Evolution of the Eye

Most likely it's A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve, Nilsson DE, Pelger S., Proc R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 1994 Apr 22;256(1345):53-8; a paper with which anyone with slight knowledge with the theory of eye evolution is familiar. Full text with no figures available here. More likely the author is writing to inform a general audience and not writing a technical paper. Did you attempt to contact the author and ask for a reference? That particular page is not a scientific paper, it's a popularization. It's not incorrect, it's just not rigorous, in the interest of clarity. Yup; but that doesn't make matters worse, except perhaps for creationists. It indicates that evolution of somehting as useful as an eye is essemtially guaranteed. No problem for the ToE.

No, the calculations and contents of the paper are no myth. The only myth involved is created by the IDiots, who don't seem to understand that much mathematical modeling can be carried out without simulation. Of course, there's no simulation, nobody except the IDiots ever claimed there was a simulation, and the link that you posted contains nothing relevant to the contents of the paper.[This message has been edited by JonF, 09-24-2003]

No. IMHO "upside down" is not a good term ... "backwards" or "inverted" would be better. See The Inverted Retina: Maladaptation or Pre-adaptation?, which starts out with a good summary but goes rapidly downhill from there.

They are not modeling for all mutations in the organisms, just those that increase the acuity of the visual system. Therefore there is no such thing as a deleterious mutation in the model, and the overall mutation rate is greater than the mutation rate that is considered in the model. 1829 steps. The number 80129540 does occur in the paper, but it is not
a number of steps. The steps are implicitly required to be in order, since step N+1 canot occur until step N completes. I admit I'm not enough of a geneticist to answer this one. But, given your obvious and total misunderstanding of the paper in all other aspects, I doubt it's a valid criticism.Your claims about the fixation rate are laughable since they are based on your misunderstanding of the number of steps.

Yes, they must incur a cost in reproduction ... but genetic deaths need not and almost certainly don't incur a cost in eye acuity, therefore they can be ignored (as long as the mutation rate required for the eye acuity mutations is significantly smaller than a reasonable overall mutation rate). Yes, it's simply amazing that you could come to such a conclusion. The number of substitutions per 1% increment is one or more. Although I'm not a geneticist, IMHO Haldane's one per 300 generations is not relevant here; that's not a number that applies to all situations. And the derivation of the 1 per 300 number requires several assumptions that are not established or even universally accepted. Some even claim that Haldane's Dilemma does not apply to beneficial mutations. You appear to be claiming that there is a step pre-labeled "1" and a step pre-labeled "2" and so on. There is no such pre-labeling (which sounds similar to the fallacy of assuming a direction for evolution). S1 is by definition the first step, and is whichever step occurred first, and consists of some step that is possible from the starting conditions. S2 is by definition whichever step occurred second, and consists of some step that is possible given that S1 has occured. And so on. It might or might not be possible to achieve the same end with the same steps in a different order; we can't assess that without knowing more about the steps (such as what initial conditions each requires), which would require a significantly different and more detailed model. Given your track record in this thread, which is all I have by which to judge you, you aren't knowledgable enough to have a valid opinion on the subject.I note that you aren't discussing the "no simulation" link that you posted earlier with such glee ... have you re-evaluated that?

Maybe he is kidding ... he just posted a link to his "evolution of flight" page in another thread, and that's got to be parody of creationists.Anyhow, it appears that he's heard of Haldane's Dilemma, and thinks that it takes 300 generations to fix one mutation in all circumstances. If you take that as revealed Word, then the number of generations divided by 300 is the number of mutations, and is less that the number of changes. He doesn't consider the possibility that his division by 300 is the error ...I'm not sure if the 1 in 300 comes from Haldane or ReMine's botched interperpretation of Haldane ... do you happen to know?

No. Figuring out what they aretrying to show is left as an exercise for the student. Under some circumstances, yes. Care to name those circumstances? Nope. I notice you ignored my point about assumptions. Care to name the assumptions which are requred for 1 per 300 to be the best-case number? Then step S+1 will not occur until after step S. You are totally failing to understand. They do not assume that the steps can happen in any order. That is your myth.

I don't think he is capable of doing that ... because he thinks that he is doing that. His assumption that his way is the only way is too deeply ingrained, and he isn't very good at questioning himself.