Supposed problems with the Big Bang won’t help you here. Those problems might be relevant to the age of the cosmos, but they are not relevant to the age of the earth.
1 Like
Doesn’t that assume all mutations have the same effect on fitness?
Mutations give you capacity to adapt? How can that work if they’re not coding for anything?
No.
To the extent that mutations cause phenotypic variance, populations carrying a range of mutations will have a range of phenotypic expressions possible, some of which may be adaptively beneficial in different selective pressures.
What? They are ‘coding’ for the phenotypic variants. That’s what we’ve been talking about.
2 Likes
OK, then you aren’t factoring in that one deleterious mutation would decrease fitness so as to overwhelm any beneficial effects.
So if you’re saying that deleterious mutations can be beneficial in another context, you’ve just lost function. Evolution is not even maintaining, thus you’re not doing anything to disprove GE.
You’re giving a better argument for created variance.
Let’s have an example: Imagine a population of snakes. For these snakes, there is an adaptive peak for a particular trait (body length) at a particular value (1 meter). For the sake of simplicity, let’s imagine that length is controlled by two genes (A and B). Obviously a trait like body length is controlled by many, many more genes in reality, but let’s keep it simple. A mutation in A produced novel variant a, which reduces body length slightly, while a mutation in B produced b which increased body length slightly. Independently, both are deleterious to fitness, as both move the snake away from that 1 meter ‘ideal’ body length.
But what about when they occur together? Well, if a decreases body length and b increases it, then with both you’d have… the same length (give or take). No reduction in fitness for co-occurrence. It is at this point you will realize that not only did I ‘factor in deleterious mutations’, I was exclusively talking about deleterious mutations! Now again, in reality body length is controlled by many more than two genes, and there might be many more than two alleles for each gene, all of which makes this sort of thing more likely. All of these combine to produce an average phenotype within the population that is unchanged from the initial value, but now with a larger variance in possible sizes.
This is nonsense. What function is lost by a snake being 1.01m instead of 1m? The mutation that makes it a bit longer is deleterious in a population with an adaptive peak at 1m, but beneficial in a population with an adaptive peak at 1.05m. And nothing is lost.
7 Likes
Agree. But since he models neo-Darwinism, we are back to the initial claim that if deep time is true, then neo-Darwinism is false.
Your are guilty of denying the antecedent here, which is a logical fallacy that takes the following form:
- If A (deep time) is true, then B (Darwinism is wrong) is true.
- A is false.
- Therefore, B is false.
No, this is a false dichotomy for deep time can be true even if he has modeled the current theory of evolution correctly.
No. It could just be that one or more of the parameters is false. For example, his idea of the distribution of fitnesses for nearly neutral mutations could be wrong. There are many potential models and parameter sets. Because one is wrong doesn’t mean others are.
No, you are just misunderstanding what B means.
That made no sense. The current theory of evolution is not a single set of parameters. His model is not the whole of evolutionary theory, and the truth of evolutionary theory doesn’t rely on the truth of his particular model.
Your claims about fitness increases have been refuted many times. You are deliberately ignoring the distinction between reductive evolution and the so-called “fitness increases” that are produced by this phenomenon. Possibly the most commonly used bait-and-switch in all evolutionary debates. This underscores the fundamental problem with using the idea of “fitness” (as in, reproductive fitness) as the sole metric by which life is being judged. Darwin was flat out wrong, and his views are horrendously oversimplifed compared to real life.
This has perhaps been nowhere better dealt with than in the following article:
Because mutations are copying mistakes, and copying mistakes are nearly always bad with respect to absolute fitness regardless of your environment, we are indeed justified in looking at the DFE of mutations as generally massively skewed toward deleterious. Always. And that’s what the population genetics experts have repeatedly confirmed in their own published writings. There is next to no experimental evidence for beneficial mutations, (excepting of course the aforementioned phenomenon of reductive evolution).
1 Like
I don’t think you have enough of a grasp yet on the concepts here. Near-neutrals are not a “side show”. They are the show. Mutations of large effect are unlikely to be passed on, so they don’t present much of a long-term threat to the population. They will either kill or severely disable the organism, which generally prevents reproduction.
Near-neutrals, on the other hand, don’t present themselves in any noticeable way, so they will be passed on.
It certainly matters. And he is right in what he says about the distribution. The only way people manage to ignore this is by focusing their attention on cherry-picked examples of reductive evolution, or of laboratory experiments with very narrowly-defined fitness parameters that can succeed in hiding what is “really going on”. For example, the “Adaptation Obscures the Load” experiment with T7 phages. This is a favorite ‘proof-paper’ of Stern Cardinale, and that’s why we tackled it head on at Fitness and Reductive Evolution.
They clearly demonstrated genetic entropy in action, but by some interesting choices of words, they managed to claim that “fitness increased”. But were the viruses better off? No. They were showing (even by the paper’s authors’ own admission) strong indicators of a heavy load of deleterious mutations. Their burst size had dropped by 80%, with no corresponding improvements in any other factors like lysis time. There was no “adaptation”, only severe decline. If they had not cut their experiment off after 200 generations, but allowed it to continue, there’s little doubt they would have seen the viruses peter out completely (which would have undermined their desired conclusions).
I want you remember this every time someone like Rumraket brings up alleged ‘experimental evidence of fitness increases’.
I also want to suggest that before you continue trying to debate or discuss GE in a hostile forum like this, with experts in genetics, you should really take some time off and get fully conversant in Dr Sanford’s book and his ideas. I don’t mean this as any kind of insult, but you’re just not ready to throw yourself into this kind of environment. None of these guys are going to help you understand GE. They are bitterly against Sanford and everything he stands for.
1 Like
Heh. I wonder how many time our intrepid Creationist will repeat this already disproven falsehood?
BTW Paul, we’re still waiting for you to explain how you measure the information content of a genome so you can tell if a mutation makes the content increase or decrease. But you’ll never answer because you have no answer. 
5 Likes
Not at all. We’re just against people lying about and misrepresenting actual science to push their religious agenda. Sadly you work for an organization which pays you to do just that.
2 Likes
No it has not. Fitness increases, demonstrably. You can’t “refute” a concrete empirical reality.
Yes I am, because that is what matters to the long-term persistence of organisms, and to the concept of Genetic Entropy that says life should be going extinct. The FITNESS effects of mutations and their distribution in relation to some particular environment of the organism is what matters.
… is the one creationists come up with when the FAILED PREDICTIONS OF GE are contradicted by the FITNESS INCREASES observed in reality. Creationists then ABANDON the concept of fitness, they ABANDON Kimura’s curve, they ABANDON the FITNESS effects of mutations, and start blathering about some new vacuous concept they can’t define or quantify, which they insist has something to do with “integrity of information in the genome”.
THE BAIT AND SWITCH IS YOURS.
And there we have it, YOU are the one who is complaining about fitness. You complain about a bait-and-switch, and YOU ARE THE ONE WHO JUST DID IT.
You BAITED us with Kimura, Eyre-Walker and Kneightley, with the shape of the DFE mutations, with the “zone of no selection”, and the relative proportion of beneficial to deleterious mutations. With these concepts in hand you proceed to insist fitness should be going down and that everyone secretly knows this and can’t admit it. Then, when we show this doesn’t occur in reality, you SWITCH to talk about something else that has to do with “integrity of information in the genome”, “degeneration/loss of function”, “more ways to break machines than to improve them” and all sorts of other blather you can’t put numbers on.
Please, please stop this extremely deceptive accusation against evolutionary biologists when YOU are the one guilty of it.
Again with the DFE, which means Distribution of FITNESS Effects of mutations. You AGAIN invoke the DFE and the proportion of REPRODUCTIVELY deleterious to REPRODUCTIVELY beneficial mutations, and then insist this somehow must disprove evolution because fitness should be declining.
But fitness DOESN’T DECLINE IN THE REAL WORLD. So now you CHANGE THE SUBJECT and start blathering about “reductive evolution”. Thus you are the one doing the switch.
10 Likes
These sorts of arguments against Creationist nonsense always play out the same way. ALWAYS.
Scientists present clear and decisive evidence the Creationist claim is dead wrong. The Creationist ignores the data and keeps mindlessly repeating the same false claims. Sometimes as a bonus we get the Creationist do a triple twisting backwards flounce-out while telling us we’ll all burn in H E double hockey sticks. 
4 Likes
For a population with mean body length equal to the adaptive peak for body length, is a mutation increasing the body length by 0.01% beneficial or deleterious (nearly neutral or not)? Is this fitness effect independent of environment or not?
Is a mutation increasing body length by 0.01% in a population with mean body length lower than the adaptive peak for the environment beneficial? Does the answer to whether or not this is beneficial in that environment depend on if this mutation occurs in that environment or prior to a change when the mean and peak were equal?
Last question: what is reductive about any of these changes?
4 Likes
Sure, if Sanford’s model of naturalistic evolution is flawed, then the possibility exists that naturalistic evolution and deep time are compatible. But there is no merit to dismiss GE on the sole basis that deep time is true. To dismiss GE, you have to pinpoint why Sanford’s model is wrong.
As I used it, B is the claim that neo-Darwinism is wrong. Can you explain why you think my understanding of B is incorrect ?
That’s been done about a hundred times over. Read the thread.
2 Likes
The only plausible critic of GE I have read here is the one by @glipsnort who claims that the DFE for mutations invisible to NS may not be largely biased toward deleterious mutations as Sanford think they are.
I meant the discussion of them.
This was my point. If scientists are ignoring or not hearing what he’s saying about natural selection because they haven’t read the book, they’re missing half the argument.
Yes, I do know that. If that was my expectation, I’d certainly be extremely disappointed. I’m weird and the objections helps me learn a thing or two, as it gives me something to research. I’m sure I’ll make a lot of mistakes.
Huh? Lol, how are explaining extinction then?
1 Like
…which is a claim for which he has not been able to give any logical or evidence-based support whatsoever. His admission that near-neutrals do happen in functional DNA is the death-knell. You cannot make arbitrary changes to functional machines and expect anything other than a highly deleterious distribution of effects. To accept his view means we must ignore the vast majority of the published data on the DFE of mutations, the vast majority of the results of all mutational accumulation experiments, and most importantly, we must ignore common sense and basic engineering principles. But that’s not surprising. Accepting Darwinism has always required the abandonment of those latter two.
Poking around Creation.com I found this amazing claim about why short generation time species mice and flies haven’t gone extinct:
What about other fast-reproducing organisms?
One might reply, “But mice have genomes about the size of the human genome and have much shorter generation times. Why do we not see evidence of GE in them?” Actually, we do. The common house mouse, Mus musculus , has much more genetic diversity than people do, including a huge range of chromosomal differences from one sub-population to the next. They are certainly experiencing GE. On the other hand, they seem to have a lower per-generation mutation rate. Couple that with a much shorter generation time and a much greater population size, and, like bacteria, there is ample opportunity to remove bad mutations from the population. Long-lived species with low population growth rates (e.g. humans) are the most threatened, but the others are not immune
Hey Paul, what is the mechanism by which accumulated bad mutations are removed from the population? Wasn’t the whole point of your claimed VSDM accumulation that such mutations were invisible to natural selection? Notice the brutal error in logic too. Creatures with extremely short generations have much less time for selection to act before the next “degraded” generation comes along, not much longer time as larger species like whales and elephants have. Team GE didn’t think that one out very well.
4 Likes