Progress after the Royal Society conference?

[lee_merrill]

@Rumraket

@lee_merrill

But that is not my view, I would say the specific mutations would be anticipated to be the way function would be restored, but also any other mutations which restore function would be fine, too.

Who cares what you think is fine? What matters is what was done in the actual experiment, not whether you are personally okay with some alternative possibility that wasn’t explicitly tested.

Again, as I said (this gets tiresome), I conclude that any mutation restoring function would have been of interest, and would have been relevant in their results. Surely this is obvious. And you are the one proposing something that they almost certainly didn’t do: “search for two mutations which in combination renders a gene nonfunctional and where no other mutations can compensate, deliberately insert those two mutations, and then wait for those two and only those two to reverse.” That’s absurd, surely they ran the experiment to find out what happened, out of all possibilities.

@Rumraket

Cool, but then there are lots of examples of knock-out experiments where beneficial genes are knocked out, the organisms then evolve to compensate for the loss. Typically these involve completely deleting the gene encoding some enzyme specialized for a particular substrate conversion, and what happens is the population adapts by mutations causing upregulation of another enzyme that has some promiscuous activity on that same reaction. Here’s a recent example

Great, fine, that’s what I include in my view.

@Rumraket

@lee_merrill

@Rumraket

Then why would separate creation predict ancestral convergence, the exact result expected on evolution?

But there are more than just two alternatives, randomness (which I don’t think anyone subscribes to), evolution, and special, intentional creation for which there is evidence that argues against evolution. Such as the various explosions of life forms (Cambrian, Avalon, etc.), such as the problems with the tree of life (e.g. orphan genes), such as the concerns some biologists have now about the origin of phenotypic complexity, and so on.

So what is the reason on special creation for forcing exactly the result (ancestral convergence) expected on common descent?

Um, you skipped all my reasons for doubting common descent, somehow! I think there are significant reasons to doubt common descent, and good reasons to believe in special creation. Therefore I reject common descent, and say the evidence for it is not persuasive, in that it doesn’t address critical concerns.

@Rumraket

Where is your model of the creation process that predicts ancestral convergence should result from it?

I claim my model of creation doesn’t predict that! The two models are quite different, and have different support for each, and the evidence needs to be evaluated. I think there’s a good choice here, and it’s not common descent. As per various concerns of the EES evolutionists.

@Rumraket

Something about the flood possibly being local.

Yes, sorry I blew a fuse somewhat.

@Rumraket

What does that have to do with how many species share common descent, and how much they have diverged in the time since the supposed flood?

Again, I don’t believe common descent is a good view at all, before or after the flood. But I do believe all the “kinds” (i.e. major groups of animals) were alive before humans arrived, so no need for more major divergence after humans.

@Rumraket

By the way, how many animals were on this ark and when did the flood happen? This is a serious problem you have to deal with.

I’m not sure why a count of animals is necessary, though, nor the date of the flood, or why these are serious problems. Bible readers have done just fine throughout without knowing this.

@Rumraket

If you think two populations can have diverged by no more than two mutations, how can you think even two individual human beings can be related?

New function, new function, my friend! Think man, think! No one claims that at most any differences of two mutations are possible.

@Rumraket

@lee_merrill

But you need to address the problem of two mutations requiring about 100 million years for humans.

I already have, but seriously no that’s you who needs to do that. Handwaving in the direction of wind and local floods (wtf?) does not accomplish that. Dude wat?

This wasn’t me concluding this, nor winds and waves, this was a paper in a journal. So back to it being your problem, not mine. Please explain how we got to humans, through millions of mutations, as I’ve heard it stated (I believe by Stadler), at such a slow rate…

@Rumraket

@lee_merrill

I’m not sure what you mean, but I don’t require certain mutations were required, and that no other possibilities were possible, for a given function.

Then it isn’t clear why there is a problem at all. If you allow the possibility of many equivalent mutational sets, then there is no reason to think there’s a two-deleterious-mutation barrier to evolution.

Because the easiest task for evolution is if there are (let’s say) just two mutations to get to a function, this is a setup for evolution, can it do a slam dunk? Actually, it can, such as chloroquine resistance in mosquitoes, so we see it’s difficult, though, and I’ve tried to be careful and say “about two mutations”, and Behe sets the edge of evolution at what he terms a “double CCC”, or at four needed mutations to get to a new function. He claims that the barrier, the most we can expect from evolution.

@Rumraket

@lee_merrill

@Rumraket

Have you heard of the neutral theory of molecular evolution and the rate of fixation of neutral mutations being equal to their rate of occurrence?

I have heard of the theory, but I don’t know what you mean by “rate of fixation of neutral mutations being equal to their rate of occurrence”.

Google it.

I just going to say it sounds like you are saying neutral mutations get fixed basically as fast as they occur, i.e. all neutral mutations basically get fixed. If so, I don’t know what this has to do with our discussion here.