Nuff said??
That fake quote is utterly, objectively dishonest. Why did you use it?
2 Likes
âGenome Reduction as the Dominant Mode of Evolutionâ Wolf and Koonin,
âSelection Driven Gene Lossâ â Sanna Koskiniemi
So, there is at the very least no inevitability to the evolution of more complexity by elimination of the least fertile and viable (falsely advertised as Natural Selection).
If on average gene loss is more predominant than gene creation, I donât think thatâs good.
Do evolutionary biologists bother to think about this and examine it and publish on it?
Have they solved the problems Ariew and Lewontin have pointed out about fitness confusions?
I donât think so.
That fake quote is utterly, objectively dishonest. Why did you use it?
It shows that evolving âfitnessâ does not equal evolving genomic complexity, therefore Darwin got it wrong, or at best the question is not settled.
Darwin Devolves, to quote Michael BeheâŚ
Lenski uncharacteristically listed himself in the MIDDLE of the author list rather than the usual âlast authorâ lab head position.
In any case:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1705887114
âMutator genomes decay, despite sustained fitness gains, in a long-term experiment with bacteriaâ
Here, we document the rapid genome decay of hypermutable bacteria even during tens of thousands of generations of sustained adaptation to a laboratory environment. These findings suggest the need to reexamine current ideas about the evolution of bacterial genomes,
I think they actually showed how useless some of the supposed measures-by-inference of selection as the genomes under supposed adaptation looked a lot like those under no adaptation.
The experimental results were not at all surprising to me.
Actually Iâm trying to see if you and your friends have anything of substance to contribute by way of agreement or disagreement with Ariew and Lewontinâs assessment.
Do you agree with Ariew and Lewontin?
The subject of the post wasnât about me, but rather their paper,right?
If youâve been enlightened by their insights, the least you can do is show some appreciation for me finding such an outstanding essay.
Do you really not understand that the Couce paper is specifically discussing populations that have evolved unusually high mutation rates? ie. Hypermutation?
1 Like
There is no upward trend to complexity in evolution - that idea was laid to rest decades ago. I have no idea what the second part is meant to mean. It looks as if youâre trying to say that Natural Selection isnât Natural Selection, but it looks more like youâre talking about eugenics (whic, of course would be Artificial Selection).
So you are claiming that the quote was intentionally mutilated to deceive? Because the full quote certainly does not make any such claim. Moreover Darwin certainly did not make any claims about genomic complexity - nor have you found anything that is a real problem for evolutionary theory in that respect.
2 Likes
Just to dispel any remaining doubt regarding the results of Lenskiâs study (my emphasis):
Experimental studies of evolution have increased greatly in number in recent years, stimulated by the growing power of genomic tools. However, organismal fitness remains the ultimate metric for interpreting these experiments, and the dynamics of fitness remain poorly understood over long time scales. Here, we examine fitness trajectories for 12 Escherichia coli populations during 50,000
generations. Mean fitness appears to increase without bound, consistent with a power law. We also derive this power-law relation theoretically by incorporating clonal interference and diminishing-returns epistasis into a dynamical model of changes in mean fitness over time.
Long-Term Dynamics of Adaptation in Asexual Populations | Science
Iâve previously reproduced this graph from the article for those who need pictures to help grasp the point. @stcordova, of course, being a for real actual scientist does not need such visual aids, but for anyone who does:
The more important question: do you? And do you have any real idea what theyâre saying?
4 Likes
Yes thatâs a nice figure Faizal, but Mr. Cordova will shortly return to regurgitate a cut-out of the title of the paper concerning a mutator strain in an experiment with E coli, as if it applies to all of biology under all circumstances.
And then what you gonna do? Explain all the same facts to him again and again?
4 Likes
Nobody says there is. Evolution is not a theory that says complexity is an inevitability that will always occur under all circumstances.
Just that it is something that occurs under some circumstances.
Natural selection doesnât always favor complexity =/= Natural selection never favors complexity.
Your problem is dichotomous thinking has corrupted your ability to reason. Everything is black and white, there are no details, no nuances, no caveats.
That would meet the definition of evolution by natural selection as it would cause transgenerational change in the distribution of alleles in a population.
It doesnât matter what you think is good because youâre showing yourself to be unwilling to think about what processes might be occurring in nature.
Hereâs one possibility how losses and gains can combine to give a picture where periods of loss occur for much longer than periods of gain:
Hereâs another:
The periods where loss occurs are much longer than the period where gain occurs, and yet you can have a net total gain for some lineage, even with longer periods of loss. Then the lineage where gain occurred (say the origin of eukaryotes, or instances of whole genome duplication) can then diversify under a lot of subsequent losses again.
You are simply refusing to use your brain.
Do you?
Fixed.
2 Likes
Why would you think that complexity is opposite to, or complimentary to, fertility and viability?
How long have you been on the origin apologetics beat? Surely you know that complexity is not some evolutionary goal by now.
1 Like
Since itâs not a real quote, it shows nothing but dishonesty.
So now youâre compounding your mendacity by pretending that you understand how to read a typical author list. Even if you donât, itâs made clear by clicking on the link next to the authorsâ names:
Author contributions: D.S. and O.T. designed research; A.C., L.V.C., and O.T. performed research; A.C., L.V.C., C.F., T.H., J.-P.F. M.W., R.E.L., D.S., and O.T. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; A.C., L.V.C., M.W., D.S., and O.T. analyzed data; and A.C., L.V.C., R.E.L., and O.T. wrote the paper.
Olivier Tenaillon is a lab head and the corresponding author. The first two authors are French. The only person from Lenskiâs lab is the third author, so there would be absolutely no reason for Lenski to be last, or to decide on the authorship order. Heâs Tenaillonâs collaborator.
So there are at least FOUR aspects clearly presented (one step from the link you provided!) that contradict your false claim, offered to support your phony quote.
Letâs put this in Judeo-Christian terms. Quoting someone is a claim that you were a direct witness to those words, either in person or in print. How does repeatedly bearing false witness help to defend your idea of Christianity? Does it not include the Ninth Commandment?
2 Likes
Your point is that fitness is worthless as a concept. But that isnât the point of Ariew and Lewontin.
You understand that one can agree with Ariew and Lewontin and disagree with your entirely different conclusion?
Once again, the fact that fitness is contextually specific does not mean the concept is worthless and canât be made sense of. Examples and explanations of how it can be useful and made sense of have been given already.
There isnât anything else to add to this discussion. Youâve given arguments and then cited papers purported to support those arguments, the arguments have been refuted either outright, or weâve shown the papers donât support your conclusions.
Youâve revealed yourself to be a person prone to overly dichotomous thinking and hasty generalizations, desperate to derive a pre-conceived conclusion with data that canât support it.
The topic has thus been exhausted.
3 Likes
In Salâs world, the 9th commandment would be cited as:
âBear false witnessâ - God
4 Likes
âgenomes decay despite sustained fitness gainsâ â Lenski
That was a result of his experiment. Nothing to crow about. Not just the mutator lines, but even the glucose line lost genes while fitness increased.
Stop with the quote mines. Youâve been called out on it already, and repetition after that is transparently dishonest.
What does âdecayâ mean? Is gene loss always decay?
2 Likes
So now youâre not only misquoting the paperâs title, youâre also mischaracterizing what it says, because adaptive streamlining by dispensing with unnecessary genetic material isnât increasing mutational load, and isnât the result of deleterious mutations hitchhiking with beneficial ones like in the mutator lines.
So yes, in fact, it is just in the mutator lines.
I think it is a big hint that youâre not on the side of truth if you have to tell falsehoods to attack evolution.
3 Likes
Sorry not to have been involved in this discussion. I was busy with other things. Ariew and Lewontin, as some people here have argued, were just saying that if the life cycle of the organism is not very simple, there is no easy way to calculate a single number that is the fitness of a genotype. However that does not mean that there are no differences in the ability of the genotypes (or phenotypes) to leave offspring in future generations. In modeling of genotype frequencies and gene frequencies in simple discrete-generations models, there are numbers which are relative fitnesses, and these allow predictions of change in gene frequencies. Equations intended to demonstrate âgenetic entropyâ use those predictions and thus make use of fitnesses. To have one of the co-authors in papers on that topic declare that fitnesses are meaningless is, well, rather astonishing.
3 Likes
And still pretending it was written by Lenski and Lenski alone, which it wasnât. That canât be passed off as a misunderstanding or mistake.
@stcordova, you are an unashamed liar. Why donât you scurry off to your slime-pit for another 3 years.
3 Likes