DNA duplication, mutation, and information

Remember when I asked you to describe what pattern you believe should be observed here under common descent, and you wouldn’t or couldn’t?

I do, so I’m calling you out on your BS now.

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Why would we expect the patterns we see, rather than any other pattern? Can you predict what genes we should see in the next mammal or next fish we sequence?

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It’s not necessarily about expecting to see patterns but it is about expecting to see functional convergence:

"In both Old World and New World monkeys Mhc-DRB sequences have been found which resemble human DRB1*03 and DRB3 genes in their second exon. The resemblance is shared sequence motifs and clustering of the genes or the encoded proteins in phylogenetic trees. This similarity could be due to common ancestry, convergence at the molecular level, or chance

…Statistical comparisons of exon 2 from different DRB1*03 and DRB3 lineages indicate that it was neither gene conversion (descent), nor chance, but molecular convergence that has shaped their characteristic motifs. The demonstration of convergence in anthropoid Mhc-DRB genes has implications for the classification, age, and mechanism of generation of DRB allelic lineages."

Convergent evolution of major histocompatibility complex molecules in humans and New World monkeys | Request PDF (researchgate.net)

We should expect to see more of this.

With unique animals I think we would expect a similar pattern of common genes and unique genes specific to that animal including shared genes with dissimilar animals. This is what we are seeing in @Winston_Ewert dependency graph.

I think we can predict many of the common genes among mammals . Being able to predict the unique genes is years down the road as we need to know how they work together in animal development and sustaining life in mature animals.

Ironic Design Theory simply fits data better. One of the pillars of IrD is that one will never be able to determine with certainty that God did or didn’t meddle with the evolutionary history of organisms or even the universe. And dang if that doesn’t fit explanations for human emergence to a ‘T’.

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As I have previously shown you, yes, they are. You still confuse the pattern with the individual changes themselves. Then again, as many others have pointed out many times, your claim explains nothing and makes no predictions at all.

So you completely ignore the data, and you make no prediction of or explanation for nested hierarchy. This is not a useful response. Further, you have not explained why functional convergence is expected under your “model”, such as it is.

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In the constraint of methodological naturalism you are right as you cannot explain the noise in the pattern without invoking God or intelligent design. The theological claims of Genesis 1 can invoke God and explain the noise in the pattern.

Winstons model makes predictions. You may not agree with his predictions, however your continued assertions “explains nothing and no predictions” are not accurate.

What noise are you referring to? And how does just saying the words “God” or “design” explain anything? Couldn’t any pattern at all, or in fact no pattern, be due to design?

What predictions, exactly?

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The noise are the genes that do not follow the tree and require further explanation such as gene gain and loss.

God or design invokes the working assumption that we are in a intelligently created universe. It is the opposite of the working assumption that evolution has no purpose or direction.

Intelligence is a starting condition of the universe. There is a lot of evidence supporting this working assumption.

Genesis 1 is an explanation of how the earth was formed. It explains that it was seeded with fully formed animals. Population genetic models work with this starting assumption.

That the gene patterns will follow a dependency graph based on the optimization of both fit and parsimony. The dependency graph is a tool used in software design where mixing and matching of modules is common.

You fail to understand what “follow the tree” means. A gene that follows the tree requires the inference of only a single gain or loss on that tree. Genes that are found in every species follow nothing. Furthermore, neither gain nor loss requires God.

Still not an explanation for anything.

No, there isn’t, and what does the beginning of the universe have to do with creation of new “kinds”?

It’s an explanation that’s easily shown to be false, though.

You are incorrect.

But any gene pattern must follow a dependency graph. That’s not a prediction that can be falsified. In fact a phylogenetic tree is a dependency graph. This is not in any way a useful prediction. Further, there is nothing to show that the “modules” Ewert produces are have any real connection other than showing a common pattern of distribution among species. Useless.

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How do you know if you cannot model the change? Red and green marks on a piece of paper are not a model.

These all are repeated assertions.

This is not addressing his argument. You have created a straw-man which is a logical fallacy.

Of course you can model the change. Loss can occur in several ways, all well understood. Gain also. We’ve even been over this.

A good match to your repeated assertions. But I can back mine up with data.

And that was a nonsensical response. Do you disagree with anything I said? If so, why? What, in your opinion, is Ewert’s actual argument, which you apparently didn’t actually state?

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If you are under the constraint of methodological naturalism sure. What new animal can you predict with this “model”.

You simply defeated your own argument. It appears Winston’s arguments like Behe’s are invoking logical fallacies. Any pattern can follow a tree or nested hierarch if you are willing to make exceptions to it like your doing with your red and green markings.

Winstons analysis is that the gene pattern follows a dependency graph more closely than a tree. This is a significant observation.

You can’t predict new animals with any model. Certainly not with yours. Do you even have a point?

You said it, not me.

Any gene pattern must, as long as you pick the graph that represents the pattern. And you can represent any pattern. But that doesn’t make it a dependency graph, just a graph of gene distributions. It explains nothing unless you can find real, functional dependencies within a module and between a module and its dependents.

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You don’t have a predictive model unless you start from animal populations. This supports the theological claim of Genesis 1 that God seeded the earth with fully formed animals.

This is a valid point.

This is what needs to be tested going forward. We know different gene sets are associated with very different animal types from Sal’s flower and Winstons dependency graph. We also know there are house keeping genes that are common among vertebrates. We can eventually test the dependency of those gene sets. Thats why @Winston_Ewert model is valuable. This is why @Meerkat_SK5 RTB model should be developed.

That’s because a dependency graph in the way Ewert is using it is anything imaginable. There is no pattern his dependency graph is incapable of fitting.

The dependency relationships are imaginary(Ewert does no work to establish that the “modules” (gene-sets) are actually dependent on each other), and in any case still only attempt to account for the nested hierarchy in terms of gene presence or absence.

It has nothing to say about the same nested hierarchy in actual DNA sequences, or in comparative anatomy(good luck arguing that the shape of your forearm depends on the shape of your skull), and it has nothing at all to say about fossils and their chronologies, or biogeography.

And while we are on the subject of gene presence or absence, the data the dependency graph relies on are annotations of homologous gene sequences. The “modules” thought to be identical between species, and to be “dependent” on other such “modules” in those same species, are actually sequences of homologous genes. They are not identical in sequence, so one wonders why Ewert considers them to be the same modules without implicitly accepting them as homologous, and there are times their functions are different or altered between species, further undermining whatever hypothetical dependency relationship you might conjecture between them.

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You need to stop these vacuous responses.

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Your comment is not relevant to his model. We know the gene sets build specific highly differentiated animals so there is some dependency to start with. He has built the model around fit and parsimony which restricts the graph from fitting anything. My point is this is very clear from his paper.

This is simply not part of his model. BTW how often do software designers compare bit patterns?

This is true. The model needs refinement over time.

My comment perfectly well explains several of the things that is wrong with this model. I can add more if you like, such as the fact that he’s treating common descent as a perfect tree, and any deviation from a perfect tree he takes to be a better “fit” for a dependency graph than common descent.
Yet the idea of a perfect tree implies there can never occur parallel gene gain or loss, which is flatly ridiculous. Parallel gene gain or loss has been observed in real time in experimental evolution.

Oh gee really? Nobody says there are no dependency relationships between genes, nor that the attributes of organisms do not depend on their genes.

What we’re saying is that making up a dependency graph to explain patterns of gene presence or absence between species does not constitute establishing such relationships.

“restricts”? No, it penalizes(think of subtracting a point for each new module “created” to account for a gene present in one or more species) overfitting, it doesn’t “restrict” it. Nothing technically prevents the dependency graph from fitting any imaginable pattern. It will just incur a cost in terms of increasing the complexity (and thus reducing parsimony) of the model.

Which is a problem, because the consilience of evidence between these different sets of data is some of the strongest evidence for common descent. If you’re going to say you have a valid competitor to common descent, you need to explain all the same evidence at least as well or better. Winston’s hopeful monster is mostly monstrous in the hopefulness of his fans, not it’s explanatory power or scope.

Less often than you try to distract from a topic outside of your comprehension with barely coherent questions, word-salad, and science-sounding technobabble.

For hyperastronomically large values of time and refinement.

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That’s why his model is not useful.

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