Comments on Gpuccio: Functional Information Methodology

Yet there are literally millions of empirical observations in hundreds of different scientific disciplines over the last 160 years which show that’s exactly how evolution works. Heck, you’re still ducking the empirical examples of the evolving soft robots where you can see them evolve right before your eyes.

You need to offer more than some silly calculations which we’ve already established have no relevance at all to actual evolutionary processes.

Can you

Then provide 20 citations where it has been “exactly” tested evolution (i.e UCD) by blind and mindless processes works. Simply making a general sweeping statement does not convince skeptics.

If it biases the results away from evolution’s viability, that is one reason.

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But you haven’t done that, so how do you know?

For prp8 if 80% of the amino acids per position have substitutability evolution will still not be able to find a functional sequence. If they can create a functional fold that can splice the chance of a random search finding this sequence is 10^-96 where all but two work in every position.

That’s the Texas sharpshooter fallacy again. As explained earlier in this thread, this same type of calculation could be used to “prove” that I cannot have ten consecutive ancestors, as it would be too unlikely for random mutations to happen to accumulate and produce my particular genome. As @Giltil was correct in pointing out, the issue with this type of calculation you’re doing is it commits the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

Evolution isn’t searching for any one specific function from an arbitrary starting point. Rather, there is an already existing and functioning organism that is mutating, so this organism is the “starting point” for any mutational sampling into sequence space. And it’s not trying to find something specific, the process just works by keeping beneficial mutations and discarding deleterious ones. There is no good reason to think that what solutions this process result in is something that was ever specifically searched for.

I am skeptical given this restriction that a 2335 AA protein can even execute a successful 3D fold.

There is essentially no reasonable window where evolution created the eukaryotic cell.

The Prp8 protein exists in prokaryotes. It’s encoded by Group II self-splicing introns. Self-splicing is the key word there. It is homologous to prokaryotic reverse transcriptases. The protein is ancient and has a long evolutionary history before the origin of eukaryotes.

Of course, you’ve had all this explained to you before. Something like twenty times?

What possible case do you have that evolution build prp8 let alone the spliceosome?

I don’t have to rehash all that stuff over and over again, you’re claiming to know it couldn’t evolve but all your arguments to that effect are either fallacious or based on ignorance.

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Thanks, that’s perfectly clear.

The FI associated with “cat” is approximately 14 bits.
The FI associated with “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL” is approximately 120 bits.
The FI associated with “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL TO ME IT LOOKS LIKE A WEASEL IT IS BACKED LIKE A WEASEL IT DOES HAVE A BACK LIKE A WEASEL” is more than 500 bits.

That last string was easily found by a simple genetic algorithm using mutation and selection.

Anyone claiming that biological evolution cannot produce 500 bits of FI is thus faced with explaining why my laptop can generate more “probabilistic resources” in 5 minutes than the entire planet can generate in 4 billion years.

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Once again, HOW DO YOU KNOW?

You’ve avoided this question once. I expect you to avoid it again.

P.S. You’re oft-referenced post by gpuccio says this:
“The “beneficial” mutation must not only be “beneficial” in a general sense, but it must already, as it is, confer a reproductive advantage to the individual clone where it was generated. And the reproductive advantage must be strong enough to significantly engage NS (against the non-mutated form, IOWs all the rest of the population), and so escape genetic drift. That is something! Can you really think of a pathway to some complex new protein, let’s say dynein, a pathway which can “find” hundreds of specific, highly conserved aminoacids in a proteins thousands of aminoacid long, whose function is absolutely linked to a very complex and global structure, a pathway where each single new mutation which changes one aminoacid at a time confers a reproductive advantage to the individual, by gradually increasing, one step at a time, the function of a protein which still does not exist?””

That’s not evidence, it’s a fallacy of argument by incredulity and omission.

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I have. You don’t understand the test and I don’t have the patients right now to explain it to you. We fundamentally disagree with the claim that evolutionists make that evolution could take any course especially at the cellular level. That assertion is not supported in any reasonable way in my opinion.

Interesting. So you agree that direct observation of macroevolution is not necessary in order to determine whether it occurred. We’ll remind you of that as necessary.

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You’ve done a test and I don’t understand it? What test? Where has this test been published? I’m super-interested.

We fundamentally disagree with the claim that evolutionists make that evolution could take any course especially at the cellular level.

I really have no idea what it means to say that evolution “could take any course especially at the cellular level”, and I haven’t seen anyone make that claim.

That assertion is not supported in any reasonable way in my opinion.

It’s even worse, nobody has made that assertion as far as I can see.

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No, Bill. You are using incorrect terminology here. Gpuccio is using real data(which he gets from publicly available databases) and trying to analyze it in various ways. He’s not doing any measurements, not even indirectly. Gpuccio is doing a sort of data analysis, not data collection or data discovery.

He’d have to use instruments, and go into an actual wet-lab and do stuff with molecules and cells to make measurements and produce data. You know, those lab experiments you are so happy to demand evolutionists do to convince you. Somehow you’re always satisfied with data analysis when it’s pro-ID.

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If you have a mechanism that you can model and test that is robust enough to validate the observations then you don’t need to observe it directly.

Ok. I agree he is using data available in the public domain. He is also doing comparisons of the data which is producing newly formatted data for analysis.

No. I do not support all their claims. I do believe they have the only viable argument for the origin of functional information given the current set of facts.

Exactly.

Evolution has such a model.

ID doesn’t.

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It turns out just the opposite is true for generating sufficient amounts of functional information.

This is the specific claim and I did not represent it properly. My apologies. As you know I don’t agree with the above claim either.

So if you don’t agree with it, does that mean you think evolution IS searching for something specific, and that the starting point for this search is completely arbitrary as opposed to historically contingent?

I don’t think there is any search going on at all. The only practical way to search through a long sequence is Dawkins method using the sequence itself. If you know the sequence you want then just infuse it into the genome. The eukaryotic cell is a single holistic design IMO.

How am I to understand this claim? Are you saying there is no evolution going on at all, that mutations do not occur, or that they do not accumulate?

If you have a problem with the word search then you can substitute it for something else. Sampling of sequence space, for example. The effects of mutations are being tested in real environments by living organisms. Are you denying that this happens? How deep does this rabbit hole go?

The only practical way to search through a long sequence is Dawkins method using the sequence itself.

If you think there’s a pre-determined target that needs to be found, sure. But there is no evidence that there are any targets that need to be found.

If you know the sequence you want then just infuse it into the genome.

Sure, there’s no reason to search for something you already know what is. There’s also no evidence that evolution is searching for anything specific. Rather, evolution happens in the way I described earlier: Mutations happen, they have phenotypic effects, and those in turn determine how likely they are to rise in frequency or go extinct. Over time mutations build up, and descendant sequences have changed a lot from their ancestors. They change in sequence, and they change in function.

The eukaryotic cell is a single holistic design IMO.

You opinion has been noted there’s just no evidence for it.

There is no search for a de novo functional sequence. Mutations happen but they are not the source of a de novo functional sequence. They can result in simple adaptions.

This is an assertion that I think is as false as anything.I ever heard an intelligent person state. The evidence is a functioning eukaryotic cell. The evolutionist canard of “no evidence” when there is a smoking gun is astonishing. Let’s agree to disagree.

That doesn’t make sense. What is preventing these accumulating mutations from resulting in novel functional sequences?

Well thanks for another pile of opinions piled on top of the previous one.

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And those aren’t found by searching, they’re found by… something you want to call something else. Okay, what should we label that process? Evolution?

Also, if simple adaptations can evolve, why can’t slightly more complex ones also evolve in longer time, and so on?