Integrity. Coherence. The point.
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Sorry, Bill, but that’s just nonsensical. Even many creationists accept that there was a chromosomal fusion, and anyone who doubts it will have to explain the clear evidence that you consistently ignore. Reality isn’t just a matter of opinion.
In short: a clue. The evidence for fusion is separate from the evidence for fixation. We know that fixation happens because, well, it’s fixed. Why are you unwilling to believe that the frequency was once less than 1? You appear to accept that some mutations are eventually fixed. Why not this one?
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This is … weird. At any given moment EVERY gene is fixed in the current population. It might not remain fixed if there is further mutation or deleted.
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How do you eliminate design as the cause?
If it was not designed then you need to explain how it got fixed by selection/drift. If it was designed that explains the observation of fixation. There are fixation models for a reason.
False. If you are working with the axiom that natural processes observed in the present can explain events in the past then you will conclude that it is a fusion event. We see fusions occurring in the present, and they look just like human chromosome 2. As mentioned elsewhere, your design argument is equivalent to claiming that we should throw out fingerprint evidence because God could have designed swirly oil patterns at crime scenes that just happen to look like fingerprints.
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Because design, by which I presume you mean fiat creation, makes no sense of the data. Why would a designer construct one chromosome to look as if it had once been two chromosomes, complete with a degenerate extra centromere and buried telomeric sequences?
You demand an explanation and supply one. Lots of mutations become fixed. Chromosomal fusion is a mutation. What more is needed? If we’re talking about drift, any individual fusion has a very small chance (1/2N) of ever being fixed, but lots of them have happened in various lineages, and some of them become fixed. This happens to be one.
Sure. They help us understand how some things happen. But they aren’t needed to decide whether they happened.
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I think this is missing an important point. Design by an omnipotent Designer can never be eliminated, which is where ID fails as a science. It’s the job of ID scientists (if any) to state how their hypothesis might be falsified, and how to make sense of it.
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Whether it is designed or not, it is still a fusion.
‘Selection or drift’ is the explanation to how it got fixed by selection or drift.
But not why there is a fusion. Which is vaguely important when you are trying to explain the fusion…
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It can be eliminated as the direct cause if you can show a tested hypothesis for the claim. It looks like a fusion is not a tested hypothesis.
This important point has been communicated to Bill over, and over, and over again. But sealions are going to sealion.
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No, that won’t do it. The Designer could have designed it this way.
If the designer used drift and/or selection, then there is no distinction between design and evolution. THE DESIGNER COULD BE EVOLUTION.
Please consider.
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When you say there is a fusion do you not mean a reproductive mistake? I may have missed your point.
Sure, that’s one place where it fails. An omnipotent designer can do anything and make it look like something else. In order to make this into anything like a scientific hypothesis you need auxiliary assumptions: the designer isn’t senseless or evil, for example, and is not trying to deceive us. I’m assuming that creationists are willing to grant those assumptions. With them, creationism (which you should not equate with ID) can be tested. Of course it fails.
Of course it’s a tested hypothesis. Here’s a test: if it’s fusion, but not if it isn’t, we should see a degenerate centromere and telomeric sequences lined up inside the chromosome. We see them, so the test is passed. This is just another of your myriad of excuse mantras.
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This is gibberish.
The fusion is the observation.
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How would you possibly construe the evidence of telomers, centromeres, and head to head resemblance to other primates as supporting intentional design? If the creationist filter hears quack and concludes dog, well, I suppose that makes sense actually. We can call it the creationist quack filter.
Dan and others are correct here. Let us suppose that chromosome 2 was indeed designed by Loki, the Norse trickster god. Delighting in confounding humans, he purposefully set out to arrange chromosome 2 to be indistinguishable from a fusion event. Carefully, he orders the genes to line up with other primates set head to head. Fiendishly, he places a degraded centromere - “Ah, that will have them thinking they are on the right track.” Continuing with a sly grin, “Now, for the confirmation, we will throw in some degenerate telomeres”. After some housekeeping to ensure the molecular clocks and so forth would not give away the ruse, Loki is done.
@colewd, How do you eliminate Loki as the cause?
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I strongly suspect you may have missed the point I’ve been trying to make to you this entire time, yes.
No, I mean that the chromosome is demonstrably the product of a fusion of two other chromosomes, on the basis of sequence analysis and other lines of evidence.
An analogy:
Imagine you see a part that has been welded together. There are obvious, observable indicators of welding from looking at it, and metallurgical analysis shows conclusively that it was welded. It could be an engineering design (the part was always intended to be welded in the middle) or a fix later on (something broke, so someone welded it together). Either way, the part is welded together, and how it came to be welded is a separate question from if it is welded.
By analogy, whether it was designed that way or it happened by rearrangement in reproduction, Hsa2 is a fusion. Just as you can look at a welded part and see visible signs of welding, you can look at the karyotype and see visible signs of fusion. Just as a metallurgical analysis can conclusively demonstrate welding versus machining or forging, sequence analysis conclusively demonstrates fusion.
This is the thing I’ve been trying to get you to understand this whole time. When people like Tomkins say it isn’t a fusion, they are wrong. When they try to explain away the countless facts that mark it unarguably as a fusion, they are wrong and generally being dishonest. Argue the improbability of a fusion happening, or fixing, or whatever else if you want, but it still is a fusion! Argue only God could make such a perfect, improbable example of chromosomal rearrangement, it’s still a fusion.
But don’t say it isn’t a fusion, or that we can’t tell if it is a fusion without a model for how fusions could happen and fix. That’s just silly.
Clear enough?
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This is a good question. People are seeing what their filter is telling them. There appear to be remnants of centromeres and telomeres. How reliable is this observation? How did this happen? @CrisprCAS9 showed a paper describing a model how a fusion event could get fixed in a population. How well does that model fit this observation?
@Michael_Okoko brought up a primate sequence called the “Gulo pseudo gene”. Is this a pseudo gene? This is certainly the consensus view per a paper I cited. Can we verify that it has no function?
As in Sals flower the real gene and the pseudo gene are not following the tree as guinea pigs have the pseudo gene and dogs and cows have the real gene. This is discussed in the paper I cited. Michael thought I did not understand the paper because of the assertion in the paper that primates all share common ancestry due to the shared pseudo gene. Again, the consensus view is that this is very strong evidence of primate common ancestry.
Understanding how these events might have occurred is much more challenging and may be beyond science at this point. Until we can the hypothesis remains very tentative IMO. The standard I have looked to for the reliability and strength of a scientific theory is general relativity
You can eliminate Loki as the immediate cause by successfully modeling how this event could take place by reproduction. Assuming Loki designed reproduction he is always in the picture but science discovered a mechanism Loki designed called reproduction. As science also discovered a mechanism of matter Loki designed called gravity. Science’s job is to describe and test Loki’s design.
Thank you. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Well, that’s just weird. How do scientists determine an organism to be a dog? There are physical attributes it has that allow them to define it as a dog. Would that also be an example of what you call “not a tested hypothesis”?
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So, in your design model, are there genetic sequences that were originally “designed” in the first human being that was created by the designer? And then, over time, mutations arose in this originally designed genome? And, as the population of humans grew, the number of these mutations in the population also grew? And then some of these mutations became fixed, so that they are now present in every individual, alongside those genes that were part of the original design?
Am I following correctly?
If so, how are the designed “fixed” genes distinguished from those that were fixed afterwards thru the process described above?
Does the design hypothesis use different population genetics models to account for how new mutations are fixed in the genome than those used by evolutionary scientists?
Thanks in advance for your answers.
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