That’s odd, since I’m literally asking you to explain the differences in heterozygosity and polymorphism between groups of humans in the context of GE.
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Not at all. My simulation modeled a population which was scaled by a factor of 3 from the realistic human effective population size of 10,000. So it capped out at 3,333 individuals at carrying capacity. Each individual has its own diploid genome, which is why it took weeks on end just to run it through about 750 generations.
You are wrong on the principle, not just the analogy. It all comes back to the fact that genetic sequence in and of itself does not possess any intrinsic quality of fitness, and your quixotic denial is religiously motivated by some notion of plenary inerrant inspiration of the archetype genes of Eden.
You seem to be indulging in some sort of Zeno’s paradox of trait definition, that if it is impossible to precisely define the point at which a horn begins, then the horn can never be objectively there. As a child with a Dr. Seuss reading level would not have such difficulty identifying horns, this is a ridiculous path to go down. Movement is possible, bumble bees fly, and no amount of rhetorical sophistry will counter that traits have objective existence. These traits are the engine of fitness, and in most cases their fitness effect will vary with environment.
As your referenced book is unverified, and other purported evidence of human and dinosaur cohabitation have proved fraudulent, my statement stands patently true. There is no evidence of non-avian dinosaurs above the global KT boundary, a well documented fact that is incompatible with YEC, but perfectly in keeping with science.
Delusion of grandeur - GE does not attract attention because it is not a significant problem. It has never directly been detailed in any scientific publication, and is promoted by scientists with scant, generously put, ongoing research recognition. Working scientists generally have more pressing investigations than essentially theological debates from apologists.
You have received plenty of responses to your argument in this forum, they just are not to your satisfaction because they do not suit your apologetic.
Which is why GE has no bearing on reality in nature. Of course mutations accumulate, that is why species have distinct genomes and vary in their adaptive traits.
Thank you for that correction.
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This is the most fundamentally false thing you could have said. Fitness being defined as “the ability of organisms to survive and reproduce” is of course only possible because of the information encoded in the sequence of nucleotides. This information specifies an unfathomable degree of functional complexity.
That is inherent, and mutations objectively damage that information content. To deny this is to deny basic reality, very much like putting your head in the sand. The fact that you feel the need to deny this is a strong indicator that your ideology is severely divorced from reality.
“Even the simplest of living organisms are highly complex. Mutations—indiscriminate alterations of such complexity—are much more likely to be harmful than beneficial.”
Gerrish, P., et al., Genomic mutation rates that neutralize adaptive evolution and natural selection, J. R. Soc. Interface, 29 May 2013; DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2013.0329.
If evolution were true, then its defenders would not need to align themselves against the progress of science by denying the basic nature of what DNA represents.
Professor Hancock argues that the effects on traits are not so simply modelled. An effective answer has to go beyond simple nay-saying.
That’s untrue. Fitness has always been about reproductive success and always relative to the environment. There’s no redefinition involved.
Mutational meltdown Is only observed in the special case of small inbred, isolated populations - as the article said. The whole point of Kondrashov’s Paradox - what makes it a paradox - is that it is not generally observed.
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Well, it does show your understanding of physics and chemistry has its, er, limitations.
If you want more substantive response, where can I find the assumptions you made in your population genetic computer simulations?
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Fitness is a consequence of physical traits. Selection occurs due to differences in those traits.
The shape of the shark affects how many calories it burns, how fast it can swim, for how long, and how much food it has to catch and consume to keep swimming. Thus selection happens at the level of traits, and all the loci contributing to the trait, including all the novel mutations, are going to be affected in their frequency when one shark survives and reproduces better or worse than another.
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Upthread you claimed Zach’s admission that the human effective population was 2.7 billion as a victory. If 2.7 billion is a concession, 10,000 is not realistic.
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That 10,000 value is based on an old earth scenario that is incompatible with GE. For 10,000 to be realistic, GE has already been abandoned. Using it renders your simulation of GE worthless.
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It’s lunacy of course. The horns are a physical trait and how well humans are at gauging the exact dimensions of horn-size between one goat and it’s neighbor is just flatly irrelevant to what extent the horn dimensions affect goat survival and reproductive success.
Not to mention the fact that even if it is difficult to estimate the difference when two horns are very close in their physical dimensions, there comes a point where the differences, when they grow larger, can no longer be denied by a reasonable person. A point where dissent becomes more plausibly a product of human psychology(the person is literally crazy, or just being obstinate out of spite) than of intrinsic difficulties with telling similar horns apart.
There isn’t anyone who doesn’t know this is true, including Paul. Just change the topic to differences between men vs women and see his head explode from cognitive dissonance (Warning: Safety Hazard). Or if you want to be slightly less controversial, if traits are merely subjective what separates humans from other apes, or primates, or animals for that matter?
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I suspect that book claims that herds of Diplodocus roamed across the English countryside during the reign of Henry VII.
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Hancock made two separate errors in his statement about effective population size. His figure was way off even assuming we should use recent Ne.
His bigger error was to use recent Ne in the first place, when it’s long-term Ne which is relevant here.
Incorrect. It’s not based upon an “old earth scenario”. It’s computed using an understanding of genetic linkage disequilibrium as well as the harmonic mean of human population census size over time.
Whether you think the earth is thouasands or billions of years old does not change the fact that the human population size was much smaller for the vast majority of our history. The long-term Ne of 10,000 is just an estimate, but it’s the ballpark figure scientists use.
What it shows is that you’re taking a cheap shot at me based on a sloppily-worded analogy (an off-topic one at that). Considering that I’m the only one with the guts to get into this ring of schoolyard bullies and defend my position, I think you could show a touch more respect than that.
You can find the raw code at github.com/GenPDP7/GE_QED
You can find the comparison of parameters I used with the ones Hancock used here:
As usual, reality is turned on its head. Hancock is the one engaging in nay-saying (ignoring all the work I did actually simulating genetic entropy using population genetics theory that is very well established), and instead preferring to handwave the problem away by claiming it’s all just relative.
As I have already shown from the published literature (Orr), fitness is not merely about reproduction, it’s also about survival. It’s by no means purely relative to the environment (my quote from Gerrish establishes that fact, since “complexity” is not a subjective, environment-relative property).
Mutations, to paraphrase Gerrish, indiscriminately alter functional complexity. That is always true in every environment. They are always much more likely to be harmful than beneficial.
The reason why it’s only observed in such populations is obvious – because small population sizes speed up the process a lot.
Dr. Joanna Masel and company (like Kondrashov) have already publicly disavowed the claim that this issue applies only to small population sizes. But more than that, I actually showed the problem does apply to the realistic human population in my simulation. You should pay closer attention!
I’m not denying that the genotype is expressed in the phenotype. I’m all on board with basic reality. If you accept that it is the phenotype that, you know, must compete to live or die and reproduce, and that is where differential selection happens, then we are in agreement!
Why is trisomy always devastating and usually lethal? The information in the extra chromosome is identical. It is not the information, but over expressed transcription and translation that results in non survivable phenotypical expression.
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It’s not the same information in the genome. Take any text document and then take one paragraph and duplicate just that paragraph. Has the document as a whole changed? Yes. This is what I mean when I say “obfuscation”. It’s still and always about information.
No. Raising reasoned objections is not just nay-saying, it is your statement that attempts to invert reality - the more so since it fails to recognise that models are merely models.
Again you are wrong. Strictly speaking fitness is the number of offspring per individual reaching reproductive age. Complexity is not the same as fitness.
And yet again we come to the point that there has been more than adequate time for the supposed effect to show up elsewhere - that’s the paradox!
I’m pretty sure that they don’t agree that the problem is actually occurring. And again, your model is a model and so not proof - the more so since you have chosen to shred your credibility here.
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There isn’t anyone here who isn’t aware that what fitness represents is not just about how many offspring you can strictly produce (that would be more correctly referred to as fecundity) but also about how well each of those offspring go on to survive and reproduce themselves (there’s no use having 100 children if they all die before reproducing themselves, and the neighbor has only 4 and all of them survive to have 4 more of their own).
This is news to no-one here and nobody is redefining anything about what fitness means. When we say fitness is about reproductive success, it is to be implicitly understood that the survival component is part of what reproductive success means.
You really should climb down from that horse.
This is confused. Complexity is not necessarily a component that contributes to fitness (though it might contribute, it is rarely if ever a trait that is directly selected on). Heck, the fact that Sanford et al. redefined the concept of GE to refer to something like net functional complexity in response to the observation that fitness increased in experiments with microorganisms shows that complexity can even be anti-correlated with fitness.
To fitness, or to functional complexity? Not the same thing. A mutation that degrades a function and reduces complexity can aid survival and reproduction in a particular environment, and that same mutation in a different environment can be deleterious to survival and reproduction.
Even though everyone would agree that the DFE is always skewered towards being predominantly deleterious, it really does matter how much it is so, and how much it changes with both organismal fitness and the environment itself.
One issue with your simulation is it was based on the unsupported (and in fact highly dubious) premise of a fixed DFE. An idea we just have no good reason to think is true in reality.
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If, as you claim, the human population has grown from 8 to 8 billion since 4400 years ago, and we know the human population was in the millions during the Roman empire, there is no way that the human population was about 10,000 for even a few decades, let alone “the vast majority of our history”. You are using a value completely at odds with your view of history, and that renders your results invalid.
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This hypothesis (kinds are higher order than species) can be tested with experiments and evidence that isolate how much genetic variation can be tolerated in a unique population. I agree this is not an easy task.
One level of evidence available is the number of different genes between species. Can reproduction generate new genes?
That’s a misrepresentation of what I said. Harmonic mean of census size would only be one aspect of the long-term Ne. You also have to take into account geographical isolation and LD. I’m perfectly fine using the estimate in the literature of 10,000, even though with a strictly biblical framework the long-term Ne might look a little different. Either way, GE is going to happen for sure.