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Author
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Topic: Potential falsifications of the theory of evolution
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Taq
Member Posts: 10045 Joined: 03-06-2009 Member Rating: 5.3
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Re: Has any evidence been found yet?
According to Sanford's simulation, rabbits should have gone extinct a long time ago given their short generation time. They haven't. Reality demonstrates that Sanford's simulation is not representative of reality. There was a thread over at theologyweb and one over at infidel's that dealt with these calculations. I can dig them up if you want. To put it another way . . . A few years back there were some scientists who programmed a simulation dealing with aerodynamics. When they applied this program to bees the program told them that bees should not be able to fly. So who is right? The reality that bees are capable of flying or the simulation that says they can't?
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Taq
Member Posts: 10045 Joined: 03-06-2009 Member Rating: 5.3
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Re: Has any evidence been found yet?
Interesting claim, please support this with some evidence. I know of no such claim.
You should check out this thread over at theologyweb. They did the calculations using Sanford's program. The program claims that populations should die out due to genetic entropy within 300 to 800 generations. With a 6 month generation time for species such as rabbits this equates to 150 to 400 years. ALL RABBITS SHOULD BE DEAD ACCORDING TO SANFORD. Obviously, rabbits are doing quite well. Therefore, Sanford's program is not a good model of reality.
Well, your claim is false. There are extinct species of rabbits. And there are some extremely close to extinction right now. Do you recognize reality, or is it something you just believe in? According to Sanford's program, there should be no rabbits PERIOD. The same for insect species with a generation times that are even shorter than rabbits.
Well if the simulation says rabbits are going extinct, and rabbits are indeed going extinct then I would say it is a pretty good model. Again, what is this reality you keep referring to? Not on the way to extinction. Extinct. Within 300 years. All of them. This is what Sanford's program predicts, and it does not carry over to reality. The other thing you seem to ignore is that Sanford's program was only peer reviewed in a computer journal. The biological claims made by the program were never peer reviewed by biologists.
| Replies to this message: | | | Message 99 by dwise1, posted 11-02-2010 4:41 PM | | Taq has replied |
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Taq
Member Posts: 10045 Joined: 03-06-2009 Member Rating: 5.3
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Message 100 of 968 (589458)
11-02-2010 5:30 PM
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Reply to: Message 99 by dwise1
11-02-2010 4:41 PM
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Re: Has any evidence been found yet?
I've been trying to research on "genetic entropy" and have so far found that it's apparently a term coined by Sanford. The closest concept used in biology is "Muller's Ratchet" where slightly deleterious mutations become fixed in asexual populations. In sexual populations recombination does away with this effect. Further research on Muller's Ratchet suggests that there is a limit to the number of deleterious mutations that can slip past selection.
quote:
A decrease in nucleotide substitution rates over time suggests that selection may be limiting the effects of Muller's ratchet by removing individuals with the highest mutational loads and decreasing the rate at which new mutations become fixed. This countering effect of selection could slow the overall rate of endosymbiont extinction.
Mutational meltdown in primary endosymbionts: selection limits Muller's ratchet - PubMed
IOW, there is a threshold below which the population does not go due to stronger selection. So even in the worst case scenario (asexual reproduction) it is found that mutational meltdown (i.e. Muller's Ratchet) does not result in extinction. That is, unless, AlphaOmega can tell us why reality is forced to conform to a computer program (instead of the other way around).
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 99 by dwise1, posted 11-02-2010 4:41 PM | | dwise1 has not replied |
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Taq
Member Posts: 10045 Joined: 03-06-2009 Member Rating: 5.3
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Message 101 of 968 (589459)
11-02-2010 5:37 PM
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Reply to: Message 99 by dwise1
11-02-2010 4:41 PM
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Re: Has any evidence been found yet?
Being limited to simulating only small populations means that the program is biased towards populations that will experience extinction due to mutational meltdown. Thus, at most the program would serve as verification of mutational meltdown of small populations, but it cannot say anything at all about normal-sized or large populations which by virtue of their population size are not subject to mutational meltdown. It is also worth mentioning that the program can only handle ~1700 beneficial mutations within the population. If more than that are produced in the simulation they are ignored.
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At the end of the output file, MENDEL presented the error, "Favorable mutation count exceeds limit". It seems that MENDEL is unable to process favorable mutations over 1788 (the number of beneficial mutations in the final generation). In the end, the population had a fitness of 0.2297 (and rising), with 3329 deleterious mutations and 1788 beneficial mutations. Ansgar Seraph at theologyweb
so the program allows for over 3,000 deleterious mutations but limits the beneficial mutations to almost half that. It would seem that the program is set up for a predetermined outcome.
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 99 by dwise1, posted 11-02-2010 4:41 PM | | dwise1 has not replied |
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Taq
Member Posts: 10045 Joined: 03-06-2009 Member Rating: 5.3
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Re: Common Descent explained
Well, with all due respect, I understand this quite well. "All of the available evidence" that you refer to equally supports a common designer and multiple ancestors as well. What shared genetic markers would falsify a common designer and multiple ancestors? What mixture of characteristics in a fossil would falsify a common designer and multiple ancestors? Why is it that common design and multiple ancestors produces the same exact evidence as we would expect from common ancestry and evolutionary mechanisms? Can you explain this?
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Taq
Member Posts: 10045 Joined: 03-06-2009 Member Rating: 5.3
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Re: Has any evidence been found yet?
Now natural selection works at the phenotype with individual organisms. As phenotypes gain these slightly deleterious mutations, there is a selective pressure against these mutations, but basically all of the organisms have them, so they cant' be differentiated at the organism level. If there is selective pressure against these mutations then they would not become fixed in the population to begin with. If they are not deleterious enough to lower the fitness of the organism so as to bypass natural selection then they will not cause the species to go extinct. Perhaps the analogy to use here is the "straw that broke the camel's back". Each piece of straw is very light, but the camel can only carry so much. That last piece of straw that overloads the camel is the threshold, the mutation that will be strongly selected against.
Now, natural selection can remove these mutations from the population if the population can afford the cost of section. In organisms with large genomes, low fecundity, and long generation times (most large mammals), they cannot afford the cost of selction without severe inbreeding depression. Please support this assertion.
The population will also carry the recessive negative alleles, because NS can't see them. They are seen by NS in homozygotes. This is why there is a strong correlation between the frequency of the sickle cell allele and geographic areas with endemic malaria. If what you claimed is true then the frequency of the sickle cell allele should be the same in Europeans as it is in Africans. It isn't.
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Taq
Member Posts: 10045 Joined: 03-06-2009 Member Rating: 5.3
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Ahhhh. You have provided a good example. Can I use it?. Let's say the straws are the mutation rate, and each of the straws weighs very little. Gen 1 has no straws. Gen 2, each camel in the population gets 100 straws. (100 mutations per generation) That's no problem for all the camels. Gen 100 all the camels are still standing fine with 100000 staws each. At Gen 200 some of the weak camels start dropping because of the weight of the straws, and they are selected against. Therefore, at Gen 200 no more deleterious mutations are passed on to the next generation because those born with a deleterious mutation are selected against.
I think you are assuming that I am arguing against NS. You are arguing that NS does not see recessive deleterious alleles. NS does see these alleles, in homozygotes.
Sickle cell example is a good example of NS. It happens. Agreed. It is a falsification of your claims. If NS can not see deleterious recessive mutations as you claim then the frequency of the hemoglobin S allele should be the same in European and African populations. This is the prediction that your hypothesis makes. It is falsified by reality. Hemoglobin S correlates strongly with African populations due to endemic malaria. Therefore, deleterious mutations are selected against and removed from the population before they reach fixation.
Now evos theorize that we all came out of Africa. But we don't all look like Africans, do we? We have mutated. They have mutated. The majority of indiginous African people have mutations for kinky hair, larger lips, and flatter noses. (this is not racist, it is a fact). There appears to be no selection against these traits. There appears to be no selection for these traits either. But those traits have spread through the population. So either they drifted or were selected. There are two ways mutations can spread through a population. One is drift, the other is selection. Are any of these traits deleterious or causing genetic entropy? If not, then what is your point?
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Taq
Member Posts: 10045 Joined: 03-06-2009 Member Rating: 5.3
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Re: Genetic entropy and other nonsense
I suspect Darwin became an old earther before he came up with the nonsense of OOS. Despite your opinion of Origin of Species, almost all naturalists of Darwin's time accepted the findings of Lyell and others as to the ancient age of the Earth. The ancient age of the Earth was only denied by a minority of Darwin's peers.
Darwin's ideas seem to stem from the religious myth of Lyell's uniformitarianism, and he invented evolution to explain OOS. How is Lyell's work religious and how did Darwin's ideas stem from it?
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Taq
Member Posts: 10045 Joined: 03-06-2009 Member Rating: 5.3
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Re: Has any evidence been found yet?
What you are missing is that the strongest are mutants also relative to their ancestors. They are the most fit in that generation in that selection environment. However, they are less fit than their ancestors. That's what relative fitness is. This is not true. If the parents are heterozygotes for a given deleterious mutation then 1 in 4 of the offspring will be homozygous for the fitter allele. 1 in 4 of the offspring will be FITTER than the parents, and fitter than their siblings (especially those that are homozygous for the deleterious allele). You also are trying to have your cake and eat it too. You want to say that these deleterious mutations make it past selection, but then you claim that these mutations are deleterious enough to cause the offspring to be non-viable. You can't have it both ways. Either a mutation lowers fitness and is therefore selected against or it does not lower fitness and therefore no extinction.
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Taq
Member Posts: 10045 Joined: 03-06-2009 Member Rating: 5.3
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Re: Population genetics?
Im not sure of your reasoniing here. Dr. Sanford is a Biologist in the field of genetics who specializes in agriculture. Everything in agriculture is realted to populations. All of his individual papers do not address populations as such, but his work can and is applied to populations. That is not population genetics. Sanford does not have any population genetics papers in any biologically related peer review journals that I am aware. The MA paper is in a computer journal and was never peer reviewed by biologists.
Well that's what MA is. It is a forward population accounting program. It accounts for the genomes and compares populations relative to fitness. MA does so in an artificial environment that does not model real life. As I demonstrated earlier, the MA program predicts that mice and mosquitoes should have gone extinct by now. Not just a few species, but ALL OF THEM. Not only that, but the program only allows ~1700 beneficial mutations in the simulation. If any more appear in the simulation they are ignored. This is not so with deleterious mutations which are allowed to accumulate well past the 1700 mark. It's almost as if the computer was designed with a pre-determined outcome. . . . hmm, how strange.
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Taq
Member Posts: 10045 Joined: 03-06-2009 Member Rating: 5.3
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Re: Has any evidence been found yet?
X, Y, and Z are slightly deleterious in your scenario. By definition, that means that there is a fitness decrease already. How did they become fixed then? Well, the negative effect on the phenotype was so small that in nature there was no recognizable fitness difference between thiose organizms that had X, Y, and Z slightly deleterious alleles and so the population frequency of those alleles increased through drift. If the negative effects are so small as to bypass natural selection then they are not strong enough to cause the species to go extinct.
Fitness is not dependant on natural selection. The fitness of a population is most certainly dependent on natural selection. That is the whole point. If a mutation lowers fitness then that mutation will not be passed on as often as neutral or beneficial alleles for the same gene.
Let's reduce NS too zero (or as close as possible). Let's in the lab supply an environment where there are no predators, plenty of food, and a viable climate. No such environment exists. If it did we would be swimming in hundreds of feet of E. coli. All food supplies run out, and those who are most capable of getting that food will pass on their genes at a higher rate. This is true of E. coli on an agar plate as much as E. coli found natively in the gut. When you grow bacteria in a lab environment they evolve to best fit those conditions. If you grew bacteria in a lab environment for many generations and then pitted them against the ancestral population that had evolved in the gut the lab grown bacteria would win out. What your example does is have a population evolve in a different environment. They will evolve to that environment and lose adaptations to the original environment. That is what natural selection will do. You can not claim that "genetic entropy" has occurred because a population does not survive as well in an environment it did not evolve to be in.
We place them in an environment where the whole population dies except a few and then we see the bacteria thriving once again. Bacteria and viruses and the like can afford these drastic bottlenecks (they can afford the cost of selection). However when you have sexual creatures, they rarely can go through these bottlenecks with out severe genetic drift problems which show up in inbreeding depression. They also rarely see these bottleneck reductions in reality. Why are you bringing up environmental challenges that cause genetic bottlenecks? Sanford's claim is that species will go extinct WITHOUT A CHANGE IN ENVIRONMENT OR A GENETIC BOTTLENECK.
The problem is the frequency of deleterious mutation in the population. When the frequency of deleterious mutations is high, then homozygosity of those alleles gets expressesd and NS has a hay day. When the frequency of deleterious alleles is low, then heterozygosity reigns and the population diverges, but successfully. If an allele is deleterious enough to cause a decrease in fitness then it will be selected against before it can reach a high level of homozygosity.
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Taq
Member Posts: 10045 Joined: 03-06-2009 Member Rating: 5.3
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Re: XYZ allele example
No, they are subject always to selective pressure which decides if the inividual mutation is slightly deleterious, deleterious, advantageous, or slightly advantageous. But relative to the whole population, a specific slightly deleterious mutation can not be singled out relative to the other mutations in the population. This would only be true if these mutations did not affect fitness. You are saying that these mutations cause organisms to be so unfit that they are unable to reproduce. Natural selection could easily sort this mutation away from the others.
A human can be fat and less fit than a slim trim muscular human relative to survival. But that fat human may have other positive fitness traits like intelligence, which allows him to survive equally well with the apparently more fit individual. So the dumber human and the fat human both pass on their genes. Both traits may be slightly deleterious. If we are using fat vs. slim as alleles and smart vs. dumb as alleles then those with both the slim and smart alleles would outcompete everyone and cause the fat and dumb alleles to remain low and would not reach fixation.
Not only slightly deleterious mutations can be fixed in a population via drift, but deleterious mutations can as well. If that were so then hemoglobin S would have reached fixation. Instead, it is strongly correlated with selective pressures in areas with endemic malaria. Reality demonstrates that you are wrong.
That is only true if fitness is dependant on natural selection which it is not. Drift and random mutation also play a vital part in this picture. Drift only applies to mutations which do not affect fitness. Mutations that produce non-viable organisms, as your genetic entropy hypothesis suggests, would not reach fixation through drift. How could they when the non-viable organisms in which these mutations occur do not produce offspring? Like I said, you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you are using random drift to fix slightly deleterious mutations in the genome then you can not turn around and claim that these same mutations result in non-viable species.
But the reality is, in large mammals, the mutation rate is high, the fecudity is low, and the ratio of advantageous to deleterious is very very low. It is not possible here, and that is what MA shows. MA shows that ALL rabbits should have died off ages ago. They haven't. MA is wrong. The Map is not the Territory.
Remember, you said X,Y,and Z drifted and fixed in the population. That means all of the organisms have them. When the load does become too high then natural selection will begin selecting them out. Since all of the organisms have them and each generation they keep getting more, then extinction is inevitable. Again, you are making a fundamental error. Natural selection will select against the new mutations, in addition to X, Y, and Z, AS SOON AS THEY HAPPEN. The fourth and lethal mutation can not reach fixation.
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Taq
Member Posts: 10045 Joined: 03-06-2009 Member Rating: 5.3
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Re: Has any evidence been found yet?
In population genetics, fitness is almost always measured against ancestral populations. How does one do this? Do we dig them up and reanimate them?
Here is an example paper in Science disscussing the captive breeding of trout and how thier fitness is decreasing genetically. Decreasing compared to what? To other MODERN populations of fish? And what environment are they measuring this fitness in? In the hatchery environment where the hatchery fish have been selected for or in other environments where the other modern population has been evolving?
This fitness decline took place in just 12 years. Oh My! with no inbreeding depression. Oh my! Could it be genetic entropy? Oh my! No. A creationist cannot be right. Fitness decline in which environment?
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Taq
Member Posts: 10045 Joined: 03-06-2009 Member Rating: 5.3
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Re: Has any evidence been found yet?
You take a parent population. You measure how many offspring they have. You measure how many offspring that survive to reproductive age. That is a measurement of reproductive fitness of the parental population. This assumes that the environment is the same, that predation is the same, etc.
Open your minds people. EVO has blinded you to so much simple stuff. This is elementary school science here. We are not the ones removing natural selection from the process of evolution and then complaining because deleterious mutations increase.
Is it even possible for you to read and comprehend the paper? He spells it out quite simply. It wasn't in the original quote you gave us. What is wrong for asking for the context for the measurement of fitness? Also, why isn't there genetic entropy in the wild populations? Shouldn't we be seeing the same decrease in fitness in the wild populations as seen in the captive populations according to MA?
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Taq
Member Posts: 10045 Joined: 03-06-2009 Member Rating: 5.3
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Re: Which side are you on?
My claim is that genetic entropy is real, and it can be modelled using MA. If it is real then you should be able to point to a naturally occuring population in which genetic entropy is occuring and can be verified. Can you point to one? The only populations you have pointed to thus far are populations that are declining because of habitat loss, not because of deleterious mutations.
The problem is not the environment. Humans live and have lived in many environments. So have most other animals. The problems are the mutations and mutational load that doesn't allow for adaptation. Evidence please. For a specific example, can you please point to the genetic differences between humans and chimps that could not have been produced by the observed mechanisms of mutation and selection.
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