Kondrashov's Paradox: Why We Haven't Died 100 Times Over

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Sure. Absolutely. Never said anything else. But duplicating a chapter does not alter the plot, does it? The point is still and always that genotype, expression, and phenotype cannot be teased apart, and that fitness effects are not intrinsic to the genotype but are measured by the differential success of the living, breathing, organism. This is elementary. Once again, I’m not denying anything, not the role of the genome, and not the roles of phenotype and environment on fitness outcomes. Its you that has problems with where life and death and reproduction actually happen.

This is all about GE. Your model does not capture all the complexity that exists in nature, and is empirically falsified, which is why you reject factors that are real but not captured in your model. For all your talk of functional complexity, you dismiss the role of function in a complex and dynamic environment. You still cannot even answer if a mutation changing color is deleterious, neutral, or beneficial.

The reason you have zero interest in the actual biological limits on your model is that GE is just a dogma of dispensational theology; as I stated before, a quixotic denial which “is religiously motivated by some notion of plenary inerrant inspiration of the archetype genes of Eden.”

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So survival is a component but only for the offspring, not for the parent? That still just boils down to reproduction only. No, survival is an inherent part of the definition of fitness (meaning mutations that harm survival without affecting reproduction can still be said to be reducing fitness).

The truth is, the word fitness is foggy but it acts as an imperfect proxy for total genetic function. You won’t get anybody who isn’t a creationist (that I’ve heard at least) come out and openly admit that, but Gerrish’s statement is an implicit admission that functional complexity lies at the heart of fitness effects. Fitness is not purely relative or subjective, far from it.

In the vast majority of cases it is. That’s why Gerrish et al openly acknowledged that fact. It’s not just any complexity though, it’s functional complexity.

Yes, that’s an example of an edge case where the artificial lab environment created conditions where part of the robust function that is needed in nature became unecessary or even detrimental in the lab. Exceptions don’t overturn the rule.

Again we hear what “everyone” would agree with. Not sure I buy it. In any case, if someone wants to claim some other DFE besides the ones we have published evidence for, then the burden of proof is on that person.

Fixed? Not strictly fixed, but it’s never going to change so much that suddenly thermodynamics starts running in the wrong direction and functional complexity starts assembling itself without a designer.

The more I explore this, the more it becomes clear that GE is an absolutely unbeatable problem for evolutionists, and when confronted with it they can only resort to redefining words and ignoring the obvious facts of life.

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It’s hard to carry on any sort of civil conversation when you constantly insult the intelligence (in two meanings of the phrase) of everyone here.Why not try leaving all that out and responding to what people actually say? One obvious fact of life is that there are many millions of extant species. If there really were widespread GE, why wouldn’t most of them be extinct by now?

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It’s really rich to see you saying this to me in the context of this thread (or more broadly, this whole board, or more broadly again, the whole internet). Pretty much everybody engaging here has at one point or another attacked my intelligence, my ability to read, my education, my credentials, my honesty, and so on and so forth. If you can’t take it then don’t dish it. I have been responding to what people say extensively. Most of the time my responses are ignored or misconstrued.

Take for example this very post I’m responding to. You ignored almost all the content of my post and responded only to the last paragraph, and then only to get offended, and you had the gall to suggest that I should actually respond to what people say (the very thing you were not doing in the process of making that post).

As I’ve already stated many times on here and also in the livestreamed debate:

GE is independent evidence that enough time has not yet elapsed for most LMEs (not all!) to go extinct. Many of them already have gone extinct. Some of them, like the wooly mammoth, we can directly identify mutational meltdown as the cause of extinction.

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Wikipedia - Fitness (biology)

Fitness … is a quantitative representation of individual reproductive success.

That is perfectly clear and integrates all other factors including survival, given that not surviving is strongly correlated with not reproducing. There is nothing foggy about it except the incoherence in your dissonant mind. There is nothing to admit. Its a matter of DEFINITION. You are welcome to coin a word with a different meaning, but get your own special little creationist blitherin word, this one is taken.

Says the person who seeks to redefine fitness and ignores the obvious role of traits.

And yet, elephants which YEC consider to be the same kind, are still very much with us 4000 years later.

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No, survival is only important in so far as it contributes to the number of offspring reaching reproductive maturity. Some species produce vast numbers of offspring, where only a few survive. Others have few offspring but take care of them, helping them survive the early stages of infancy, or even beyond that.

Fitness in population genetics is not foggy - it is very clearly defined. And you’re calling that definition a “redefinition”, which is clearly absurd.
There are two issues here. First there is the fact that there are many ways to achieve fitness and survival may or may not be a component. Consider the giant pacific octopus - each breeds only once, the female may produce hundreds of thousands of eggs. The female cares for the eggs, not taking any time to eat - and will die after the eggs hatch. The vast majority of the hatched larvae will not survive - only two need to reach adulthood to sustain the population.

Second you are still trying to make the concept fit your own ideas - and it doesn’t. You want fitness to be an inherent quality of the individual - but it can’t be. The definition does not allow it.

Indeed it is really clear that within-species competition is a part of fitness. All members of a species require the same resources - and if there are not enough to go around some must do without. When a species is expanding mean fitness must be > 1.0, when it reaches the limit of expansion mean fitness must fall to 1.0 even if the species is unchanged. Within-species competition for the limited resources explains this.

And yet parasites typically lose complexity. Complexity is not fitness - it may contribute to fitness but it may also detract from it.

Yes this is a typical reaction in apologists when a much-loved idea is shown to be untenable - becoming more convinced of it and embracing obvious falsehoods to prop up that conviction. Tell me how can using the standard definition of fitness in population genetics when discussing a work of population genetics possibly be a redefinition?

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No, why would you say that? Why do you give such uncharitable readings constantly?

John Harshman keeps telling you to read what people write and this is a perfect example of why.

Gee, I wonder why I wrote “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.”?

That’s just wrong. Just flat out wrong. Now YOU are the one redefining fitness.

Already explained why complexity is not a proxy for fitness.

And nobody here claims it is. Neither are the traits (phenotypes) that are the underlying physical causes of fitness. The goat in the picture really does have those horns, and it doesn’t matter where you personally think the top of the skull ends and the horn begins. The trait is a concrete, objective, physical reality. So is the density of it’s fur, the length of the hairs, the hair diameter, how fast they grow, and so on and so forth.

It isn’t, and he didn’t. Complete misrepresentation of his words. He wrote it is more likely that mutations are deleterious than beneficial, not that increasing complexity increases fitness, which is what you are trying to imply. He has stated no such thing anywhere and it doesn’t follow from his words.

There is no such rule. You made it up and none of your sources support it.

Besides, streamlining (the shedding of excess genetic material that does not contribute to fitness) happens constantly in nature. Again since microorganisms are much easier to work with (see more evolutionary change within human timeframes, are easier to collect and sequence), there are plenty of good examples there. For one, bacteria will routinely expel plasmids containing new genes that were beneficial for a time, but turned detrimental in a changed environment.

Heck, even in our own geneome we have innumerable pseudogenes that are both inactive and degraded. Genes for making egg-yolk protein (we begin developing a yolk-sac in development, but the process is aborted), hundreds of pseudogenes for olfactory receptors, the classic GULO pseudogene for the enzyme in vitamin c biosynthesis, which is totally unnecessary when you can just eat a few plants. And so on and so forth.

So, to be sure, lab environments are typically much simpler than natural environments, but the same processes are known both by observation and inference to occur in the wild.

No, the burden of proof is on those who want to convince others that their simulation correctly reflects observational reality.

Since you are the one who presents your SLiM simulation to the readers/watchers of your debate, to convince us that we should go extinct due to GE and that life could not have evolved, you are the one who has the burden of supporting the parameters you used in your simulation.

Since your simulation had a fixed DFE, and since the realism of that idea is disputed, you must shoulder the burden of showing that the DFE doesn’t change but remains fixed regardless of what the fitness level of the population is.

Get to work.

Oohhh, really? It was in your simulation. So how much is it not fixed? Evidence please!

Nobody claims the DFE reverses thermodynamics. Another silly misrepresentation from you Paul. Do better.

Rich coming from the guy who makes up ad-hoc rationalizations why DFEs observed changing even in multicellular eukaryotes somehow magically wouldn’t also apply or happen to “large”(a measure you’ve yet to rigorously define and delineate) multicellular eukaryotes.

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If GE is the reason woolly mammoths went extinct then why haven’t elephants also gone extinct?

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You guys (and I can say that about this group because you act as a block and basically only ever criticize me, never one another) – you guys cite wikipedia, while I cite peer-reviewed papers.

Yet you claim that I have no credibility. That’s about all that needs to be said here. I’ve already shown from Dr. Orr that 1) the word is fuzzy (countless definitions have been proffered) and 2) it entails both survival and reproduction. It is not as simple as counting offspring that survive, and as you get more complex that gets more and more true.

In my simulation, the fitness is used to cull the population prior to reproduction, deciding which individuals reproduce at all. Reproduction happens with fixed numbers of offspring per set of parents (I chose 8 total per pair of parents). This is very realistic for LMEs like humans. Genetic factors rarely play a role in the number of children we have. Socioeconomic factors are the prime determinant of number of children, not genetics.

No simulation will be perfect, and all will entail simplifying assumptions. You can certainly change the method and use fitness to directly determine the number of offspring had. It will change the internal dynamics a bit, but fitness decline will still be inevitable as long as you keep the parameters within Kondrashov’s danger zone. Population geneticists who are in the know, like Dr. Masel, will tell you this. “Fitness keeps declining no matter what”. It’s because of Ohta’s Ratchet.

You cited wikipedia, I cited peer reviewed sources. I don’t think you’re on the high ground here. I do my homework, you sit on the sidelines and parrot the propaganda you learned in school.

Here is Orr from the same paper I already cited:

“…the word ‘fitness’ has been used to mean subtly different things.”

This is why I say it’s ‘foggy’.

Here’s another peer-reviewed source talking about the definition of fitness, emphasis mine:

‘… the concept of fitness was born from the original notion of evolution by natural selection, and fitness is a critical component of how adaptive evolution proceeds. Yet biologists have disagreed about the formal definition of fitness since the term was first introduced (Dobzhansky 1968; Stearns 1976; Cooper 1984). Indeed, in his glossary, Stearns (1976, p. 4) defined fitness as “something that everyone understands but no one can define precisely.”’

Wadgymar, S. M., Sheth, S. N., Josephs, E. B., DeMarche, M., & Anderson, J. (2024). Defining fitness in evolutionary ecology. International Journal of Plant Sciences,185(3), 218–227. https://doi.org/10.1086/729360

Of course, I’d say Stearns perhaps assumed too much when he assumed everyone understood it. It seems most do not because they oversimplify it.

Here’s a peer-reviewed example of fitness describing survival only, with reproduction not even considered, emphasis mine:

“Fitness curves were computed to examine changes in survival with different trait values …”

Byars, S. G., Papst, W., & Hoffmann, A. A. (2007). Local adaptation and cogradient selection in the alpine plant Poa hiemata along a narrow altitudinal gradient. Evolution, 61(12), 2925–2941. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2007.00248.x

I’ve noticed you tend to make bold claims you cannot back up, then when I challenge you on those claims, you just drop it and act like it never happened (such as when you claimed that created heterozygosity is contrary to a plain reading of scripture).

Implicit in what you said above is a claim that if any member of a created kind goes extinct due to mutational meltdown, we should expact all members of that kind to go extinct at the same time. Can you perhaps back up this claim?