"The Edge of Evolution" by Michael Behe

Hi Modulus, I don't believe this is circular reasoning. If i had plugged in my numbers and was left with say a value of 10 for the number of legitimate beneficial mutations to make the equation balance, this would strike me straight away as too pessimistic, and i would need to make up the numbers by taking them from somewhere else, lets say, the population value. This however, would only cause other problems for my argument. I can rob from peter to pay paul, but i have limited scope to fudge the results. Again, I have shown where my numbers came from. They are debatable but reasonable i think. I am waiting for a potential reply from Behe about issues concerning probability, which also applies to your second comment.

Hi doctor,I still believe that reading between the lines, he would have taken the things we spoke about into account when calculating the probability. But if i get a reply from Behe I will get back to you on this.You also seem to disagree in a general sense with this line of reasoning because it involves a specific. It I want to calculate my odds of winning a lottery, I can calculate the odds of a specific line of numbers coming up, then recognize that I have any 10 lines with similar odds. I have applied one specific to a set of general but similar events.

I wasn't expecting you would. Did you? I thought you said:

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I suggest 10000, which I arrived at arbitrarily in order to produce an "even odds" example at the end.

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Which sounds awfully like you used that number for no particular reason except to provide a pre-defined conclusion. I have absolutely no way of knowing how reasonable they are. And neither do you - at least you've shown none. I guess on that note - I'll have to wait alongside you.

The things between the lines are not evidence.I myself would never "read between the lines", but if I did I wouldn't do so and conclude that Behe was probably right. The man has a track record. It is not impressive. Yes, the "Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy". But my point would be broader than that.If humans were absolutely perfect, then your analogy of winning the lottery would be correct. But we're not. We're capable of surviving, but we're a bit of a mess. Our immune systems screw up. Our bodies screw up. Our brains screw up.You brought up sickle-cell anemia. Apparently the best defense we have against malaria is such that we die of possessing that defense if we have that allele in homozygotic form. Which leads me to say: "Intelligent design, my ass".What we can say is that we're better adapted to survive than other hypothetical organisms we can think of. But we have no reason to suppose that evolution must have gotten it right every time, because clearly it didn't. It doesn't. It can't.Let us compare this situation with our expectations should we have been specially created by a perfect and omniscient God ...Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Even odds is neither good or bad for my argument. It is just a reference point. It neither supports nor contradicts my argument. The support or otherwise of my argument comes from the distribution of values within the equation. I could decrease probability, and choose to extend the population value, but i could not have it both ways. Edited by Colin, : No reason given.

So why did you bring it up? I fall back to my original question: What was the point of the calculation? What do you think it shows us about evolution that is relevant to this debate?I was under the impression that you were saying that there is only even odds for getting one type of mutation event within the time frame under discussion (the trillion animals' lives). I was thinking that you were saying that since it is only even odds of getting one - and that presumably you think many such mutations are required, then this shows that evolution is not up to the task it says it is.That's how I interpreted this:

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Getting back to the numbers, 1 in 10^17 chances with 10^12 trials, leaves 10^5 in change. In other words, if all 1 trillion creatures on the line to humans each had 100000 feasible steps to gaining an advantage of similar complexity to the step of developing chloroquine resistance, there would be even odds of such an event happening once in all of history on our branch....Consider also, we are not just looking for one occurrence, we are looking for many, many steps of change.

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If that is not what you were saying - what are you trying to say?If that is what you were saying then the even odds seem pretty important to your argument after all. Could you please clarify what you are saying so I am not mistaken again.

My apologies, I had thought it would simplify my argument but it has only complicated it. I will try to clear it up.If i was analyzing a lottery, i could ask, how many tickets would i need to buy to give myself a 10% chance of winning the jackpot? Or, if i bought 2 tickets each week, in what period of time would I expect a 0.1% chance of winning twice. Or, if i plan to buy 100 tickets and i expect a probability of 0.001 of getting at least one winning ticket, what would the general chances of any 1 ticket winning need to be?And there are many more like them. All of these questions are equally valid for gaining insight into entering the lottery. Some would be better suited to answering our questions, but in the end, they all give different perspectives of the same picture, and all would be equally correct.So to answer your question about whether even odds is or is not important, it is only important in that I chose it as a point of reference, like the other lottery questions above.You interpreted my quote correctly. But again "even odds" as a point of reference is just one of an endless number of views of the same picture. It is important in my argument because i chose it as my reference in order to greatly simplify calculations, but the point of view does not change the thing i am looking at (unless its an electron).So what am i trying to look at? The relationship between the probability of steps, steps available, population and expected number of steps taken. But like i said, judging from your last post, you understood my argument, just not the role that the "even odds" were playing.If i remember rightly, you said i was fixing the results by choosing the even odds scenario.PS. Even odds in the lottery example might be, how long would i need to live to get even odds of winning at least once, if i buy 2 tickets every week in a lottery where each ticket had a 1 in 5 million? The answer is 2.5 million weeks. Again, we can play with numbers, 4 tickets a week would give half the time for example.Edited by Colin, : No reason given.Edited by Colin, : No reason given.

I think lottery comparisons are a bit flawed, but they can be saved by turning them around. A lottery, by definition, means each person is trying to get a single sequence to win, even if the actual sequence isn't known at the time. More aptly, if you consider the number of tickets sold, what are the odds of the lottery picking the numbers of one of them. It's slightly reformulated, but more accurate, I think.For example, say the lottery is one where three numbers are picked from a pool of 100. There should be 970,200 combinations (assuming the order didn't matter). So, if you buy one ticket, you've got a 1 in 970,200 chance. If you buy 2, you have a 2 in 970,200 or 1 in 485,100 chance. But, you're still trying to get to one specific group of numbers. Evolution doesn't work that way. So, if 100,000 tickets are sold, what are the odds that the lottery will pick one of them?This means, there are 100,000 possible ways to win, and 870,200 ways to not win. Which is much closer to how evolution works, especially if the lootery continues, the jackpot raising, until someone wins eventually.

I'm sorry. Allow me to be clear. I know all of the above - I know what role the even odds were playing. However - my point is that it is entirely meaningless. It has no meaning for anything relevant to the real world.Let's use your lottery example. Let's say we happen to know there are multiple ways of winning the lottery. We know the probability of winning the lottery is 14million-1 and I ask you: How many games should you play to stand an approximately 50% chance of winning?The problem we have is that there are at least two unknowns in this equation (there is another one I'll come to later).First: We obviously don't know how many games you need to play.
Second: We don't know how many different ways there are of winning the lottery.So you said - let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that they played a trillion games. If they played this amount (and I appreciate that these numbers don't work for odds as small as the lottery), you point out that you know that if there were 100,000 ways of winning - this would give about even odds.This, however, is not necessarily the correct answer. You just happened to find two values for the unknowns that satisfy the even-odds requirement. There are many pairs of values that would satisfy this requirement and you have given no reason for picking those particular ones. When you have two unknowns in an equation - the correct method for solving the equation is not to find any two values that fit. I suppose you could find all possible numbers that fit in, but I suspect that set is infinitely large.If you had picked a billion games you'd find that the number of ways to win would have to be something other than 100,000 in order to get approximately even odds. The real problem is that you actually have no idea whether 100,000 is remotely close to being realistic. You haven't a shred of evidence that suggests that it is true.It is completely meaningless. You've picked two values that you knew ahead of time would give you approximate even odds when plugged in and are now trying to make some conclusion from this fact. But you can't. It is devoid of meaning. You've engaged in a basically pointless activity.I'm not sure if I can make it any clearer than that. You have not tied any numbers to anything interesting in reality in any empirical fashion. No - you were 'fixing' things by deciding to find a number that gives the even odds result and suggesting that this number has any meaning in reality.And even if we grant all your assumptions, we're still left with the largest and most glaring one. Not all possible beneficial mutations are as improbable as the malarial resistance mutation. To return to the lottery: Sure the jackpot is difficult to get and you might need to live for millions of weeks to have a reasonable chance of winning it...but the chances of getting three numbers right is closer to 30 - 1. So the chances getting at least one winner after 5 million trials is very very high (my calculator rounds it to 1).To drive the point home:To tie your calculation to reality requires some shaky assumptions:1. You assume all beneficial mutations are as ludicrously unlikely as the malarial one - without any justification for doing so.2. You assume that there are only 100,000 possible such mutations in every single possible viable descendent of a certain ancestor of ours that coincides with a time period around 1 trillion births within the population without justifying this number.So I'll hearken back to my earlier posts: There is only really one conclusion we can take from this calculation with any confidence, assuming that Behe's probability itself is sound. That is that it is unlikely that human ancestors managed to 'find' such mutations multiple times unless the number of possible such mutations is very high.But who is proposing that many of these types of mutations is required for human (or whatever) evolution to have occurred? Nobody I'm aware of.

Haven't read the book, but I suggest Behe was referring to P.Vivax and not P.Falciparum. The latter has achieved widespread resistance to Chloroquine, to the point that treatment is ineffective unless combined with other drugs. P. Vivax, on the other hand, has shown only sposmadic resistance to Chloroquine. This does not reflect effective natural selection, but rather the strain's difficulty in mutating and fixing resistance.Behe's argument is somewhat weakened, however, if he is using P Vivax to establish a beneficial mutation rate and then extrapolating that to Man/Ape divergence. The counterargument is simply "Why not use P. Falciparum?"A far better argument has been conveniently provided by Richard Dawkins in his Greatest Show on Earth. He crows long and loud about a 20-year laboratory experiment in which E. Coli were able, through a double mutation, to absorb Citrate. Having pronounced this to be clear evidence that Irreducible Complexity has been overcome and genetic information increased, he then deftly shoots himself in the foot by pointing out that the extreme rarity of the double-mutant suggests two simultaneous mutations.Oh dear! Simultaneous, not serial mutations. So the mutant was just a mathematically improbable fluke, not the result of incrementally increased fitness. Someone should point out to Richard that to overcome Irreducible Complexity, you really have to reduce the complexity...

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"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy." Charles Darwin

Indeed. And if the 1996 Yankees had wandered around aimlessly on a baseball diamond and wound up winning the World Series, that would have been caused by evolution. Same problem. Someone had to win the 1996 World Series, so the chance that it would be the Yankees was quite large. Equally, given that Colin's forebearers were fertile and liked children, the chance of a child being born was 1. The fact that it was Colin is just as likely as any other result. To be analagous with evolution, Colin would have to be the only individual out of the trillions possible to be born with the specific genetic novelty needed to preserve the human race at that particular time.Fine chap though he undoubtedly is, I don't think Colin will lay claim to that...

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"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy." Charles Darwin

Notice how the theory has evolved? I particularly like the phrase "creating the background". It's kinda like joining up the dots, isn't it?The ToE used to be simple random mutation followed by natural selection. But over time, evolutionists realised that this process wasn't going to get them very far in molecule-to-man evolution. Where were all the new genes going to come from, for Heaven's sake?So now we have this new element. The current theory appears to be: "Random mutation, followed by the fortuitous assembly of necessarily complex genetic structures courtesy of some very convenient neutral mutations, followed by natural selection."Hard to believe it's all the work of a process that has no purpose or target, isn't it?In fact, it's impossible to believe.

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"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy." Charles Darwin

This bears no relation to how evolutionary theory has actually progressed. Things like drift and neutral theory were not considered sources of new genes, but they do explain genetic features which aren't explained by adaptive evolution alone. The fact that these changes have subsequently been found to have an effect on adaptive evolution is incidental. No, but it is hard to believe that you know what you are talking about. A genetic background is simply a common technical term for the genomic state to which a mutation is introduced.As to joining up the dots, isn't that what the creationists are always begging us to do? Thornton's work is one of the most joined up examples of molecular evolution we currently have.TTFN,WK

I know - those biologists are bastards. How dare they learn more about a subject and research it and realize that 19th Century and early 20th Century conceptions were good but weren't quite right. I mean really - neutral mutations having an effect on a genome later down the line? Epigenetic influence? Recombination? What are those researchers trying to do - make creationist's life difficult??Next thing you know - physicists will start saying that Newton's ideas need an update. Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Can you tell me more about these genetic features? Again, really interesting if you can verify it or provide a reference. What's wrong with good 'ole junk DNA as a background? No the writer's intention here was to try and give evolution a much-needed helping hand with a few lucky neutral mutations. Try not to make that widely known.

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"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy." Charles Darwin