There you go again. You don’t have a rudimentary understanding if you think that there are arm genes and gill genes.
Looking at them is not engaging. Why are there so many?
That it will demonstrate your lack of even a rudimentary understanding of genetics and evolution.
No, I think that your misunderstanding of it is.
It’s not ad hominem.
He’s still being polite. I notice that you aren’t disputing them.
I agree, Bill. There are lots of people in the world who have the same questions about the pious certainties of “consensus” science that you and I have, and probably lots of “lurkers” here as well. I think people like you and me feel vastly outnumbered because of the concentrated fire we get here. But when you add up all our regular critics here, they only total about ten. It was the same on BioLogos, where a core of hostile writers who, because they would “gang up” on isolated ID proponents or creationists, seemed like a vast army. But they really aren’t. When you take away overlaps (people who were both on BioLogos and here), the number of these guys in the world is nowhere close to matching their sound volume. Sites like this give them a 24/7 platform to push the atheist/materialist view of the world, and they make the most of them. But in the real world, outside of websites like this where ultra-hobbyists gather, even most of the atheists are more moderate, friendly fellows and just live their lives, without feeling the need to wage war on ID or creationism. This is a very artificial environment. We have to try not to take it too seriously.
There is no sequence problem. John is saying natural selection is removing deleterious mutations. That’s it. You’re blathering again.
A new gene is just a gene duplication. In so far as a gene duplication occurs you have a new gene. You have two where before you had one. Neutral mutations will make them diverge so they become different from each other.
Natural selection isn’t “giving” anything. Try to write in a way that makes sense.
It isn’t eliminating variation it is reducing variation by purging deleterious alleles. A pretty key difference. And that’s not an “admission” -it’s known to be an essential part of the theory that selection removes deleterious variants but allow neutral and beneficial.
Literally every sentence you write is either wrong, incoherent, or stating something trivial.
Both of those have been addressed in direct empirical experiments that show them to not be problems. One does not need to assume anything when you can literally see the kind of evolution ID-nutters says shouldn’t happen in real time.
Maybe in the usual social setting of science geeks, directly calling someone a deceiver is considered “polite,” but out in the world beyond labs and universities, it’s not.
Hey @Eddie, humor me here for a moment.
Do you find Bill to be asking sensible questions? Are you genuinely of the opinion that Bill Cole’s blather isn’t being comprehensibly answered on this forum? On actual scientific substance, what do you see in Bill’s posts?
You are treating natural selection as some sort of universal constant parameter acting on all organisms alike. You did the same thing discussing olfactory gene loss. In this, you are either misunderstanding or misrepresenting an ever so fundamental concept.
For one, as Rum explained, positive mutations, by definition, are not filtered away.
You ask:
Natural selection varies because natural selection concerns the fit between organism and environment.
And the environment is always varying. So of course natural selection varies with it. For some lineages, there is a shift in favored traits. Natural selection is not just some static filter as you have it.
Climate, geography, ecology, isolation, territorial expansion, fresh niches opening, pathogens, predators and prey - you never step in the same river twice.
Maybe you are ok with a single experiment that address one type of organism. I am not Rum especially considering the sequence dependence of genes and proteins.
Hi Ron
I agree with this.
I also agree with this.
I don’t agree that natural selection plays a significant role in the origin of new genes. If you look at the Lenski experiment with billions of mutations wouldn’t you expect a novel enzyme to form if there weren’t significant obstacles such as the sequence problem and waiting time problem. The experiment was forcing selection in the case of using citrate as an alternative food source. The evolution that occurred was simply caused by a duplicated promoter that became fixed due to an extremely strong selection environment.
I also think Rum like many others quotes a paper making a small experiment can explain that the Neo darwinian mechanism is responsible for biodiversity. This is not at all convincing given the differences between microbes and multicellular organisms and in addition the experiments are generally very focused applications.
That’s not a good response. A better response would be to say clearly what “the sequence problem” is and why it’s a problem. (I don’t think you’re capable of that, but one can hope.)
Thanks for the polite tone of voice to me. (Usually you are more polite to me than 6 or 7 others here.)
As you may have noticed, I haven’t got involved in many of the long discussions where Bill is involved, and more generally, in threads where there are long arguments about biological details. This is partly because I am more interested in the philosophical or foundational methodological questions, and in questions about dialogical fairness to ID people, than in detailed biological arguments, and partly because the detailed biological arguments never seem to me to get out of an endless circle. Ever since I started following website debates over ID, it seems the same arguments and counterarguments come up again and again, and no one on either side ever yields an inch. It seems most people who come to these sites come to defend fixed positions, not to listen to each other and possibly meet somewhere in the middle. And anyway, if someone like Behe or Denton who knows much more biology than I do can’t persuade the people here, I’m sure I can’t.
To answer your question about Bill, I haven’t followed the details of any of his longer conversations, so it’s hard for me to render a meaningful opinion. When I’ve looked in briefly from time to time, it has seemed to me that some of the points he has made look reasonable, but not having followed all the back and forth, I can’t say whether those points have held up well. But I have noticed that he seems to get treated pretty roughly, and having experienced that myself, I have a certain sympathy with his “social” position here.
I applaud Bill for his courage in walking into the lions’ den on an overwhelmingly unfriendly-to-creationists-and-ID site (I don’t mean Joshua, but the general culture here), and trying to defend ID arguments and criticize Darwinism. I would like to help, but I tired myself out doing that years ago. But there’s no reason other ID folks and creationists (I belong to the first group, not the second) couldn’t rise to the challenge and help him. Where are they all? Anyhow, I have my hands full with my own fights. I only discovered this particular page by accident, because my name was mentioned. I expect that in the long run, some of his arguments will be vindicated, and others will fail, but in the short run he deserves a medal for valor.
I agree with what Ron says here, but it raises an important question of method. Assuming that Ron is entirely right, it means that evolutionary theorists will be able to explain virtually any evolutionary outcome, no matter how unexpected, by appealing to all these changing factors – after the fact. (Much as, say, a depression that no economists, or hardly any, predicted, suddenly has a thousand lucid explanations in terms of complex causes – after the fact.) This raises the question whether evolutionary models (I don’t mean the mere assertion of common descent, but models dealing with causal factors) are ever truly falsifiable. What would it take to show once and for all that, say, neutral theory just can’t account for what happened in the Ordovician seas? Or can any data from those seas be made compatible with neutral theory, with enough juggling of complex factors? These are the sorts of question that interest me, given my interest in the history and philosophy of science.
When I’ve looked in briefly from time to time, it has seemed to me that some of the points he has made look reasonable, but not having followed all the back and forth, I can’t say whether those points have held up well.
Okay. I have no further questions.
Could you kindly explain how attempts to correct Bill’s misunderstanding of the bare basics of genetics and evolutionary theory amount to pushing atheism/materialism? Does one have to be an atheist/materialist to understand the Howe diagram differently than Bill does.
The number of people who “wage war” on Flat Earth Theory is probably also quite small. But that should not be taken by the Flat Earthers as reason to continue holding to their beliefs. You disagree?
Uh huh. Right. And those are all the reasons you try avoid discussing the scientific aspects of this debate? Nothing else?
And exactly how do you intend to address those questions without understanding neutral theory and the scientific evidence that supports it?
Could you explain how it would be possible to produce a diagram like this from extent genomic data if neutral theory was not correct?
I observe that you tend to over-interpret the blather, answering questions that haven’t been asked, and giving credence to empty propositions. I suggest a strong focus on defining the question, and make Bill do the work to define his own questions.
Doesn’t work. Bill is incapable of definition or, more generally, of writing coherent English sentences.
I note with glee that you have taken zero exception to the substance of @nwrickert’s description of you, choosing tedious tone policing instead. That says a lot.
You’re probably right about that, though I also think I’ve seen enough of Bill’s crap to know where he’s trying to go with it so might aswell cut it off out of the gate. Of course that just leaves Bill to change the subject and/or make more vacuous assertions.
You take a materialistic view of the world. It is very hard with this view to conceptualize that there is any other explanation then common descent.
I do not look at the observation with common descent as a working assumption as I think there is plenty of evidence to question common descent of vertebrates as a hypothesis.
This has very little to do with my religious beliefs. It has to do with with trying to explain how genes arrangements are formed through the reproductive process. With all due respect I do not think you are capable of coming up with a realistic materialistic explanation for this other then hand waving with mechanisms like gene duplication.
I remember you trying to explain the origin of the spliceosome by gene duplication. This is an example of Rum crap.
No. I take an evidence-based view of the world.
No. It’s easy to imagine that different organisms could have different origins. That’s just not compatible with the evidence we see.
Look at the observation?
For extremely large values of “very little”.
I like how a concrete real-world mechanism observed in real time is hand waving.
LOL. No you don’t. And of course you have NO explanation for the spliceosome at all except just typing the word “design”.
Word salad.
Yet you never cite any such evidence. Your bizarre interpretation of a couple of graphs is not evidence.
Ok, you take a materialistic evidence-based view of the world.
The evidence from a materialistic bias.
Almost none.
If you cannot connect it with the claim as you cannot it is hand waving. Gravity is a real world mechanism. Does it explain the origin of the spliceosome?
The explanation is that the origin of the spliceosome maybe beyond scientific reach.