You mean the tiny bit Behe cherry-picked while ignoring all the data which directly contradicts his claims.
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What beneficial mutations? The ones that break or blunt a gene?
Are you saying that Behe is denying the existence of beneficial mutations that donât break or blunt a gene?
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Do you understand if a mutation is beneficial it doesnât matter one iota if it âbroke or bluntedâ an existing gene?
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No. I am saying that the majority of the mutations observed that look like real evolutionary adaptions that are fixed in the population do.
Really? What if the environment changes?
Beneficial or neutral or deleterious is determined WRT the current environment.
How many times have you had that simple concept explained to you Bill?
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Where can we see that data? Where did Behe compare these numbers?
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This analogy may sound good on the surface. Unfortunately, an analogy is no better than the quality of its correspondence with the processes being analogized. In this case, youâve âstacked the deckâ and assumed that the only possible usefulness of a database of phone numbers is in reaching a particular personâs family, friends, colleagues, and business contacts (e.g., oneâs local electric company.) Yet, I could just as easily cherry-pick another kind of telephone data situation and show how a serious of random or semi-random changes to a database actually improved the usefulness of that data sequence (i.e., the telephone number database.)
To illustrate what I mean, I will modify your analogy and replace it with an actual real-life telephone-number database I dealt with back in the late 1970âs. (If you can cherry-pick an analogy, so can I.) Letâs see if âEvery morning make a random change to the phone numbersâ in a database will necessarily produce a negative result.
As I explain this real life example I will include a few of the technical detailsâfor the benefit of the many on this forum who will understand the terminologyâbut my analogy is in no way dependent on those technical details of why the phonenumber-digit sequence errors occurred.
In those days of long ago I was among the lowest of the lowly lecturers on a university campus. (That is, I was low-paid because I lacked regular faculty status.) So I supplemented my income serving as a âgeneral consultantâ for various troubleshooting situations at the campus computer center. One day I got a call from an executive from a major charity which contracted with the university for its database-maintenance services, They had run into a significant problem which appeared to be the universityâs fault. One of the many donor contact databases used by the charity for telephone solicitations (among other things) had somehow become corrupted and an unknown number of those 10-digit telephone numbers were wrong. It was assumed that it had happened during one or more of the recent weekly transaction sort-merge operations on the universityâs IBM 360 system. (Those who share my I.T. dinosaur status will understand what that meant. Batches of transactions were held until a weekly middle-of-the-night sort-merge so as to minimize mainframe time-sharing costs.) Initially they suspected that the telephone-number corruptions were due to a combination of random parity errors on a bad 2400 Series Magnetic Tape driveâs 9-track tape together with some kind of program software update error. It was my job to determine the exact cause and see if I could easily write a program to remove the corruption from the resulting database (because a critical backup tape was damaged and so they couldnât simply repeat all of the transaction sort-merge updates.) Otherwise, if I couldnât figure out the cause, the charity would have to spend a lot of money and divert many hours of punch operators keypunching from the original handwritten âdonor cards.â
Iâll cut to the chase: I eventually traced the problem to a tape error which affected only a Huffman Code table which would roll into CPU core and make sense out of the compressed version of the database. So I telephoned the charity to tell the Executive Director what had happened and give him an estimate of what it would take to produce a corrected donor database. I heard him laugh aloud. Then he said, âI just had a meeting with my operations people and we are actually ecstatic that this database corruption happened.â He proceeded to explain to me that this disturbing set of database errors had actually been the best thing to happen to the charity in years. Hereâs what he meant: The telephone-number database was a way for the charity to contact past donors as part of their end-of-year solicitation campaign. The database error caused the telephone solicitors to call some non-donors in two incorrect telephone exchangesâwhich just happened to be in very wealthy suburbs of another city. Some of those âwrongâ telephone numbers actually allowed them to reach the unlisted residential phones of some extremely wealthy people. One such person was a very rich businessman who needed a tax write-off before the end of the year, and so he decided to make a $750,000 matching grant offer which the charity was able to spin into a much more lucrative fundraising campaign in the more modest suburb of the âcorrectâ telephone exchange number. So the ârandom mutationâ in that database had actually helped the charity to raise far more money than they had expected that year.
The difference between my analogy and yours, Bill, is that mine better reflects what can actually happen with random mutations in real DNA sequences: a mutation can produce a beneficial result even if there is âdegradationâ of the code sequence.
Of course, most biological mutations are neutral but Iâm simply giving you a real life example to analogize why sometimes a mutation can be spectacularly beneficial. And when a mutation is beneficial, natural selection may tend to preserve and amplify itâjust as that charity decided to capitalize on that spectacularly beneficial mutation and start making more âcold callsâ to exchanges in that affluent suburb in the next city in the years that followed Even if their âhit rateâ was low, all it took was an occasional âjackpotâ to make it pay off statistically. Indeed, that charity official told me about a year later that they had found that cold calls to extremely affluent communities were paying off far more lucratively than calling past-yearâs small donors in poor communities. (One big fish can donate far more money that even two hundred little fish. Yes, one $750,000 is more beneficial than 200 donors each contributing $5 to $25 dollars.)
If my real-life analogy is still not clear to you, Iâm sure there are many evolutionary biologists on this forum who will tell you that my analogy actually illustrates the potential benefits of real-life biological mutations better than your analogy. Mutations donât just reduce fitness by changing a sequence. Mutations can actually produce new sequences which improve fitness, that is, produce a beneficial result. That was the case with my database corruption example. The result was spectacularly beneficial to the organism⌠err⌠I mean⌠charity!
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Your analogy is great and thanks for sharing it. I agree that there can be very beneficial mutations. The problem however is the claim that this process can build complex structures like and eye or a flagellum motor where lots of novel sequences are required.
A 10 digit telephone number has a one in 10 billion chance of calling a specific number. As you mention the odds improve if calling a wider group is also considered success. According to Szostaks experiment a randomly generated 80AA string has a one in 100 billion chance of binding ATP.
So a flagellum which has 10 to 20 novel sequences that bind to each other has to overcome very large odds to be build by a random process and yet we are observing many variations of this protein complex in nature.
This and other reasons is why many scientists are skeptical of the Neo Darwinian mechanism.
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What selection feedback? We have mobility or we donât.
Are you an authority Tim?
We not talking about a concept we are talking about a bacteria gaining mobility.
Tim with all due respect you generally mis interpret people you donât agree with. You are claiming there are interim steps to a fully working flagellum without showing what those steps are.
A bacteria is either mobile or it is not. You are not really showing understanding of Darwinian selection.
Tim
A flagellum needs all parts working to have any mobility. Your view of selection is over simplified. You are also so determined to prove the design concept wrong you often mis interpret arguments.
Its has mobility or it doesnât there is no step by step in this case. It needs all parts in place to have mobility. This is what irreducibility complexity is about and why it creates a large challenge to the Darwinian mechanism.
Dory youâve already seen in this very forum data on different types of flagella from very simple to quite complex. They all work to provide SOME mobility to their possessors.
Itâs not ALL or NOTHING just like itâs not ALL or NOTHING with eyes and vision, just like itâs not ALL or NOTHING with wings and flight.
Please Dory, lose the amazingly lame âwhat good is half an eye, er, half a flagellumâ nonsense.
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So how many proteins are in the simplest flagellar?
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Which is the simplest flagellum? Why donât you do a little research for yourself for a change and surprise us.
The one with the fewest proteins to get mobility. The number is probably 40 with another 10 to 20 to construct it. All 40 need to be working.