I think that essay may be summed up as saying that reality is complicated and messy and can’t be fitted into any simple scheme. It’s not a problem - as the essay says - for the basic Darwinian scheme - but it is a problem for population genetics which must be applied with careful attention to the details on a case-by-case basis. I’m reminded of Chaos Theory, and the three body problem. It’s not even a problem unique to biology.
It doesn’t really seem to be much of an argument against evolution - it does not weaken any of the evidence, nor does it offer much hope of a better explanation. Design proponents have come nowhere near proposing even an alternative theory they can agree on, let alone anything that would be a viable alternative to evolution.
But you have no theory that says those should be lost at any particular rate, that they always will be lost, nor that they will be continuously lost until extinction and prevent the long-term evolution and existence of life. And there is no theoretical or empirical basis for thinking natural selection is powerless to prevent gene loss or “functional compromise of genetic systems” until extinction.
All that crap about Kimura’s curve? Right out the window.
You have no unit of measurement, no curve, no mathematical function that predicts a rate of decay, a shape to a curve, or anything of the sort.
You essentially just have the observation that species have often been able to adapt by dispensing with unnecessary gene duplications.
Sanford was forced to change his definition of Genetic Entropy because real-world experiments falsified his prediction that all populations should be undergoing inevitable fitness decline until extinction.
So now suddenly Genetic Entropy stopped being about fitness, because now suddenly he finds fitness to be incomprehensible, and GE became about something else Sanford can’t measure and has no theory that says should accumulate indefinitely.
The argument from a title of a paper concerning a specific lineage in the LTEE? How can evolutionary biology hope to stand against this?
More paper titles that don’t support your contention that the concept of fitness is worthless, and do not support the concept of genetic entropy (gradual fitness loss invisible to selection) until inevitable and eventual extinction.
Interestingly Wagner is discussing the problem of measuring whether a mutation is neutral, ends up abandoning the concept of an “essentially” neutral mutation (one that is supposed to be neutral in all environments and genetic backgrounds, because experiments show there is probably no such thing), and instead proposes:
In sum, it may be best to define neutral mutations in the following way:
A neutral mutation does not change one aspect
of a biological system’s function
in a specific environment and genetic background.
This is no longer an essentialist definition of neutrality: a mutation’s neutrality depends not only on the mutation itself but on its interactions with other genes and the environment. Both may change over time.
According to Wikipedia, the umbrella organisation for these student clubs has been moribund for more than a decade. Looking at that organisation’s website, their last press release was in 2016 (and was mostly just a series of videos – many of which no longer exist), and none of their list of chapter clubs provide any contact information or non-broken weblinks (one of the only two broken weblinks was to Geocities – which hasn’t existed since 2009).
“I have a great deal of respect for the scientific method,” Cordova tells his attentive audience as he outlines the case for intelligent design. Broadly speaking, he says, the concept is that a divine hand has shaped the course of evolution.
Sal would have made an excellent expert witness at Kitzmiller, which happened a few months later.
My memory of it (which may be a bit fuzzy admittedly, after nearly twenty years) is that they’d accept anybody as members, but only Christians as leaders.
An explanation of this would however still be appreciated.
We also require that club leaders be Christians as the IDEA Center Leadership believes, for religious reasons unrelated to intelligent design theory, that the identity of the designer is the God of the Bible. …
So ID purportedly isn’t religious but IDEA is, and because of this IDEA wants its leadership to stay religious, in spite of the fact that this can’t help but undercut ID’s purported secular bona fides?
I would suggest that this is not just “extra sneakiness and ignorance”, but an unhealthy dose of extra stupidity on top.
How could functional compromise be measured without reference to some form of fitness?
Figures of Merit as David Snoke suggested, also Engineering Metrics.
Biophysicist William Bialek points out (without explicitly using the term “figure of merit”) what figures of merit are optimized.
When a medical doctor measures the fitness of an individual it is along a laundry list of several diagnostics alone, and reproductive success isn’t high on the list. Counting how many kids someone made does seem kind of irrelevant to someone’s vital signs.
By way of extension, figures of merit for a variety of biological systems can be developed. Biophysics is the answer, and this avoids the problem of “single unitary scalars”.
The Springer-Nature Switzerland AG Reference publication that I mentioned earlier is here in a book that used to be priced at $1500. It’s on university shelves now:
Refinement of that work is forthcoming, and I would like to thank the commenters here for participating in a discussion that will improve the quality of the future publications I hope to participate in.
Yes, and the most jacked up dude at a bodybuilding championship may be so full of dope he will never hear “dad”, but he may still win the competition with great lats.
Context matters for the meaning of words. Language is a vehicle for communication, and word definitions are based on mutual agreement and understanding of that meaning. Our grunts and vocalizations do not possess some intrinsically correct meaning. To assign another definition to fitness in the context of ecology is just to invite confusion; and worse yet, to apply your private meaning to other published work which utilizes the conventional understanding would dishonestly reinterpret those author’s intent.
Despite being gussed up in sciency blather, a biological definition of fitness will never be about some platonic created perfection that allowed Methuselah to live 969 years, such as Sanford argues from his lifespan decay curve in Genetic Entropy. This whole enterprise is about the pulpit, not the lectern.
