Congratulations. You have just agreed that there is in fact junk DNA in the human genome.
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Yes. How’d you tell that from sequence alone if you don’t already know something about what function it has and how mutations are likely to affect it? Then you’d have two clades with homologues of the protein, with many different species having some variant of it. You don’t just automatically know if it lost function in one of these species. So your FI calculation would yield a false positive for that species at least.
Assuming you already knew in some other way that it was the human one that broke.
Edit: Also not sure what the “big apes” sequence is. An inferred ancestral sequence?
What I find most amazing is how @Giltil and others are also strong proponents of Genetic Entropy and Behe’s “devolution” which they assert work mostly either by selection being powerless to prevent deleterious mutations, and by adaptive loss of function mutations. Yet they’re highly resistant to the idea of large amounts of junk sticking around in the genome. Behe says functions constantly break, producing more and more dead genes presumably. Then Sanford says deleterious mutations of small effect can’t be removed by selection. Hmm gee I wonder what the long-term consequence of those two effects combined will be. Lots of broken genes selection can’t purge? Hmmm. Nah, zero (or close to it) junk because design.
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You forgot @gpuccio’s strategic omission of measuring conservation within species for functional protein sequences. What’s the actual biological reason for it? No intuitions or assumptions, please.
Humans are big apes. Are you denying the validity of these cladograms? If so, what specifically is wrong with it, other than your need to deny it?
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aar6343#F3e
This is basic, Wikipedia-level stuff.
I don’t exclude at all that a proportion of the genome is junk but I am very skeptical that 90% of it is. I wouldn’t be surprised if 10 or even 15% was junk. Not exactly zero or close to it!
Nothing strategic here for conservation within species is irrelevant to Gpuccio’s argument. If you think otherwise, please explain.
I’ve already asked you to explain why. Especially since the definition of species is fuzzy, there has to be a reason for the omission–the only two I can think of are strategic: intellectual laziness and a need to reach a particular outcome instead of searching for truth.
That’s a silly attempt to transfer the evidentiary burden. You never responded to my request to defend that decision in the initial presentation of @gpuccio’s notion. You agree that conservation is a proxy for function, so you need to explain why lack of conservation within a species is somehow different and can be ignored.
As I wrote,
Why do you reject the scientific method?
You are the one who claims that intra species variation is a problem for Gpuccio’s argument. So the burden is on you to explain why you think so. This is quite elementary.
Why 10 or 15%? Why not only 5%? Or maybe 25%?
Everything about ID and junk DNA just seems to utterly arbitrary.
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I don’t think so. You are dodging questions again. You made an assertion and @Mercer asked you a question. He said:
Let’s have an answer to that before we go off on a wild goose chase.
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That’s just one of the many ways in which the notion (why avoid the scientific term “hypothesis”?) has no scientific foundation. It’s just an easy one to focus on, because you don’t have the slightest idea why one would be a proxy for information and the other would not.
In reality, I didn’t make some haughty claim that it is “a problem for Gpuccio’s argument,” because his notion is utterly vapid. I simply asked you why intraspecies conservation is irrelevant to his claim that interspecies conservation is a proxy for functional information, which you continue to rabidly defend with no data at all.
Your dodging speaks volumes.
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The problem is that the passage you quoted from John makes no sense to me, reason why I asked him to elaborate.
Gpuccio’s argument is based on inter species conservation through deep time. So how on earth would intraspecies variation be of any relevance here? You really need to elaborate more on what you mean before I can offer you an answer.
Which of two regions/sequences is more conserved than the other is something that can be measured rather precisely. Species, on the other hand, seems at the best of times to be a weakly defined term, with known exceptions to just about every criterion. So while conservation is something we can objectively (or as close to it as any such endeavour can be, anyway) investigate, there is no way of separating what is intraspecies conservation from what is interspecies conservation any cleaner than species themselves can be separated. That’s not to say there is no line at all one could draw. But it would be always a somewhat fuzzy one, and edge cases would have to essentially be declared one or the other somewhat… arbitrarily, at least viewed in a grander scheme (i.e. there can be perfectly reasonable and unambiguous criteria for the study at hand, but no compelling reason why they should apply outside of it, nor why other criteria may not in fact be better when dealing with a different issue). In light of this problem, an arguent can rely on one of the two only if one can articulate why it makes a difference, where to draw the line, and why to draw it there, particularly. Otherwise, the argument at best falls apart with those edge cases, or at worst applies to some amount of variation and not another for no presented reason.
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What are your underlying assumptions about how Design was implemented to arrive at your numbers? For example, do you propose a designer introduced changes to a preexisting set of organisms to create new forms or did the designer create each new kind de novo, starting from a blank slate? Or something in between?
I ask because there is nothing inherent in the generic concept of design that makes any predictions about the amount of junk DNA we should find in organisms: 95% could be as fine as 0%. It’s only when people propose specific models or modes of design that one can make a case for a specific prediction.
So, how do you think the Designer created and released humans & chimps or other species to the world? How do you believe design was implemented such that large accumulation of junk DNA would be unexpected? Basically, what are the core design hypotheses you are testing when you propose that 90% junk DNA accumulation is far too much but that maybe 10%-15% is reasonable?
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Got any reason for those numbers? It looks basically pulled out of thin air to me.
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Sounds to me like an ego that is trying to resist being deflated.
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Let’s not throw caution to the wind.
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Which is not a measurement of functional information. We’ve been through this, and you never respond to substantive points.
But I’ll play your game. Where, precisely and quantitatively, is the division between “deep” and “non deep” time?
Can’t you see that there can be no real quantification here, when you are flinging around so many undefined weasel words to frame it?
So, the simple question is, why do you baselessly assert that degree of conservation over longer periods is a proxy for information, while degree of conservation over shorter periods, as in real time, is not a proxy for information? Where is the line?
No names, assertions, intuitions, or definitions (a la Nigel Tufnel), please; just straightforward, detailed explanation of your reasoning.
I’m very clear about what I mean. You and @gpuccio are not.
Here’s another perfectly clear description of what you are doing:
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Another point of order: has there ever been “a measurement of functional information”?
If not, it would render FI such a nebulous quantity that it would seem that anybody could make any claim they wished about it without fear of direct contradiction by the facts. I could claim that every second a single drop of water creates a zillion bits of FI through Brownian Motion.
This means that anything is both an equally good, and an equally poor, proxy for FI. This week’s lottery numbers are an equally good proxy for it as Gpuccio’s “inter species conservation through deep time”.
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