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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
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Author | Topic: A barrier to macroevolution & objections to it | |||||||||||||||||||||||
PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
So far your arguments that mutation cannot keep pace with the loss of alleles have been:
1) Just ignore mutation. No further comment on the rationality of this argument is required. 2) A guess that the number of alleles lost (which will be almost entirely neutral and detrimental alleles) with a guess at the number of beneficial mutations. The guessing alone would disqualify this as a logical argument - but the fact that the numbers are not equivalent completely invalidates it. To that should be added the difficulty in conclusively identifying mutations and the fact that you were reluctant to accept even an example where there was good eveidence that the new allele was a mutation (one that seems to be evolutionarily neutral, but beneficial in other terms). Thius it must be said that your guess at the number of beneficial mutations is likely to be an underestimate. So your asssertion is not the conclusion of a "logical argument". It is an opinion and the so-called "logical arguments" are fallacious post hoc attempts to support that opinion. Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
Yes, ignoring mutation.
http://EvC Forum: What is the mechanism that prevents microevolution to become macroevolution? -->EvC Forum: What is the mechanism that prevents microevolution to become macroevolution?
The point is just that it is very hard to get across this fact of inexorable genetic depletion through the normal processes of variation and speciation, because mutation keeps being assumed to take up the slack of this depletion. In fact it simply doesn't.
But that has NOT been established as a fact. That is your opinion, and so far as I can tell it is based mainly on your desire for it to be true.
If you would just keep mutation out of the picture for the time being and just think through the processes I'm describing, which are all standard science that evolutionists refer to all the time, you ought to be able to follow it all to the logical conclusion I keep pointing out here, which is that genetic depletion IS the overall trend in all these processes. There's nothing of opinion in this at all, it logically follows from an understanding of what these processes actually do.
So Faith claims that it is a "fact" that mutation "simply doesn't" "take up the slack". She says that has a "logical argument" to that effect. But we have to "keep mutation out of the picture" i.e. ignore it... But to be fair Faith has since moved to ignoring neutral mutations (i.e. the majority). Her argument is based on guessing the number of beneficial mutations - which, of course, is the wrong number when looking at allele diversity. Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
quote: What is there about speciation that would STOP mutation from producing new alleles ?
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
quote: If that is the case - and in fact I think you have things reversed - then Faith needs to stop claiming that mutation cannot produce sufficient new alleles to replace those lost until she has established her other claim. Yet she calls it a fact, and keeps claiming to have a logical argument for it when neither appears to be the case. Personally I am of the opinion that speciation usually requires mutation to produce divergence between the split population. And I have seen no argument to the contrary from Faith or any reason to suppose it is not true. I would add that the creationist "dividing line" you refer to seems to be entirely artificial and based on the assumption that evolution must be false. Certainly the claim that mutation cannot produce "new information" is never supported by sound argument and is usually not even accompanied with a measure of information that could be investigated. Spetner is I think the only person who has made a half-serious attempt and even he doesn't stick with a consistent measure of information - instead it seems that changes his measure as needed to get the results he wants.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
quote: Alleles that work as well as those already in the population are "useful".
quote: No, it doesn't. You need to take into account the role of selection. It's enough that it produces some new alleles that will be beneficial in the future in some species (evolution only has to account for what does happen - and many species go extinct without leaving descendants).
quote: There's no reason to assume that new species typically start off in a state of "severe genetic depletion". There may be some reduction in diversity but it is unlikely to be sufficient to be an immediate threat to survival.
quote: This really makes no sense. THe appearance of a new species is part of the DEFINITION of macroevolution used by biologists. It does not require that the new species have many fewer alleles per gene than the parent species nor for it to develop many more alleles per gene.
quote: Yes, there is something very wrong with your picture. You fail to understnad the definition of "macroevolution" used, you assume a radical depletion that is not required and you assume a drastic increase far beyond what is required.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
quote: The fact that no boundary has been identified, plus the evidence for common descent is adequate reason to provisionally assume that there is no such boundary.
quote: The path between the two may indeed be very unlikely. However since nobody proposes that evolution did follow that path it hardly represents a problem for evolution.
quote: But it isn't a "missing link" because no such link is thought to exist. Evolutionary theory in the broad sense says that humans and drosophilia had a common ancestor - and the hox genes are evidence of that. But it does not say that that ancestor had a compound eye.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
quote: I fact I gave a reason. Incompatibility is more likely to arise after the population splits because it would be detrimental before the population split.
quote: They CAN'T select traits that don't exist. But if a trait does appear (like the "scottish fold" cat) they can and sometimes do select it.
quote: And you can't just assume that it wasn't - but you do.
quote: Several experiemnts - including replications - in fact. And even one experiment is more than you've produced.
quote: There's even less reason to suppose that is all that it is. So where's YOUR evidence ?
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
quote: On the contrary it IS relevant because given the fact that we have seperate and divergent lineages, there may very well be no viable evolutionary route between them. And given the timescales involved it certainly can't be claimed that it would be a sensible laboratory experiment.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
quote: If the organs are so clearly distinct then that is highly likely. However I did not base my claims on that, but on knowledge of the proposed phyologeny of drosphilia and of humans. i.e. what the relevant part of evolutionary theory actually says.
quote: The fact that your proposed argument is invalid because it is based on ignorance of what evolutionary theory actually proposes is hardly a good argument that evolution is unfalsifiable.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
I'm not a biologist, just an interested layman. So far as I am aware there is no requirement in evolutionary theory that "clearly distinct" organs performing the same role must be related so that one directly evolved from the other. In fact the more clearly distinct they are the less closely related we would expect them to be, and since evolution can't be assumed to "stay still" in either lineage divergence is expected.
quote: Unfalsifiability requires that there is no concievable evidence that could cause us to reject evolution. It does not require that results that we would expect if a theory were true should be treated as falsifications !
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
Let me put it this way. Would you say that creationism is falsified as scence because we can't get God to create a new species or "kind" for us in the lab, on cue ? Or is it an unreasonable test that doesn't allow us to draw that conclusion ?
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
I'm not going to go off my planned line of argument.
So you agree that the test is unreasonable. Does the fact that that test is unreasonable allow me to conclude that creationism is unfalsifiable ?
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
The test is the one I stated. To get God to create a new "kind" in the laboratory, reliably and repeatably (you know that's a requirement for experiments, right ?). We agree that this is not a reasonable test.
So I repeat the question. Does the fact that the test is unreasonable allow us to conclude that creationism is unfalsifiable ?
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
Genetic Surprise: Mobile Genes Found To Pressure Species Formation
The beginnings of speciation, suggests the paper, can be triggered by genes that change their locations in a genome.
In theory, the idea was sound, but scientists long debated whether it actually happened in nature. Eventually a competing theory involving the gradual accumulation of mutations was shown to occur in nature so often that geneticists largely dismissed the moving gene hypothesis.
This is an important bit - it confirms what I've been saying.
"That was really exciting," says Masly. "It was completely unexpected and it made the cause of this hybrid's sterility very simple; the gene's on number four in one species and on number three in the other, so when you mate the two, every now and then you'll get a male with a combination that includes no gene at all. These guys are sterile because they completely lack a gene that's necessary for fertility."
Masly's work shows a back door through which speciation can start. If the right genes jump around in the genome, a population can begin creating individuals that can't successfully mate with the general population. If other speciation pressures, like geographic isolation, are added to the mix, the pressure may be enough to split one species into two new species.
No mention of incompatible alleles causing speciation anywhere. Presumably you could get similar effects with incompatible alleles. But I'm not aware of any such case, and I think that it would be more difficult so we certainly can't say that it is the usual situation. - not when there are known alternatives Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
quote: No, you have failed to producer any valid support for your assertion. It remains your unsupported opinion, and hacve produced absolutely no reason to beleive that it is true.
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