I, for one, welcome our avian overlords.
1 Like
Given that there are significant outliers, the assignment would be probabilistic, meaning that if a new genome displays a high ncDNA/tgDNA ratio, then there is good chance that it belongs to a complex organism. I also think that the inverse reasoning is more accurate in the sense that high organismal complexity predicts high ncDNA/tgDNA ratio better than high ncDNA/tgDNA ratio predicts high complexity.
What is your basis for either of those claims? Have you been paying attention to the data at all? Are ferns and salamanders really the most complex of organisms, or would that be amoebae? You can’t look at data falsifying your claim and just mutter “outliers”.
1 Like
Yes I can for it is precisely what outliers are all about, ie., exceptions from a general trend.
Now, my claim is that you cannot have high organismal complexity without a high ncDNA/tgDNA ratio. The reason is that high organismal complexity requires high amount of meta-information, ie., information on how to use information. And within a genome, this meta-information resides in the non coding regions.
Here is a similar figure for plants (from Pellicer & Leitch 2019):
Range and mean (•) genome sizes (1C‐values) encountered in the different lineages represented in the Plant DNA C ‐values database (release 7.1, April 2019). The number in brackets following the name of each lineage corresponds to the number of species with genome size data.
Note that the average flowering plant has a genome that is substantially larger than the human genome. Also the range of genome sizes in flowering plants spans more than three orders of magnitude.
1 Like
You haven’t established that the data you don’t like actually are outliers. That’s the problem here.
Are you familiar with fugu?
If you want to claim that very large proportions of non-coding DNA are functional and contribute to complexity in specific organisms (i.e. humans), you need more than a general trend that can distinguish between multicellular eukaryotes vs prokaryotes.
Ask yourself: would the trend look any different if all organisms had 50% as much non-coding DNA? The answer is no, because we’re talking about relative proportions here - it provides no information about the absolute percentage of an organism’s non-coding DNA that is functional. If all organisms had functionality in 10% of their non-coding DNA, that would be just as compatible with the broad trend you’re arguing for - expansions in the amount of non-coding DNA with complexity.
1 Like
You’re also going to need an explanation for why the genomes with larger fractions of non-coding DNA consists mostly of just more copies of transposable elements, and various forms of repetitive DNA prone to duplication.
1 Like
Human genome size is well below the median genome size for the Afrotheria clade.
This is falsified by the bladderwort. It is a complex plant that has a genome of just 83 million bases, a mere 3% of the human genome and a tiny fraction of that found in other plants. Only a small fraction of the bladderwort genome is made up of non-coding DNA.
1 Like
A carnivorous and aquatic plant, that flowers, no less.
So we have:
- State a ‘fact’ (there is a general trend of correlation between complexity and genome size)
- Don’t provide any evidence
- Demand others provide counterexamples instead
- When given a counterexample, say its an outlier.
- When provided with more counterexamples, admit there are significant outliers and say the fact is ‘probabilistic’.
- Run away
- Start again elsewhere with a different ‘fact’ (evolution has amortised)
- Object to not being taken seriously
5 Likes
5b. When the median genome sizes, which ignores the outliers, don’t follow the claimed trend, ignore it even more.
Ah, but some of the medians are outliers from the medians’ general trend.
I persist and sign!
I’ve provide evidence
I’m here
I persist and sign!
???
So you’re going to continue to claim something that has been shown to be untrue. Can’t say I’m surprised.
1 Like
In a manner of speaking, I suppose.
I could also claim that the posts you make on PS are more likely than chance to have an even number. And, look, your last post was #498 in this thread! Evidence! So I guess that makes my claim a fact, right?
How in your opinion should virulence be measured: Mortality rate? Or some other measure?
Thanks,
Chris
Yes, virulence can be measured by mortality rate.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/virus-virulence
A recent study in Nature Ecology & Evolution gives another reason to doubt Sanford’s implied simplistic correlation between viral/host codon bias and viral fitness.
Chen et al. (2020) found that there can be selection for the virus to evolve a codon usage bias away from that of its host, to avoid placing too much translational burden on the host. It’s already well known that pathogens can evolve to reduce their lethality in order to spread further, technically increasing their reproduction and therefore fitness. This is the same idea - viral codon usage bias can evolve to be less similar to the codon usage bias of the host in order to reduce the deleterious fitness effects on the host, keeping them alive and propagating the virus.
Carter and Sanford have the below figure in their paper, and claim that it represents “eroding” codon preference indicative of decreasing fitness, but it could actually represent increasing fitness as the virus evolves to be less virulent.
8 Likes
Sanford’s premise is that some virus, created perfect and terrible in its virulence, is unleashed upon the world to cause indiscriminant misery and loss, before it yields to the accumulation of deleterious mutation and attenuates.
What sort of a sadistic, sociopathic (g)od would design such a torment and take relish in a lethal harvest of human life without respect to deserving or consequence? In my wife’s ancestry, one family lost 3 sons in one week in 1918.
If Sanford and his followers insist that God created all of nature in such exquisite detail, then Sanford and his followers can deal with the morality of that assertion. I have asked this question concerning God’s agency on several occasions where design, intricate but cruel, is held to be evidence of a designer, and none of the defenders of special creation has ever addressed the moral dimension. I started a specific thread concerning design and the problem of evil, and so far no actual proponents of design have touched it.
https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/id-who-is-the-designer-behind-the-curtain/
So here it is: the moral conflict of immediate design and special creation with the orthodox view of the goodness of God is in itself grounds to invalidate the entire proposal on the basis of self-contradiction.
1 Like