Why doesn’t it? It seems to me that it does. There is an enormous amount of evidence that this has in fact happened to most proteins. You pull up a phylogeny of a large protein family with a common ancestral protein a billion years ago and you’ll see that has pretty much happened across every lineage leading to all the modern, extant members of the family we see today. Many substitutions have happened, some have had deletions, or insertions, or both.
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That does not follow logically.
It would be more correct to say that many of the errors made by creationists arise from their viewing contingencies as necessities.
This is a general statement. How did natural selection fix the the sequence?
Some mutants leave more offspring than others. You know, the usual way.
There’s a big population, they reproduce. Some in the population have deleterious mutations, some have neutral mutations, some have beneficial mutations. Those with beneficial mutations leave more offspring. Over time, they take over the population. Meanwhile, new mutations keep occurring, etc. etc.
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We are talking about an environment of antibodies right?
Bill there’s no reason for us to go through how mutations in antibodies affect the proliferation of successful antibody mutants in the immune system. You can go read about that on wikipedia.
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After close to a week it looks like we have ascertained the following:
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There is lots of evidence natural processes can produce over 500 bits of FI and no evidence it can’t.
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Gpuccio’s calculations are based on a strawman version of evolution which has nothing to do with actual evolutionary processes.
It seems Gpuccio’s FI hypothesis is dead in the water. The interesting thing will be to see if he attempts to modify it based on the fatal flaws it currently has.
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I am sure you feel this way Tim. You should read @swamidass last post very carefully.
Bill, what do you think I’m saying that is relevant? I can’t see any contradiction with what @Timothy_Horton wrote. Can you?
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My opinion is your cases of one and three are consistent with Hazen and Szostak. I think 2 needs to be clarified that the FI is defined by both events occurring to create the specified function. All that being said I think this write up is valuable for this discussion and I posted it at UD.
No that is not the case. In that example, either one is functional on its own. Together they might have a new function.
Great. They are welcome to engage in a comment thread for this new discussion: Information is Additive but Evolutionary Wait Time is Not.
Then this is not consistent with FI as defined by H and S IMO. I am interested if this is @gpuccio’s @Joe_Felsenstein opinion also.
It absolutely is consistent. It is precisely the same definition. Precisely.
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Here is where I see a mis match.
I(Ex) = ?log2[F(Ex)], where F(Ex) is the fraction of all possible configurations of the system that possess a degree of function ? Ex. Functional information, which we illustrate with letter sequences, artificial life, and biopolymers, thus represents the probability that an arbitrary configuration of a system will achieve a specific function to a specified degree. In each case we observe evidence for several distinct solutions with different maximum degrees of function, features that lead to steps in plots of information versus degree of function.
That is precisely the definition I’m using. Exactly. Zero difference.
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@colewd says you’re wrong.
I’m having a very hard time deciding who to believe. I may have to go lie down for a bit.
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Case 2. Two independent events, each with probability p, and each event is independently usefule, so it can be retained by negative selection when found.
The key is to point to the function these independent events form or you are violating HS definition.
Not a violation @colewd. I did specify my function. I am discussing a specified function. H and S are excellent scientists would entirely agree. At no point have they ever claimed that wait time = 2^FI in decomposable systems. They would never make such an obviously false claim.
Wait time and functional information are two different issues. Your item 2 is only functional information if you specify that both A and B are necessary to form C. You have a lack of clarity here.
A is a function
B is a different function
A + B is a different function still.
That is pretty clear. that is the definition of decomposability.