Of course not. Why should they balance each other out exactly? I have no idea which direction, if either, is ever so slightly more efficient and neither do you. We’re talking about utterly insignificant differences here – much smaller than adding or deleting large chunks of nonfunctional DNA, which itself has no discernible effect on fitness. And there is no long-term trend in either direction anyway, so what’s the point of bringing it up?
This is exactly what is under discussion. How do you know there’s no long-term trend? Unless these processes counterbalance each other exactly, then there would logically have to be a long-term trend, would there not?
No.
Excepting maybe for Rosencrantz.
We know there’s no long term trend because life has been on the planet successfully for at least 3.8 billion years. Why do you still not understand that simple fact?
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I highly doubt it would matter. There are many mammals with genomes 1 billion bases larger than the human genome, and they get along just fine. There are species of salamanders that have 10 times more DNA than humans, and they are doing just fine. Other processes in the cell take up way more energy than replicating DNA.
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The crux of the discussion is your inability to accurately portray the objections of experts to GE.
You brought it up in direct response to @swamidass’s request:
Thank you again for apologizing for your inaccuracy. I would respectfully suggest that correcting your misrepresentations would greatly aid in correcting your misunderstanding. Who are the “some” to which you are referring?
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Yes, GE, in its inception, just chose to ignore this. That may be a slight over simplification, but is substantially true. What Steve states here is clear enough to me; but it can be difficult to understand what you just refuse to accept.
Please note the word zero. Not slightly deleterious. Not ever so slightly deleterious. Not ever so slightly effectively deleterious. Junk DNA does not get junkier from a base pair substitution. Mutational load in junk DNA is a nonsensical concept. Mutation in functional DNA of course has consequences, but that is selectable.
This is where I’d like to direct the conversation at this point.
You seem to be inviting only two people to respond there. Was that your intention? And why are you ignoring all other points in favor of the fitness distribution?
Anybody can obviously respond, but these are the two contributors I know of that are population genetics experts.
But your position appears to be entirely derived from your discipleship with nonexperts in population genetics. Why so selective?
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No, because (as I said), the sequence that any trend acts on is itself in flux, with new sequence coming from new transposable element insertions and old sequence disappearing through deletions.
More importantly, it doesn’t matter. Roughly 90% of the human genome is junk. Suppose all of it originally had the most efficient sequence for replication (presumably by magic, since there’s no other reason for this to have occurred), and that subtly deleterious mutations have been driving it toward lower efficiency ever since. How much difference would that make?
Well, DNA replication for the entire mass of junk DNA might account for as much as a couple of percent of the energy budget of human cells (based on this). Let’s assume that a most efficient to less efficient mutation increases the energy cost of each nucleotide by 10%. Let’s also say (arbitrarily) that a 10% energy inefficiency carries a 2% fitness cost, i.e. that energy efficiency represents 20% of fitness. Mutations have been accumulating in the human lineage at a rate of about 1% per 5 million years. With these assumptions, in the last 100 million years of evolution leading to humans, 20% of junk DNA bases have mutated, increasing the cost of replication by 2%, which was itself ~2% of the total energy budget. We now have to increase our energy intake by 0.04% just to copy our junk DNA. This means that we have become 0.004% less fit by the operation of GE over the last 100 million years – and that’s under the ridiculous starting assumption.
This entire discussion is like spending days arguing about the effect of fingernail polish on the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin.
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The Creationist goal isn’t to understand the correct science. The goal is to “win” for your religion.
Are these transposable elements not subject to any mutations themselves? I fail to see how this eliminates the trend. Mutations are the only potential naturalistic source of new information. All the other processes only move around existing stuff. I see no way out of the fact that if these processes are out of balance in any way, a long term trend must develop.
Of course they are, and if you didn’t know that it would be easily discerned from the very post you were responding to. You are not reading or thinking about what people say, merely looking for the first thing you could possibly object to. Even if it’s objecting to a mistaken reading of what little you have managed to see.
We aren’t talking about new information in whatever sense you mean here. We’re talking about junk DNA, which has no function. What @glipsnort showed in the post you didn’t read before responding to is that even if there’s a long-term trend, it’s so slow as to be inconsequential even over the amount of time you refuse to countenance. How much less consequential must it be over the few thousand years you allow for the history of life?
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Whether it’s consequential depends a lot on your timescale. But that wasn’t the question.
That gets us back to influenza. Do the rearrangements of genome segments (the reason we need new vaccines every year) not produce new information?
Is that why you misrepresent those rearrangements as mutations at creation.com?
“The influenza genome consists of eight RNA segments totaling over 13,100 nucleotides. These code for up to eleven distinct proteins, two with alternate reading frames and one through alternate splicing. Each of the eight RNA segments has its own history of reassortment, inheritance, and mutation[5]. In the same way, each of the major serotypes (e.g., H1N1, H2N2, H3N2) has its own rate of mutation and history of reassortment.”
“Previous genetic studies examining the history of the influenza virus have performed extensive phylogenetic analyses of influenza genomes[8, 31–35]. They have shown considerable nucleotide diversity among circulating strains, given clear evidence for adaptive selection of antigenic variants[36–42], and have shown that most of the major innovations within the flu genome have occurred via reassortment[5], by which one flu strain has recombined with another strain and obtained a segment of RNA from the second strain.”
–Carter and Sanford
How can reassortment, which is not mutation, possibly produce “major innovations” if it does not involve any new information?