Comments on Bill’s math class

As is the point of this thread and the original, literally everything you say can be addressed by just quoting a prior comment. Unfortunately, they’re not always in the same thread, and I don’t want to go digging every time.

Where is the model that has been shown to show the magnitude of changes we see in gene Venn diagrams are due to gene duplications?

How has this model been developed over the years?

How do you account for the Schmidt paper that shows 2 functional mutations taking 160million years in humans and chimps. Is Schmidt lying?

How do you support the claim that most all gene changes are neutral?

Why don’t you just move on from the claim that most changes are caused by gene duplication and neutral mutations?

Not the point of this thread, Bill.

… Or ask @Dan_Eastwood to reopen mine…

Thread reopened!

What I meant is there is already a lot of good refutation to be found. You don’t really need to dig it up yourself, just ask our usual suspects to find and link their previous effects for you. @John_Harshman alone must have addressed this half-a-dozen times.

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Consider this a sort of New Year’s Resolution on my part. I’d like to cut down on the petty arguments in favor of deeper discussion. For example, I think it’s sufficient if one or two people point out BIll’s error and leave it at that. We don’t really need a whole chorus of people saying the same thing, as that tends to fuel such arguments, not end them (a personal observation).

The real goal is to get everyone to think ahead a little, realize they are being baited, and not take the bait. Some of you guys, though really smart, are less than wise about letting yourselves be baited. Bill really has your number, to the point where he can manipulate your responses with just a few words. I see it happen over and over again, you should be able to see it too - and respond differently next time.

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If you really believed that this was a real problem you would show your math.

First, mammals ARE vertebrates, so “mammals and vertebrates” makes no sense.

Second, how many of the >5000 papers in this list are about vertebrates?

Third, how many of those have you read and carefully analyzed?

Many of Behe’s claims have been shown to be empirically false. How did YOU evaluate this particular one, Bill?

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Since the other thread was reopened, I’d move that this one be closed.

New Year’s resolutions can be good. The thing about them is that they are meant to be self-imposed constraints on what you yourself do – not constraints on others.

Good. Think about what you can do to reduce the level of petty arguments.

And this is where it falls apart – this is not a self-imposed constraint on yourself but a constraint on others – it is not a genuine ‘New Year’s resolution’ so much as an imposition on others.

No Dan. This is treating the symptom, not the cause – and is wandering into an area akin to victim-blaming.

Our “real goal” is to stop Bill disruptively and repeatedly bringing up the same old debunked arguments over and over again. (And parenthetically, I would point out that there appears to be a fairly strong consensus that this, or something closely similar, is the real goal.)

Also, may I point out that instructing us on how we should view Bill and respond to him is really really patronising. You are drifting from the role of ‘moderator’ into that of ‘Schoolmarm’.

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DON’T make put you in the corner wearing the Dunce Cap again! :wink:

If being patronizing will get others to see how they allow themselves to be manipulated, then I’m willing to give it a try. You (the group) are not victims, but there is a near Pavlovian response to anything Bill says. Granted most of that is really wrong, but the group response is obviously playing into Bill’s hands. The smart response would be to find a way to respond that doesn’t enable him. @CrisprCAS9 is probably on the right track in making a record of these responses, maybe organizing them, and pointing to it the next time Bill says “Squirrel” “Lynch”.

The above also applies a a great many ID and YEC arguments. The claim is wrong, but it provokes and argument, and that is what they want. We should learn to argue smarter.

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Feel free. It’s no skin off my nose. :man_shrugging:

You’ve been trying that tactic for some time now, how has it been working for you?

Telling people what they want, particularly when done in a patronising voice, is an ineffective means of persuasion.

If you want to persuade us you should not be telling us what we want, but telling us how doing things your way will get us what we want.

Will trying to avoid responding to Bill cure him of his own “Pavlovian response” of repeating one of his talking points (no matter how debunked and how unrelated to the topic under discussion) whenever he reads something that he interprets as casting shade on ID? No? Then you will have an uphill battle convincing us that this will get us what we want.

This appears to be attempting to change human nature. To the extent that this is possible, it needs to be done with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.

You are also avoiding my main point that as this is your New Year’s resolution, the onus is on you to do something different, not to tell us to do things differently.

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Why do you need to wear the cap when putting Tim into the corner?

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Is it Dan wearing the cap or the corner itself wearing it? It’s not clear from his phrasing. :wink:

In fact, lacking the “me” between “make” & “put”, it’s not even clear that Dan is involved in this charming little tableau at all. :thinking:

House with a corner with a dunce’s cap:

If you look closely, you can see Tim looking out a window, admiring the view, but wondering what he’s doing here.

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image

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Are we though?

Your whole model is based upon the assumption that Bill is purposefully ‘manipulating’ us into say derogatory things about his talking-points – what I would call the Machiavellian Martyrdom/Masochism, or M3, model. Whilst a psychological case can be made for this model, I find it rather tenuous, and thus less-than-compelling.

May I suggest an alternate model:

Not infrequently, facts turn up that makes ID look stupid.

As Bill really likes ID, this makes him really sad. :sob:

In order to make himself not (so) sad, Bill says something that, he thinks, makes ID look less stupid. :neutral_face:

This model has the advantage of simplicity – it gives Bill a payoff regardless of how people respond.

But how do people’s responses affect the payoff?

If people reacted by saying ‘by Jove Bill, I think you’re right! Evolution is rather silly and ID is the way to go – how could we have been so wrong?’ Bill would be very happy. :smiley:

If people didn’t respond at all, Bill could think to himself ‘Aha, I’ve stumped them’, and be happy (if less happy than if we told him he was right). :slight_smile:

If people reacted by telling him his statement was stupid, Bill could think to himself ‘they’re just poopey-heads’ and ‘they just don’t get it’, and be sad (but not so sad as if he hadn’t said anything in the first place). :frowning:

I call this my Bill Sad, or BS, model.

At which point I grab the dunce’s cap, saunter over to the corner, and play a quick game of ‘Props’ from Whose Line is It Anyway (the excellent British version, not the horrible American knock-off) with the cap, with a cheesy grin on my face. :grin:

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I agree there are more questions to explore here but at the end of the day it is pretty clear that the gene duplication and divergence mechanism is limited as an explanation for new functional sequences. There are papers discussing the time to fixation of gain of function mutations we have discussed here. I will post them in a private message if you like.

If we look at the number of different genes between classes of vertebrates it looks like multiple origin events. I know John believes that he has confirmed a single origin event thorough the pattern of phylogenetic nested hierarchies. I think his conclusion can at best be tentative until the gene and chromosome differences can be mechanistically explained.

Hey look, it’s that same claim you’ve made dozens of times without providing any support. You going to show your math this time, or are you lying again?

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Instead of that, you should address the questions raised in this thread:

Bill’s math class - Peaceful Science

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Why? Your opinion isn’t relevant without some kind of support.

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The support that is needed is a model to reconcile how the gene and chromosome patterns came from a single point of origin.

There is no evidence that the existing model can’t account for all patterns observed. You’ve been asked repeatedly to provide such evidence. You’ve never managed. Will you do it this time? I doubt it.

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