Evolution of the Eye

I don't think MonarchzMan was looking for "just-so" stories to explain away the problem. Your citation includes this brazen claim:

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"according to one scientist's calculations, only 364,000 years would have been needed for a camera-like eye to evolve from a light-sensitive patch."

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Where is the proper citation for this "evidence"? Is the author afraid someone might actually look at the math and find it to be compeltely bogus?Is this what you guys call "science"? To make matters worse, evolutionists were forced to admit that the eye must have evolved down 40 seperate, independent paths becuase of the "convergence" problem where similarities could not be explained via common decent!

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Most likely it's A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve, Nilsson DE, Pelger S.,

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Oh, you mean the simulation that is a myth?http://www.arn.org/docs2/news/vexingeye021302.htm

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[Convergence] 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.

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Guaranteed? Thanks you JonF for continuing to prove my point that evolution is not falsifiable! You guys are doing the work for me. Thanks, man!

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Convergence is a hallmark of evolution and very supportive.

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Uh, Loudmouth, does convergence thwart, or aid, in attempts to construct phylogenies?Again we have an evolutionist who is allowing the theory to explain both homology, and anti-homology (convergence). A theory that explains everything! I thought those kind of theories were not theories...

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Show me an example of how convergence has made phylogentic analysis IMPOSSIBLE. I would be happy to discuss it.

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Loudmouth, that is not what I asked. Let me ask again. Try to answer with a simple yes or no, then you can explain your answer. Does convergence thwart, or aid, in attempts to construct phylogenies? Yes or No.

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Here we have a Creationist/IDer who can pose strawmen to try and punch holes in any theory.

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Ironically it was you who erected the strawman. Please answer the question this time, and avoid the man of the straw variety.

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No, the calculations and contents of the paper are no myth. The only myth involved is created by the IDiots

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JonF, you only expose yourself for what you label creationists by blindly defending a completely bogus paper. I read the paper in its entirety, and truly found it to be the worst science I have seen in a long while. Normally this is the kind of stuff you read at T.O., where there is no control. Where were the Royal Society reviewers who let this nonsense through? Playing cricket? Granted even the worst of studies can survive a peer-review, but this one takes the cake. I was not surprised what I found, because I was very skeptical of their conclusion based on common sense knowledge the mathematics problems of evolutionary genetics.Here are just some of the problems, and they are SEVERE:1) The study completely fails to account for genetic deaths! Where are the payments in equation 2 for genetic deaths, such as from deleterious mutations?!!! Essentially they are assuming that each and every random mutation that occurs is beneficial. Wow, a beneficial mutation rate of 100%, and a deleterious rate of 0%. Very impressive!
2) The alleged 80129540 steps are not required to be in any order. So, it doesn’t matter which step occurs, by golly it has a selective advantage!
3) Their claim that they are being generous to assume serial accumulation instead of parallel accumulation is bogus, since each mutation has to essentially pay its own substitution cost (unless the authors think that a mutation can suddenly appear on all the chromosomes of every organism). Gene hitchhiking (linkage disequilibrium) doesn’t help much either because it’s rare.This paper is laughable. To look at it another way, they are claiming that the required mutations are fixating at an average of 220 every generation! Wow! Perhaps some of you remember Haldane’s beneficial substitution rate of 1 per 300 generations? And before you quote Fred Hoyle (who disputed Haldane’s substitution rate), realize that his rate was still no better than 1 per generation. But by golly Nilsson/Pelger get 220 per generation! ROTFL!The paper is a fraud.

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Fred: 1) The study completely fails to account for genetic deaths! Where are the payments in equation 2 for genetic deaths, such as from deleterious mutations?!!! Essentially they are assuming that each and every random mutation that occurs is beneficial. Wow, a beneficial mutation rate of 100%, and a deleterious rate of 0%. Very impressive!

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JonF: 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.

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What? The model is not accounting for genetic deaths, which MUST incur a cost on reproduction. The downward pressure of deleterious mutations is completely removed from their model! Their model is as fallacious as Richard Dawkins Methinks it is a Weasel simulation.

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Fred: The alleged 80129540 steps...

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JonF: 1829 steps. The number 80129540 does occur in the paper, but it is not
a number of steps.

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The 80129540 number is length, which I thought could be equated to steps or more specifically changes. But rereading the paper I stand corrected. What I want to know is the number of substitutions per 1% increment. They conveniently don’t show this (it would expose their illusion). So let’s work backwards. Given 363,992 generations, and Haldane’s substitution rate of 1 per 300 generations yields 1213 allelic substitutions to evolve an eye from a light-sensitive patch! This means that each step is represented by less than 1 substitution! Simply amazing! Well, I guess it isn’t so amazing when you ignore the impact of deleterious mutations, pretending they don’t exist.

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The steps are implicitly required to be in order, since step N+1 canot occur until step N completes.

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No they are not. Label each step S1, S2, etc up to S1829. The steps do not have to occur in order, ie S1, S2, S3 The model allows them to occur S542, S2, S304, The authors support my point by claiming the steps can occur in parallel. They opt to use linear stepping because they want to add to the illusion that they are being pessimistic.I think I am being too kind to merely call the paper an illusion. It’s not clever enough to be an illusion. It’s a fraud, and it should never have passed peer review.

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Fred, just because you think that they should have taken an entirely different apporach neither invalditate the paper nor make it a fraud.

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I know this may come as a complete shock to you, but wrong approaches often yield wrong results. Their conclusion that the eye can evolve in 300K years is a fraud because their approach is grotesquely illusionary. Their argument is no more compelling than the argument flat-earthers use, its just the illusion is packaged a little nicer.

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Seriously. If I made a logical error, show it to me. The strawman I saw on your part was as follows: Convergence makes phylogenies impossible to construct therefore ToE is falsified. If this is not what you are arguing let me know.

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I never said convergence makes phylogenies *impossible* to construct, nor have I ever stated they falsify evolution. I said convergence thwarts efforts to construct phylogenies. Thwart can also mean baffle. That is exactly what convergence does, and is a major stumbling block to phylogeny construction. Do you at least agree with the last sentence, that convergence offers a major stumbling block to phylogeny construction?Convergence doesn’t falsify evolution because evolution accommodates convergence. Evolution accommodates everything! This is what we expect to see from bogus theories. It is no better than a low-grade hypothesis.* Evolution presumed/predicted phylogeny — severely clouded by over-abundance of convergence in nature
* Evolution presumed/predicted simple to complex — WRONG
* Evolution presumed/predicted common ancestors — MISSING IN ACTION
* Evolution presumed/predicted accumulation of genetic information — MISSING IN ACTION
* Evolution predicted inheritance of traits (Lamarckism) — WRONG (though some evos still cling to it)
* Evolution presumed/predicted no out-of-place fossils — WRONG (though evolutionists deny them and make excuses for them, ie overthrusts, abundance of C-14 in coal and natural gas due to contamination or other decay, etc)
* Evolution is a fairytale — RIGHT!

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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).

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Genetic deaths ignored? Aren’t these authors trying to show how *fast* an eye can evolve? Do genetic deaths impact the rate at which new beneficial substitutions can fixate in populations? Sure, just use intense selection and kill off the entire population in one swoop, save the new mutant! YES, of course genetic deaths matter. To deny this is to deny reality. You are playing right in to the illusion of the paper. It is a fraud, through and through.I absolutely guarantee you that serious geneticists like evolutionist James Crow would chalk this nonsense off to cold-fusioneque science.

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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.

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It is a best-case number for the beneficial substitution rate. It includes favorable assumptions such as mutant is always dominant, and ignores the negative impact of quantitative traits (both incur greater cost of fixation).

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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.

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You are missing the point. What if a certain, specific step S had to occur before S+1? The model assumes the steps can happen in any order, yet another huge stretch but not as severe a leap as their total avoidance of the genetic death/substitution cost problem.

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I'm not sure if the 1 in 300 comes from Haldane or ReMine's botched interperpretation of Haldane ... do you happen to know?

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From my readings of those old exchanges, it appears that it is from ReMine's strict application of Haldane's model.

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You need to read more. Haldane, 1957, pg 521

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Vik: [convergence] is not a'major' stumbling block at all.

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Perhaps the biggest single problem facing the evolutionist in the determination of phylogenies ... is to distinguish resemblances due to homologous characters from those due to convergent ones. (Cain, 1982, p 1)

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The major stumbling block ... is convergent evolution: if a similar characteristic evolved independently in two groups, they may be mistakenly classified as relatives. Usually, however, convergent evolution can be spotted because it gives rise to contradictory evolutionary trees. (Futuyma, 1983, p 54-55)

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[T]he fossil record shows that resemblance alone is not an accurate measure of closeness of relationship. (Ayala and Valentine, 1978, p 232)

(via Biotic Message, Remine, 1991, pg 261)