Summations Only

Hi again Tangle, I agree, but how do we know that this feature was not present in the ancestral population and that the current population lost it? Well now, we need a little more than that. So we could test the population of the original island to see if they have this gene but it is switched off?Paging Wounded King ... paging Wounded King ...Enjoy

if it was his first offence or threat to leave; possibly. But it's far from that. I don't take offence on forums - life's too short for that, but I don't see why being called an asshole should go un-remarked.

Hi foreveryoung,Once again you are concentrating on the slight whilst ignoring the substance. JonF makes an important point, one that you need to address.You have claimed that new features cannot evolve. In response you have been given two excellent examples of new traits evolving; nylon-eating bacteria and the cecal valve of certain Wall Lizards. You have rejected these as not being the kind of trait you meant.If this is your position, you need to do two things;1) You need to explain exactly why these traits do not count as traits. Be specific; hand-waving is not sufficient here.2) Tell us exactly what would constitute a new trait. And I mean exactly what. "Like a tonsil" is not up to scratch. We need an exacting operational definition of a "new trait" so that we can know whether or not we have an example to show you and whether your definition is actually in agreement with what the ToE predicts. Without this definition, we could go round in circles forever.All you are being asked for is a reasonable definition of what you're asking to see. This is perfectly fair. Indeed, it is essential to your argument.If you take such exception to JonF calling you clueless, then there exists an obvious solution; prove him wrong. If you are unable to prove him wrong, then perhaps it wasn't such a calumny after all. After all, it's not a question that I would expect the average non-biologist to answer. In any case, calling us all assholes and threatening to flounce out every five minutes is guaranteed not to get us anywhere.It's your choice. You can ignore the sniping and engage in constructive debate or you can concentrate on more-heat-than-light shouting and name calling. Make your choice, but if you leave, no-one on this board is going to lose any sleep over it.Mutate and Survive

Hi Tangle irrelevant, sorry.People under the cloud of cognitive dissonance are at a disadvantage, they are having real actual trouble putting things together to make sense in their worldview, and it is very normal for any of us to get angry or upset in these conditions.These conditions last until the dissonance is resolved, and this may take months.What is needed is compassion, understanding that this is a tough thing to go through. Curiously, I don't have any trouble doing so, as I like to focus on the argument and ignore any extraneous comments no matter what they involve.Enjoy.

in your opinion :-)In a court of law, a guilty party in sentenced only after taking into account the perps 'previous'. A single indiscretion may result in a conditional discharge, a repeat offender will not be. But we all have differing tolerance levels - mine is set a little lower than yours it seems. Following the 'reward good behaviour, ignore bad' model of conditioning works well with young children at home. I'm less convinced of its efficacy on an internet forum, but I'm perfectly happy for you to pursue it ;-).Anyway, I've already spent too much time worrying about the child, I'm far more intrigued by our little lizard.

Hi Tangle, See? you are resisting changing your opinion due to new information ... AND it's on topic.Enjoy.

Several comments on PZ's blog have suggested that it's more likely that the ancestral population contains a trait for cecal valves that is not 'used' whilst the lizards are mostly insectivorous but is switched on when the diet changes to mostly vegetarian.Their main objection seems to be that 30 generations is too soon for a gene mutation to become set in the population.But this seems to beg the question a bit - if the lizard can eat both, why don't they all go the mostly vegetarian way? A vegetarian diet is more stable and easier to maintain. Maybe there's a difference between the two island's food sources?I'm now tempted to zip off over to the ancestral island, blag a few breeding pairs and feed them vegetables for a few generations to see what happens.There are more questions than answers......

Hi Tangle, I seem to remember comments on this before, so that would still make it a matter of selection and modification to be fully developed, just not so much a new trait evolving as an old one re-evolving. This seems a rather shady basis for skepticism, particularly as we are talking about (a) a bottleneck event and (b) competition with the other lizards now extinct -- both giving strong selection pressure that is not existing on the parent island. If the ancestral island is not as edible, veggie wise, then this might be a case of divergent evolution, with one group going for insects more than veggies and the other vice versa. You might want to capture a few breeding pairs while you're blagging them ...Enjoy.

It was the bugblatter’s prey that failed to adapt. Not that is cleared up I will address your point. They failed because their environment changed. Maybe they did use their feet and walked away to a more hospitable place. The point is they disappeared in the new environment but because different game was plentiful the bugblatter, or at least a population of bugblatters, stayed. I planned on talking about the population that didn’t stay and moved on a new territory a later time. I don’t full understand all of this statement but I will try to answer.The first part is easy although I thought I was pretty clear in my scenario. The animals didn’t change not in the way, I believe, you are thinking. The animals that were smaller and thinner, not changed but within the natural variation of the species, tended to live longer to reproduce.Hopefully that is clearer. Now can you accept that, in this situation, individuals with the traits of being smaller and thinner will survive more often to pass on those traits and that slowly this can become established in a population? I’m not even talking about a change. I’m talking about members of the new population that fall within the natural size variation of the parent population. Can you accept that this is possible? Again, I’m not quite sure what this point means but again I will try to address it. I think you are suggesting that the parent population will meet with the rain forest population. The scenario established that they won’t meet on account of a whole sea separating them. I’m not talking speciationyet. I’m talking already existing traits becoming dominant. No. Although I betcha if I looked on you tube I could find them trying. However, that has nothing to do with the ToE. Good thing because if you were you would be living evidence that the ToE wrong.You have over 30 posts in this thread and at least as many replies, many of them trying to correct your misunderstanding of even the basics of the ToE, and we don’t seem to be any further. We are still stuck at definitions. I’ve been patient and respectful, and I will continue to be, but please make an effort to understand what the ToE actually states. It is hard to discuss this with you when you are talking about a theory that doesn’t exist to us on the side of evolution.

Hi Jefferinoopolis, Actually this thread is about how the process of evolution actually works, rather than what the theory of evolution say should happen. This is one of the problems that intellen has -- he conflates one with the other.Enjoy.

Good point.My posts have been trying to show him a plausible scenerio that demonstrates how process can work but I kind of got sucked into his arguement at the end of that last response.

Hi RAZDI apologize for the late entry on this But I would like to disagree with one of you assertions you made early on in this post. Your QuoteI believe that a good measure of innate information can be represented by the inference of entropy (Shannon Entropy) and the problem of the definition in a biological system of that entropy can be overcome to some degree by the principle of Maximum entropy. The principle of maximum entropy works when little is known about the information in a system. Here is a paper describing gain in information Note the reference to the Punctuated Equilibrium in the abstract, which to me leaves a dubious source of that information and the accompanying low probability of very large changes in an organism (new novel features). I chose this paper that favors the low probability opinion verses the opposing view of Spetner. When calculating the probability of forming DNA segments from a string of Deoxynucleotides it becomes apparent that problems explaining the persistence of new information is problematical (pointed out by most Creationists).The paper on information in the DNAhttp://www-lmmb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/paper/ev/ev.pdfNow tell me why you think that the information in a genome is not well defined by creationists like Myers when it is clearly in his arguments?Edited by zaius137, : No reason given.

Hi Zaius,RAZD is by no means saying that there aren't usable metrics for measuring information in the Genome, what he is saying is that creationists/IDists don't use these metrics but instead prefer their own peculiar variations which are rarely if ever actually usable. In the few examples where a metric can be applied, such as Spetner's metrics or Durston et al.'s functional information, to get a value there is little way to relate it meaningfully to any actual biological function or system in order to look at changes in that system.It seems pretty strange to show us a paper on how evolutionary biologists measure information in a genetic system rather than a creationist one since that was what was asked for.Why not provide a specific creationist/IDist definition so we can see how it holds up? Well certainly as claimed by most creationists, but is it a relevant claim? You seem to be resorting to the old tried and tested tornado in a junkyard approach which has little if anything to do with evolution. Mutations in DNA don't come about by the spontaneous assembling of a random string of nucleotides. At best you might try to make an argument against abiogenesis with this sort of approach, but it would be a weak one with a host of assumptions needed to prop it up. Calculating the probability of any particular specific sequence of nucleotides or amino acids is essentially meaningless unless you put it in the context of the whole array of possible strings and their equivalent biological functionality.Even in the case of a completely de novo origination of a novel gene, which is what the paper you cited most closely resembles starting from 0 information, I'm not sure how relevant your approach would be since it seems to ignore the array of equally functional divergent strings. I'm not entirely clear who you are talking about here, do you mean Stephen Meyer? If so then I'd ask what that clear definition is because all the ones I have seen are pretty much a mess and he seems to dismiss commonly used ones like Shannon entropy or Kolmogorov complexity.TTFN,WK

Hi Wounded King Is it necessary for you to define what RAZD implied, I found his statement rather broad in scope. You seem to know a great deal of the Creationist arguments. Do you care to define metric or variation that concludes rarely if actually usable.I know I cited a non-creationist paper but it does provide mathematical validity to my assertion. My point was by using the principle of Maximum Entropy it is not necessary to demonstrate specific functionality in the genome. Assuredly, the utility of such information is relevant but not to the basic assertion that DNA is an information storage system. I am eventually going in that direction This is actually getting ahead of the point a bit but I might go to Dembski’s specified Complexity argument where he mathematically quantifies specified complexity in the genome using chance hypothesis. Specifically expressed:Working on it...Interesting you mentioned Kolmogorov complexity in your example can you explain why?Edited by zaius137, : A NewbeEdited by zaius137, : No reason given.Edited by zaius137, : double Newbe...

Hi Zaius,I'm not sure if there is a language problem but I am finding your argument rather hard to follow. Well how broad? I probably couldn't think of more than a dozen IDist/creationists at most putting forward distinct definitions of information. I would suggest that RAZD's criticisms would cover a substantial proportion of them, as would the similar issues I raised.Off the top of my head there are ...Lee Spetner, Werner Gitt, William Dembski, Durston/Able/Trevors (I'm putting them together since they published papers on this together), Doug Axe, John Sanford, Royal Truman and maybe Ann Gauger. There may be some overlap amongst them as well, 'Complex Specified Information' is pervasive, I haven't done an exhaustive comparison. I don't think it does, you claim 'explaining the persistence of new information is problematical'. In what way does the paper you cited support this? The paper itself concludes that in the artificial system they study new information could arise rapidly contrary to the predictions of creationists/IDists. Again, I don't think anyone has an issue with considering DNA a type of information storage system. The issue is rather the source of that information. Because it is one of the metrics which Meyer discussed in 'Signature in the Cell', and which he rejected in favour of 'Complex Specified Information', though I'm not sure if he means quite the same thing by this as Dembski.TTFN,WK