral selection story. Top idea, don't you think you should have read one before you suggested it though? Do you see yet why the fact that neutral selection is part of natural selection doesn't mean that natural selection is the same as neutral selection? And that isn't how anyone suggest it is done, this is a total strawman. I have never suggested that natural selection be the starting point of all biology, I lack your arrogance. As I have pointed out before natural selection is built on a number of observations and assumptions, part of which is the sort of population dynamics that you are describing. It doesn't actually matter how many times you say it if you never bother to provide any support for the assertion. I believe this is known as the Bellman's fallacy, 'What I tell you three times must be true.' No, you have to say the 10, or a hundred or a thousand, times because they are all you have. If you actually read my counterarguments and addressed them then we might progress, but instead you just use the same point I am countering as support for itself!! Well if you do want this thread to continue why are you basically telling me to shut up and go away? Since we are basically keeping this thread going on our own at the moment, and no-one else seems interested in discussing the topic of the OP, I was just suggesting that you might actually be able discuss the merits of your own theory, and how it differs from a slightly tarted up form of population dynamics, better in a thread specifically focussed on that.You still seem to be clinging to the strawman argument that evolutionary theory hasn't changed since Darwin's time. As I have suggested to you before actually reading some modern texts on evolutionary theory might be a good place to start if you want to conduct a debate on it without looking like a complete fool. Crack open a book for pity's sake, its not going to kill you, mind you if you can't even stretch yourself to reading the references I provide when you ask for them I may be deluding myself to think you would actually read a relevant modern textbook. Perhaps you should start off light and just read the blurb on the backs of a few, or maybe the comments on Amazon.The paper argues no 'fault in natural selection,' what it argues about is the correct way to look at natural selection, i.e. not as a newtonian system of forces but as a probabilistic system. It does suggest that the approach of some evolutionary biologists is flawed by teleology, but this is a widely propounded criticism of certain approaches to evolutionary theory.TTFN,WK

In conclusion, I agree with Syamsu's conclusion that .That's about as much as I can say wihtout turning to address faults in your argument which you have asked me not to do. I look forward to having this debate with you over and over again.TTFN,WK

I don't think he's bothering anymore.

Dear Syamsu,For someone who doesn't intend to continue with this thread you still seem to be posting a lot. Any objections if I contributed to the debate?TTFN,WK

Dear Syamsu,This is of course true for all mutations, not just beneficial ones and in the case of deleterious mutations many are embryonic lethals and therefore never even truly become members of the population. The loss of under-represented alleles due to genetic drift is exactly the sort of statistical noise that the paper was focusing on. The fact is that the noises affects all mutations equally regardless of fitness, so therefore trends due to selection for fitness may be attenuated based on the exact constitution of the population, but not neccessarily removed entirely.The problem with trying to define absoloute levels for frequency of beneficial mutations is that the benfit of any mutation is hugely dependent on its specific context. The only meaningful way it can be studied is in the sort of limited repeatable studies which have been performed in short generation organisms like flies and bacteria or through genealogical genetic studies of large samples of a population compared to some outgroup population. As has been noted fitness/ beneficial status is normally only detectable a post-hoc measurement, not something we can predict solely based on our own assumptions.TTFN,WK

Perhaps the important point is that when they do occur advantageous mutations are wiped out significantly less frequently than neutral or deleterious mutations. Would you concur with that Syamsu?TTFN,WK

So you are saying that advantageous mutations are not retained in populations significantly more frequently than disadvantageous mutations, thats a pretty good claim and would pretty effectively put a hole in most theories of how natural selection operates if true.This should be a fairly easy thing to check out. Why don't be both have a look at the literature, I'll try and find some papers supporting my position that advantageous mutations are retained significantly more frequently and you try and find some supporting your position that they aren't. How does that sound? If you think there are any particular areas we should limit ourselves to let me know, if for instance you don't consider population genetic simulations to be a valid source of evidence for instance.TTFN,WK

Dear Syamsu,Why should you guess? Is that what your new and imroved system is to be based upon? Guesswork!You don't need to guess, you can use population genetics to see what happens to specific mutations in a population. How can you possibly even know if the mutation is advantageous if it occurs in only 1 individual? You seem to have some platonic ideal of a beneficial mutation in mind.Do you have any numbers to substantiate your claims? Do you consider germ cells containing mutations but which never become part of a zygote to be beneficial mutants which failed to be preserved? It is arguable that most mutations are lost but I would be interested to know what the actual basis of your assumption that this is so actually is.How far would you go in this? Is your contention that most animals which are born fail to reproduce, since most animals will have some mutations differentiating their genes from those of their parent? Or are you suggesting that animals with more mutations than normal are more likely to be embryonic lethals thereby removing more mutations from the population than are present in animals becoming viable members of the population?Does this apply to all mutations equally or are you saying that beneficial mutations are particularly prone for some reason?TTFN,WKp.s.

quote:

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If somebody is wrong 99 percent of the time, and another is wrong 95 percent of the time, it can be expressed as 5 times more right, or just 4 percent more right.

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How is this in anyway subjective? You are just describing the same thing in two different ways, they mean exactly the same thing. I would agree that significantly more frequently can be a subjective phrase but your example doesn't show that it is at all. You can also remove some of the subjectivity with a little statistics you simply have to agree on a significance level. Then people will know exactly what you choose to call a significant level of difference.

I see what the problem is, its your phobia to comparisons. The important point is that advantageous traits are wiped out less frequently than non-advantageous traits, not neccessarily in every specific situation but less in general. If we accept that most mutations are wiped out regardless of their beneficial status then it still makes no difference to the fact that some survive and of those beneficial traits tend to come to predominate. They are generally preserved more than non-advantageous mutations. Why should this be the case, the thing which makes a certain sperm for instance be successful in reaching the egg need not be something which is carried in the genetic material within the sperm and certainly not as a novel mutation. But this is beside the point. I think you are getting confused between two concepts, one of counting all mutations lost due to never forming a zygote and another of beneficial mutations being lost due to the presence of embryonic lethal defects in the embryo.If you are counting every mutation present in every germ cell regardless of its contributing to an actual organism or not then I doubt anyone could argue that, given that assumption, most mutations are lost before they get a chance to propagate. These are never mutations which constitute part of the population however and certainly not part of the breeding population.What it comes down to is a strawman argument, by putting forward a misrepresentative meaning for the phrase 'advantageous mutations tend to be preserved', i.e. that any such mutation ocurring in a DNA sequence in any cell will tend to be preserved or at least in any cell which might contribute to the next generation, you hope to make it appear as if there is a problem with the way it is presented in the context of natural selection, which is not the context you are putting forward.By far the vast majority of the mutations wiped out in such a way never get a chance to be expressed as a phenotype and can hardly therefore be expected to be a suitable substrate for natural selection.TTFN,WK

Dear Syamsu,Not going on to form a zygote is clearly not a phenotypic expression for any de novo mutation in the germ cells. Similarly much of the loss once an embryo is formed is entirely independent of the genotype of the embryo itself, except in the case of things such as embryonic lethal mutations obviously.So if we only want phenotypically expressed mutations then we are reduced to those that form zygotes at least, which dramatically reduces the number of mutations, of any type, which are lost.If you really want to say anything usefull about the extent to which mutations are preserved/lost you are going to have to come up with some evidence/numbers at some point. In a human population every individual is thought to have at least a handful of nonsynonymous mutations distinguishing their genes from those of their parents. Assuming that the levels are the same in the lost embryos, quite a large assumption in fact as embryos with more mutations are more likely to have an embryonid lethal mutation. What you really need to show is the levels at which embryos/ organisms are lost before reproducing compared to the numbers of organisms which succeed in reproducing, ideally with fertile offspring. Then you can begin to say something meaningful about the loss of mutations from the population. Rubbish, these so called rules you continue to refer to are a device all of your own as far as I can see, and you continue to ignore the fact that our modern understanding of population genetics and natural selection does acknowledge all these things at least in its fundamental assumptions, i.e. in the larger body of knowledge pertaining to population genetics in general.In evolutionary terms it doesn't make a jot of difference how many mutations are lost because there will still be many surviving mutations to act as a substrate for selection. All that is needed for selection is one mutation which gives rise to a differential in fitness.TTFN,WK

No, that isn't the rule. Once again you show that your understanding of science is based on your own preconceptions rather than any actual familiarity with science.The usual approach is to actually look at a wide number of specific cases and then draw general assumptions from them. You can then use these general assumptions to make predictions about what you will see in other specific cases.Of course 'Darwinian' evolution is specific, it is supposed to provide a specific mechanism for a specific observed phenomenon. If you want the general science you will find it is called biology.Once again your gravitation example is patently ludicrous. the laws of motion were derived from a large number of specific studies and arguably an unusually large amount of brilliant insight. Have you not heard the apple atory? How much more specific can you get.Your post almost totally ignores the content of my previous post to which it is a reply at least as far as the topic of beneficial mutations and preservation goes. As an explanation of your objections, on the grounds of 'Organisation of Knowledge,' it is almost equally lamentable, in as much as it explains nothing but just makes the same usual vague objections.TTFN,WKP.s. Remember another thread where you argued that simply because variation obviously exists is no reason to include it in a theory? When did your epiphany occur which changed you to arguing that everything that exists must be integrated into a theory?