How about one for discussion of sea lions?
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Only one way to find out…
Let’s do this:
HARSHMAN, EVERYTHING YOU THINK ABOUT SEA LIONS IS WRONG!!!
Also, what is the evidence and rationale for your sea-lion-related claims? Hmmmm?
EDIT: Oops. Uh oh. Got split. Well, FAFO I guess.
I do not think that scientists say that because something is material, it is necessarily knowable. Certainty about the OoL, for example, is always going to be hobbled by the fact the trail has been erased and we cannot time travel. That does not mean that speculation is verboten, or that those speculations are not subject to experiments and simulations to evaluate their potential.
I would grant that many scientists and communicators endow claims with more certitude than is justifiable, but critics of mainstream science are generally much much worse in this regard.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.1441
From the paper.
Genome size (GS) varies tremendously across eukaryotes (by at least five orders of magnitude), but is thought of as a stable trait within species
How would you attribute this to random variation especially among plants?
My suggestion would be that you actually read the paper rather than just the first sentence. The section headed “selected examples of intraspecific genome size variation” might be helpful.
How would attribute what to random variation?
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As opposed to magical acts of divine creation? What is the scientific hypothesis of ID for the origin of life or ATP synthase, again? ALLAKAZAM. POOF.
Literally, that’s it. And you have the gall to suggest that the inference that the genome is mostly junk is a science stopper, when your preferred explanation is to literally stop doing science altogether. The ID research program is to just say POOF.
Everyone is welcome to posit a hypothesis (and those can have varying degrees of merit). It’s the part where it progresses from being a mere hypothesis to a well-supported theory that makes the difference. Anyone here would agree that the multiverses (for example) is just a hypothesis, and many of them might even be untestable. In fact that is a common complaint in the scientific establishment.
That’s also the part where yours have literally nothing to motivate it in the first place. There isn’t some observation in need of your ad-hoc explanation, because you’re positing a model inconsistent with the data. By your own admission, many species have genome sizes well in excess of what is required to encode their physiology. Which just makes one wonder why you are positing it in the first place. It’s obvious that it is at bottom a theologically motivated hypothesis. There is no pattern in the data that calls out for you rationalization. Nothing you do here is done in the interest of science or truth and it’s obvious from the topics you pick to complain about and attack in that comment (the origin of the universe and life). Spare us your indignation.
Now with respect to the “unpurposefulness” of scientific theories, there isn’t a testable alternative. Anything could in principle have been arranged for a purpose. Imagining that there is one can’t amount to a scientific explanation for anything. Even ostensibly purposeless theories of origins can still be imagined to be part of some grand plan that leads to some end, even down to last week’s weather. It’s completely worthless.
To the extend you might want to include purposeful acts to explain some data, the theory stops being a testable scientific theory right there and the data just becomes something that “is the way it is because someone wanted it” and the act of creation, physically, must take basically the form of a magical “and then it was.” Who was the science stopper again?
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“Stable” is a relative term in terms of both scales of time and intensity of effect. Which you would have understood if you had read the paper.
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If any of that was confusing, just google “sealioning”. Bill Cole is a regular practitioner.
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Well, I didn’t know that.
What is this ‘it’ that seems to you this way? What experience have you had or can point to a report of, where the proposal of a scientific model was presented without any suggestion of experimental testing, if not supporting data? What experience have you had of a proposition that was greenlit despite having none of that? Heck, what experience have you had where a proposition that had all the data necessary to substantiate it was swiftly accepted without further scrutiny?
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I’m not sure exactly what you mean, but I’m going to guess that you are asking how it can be random if there are only small differences among a single species of plants, but very large differences across all of the different plants. That looks like a pattern, not something random. I’ll answer that question, and if I got the question wrong, please let me know as I don’t mean to “straw man” you.
The answer to the question I have just asked myself, (which I hope(?) is the same as the question you are asking me) is that the variations in gene size are random in the individual, but naturally build up over time, so the more related two individuals are, the more likely they are to share DNA, and that includes having the same insertions or deletions. This in turn means that the more related two organisms are, the more likely they are to have the same DNA length.
So, just like you will see a nested hierarchy within different clades related to precise DNA content, you will also see a nested hierarchy (less precise, because the metric we are using is less precise) in terms of similarity of the length of DNA.
You will even be able to do some phylogeny if you want to determine when certain indels likely entered specific genomes, and this would allow you to determine why certain species have the same or different genome sizes and by what amounts.
Does this answer your question, or a part of it? Let me know.
I think this is the right argument but the problem is tying the nested hierarchy to the animals being connected by reproduction first and second reproduction and natural (random) variation vs a deterministic cellular mechanism that is causing the change.
If we compare rats and mice separated by 30 million years and over 100 million generations we see a very close genome size. If we had all that time for random variation I would not expect this. If we look at chickens and zebra finch both have genome sizes around the same despite long separation times and fast generation times.
Just to be clear, you are aware, that DNA is literally the substance of inheritance, right? Because the only way for DNA to not be an indicator of relatedness is for it to not be that. There is no third option. There is no way for DNA to both be what carries genes and for it to not be that.
Why not? Please, show us the calculation by which you arrived at a prediction of the genome size variation the experimentally observed one is outside the error margins of.
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Please explain what you would expect and provide the math to support that expectation.
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I agree with this. If your beef is with phylogenetics in general, then this is surely the right forum for you. Post some data and rationales and I’m sure we can release the hounds…er… Scientists… To discuss the minutia with you.
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Guys. It’s Bill Cole. It has to end.
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I believe the rule is demand math, then point and laugh until it is provided.
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Indeed. @Giltil would benefit from taking the time to comprehend the following graph and bear this in mind before he wants to make such claims
I also find it amusing how @Giltil dismisses examples of simple organisms possessing extremely large genomes as a problem. This is similar to how someone (I think Ewan Birney) dismisses such examples, and T. Ryan Gregory easily pointed out the absurdity of this thinking in one of his posts on Genomicron (I don’t remember which. Can’t find it. Perhaps it’s no longer available) with the following image:
Ah yes, if we ignore a significant number of organisms, like the lung fish, we do see that complexity requires large genomes… except don’t mention complex organisms with very small genomes, like the puffer fish… oh darn… too late for that.
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Nice graph, but where does it come from? And I assume the dot in the middle of each bar is the sample mean, but is that right?
@Giltil should note that even mammals have close to an order of magnitude of variation in genome size. And he should note that the mean genome size of protists is greater than that of mammals.