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Author | Topic: TOE and the Reasons for Doubt | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Kaichos Man Member (Idle past 4487 days) Posts: 250 From: Tasmania, Australia Joined: |
"False in several ways. The harmful mutations go away! They are eliminated from the gene pool. What do you think natural selection does, anyway? It eliminates those harmful mutations immediately. They do not "contribute to the degeneration of animal" because the animals that have them either are not born or die soon after. It is a creationist religious belief that the genome is deteriorating, and a false one that is not supported by scientific evidence"
Coyote, let's evolve a new gene! The average gene is around 1300 base pairs in size, but we'll make ours a little smaller at 1000 bps. To give ourselves a flying start, we'll say there was a gene-duplication event in this particular genome, and the duplicate gene is already 98% similar to the gene we want to evolve. Of course, natural selection won't apply to a duplicate gene, so we'll need to evolve it to a point where natural selection can take it to completion. Let's say we have to improve it by just 0.5% for NS to kick in. So the new gene is 20 bps away from completion, with just 5 bps required to enable natural selection. Let's hit our new gene with 25 random mutations. On probabilities, there's a 1 in 2 chance that one of these mutations will land in our 2% target area. Of course, there's only a 1 in 4 chance it will be the correct one, given that there are 4 different nucleotides. But let's say that this is a really lucky gene! It gets not 1 but 5 mutations in the target area, and -believe it or not- all of these mutations are the right ones! The odds of 5 mutations in the target area are 1 in 105 = 1/100,000. And then of course, if wewant them all to be correct, thats 1 in 45 = 1/1024. So the actual chance of this happening is 1 in 102,400,000. But like we said, this is a really lucky gene! So lucky, that it's now got the 5 correct mutations it needed to improve by 0.5% and reach that magic figure of 98.5% completion. Now natural selection can take it the rest of the way! Or can it? What happened to the other 20 mutations? Well, logically, they must have landed on the "already complete" part of the gene. Oh dear! Did they do any damage? Well, let's see. On probabilities, 1 in 4 would be correct anyway, causing no change. That leaves 15 that logically...must be incorrect. So the number of base pairs that are now incorrect would be 30. The gene is now only 97% correct! So... DESPITE having a duplicate gene to work on that was already 98% complete... DESPITE requiring only 0.5% improvement to be rescued by natural selection... DESPITE a favourable accident at odds of more than 100 million to one... ...evolution has actually gone backwards. Kaich
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Kaichos Man Member (Idle past 4487 days) Posts: 250 From: Tasmania, Australia Joined: |
What's this, Peg? Friendly fire? I think you may have mistaken me for someone else!
Cheers,
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Kaichos Man Member (Idle past 4487 days) Posts: 250 From: Tasmania, Australia Joined: |
No worries, Peg.
I don't think Coyote is around, so I don't know if anyone else wants to jump in and try to save our poor "devolving" gene?
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Kaichos Man Member (Idle past 4487 days) Posts: 250 From: Tasmania, Australia Joined: |
No science. Just a working understanding of maths and logic.
Done a lot of reading lately on a couple of Japanese geneticists, Kimura and Ohno. They came up with The Neutral Theory and The Nearly Neutral Theory respectively. While they held out the required olive branch to Darwinists, their research really showed what a load of cobblers positive selection of mutations is. Kimura didn't even factor "beneficial" mutations into his calculations, the obvious implication being that he considered them so rare that they weren't worth bothering with.
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Kaichos Man Member (Idle past 4487 days) Posts: 250 From: Tasmania, Australia Joined: |
"It doesn't work this way. There aren't "correct mutations", evolution is not searching toward a single "correct" sequence of nucleotides. Because the assumptions behind your calculations are wrong, your results are meaningless."
Nice attempt at a sidestep. Evolution isn't searching for a single correct sequence- we are. Let's say the gene is for the antenna on a fruit fly. We know exactly what the sequence needs to be. The exercise is designed to see how that particular gene might have been created by random mutation and natural selection. And even given several significant leg-ups, it can't get there.
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Kaichos Man Member (Idle past 4487 days) Posts: 250 From: Tasmania, Australia Joined: |
"The use of terms "correct" and "incorrect" and "backwards" show that you do not even have a basic understanding of the TOE. Those are terms that could only be used if there was a creator or a designer. You are using them to try to discredit a system that does not have a designer or a creator, therefore your whole premise is flawed."
Another sidestep! When faced with simple maths and logic, your only defense is to nit-pick over semantics? Again, let's call it a gene relating to the antenna on a fruitfly. We know what the required sequence is. Therefore mutations are going to be "correct" or "incorrect" with regard to its construction. And last time I checked, 98% to 97% is "backwards".
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Kaichos Man Member (Idle past 4487 days) Posts: 250 From: Tasmania, Australia Joined: |
"It needs to be for what?"
For the creation of a gene relating to the antenna of a fruitfly. Wasn't that clear? " Are you talking about a mutation we've already discovered?" No, I'm talking about a known gene which, according to you, must have evolved. "Then your argument is even more broken." I'd be happy if it was simply understood. "You can't treat the probabilities of an event that has already occured like that way; if you could no-one would ever win the lottery" This last statement only makes sense if you believe in evolution. It should be obvious that I don't. That's one lottery I won't take a ticket in.
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Kaichos Man Member (Idle past 4487 days) Posts: 250 From: Tasmania, Australia Joined: |
"No, we know what the sequence happens to be. It does not *need* to be this sequence. Try again."
I assume you are making some oblique reference to synonymous codons. Are you aware that synonymous mutations often result in impaired protein production? I repeat- "needs" to be.
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Kaichos Man Member (Idle past 4487 days) Posts: 250 From: Tasmania, Australia Joined: |
"Wrong again You are fixated on the outcome, a classic probability mistake. You have to consider the space of all possible outcomes, of which the observed antenna is just one outcome"
Let me get this straight. You're saying that the probabilities of our new gene resulting in an antenna are improved by the fact that it might turn into something else? That's priceless! Off to bed, ladies and gents...
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Kaichos Man Member (Idle past 4487 days) Posts: 250 From: Tasmania, Australia Joined: |
Not in the slightest - I am talking about your confusion between an observed outcome and the entire outcome probability space. This is mathematics, not genetics. The entire outcome probability space is all possible outcomes. It equals one. The outcome that produces a gene relating to a fruitfly's wing is a vanishingly small fraction of this. For a 1000 base pair gene it is 1/41000. I have no doubt that atheists would not baulk at this figure, or any figure for that matter. Their problem lies in convergence. The same organ appearing in vastly disparate species. All the faith in the world can't save them from the probabilities then.
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Kaichos Man Member (Idle past 4487 days) Posts: 250 From: Tasmania, Australia Joined: |
The observed antenna is just one acceptable outcome. How big is the space of acceptable oucomes? I haven't a clue. This is real smoke-and-mirrors stuff. Acceptable outcomes are a fraction of all outcomes. The outcome that produces a fruitfly's wing is a miniscule fraction of acceptable outcomes. Let's put it another way. The probability of a fruitfly's wing not being arrived at is 41000-1/41000. Which is really, really really close to 1 which is stone cold certainty. P.S. Thanks to Peg and Mr Jack for the quote thing. Edited by Kaichos Man, : Added thanks
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Kaichos Man Member (Idle past 4487 days) Posts: 250 From: Tasmania, Australia Joined: |
If the actual number of differences is much less than the prediction, the null hypothesis has failed, and researchers may reasonably assume that selection has acted on the sequences in question Notice that the null hypothesis fails when it doesn't match the prediction, Otto. Another example of the facts being shaped by the theory: "If this supports what we already believe, then our belief is confirmed; if not then it must be the result of selection". The fact is that natural selection doesn't operate that way. As Kimura's work illustrated, it rarely wipes out "most of the mutations", rather it eliminates "the most mutated". This is because the majority of neutral mutations are actually slightly deleterious, so if you accumlate enough of them, you're done for. It follows that if the critters with 100 mutations are selected out, the critters with 95 mutations survive. This process is therefore highly unlikely to give a wildly unreliable reading, with or without natural selection. But because it is so often at gross variance with the time-honoured principles of carbon dating and rock-strata-dated-by-fossils-dated-by-rock-strata methods, it's safest for evolution to sideline it as a "null theory". Kimura drew graphs illustrating the effects of mutations on fitness. The graphs did not include the supposed "positive" effects of beneficial mutations. This cannot be explained away by the idea that Kimura wasn't concentrating on beneficial mutations. That would be bad science, and Kimura has never been accused of that.
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Kaichos Man Member (Idle past 4487 days) Posts: 250 From: Tasmania, Australia Joined: |
Sorry Mr Jack.
Put it down to the fact that it's a bit cumbersome trying to express unwieldy fractions. It's supposed to be read as: "Four to the thousandth power, minus one, divided by four to the thousandth power". So that's a really huge number, minus one, over the same really huge number.
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Kaichos Man Member (Idle past 4487 days) Posts: 250 From: Tasmania, Australia Joined: |
It was only later that the fossil record was found to support Darwin's theories. As time has passed, the fossil record has offered more and more evidence Not according to evolutionists who are more highly credentialled than yourself, Pandion: "The fossil record simply shows that this prediction [that future research would fill the gaps] is wrong. ...The observation that species are amazingly conservative and static entities throughout long periods of time has all the qualities of the emperor's new clothes: everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Paleontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin's predicted pattern, simply looked the other way." (Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I., The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, p. 45-46)" Oh! I'm a Creationist and I'm using a quote! I must be quote-mining!
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Kaichos Man Member (Idle past 4487 days) Posts: 250 From: Tasmania, Australia Joined: |
So far, you've done nothing but, is effect, declare the endpoint of a drunkard's walk to be the target destination of a second drunkard's walk and using the improbability of that outcome to claim the first one was too improbable to occur. Buonas nochas, Jacorinta (That's phonetic and almost certainly wrong) You assert that evolution has no target. You are, respectfully wrong. It's target, even though it is unconscious of the fact, is survival. It's purported aiming device is natural selection.
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