New article: Constructive Neutral Evolution 20 Years Later

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

Open Access:

Constructive Neutral Evolution 20 Years Later

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

Anyone who cares about ID, for or against, needs to read this article.

[scd]

do you accept that idea? because if so evolution is probably in a serious problem…

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

Evolution is “in a serious problem” when there are mechanisms that have inherent tendencies towards increasing complexity even without involving positive selection?

As usual you seem to have a hard time saying something sensible.

[Michael_Okoko]

@scd

because if so evolution is probably in a serious problem…

How can evolution be in trouble when the idea itself explains certain aspects of evolutionary change?

[Faizal_Ali]

@Rumraket

Evolution is “in a serious problem” when there are mechanisms that have inherent tendencies towards increasing complexity even without involving positive selection?

As usual you seem to have a hard time saying something sensible.

There is a small but vocal group of religious apologists who insist on the equation Evolution = Darwinism = Atheism, and who believe that if one knocks down the middle element in that equation, the other two fall as well. @scd is merely a victim of this movement, and is to be pitied.

[Michael_Okoko]

@kleinman

Consider one of my favorite evolutionary experiments, the Kishony Mega-Plate experiment. That team has used two different antimicrobial agents (not simultaneously) in their experiment, Ciprofloxacin, and Trimethoprim. In the colony of a billion bacteria in the drug-free region will be a variant with a mutation that will be beneficial to the Ciprofloxacin selection pressure and another variant that will be beneficial to the Trimethoprim selection pressure. Each variant has a different evolutionary trajectory to the particular selection pressure but each step on that evolutionary trajectory will take about a billion replications of each particular variant at each step on their own particular evolutionary trajectory. The particular drug used in the experiment reveals which of those particular evolutionary trajectories are beneficial. This is a huge mathematical problem for the theory of evolution.

I believe there was a thread made for this topic. Take it back there.