What would be most helpful is if you would correct your misrepresentations of others, then preferably avoid trying to summarize the words of others going forward. After all, if you truly have faith that are right and we are wrong, wouldn’t a far more Socratic approach be far more effective than your current straw man approach?
He isn’t. He is talking about what he has said and not said. Please stop with the patently false attributions, Paul.
This is the problem. You’re expecting NS to be capable of shooting almost ALL of the sparrows, such that their numbers on average over deep time are less than the very rare bluejays. And that’s a very highly unrealistic expectation.
This has become a very long thread, so I don’t expect you to have read everything. But long story short, I have attempted the Socratic method in my discussion with Dr Schaffner and he has been deliberately evasive. In our last discussion, he broke off and never responded to me. Now he has returned, but is still ignoring my last responses to him.
That is objectively false. You are asking questions and then blatantly misrepresenting answers. That second part is not part of the Socratic method. You should try it sometime!
For adaptive evolution to proceed in a positve (Beneficial) direction, rather than a deleterious direction (devolution, or genetic entropy), then on average, the beneficials must be outweighing the deleterious mutations in their impact. And since beneficials are so rare, the only way this is possible is for NS to be highly effective in removing nearly all of the deleterious mutants from the gene pool.
If a beneficial mutation increases fitness by 10,000 then it can increase fitness over the effects of 5,000 slightly deleterious mutations each with a reduction in fitness of 1. Any deleterious mutations that effectively lower fitness will be removed by selection.
You need to compare the overall impact of each mutation, not just their numbers.
According to @glipsnort it is. According to all the peer-reviewed literature I have quoted here, it is. And @CrisprCAS9 commented that “we can all agree” about this fact. Clearly he was wrong, as you are contradicting it now.
Of course. But that’s not realistic. The genome is composed of information, not just some nebulous stuff called “fitness”. Mutations of large effect are almost universally bad, because mutations are typos–mistakes. Large mistakes are very, very unlikely to be beneficial in a complex machine.
The vast majority of mutations do not have a detectable fitness effect as determined by sequence conservation, which is how population geneticists determine if a mutation is neutral.
No, they aren’t always. NS is not 100% efficient or 100% effective. This all boils down to a long series of highly unrealistic assumptions. The fact that beneficials are so overwhelmingly rare is a very real problem for evolution. The fact that we have discovered that information is the basis for life is a very real problem for evolution.