Looking at the parameters of the simulation, I see that UP/PP has set the number of bases to 1/3 of the number humans have, has tripled the mutation rate per base, and specified that all of those bases are equally likely to have mutations that are selected (none of them have only neutral mutations). All 72 of the (average number of) mutations per newborn occur in loci that are under selection. If there were as much junk DNA as molecular evolutionists estimate, the number of mutations to use per newborn would be closer to 7.2.
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How do you know things aren’t being foiled via random miracles? How would you propose to test that?
Other than making arbitrary assumptions, I’ve yet to see any way of distinguishing ideas within creationism based on an objective means of testing where the supernatural is concerned. Certainly you can’t do it within a scientific framework.
I would also be interested to get your take the Medium article I linked. Specifically the 280,000 light year trail that follows galaxy ESO 137–001.
How and why could such a thing exist in a universe that is only ~6000 years old?
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Paul, you rejecting a study because you reject the basis for it doesn’t refute any arguments. It just means you don’t accept the argument because it’s based on premises you don’t accept. Fine, you don’t accept it, and therefore the article does no work to convince you personally. We knew that.
But a refutation means you show the conclusion to the argument to be false. I have not shown my own argument to be false when I state that I know you reject the premise for the study. I have merely given evidence for my position which, to the people who accept the premises of the study, therefore constitutes such evidence.
Just dropping in to clear that up as I think this discussion has run it’s course. I am satisifed that enough has been said on this topic for any potential 3rd party observers to make up their own minds about who has best supported their case throughout the different arguments here.
I also recognise that being the odd man out can be frustrating when you recieve many replies to each post you make. For that reason too, let me say thank you for taking the time to participate as long as you have on this forum.
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Typical word game retort from you. Where did @Rumraket talk about fitness being some sort of substance? Offsets are not required to be substances any more than numbers are substances.
That claim can be challenged, but what is clear is that literalist fundamentalism is opposed to science, including observational science.
Because my brain evolved and therefore lacks understanding, I’m constantly walking over the edge of cliffs, and because the universe does not behave as previously, I stand there in the air momentarily like Wile E. Coyote. After a pause, I plummet to earth while I contemplate, is falling true?, It’s all so confusing. what is truth? is gravity real? I get pretty banged up and see stars, but shake it off.
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Yes, that was to keep the per-individual mutation rate constant, which allows for proper modeling of an accumulating load in the population. I set the number of bases to 1/3 because my computer cannot handle the full 3 billion bp genome. This is still far larger than the genome Hancock simulated.
I guess that’s technically true, but highly misleading. Check the DFE I’m using. Essentially all the mutations will be below the drift barrier (near neutral). Racimo and Schraiber estimated the DFE for humans genome-wide, including all regions, not just coding regions. That is what I am using. There is no such thing as a strictly neutral mutation.
All loci are “under selection” only in terms of there being some effect on fitness, even if extremely small. Mutations in the misleadingly termed “junk DNA” still have effects. The statements you’re making here about the loci under selection are also equally true of Hancock’s sim, but his parameters were not realistic while mine are.
There’s no need to get into a debate about junk DNA, because it’s known that mutations in the so-called “junk” still have effects and can even cause diseases. What you’re attempting to do here is not legitimate. The mutation rate is the mutation rate.
“… it seems unlikely that any mutation is truly neutral in the sense that it has no effect on fitness. All mutations must have some effect, even if that effect is vanishingly small. However, there is a class of mutations that we can term effectively neutral … the fate of which is largely determined by random genetic drift.”
Emphasis added.
Eyre-Walker, A., and Keightley P.D., The distribution of fitness effects of new mutations, Nat. Rev. Genet. 8(8):610–8, 2007. doi.org/10.1038/nrg2146
“There is a growing body of literature indicating that functional regulatory elements, like enhancers and insulators, in non-coding regions of the genome are associated with congenital anomalies.”
Scacheri CA, Scacheri PC. Mutations in the noncoding genome. Curr Opin Pediatr. 2015 Dec;27(6):659-64. doi: 10.1097/MOP.0000000000000283. PMID: 26382709; PMCID: PMC5084913.
Fitness is clearly not the same as “total genetic function” . Even if it works as a “rough proxy” - which has yet to be established - that significantly undermines your models and figures - all of which deal with fitness,
Whatever your opinion of the genome, mean fitness - considered as the basic bare-bones definition used in population genetics is indeed a quantity. Indeed it comes down to population figures. Do you really think that a lot of small decreases in population size can’t be compensated for by a larger increase? Because if you are talking about fitness that is what you are effectively arguing.
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I agree the discussion needs to wind down, and I thank you for acknowledging the difficulty of my having to take on everyone at once. You deserve lots of credit for far outlasting Hancock on his own thread.
Frequently claimed, but never, as far as I know, supported.
No, it’s known that some mutations in junk DNA have effects, but that’s a far cry from the claim that all of them do. You will note that the review you cite does not itself cite anything in support of the bolded claim; it just “seems unlikely”.
And regarding your second quote, you confuse “non-coding” and “junk”. Not all non-coding DNA in your genome is junk, just close to 90 percent of it.
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Since functions are all ultimately biochemical, of course a strong biochemical effect can compensare for many small ones.
Accumulate several small bond-weakening mutations, then compensate with a stronger bond.
Accumulate many small enzyme activity reducing ones, then compensate with a large activity one.
Accumulate many with small effects on conformational flexibility, then compensate through one with a strong effect.
Catalytic rate, affinity, expresseion, binding, stability, etc. Literally all the functions of life at the molecular level work this way.
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Maybe, but that would be a difficult task.
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Why stop there?
Archaeology must be largely wrong, because its timeline extends beyond the flood date, making Giza/Stonehenge/Jericho younger than thought.
Botany must be wrong, because various growth rates lead to ages far beyond that of the Earth, unless omphalism is invoked. It also has issues with a phantom nested hierarchy, divergence times and of course olive trees surviving submergence in salt water and being buried under tons of sediment.
Climatology uses isotope ratios from gases trapped in ice that was supposedly laid down before the Earth existed. So that’s wrong.
Dendrochronology is wrong because it has trees living through the flood, and growing before creation.
Entomology has all the issues associated with nested hierarchies that never happened, plus biogeographical distribution of species is at odds with an Ararat origin (floating veggie mats too), butterfly migration routes must get established quicker than we think, and complex arthropod lifecycles don’t gel with small numbers of hosts and/or submergence.
Forensics is reliant on blood type and DNA matching, which isn’t compatible with post-flood y-chromosomes; on pollen distribution in soil, which isn’t compatible with flood geology; on carbon dating of human and textile remains, which is at odds with the creation date. Though firearms, blood spatter and fingerprints might survive unscathed.
Glaciology gives incompatible dates for Greenland Ice layers.
Heliology has estimated the age of the Sun at 4.5by, which is far too old.
Considering immunology leads to wondering how many arkonauts had sickle-cell and/or thalassaemia, or if they were post-flood developments that greatly increased fitness of humans in malarial regions. More damningly, it (incorrectly?) indicates that the immune system has been evolving for more than 500my.
Joinery[1]: Noah’s ark was too long to be seaworthy.
Kinetics: YEC claims about continental drift rates would have resulted in the landmasses melting through friction-generated heat.
Linguistics, as well as providing a useful analogy for evolition, indicates there were multiple languages before Babel.
Microbiology, especially Lenski’s experiment, shows that fitness can increase, in contrast to GE. Like all other subbranches of biology, it also contributes to the ‘phantom’ twin-nested hierarchy of life.
Nuclear physics has already been mentioned, in the context of radiodating, but it also gave rise to ideas about the formation of elements after the (acreational) big bang.
For optics, the SN1987 measurements show an apparent event much older than 10,000 years. The various techniques that have been used to detect extra-solar planets also produce results inconsistent with the claims made by YECs before denying their existence became untenable.
Palaeontological conclusions about the number of fossils found in flood deposits suggest that antedeluvian peoples were knee-deep in small mammals, smothered by lycopods and swimming in belemnites. That’s without even touching on fossil successions, differing degrees of permineralisation or number of extinct species.
Quantum mechanics includes the determination of star redshifts, and hence relative velocity, distance and minimum age, based on atomic energy level spectra.
Radio astronomy was key in discovering the CMBR, leading to presumably incorrect estimates of the age of the universe.
Sedimentology: how long it takes particles to sink through a fluid, and hence which rock formations couldn’t have formed in a single year (and which weren’t deposited underwater at all).
Thermodynamics was used for some of the early estimates of the age of the Earth. While now known to be wrong, they still give lower bounds.
There are lots of uranological features that would take more than 10,000 years to form naturally, from planetary rings to galactic clusters. (I didn’t use A for astronomy, so it can come under U for uranology instead).
Virology gives explanations for ERVs shared between humans and chimps that defy YEC expectations of common ancestry.
Wave mechanics are used in estimating radiodecay parameters (e.g. the Gamow factor), so if radiodecay is wrong, wave mechanics is likely wrong too.
Xylology is used to determine the nature, age and formation time of coal seams as being inconsistent with a global flood or ex nihilo creation.
The YORP effect has been used to generate multi-million year estimates for the age of asteroid groups.
Finally, zoology has been providing evidence for the nested hierarchy of life since Linnaeus.
It is no exaggeration to say that YEC is in some way at odds with every single branch of science, from acoustics[2] to zymology, via ecology, limacology, oenology, palaeoclimatology, selenology, volcanology and literally hundreds of others.
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Wait. I had assumed that when Paul stated he used realistic biological parameters in his model, that non coding or non-regulating regions of DNA such as pseudogenes, repeating elements, ERVS, would be assigned a fitness effect of strictly neutral. But what we find is…
Dino coprolites, that premise alone disqualifies your model from serious consideration. A simultaneous mutation in a coding region may be slightly deleterious under the threshold of selection. A mutation in some ancient embedded ERV that is already degraded has absolutely zero effect, and if that isn’t true of the majority of the genome which neither codes nor regulates, you had better have hard data linking specific mutations to specific conditions that hurt the organism. By data, I do not mean one of your quote mines or mystic blather about information. Your model is far out of touch with reality, for this and many other reasons stated in this thread, and is therefore scientifically worthless. You are a skilled debater and presenter, so go and have your fun, but I have no idea what you think you are accomplishing.
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Thanks for your compliment. What I have accomplished is to show that one cannot maintain even a pretense that evolution is theoretically feasible unless one denies the clear statements of the world’s foremost experts in population genetics and the models they use in their published work. I have used their models, and correctly quoted their statements. This means your issue is no longer with me, but rather it is with them. I suggest you contact Eyre-Walker and Keightley if you wish for them to defend their statement (which also agrees with Kimura and Kondrashov) that there are no strictly neutral mutations. Bye now.
Noncoding has never, ever been the same as junk. Please stop.
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Not necessarily true, though that’s probably the most frequent case. But deleterious mutations can occur in junk DNA, for example the evolution of a spurious transcription factor binding site that would upset the effective concentration of transcription factor.
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I think the argument is that even if the mutation has no genetic effect, it will have a minuscule effect due to differing concentrations of nucleotides and molecular masses affecting speed and energy consumption of DNA replication and transcription.
Though such effects wouldn’t be mostly detrimental, they’d be approximately 50:50 since if a C->G change reduces replication speed, a G->C change (any G->C change) would increase it.
IDers will of course (1) unwarrantedly extrapolate from protein-coding mutations being mostly detrimental to these mutations also being mostly detrimental, and if that is rejected (2) claim that the original genome was created optimal and there hasn’t been time to reach equilibrium, without admitting that this assumes a young Earth rather than being evidence for it.[1]
PP has definitely done 1 - cf Keightley - and probably 2 as well, though I can’t recall a specific occasion. ↩︎
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A couple of thoughts on this. As C->G and G->C occurs at roughly equal frequencies, the energy cost would not accumulate over time, and a small offset would probably have minuscule impact among millions of base pairs.
Micro-organisms are comparatively genome efficient. That so much non-coding, non-regulatory DNA is left unpruned by large eukaryotics would seem to indicate that cellular energy costs in their case is of low consequence. After all, no junk is more efficient than C or G junk. There is much more to be gained by optimizing the energy costs of phenological traits.
Biology is so full of exceptions that one can almost never get away with a generalization, but I think that mutations in non-regulatory, non-coding DNA having some fitness effect above zero, is more the exception that proves the rule.
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That’s not true ar all. You haven’t shown that a single expert agrees that Kondrashov’s paradox rules out evolution. Indeed you’ve tried to rule out a proposed solution by denying that what you are talking about is Kondrashov’s paradox at all. There is no reason to believe that the problem is anything more than a problem with the models - likely multiple problems.
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If this were a significant factor, salamanders and ferns would have long since gone extinct.
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So, you have nothing, no data on mutations in non-coding and non-regulating DNA resulting in specific conditions that hurt the organism. You cannot even answer if a mutation changing phenotype color is deleterious, neutral, or beneficial. You have no response to viral fidality decreasing fitness.
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