if the chance to get a functional protein is on in 10^15 mutations, the chance to get two functional proteins is 10^30. where do you see any problem?
as for the rest of what you said: remember that we only need to find a single case of a rare function to falsify evolution. this is why i asked what make you think that all proteins are common in the sequence space. if we will find out for instance that a specific protein require 10^100 mutations, evolution will be in a big problem. as for the fact that similar proteins can perform different functions- actually even the same protein can perfrom different functions. but again; it doesnt mean that all proteins are near each other in the sequence space.
this is why i asked about different proteins like histone and globin or other proteins. they are both very different. if evolution is true and all proteins are common in the sequence space it should be easy to go from one protein to any other functional protein, because if not it means that these proteins are not common in the sequence space and thus require many mutations.
Quite right, except why shouldn’t you add to get 3%? If you’re counting gaps as differences, a gap in either sequence should count. Of course that’s a percentage of the alignment, which is longer than either genome, but I don’t think it makes much difference to the percentage. I was actually just misremembering Roy Britten’s estimate from a fragment of a few megabases, which was 95% similarity, counting each base in an indel as a separate difference. I’m not sure how you get down to 85%. Assuming that unsequenced bits wouldn’t be alignable?
Because if two genomes are 50% identical and each has 50% identity, just adding 50% and 50% would say they were 100% different. Which makes it not a great metric.
Something else that does not constitute 100 amino acids of convergence. There is nothing there about evolving the same protein twice. Rather it speaks about 200 loci in the genome showing signatures of convergence, which could just mean that out of billions of bases in the genome, there are 200 cases of parallel mutations spread throughout many different genes.
Bzzzt, wrong! The 1 in 10^15 number concerns the frequency with which a particular function is found in protein sequence space. That is not “the chance to get a functional protein is 1 in 10^15 mutaitons”. It just isn’t.
Uhm, nope. What you need is to show that the function is both rare and isolated. That there is no incremental, selectable pathway to that function, and then you would have shown merely that it would be unlikely for that function to evolve.
How could it possibly require more mutations to produce than there are atoms in the observable universe? It seems to me the highest number of mutations that it could possibly require to produce some gene, is the length of the gene.
I don’t understand that objection. The difference we’re talking about come from the alignment. Humans have a sequence where chimps don’t, and chimps have a sequence where humans don’t. That’s apparent from whichever taxon you look at in the alignment. If we’re counting each bit of an indel as an individual difference, it shouldn’t matter whether there’s a base or a gap at that position.
indeed. i never said that it has to be in the same protein. remember the original claim by dr theobald. he is saying that since there are so many sequences that can perform the same function it should be nearly impossible to get the same sequence twice. It doesnt necessarily need to happen in the same protein.
right. so the chance to get the same function again by convergent evolution is 10^30, if two proteins are required.
as i said above; there is no need to do that if we are talking about convergent evolution, since we know how many mutations are required in such a case to evolve the same function again.
My point is that if humans and chimps each have 1.5% unique sequence, a metric for their similarity that yields (1 - (.015+.015)) is not a good metric. If they are identical in 40% of their genome, this metric says their similarity is -20%, which means what?
Yes I remember it very well. He was talking about the same protein. Not parallel mutations spread out among many genes across the genome.
Wrong. He was talking about the same protein. That’s the whole point, that common descent provides the best explanation for the degree of similarity and nesting hierarchical structure in homologous proteins, such as cytochrome c. He is saying it would be very unlikely for THAT level of convergence to evolve twice independently, implicitly understood to be from some totally dissimilar ancestral sequence.
No. The frequency with which particular functions are found in sequence space(say 10-15) is not the square of “the chance to get the same function again by convergent evolution.”
But we don’t know that. Look, I think you’ve maybe lost track of what you were even trying to argue to begin with. What is your claim here, that evolving a new functional protein is too unlikely to happen? It isn’t. That it’s too unlikely for convergence to create two identical (or at least highly similar) 100 amino acid long proteins from totally dissimilar ancestral states independently? I agree, which is why this hasn’t ever happened and there’s no evidence that it did, and thus why having nesting hierarchical structure in the sequences of highly similar protein sequences is evidence for common descent.
But now you’re starting to talk about something else that isn’t really the same, by bringing in this paper about genetic convergence in loci associated with sight and echolocation in bats and dolphins. And while that is certainly interesting and also surprising, these kinds of parallel mutations spread across many individual, different genes, isn’t the same thing as the kind of total convergence of an entire protein sequence Theobald wrote about.
First, I would understand natural selection to be that that the organisms who are the fittest to survive in their environment do survive and reproduce. How would you describe it?
What I misstated is that the scientist is Donald Hoffman. Dennis is my father-in-law’s name.
And it’s not that he says natural selection is impossible: it’s that if we are products of natural selection, we don’t see reality. But if we don’t see reality, we could be understanding natural selection incorrectly. It’s a self-defeating argument. Basically natural selection means that we can’t determine what is reality. He’s decided his research means that what we see isn’t reality - I don’t see how that follows.
To ME, all his research means is that natural selection is impossible. It doesn’t explain reality.
QUANTA MAGAZINE: People often use Darwinian evolution as an argument that our perceptions accurately reflect reality. They say, “Obviously we must be latching onto reality in some way because otherwise we would have been wiped out a long time ago. If I think I’m seeing a palm tree but it’s really a tiger, I’m in trouble.”
Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be.
DONALD HOFFMAN: Right. The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions — mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.
Lisle starts off by claiming all is in the present and that science cannot give reliable information about the past. This is inconsistent , Lisle is part of an organization, and more broadly part of the young earth creationist approach, which claims that there is a ‘creation science’ which in turn claims to account for geologic strata, fossils and distant starlight. So if regular science cannot give reliable results. neither can any alternative.
There are other repercussions to a denial of knowing the past beyond living memory. All archaeology and ancient writings, including that which pertains to the Bible, and the Bible itself, would need to deemed unreliable.
No, he’s saying that everyone has to work with evidence that is in our present - how we view history determines how we interpret the evidence. Both abiogenesis and evolution give one history. Genesis gives another history.
Then we put evidence that we deem historical into a historical narrative in order to make sense of it.
I would say it’s not all that clear and being charitable you probably mean something more close to what I think of than you actually expressed.
Natural selection is the term we use to describe the phenomenon that different organisms have different levels of reproductive success, due to them having differences in their heritable traits. If being slightly smaller makes you better able to avoid predators and find food, you can probably survive longer, and thus increase the likelihood that you survive until adulthood, find a mate, and have offspring. So in a population with smaller and larger individuals, over time, given that the larger individuals will tend to survive less well and have fewer offspring, a bigger and bigger proportion of the population will consist of smaller individuals, until eventually there might not even be any large individuals left.
That’s one way to describe natural selection. There’s some fancy and technical-sounding ways to describe the phenomenon, like differential reproductive success between different individual carriers of allele genes. I’m sure that sounds like technobabble to the uninitiated. Hopefully you get the idea with the former explanation. You can vary the adaptive trait as you please, be it total body size, fur coat color, sense of smell, number of leaves on a tree and so on. All of these heritable traits(and many others) affect an organism’s survival and reproductive capacities. And since individuals within a population are almost never totally identical across all these traits, there will be differences in how well they survive and reproduce.
Whether you believe all of evolutionary biology is true(I of course know that you do not) I hope that, given the above explanation, we can agree that natural selection is something that really occurs. That there really are differences between how some individuals “perform” in the struggle for life, those differences often are because they have inherited different traits from their ancestors. And thus natural selection is something that really happens to real populations of organisms.
Yeah he says that(except if you read his papers things get considerably more complicated), but he didn’t actually prove that, because his proof depends strongly on the structure of the “physical reality” in which he models his evolutionary process(He has to make certain assumptions about the relationship between how perception functions at a physical level, and physical reality itself).
But regardless of whether living organisms are correctly perceiving physical reality through their senses, I think this is a total distraction from what you and I were talking about to begin with, which was how to understand what Timothy Horton was saying. To understand what he was saying, we first have to understand what natural selection even is. Not what Donald Hoffman thinks he has proved about what how natural selection manipulates the relationship between mental models of reality, and reality itself.
That doesn’t make it self-defeating even if true. All it means, even if true, is we can’t determine what reality is really like. It doesn’t mean natural selection would not occur given certain preconditions, such as the capacity for reproduction and the heritability of variations in adaptive traits.
Neither do I, and having listened to that interview you linked and read a couple of his papers, I don’t think he’s actually proven it either.
Oddly enough that doesn’t follow even if his premises are true. All that would follow is, as he says, that what we perceive is unlikely to be reality as it truly is. Us seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling things wrongly from how they really are, doesn’t mean natural selection is impossible. It just doesn’t follow.
If there is differential reproductive success due to differences in heritable traits (and there is), natural selection is unavoidable. Even on creationism, in so far as individuals in a population are not identical(perhaps God made them be varied), and those non-identical traits affect their reproductive success(in my experience of watching nature channels, the slower wildebeest are generally caught easier by lions), natural selection will inexorably occur.
Natural selection isn’t meant to “explain reality”. It’s meant to explain adaptations. Why dark mice living on dark rocks do better than bright mice when they are preyed upon by eagles with great eyesight. Or why fish are sort of torpedo-shaped instead of cube-shaped.
I seem to remember that you had an earlier post about Donald Hoffman’s ideas. I don’t remember whether I commented on that, but if I did then I surely disagreed with Hoffman.
As I see it, Hoffman’s thesis is absurd. He questions whether our perceptions are true (as did Plantinga in his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism). It is silly. It makes bad assumptions about truth.
We judge truth in accordance with standards. And, unavoidably, those standards are human made standards. So truth is, unavoidably, a human artifact. It is part of language. A child needs perception before acquiring language, so truth cannot have anything to do with perception.
If we examine a painting and try to see whether it is true, then we use our perception as a standard to judge the painting. There are no standards by which we can judge perception, except perhaps those used by your ophthalmologist when checking your vision.
Well yes, but there are rules that the interpretations must follow. Basically, rules that boil down to this:
¹³Do not have two differing weights in your bag — one heavy, one light. ¹⁴Do not have two differing measures in your house — one large, one small. ¹⁵You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the Lᴏʀᴅ your God is giving you. ¹⁶For the Lᴏʀᴅ your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly. – Deuteronomy 25:13-16
YEC can only give an alternative history to abiogenesis, evolution, and deep time if it sticks to the basic rules and principles of accurate and honest weights and measures (i.e. mathematics). When I look at young-earth claims that I am able to fact-check in this way, I consistently see that they completely fail to do so.
There have been whole books, tons of papers, refuting these type of arguments. I have shared many of them multiple times on this very forum. I suggest tracking em down to see why that argument is not a good one
If you count indels as part of the distance, it’s in terms of aligned sequence, not actual genome size. If two genomes were 40% identical but each had 60% unique sequence, the aligned sequence would be 160% of the length of each genome, and the similarity measure of the aligned sequences would be 25%. This is a stupid measure of genetic similarity, but it’s at least consistent.
