Entire ecosystems too. I’m wondering how birds know which butterflies are tasty and which aren’t if butterfly colour traits are only in the minds of people, not the minds of birds.
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You do not hold the high ground here either.
Nucleotide sequence, base pairs, codons, are all constructs of human language to describe and define natural phenomena, no different than any other feature of biology.
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Well, this is timely for our discussion
Scientists say evolution may work differently than we thought
Zhang and his colleagues set out to examine a key assumption behind that theory. Are beneficial mutations really that scarce?
Their results suggest the answer may be no.
Helpful Mutations May Be Surprisingly Common
Using large deep mutational scanning datasets from their own lab and others, the team looked at the effects of many mutations in model organisms such as yeast and E. coli. In deep mutational scanning, scientists create many mutations in a gene or region of the genome and then measure how those changes affect the organism.
The researchers tracked organisms over many generations and compared them with the wild type, or the version most commonly found in nature. By measuring growth, they could estimate whether a mutation helped, hurt, or had little effect.
They found that more than 1% of the amino acid changing mutations they examined were beneficial.
I do not have access to the original paper…
14 November 2025 - Adaptive tracking with antagonistic pleiotropy results in seemingly neutral molecular evolution
Note that this study does not include multicellular models, but it does serve to reinforce that model parameters must be consistent with the continuation of life as found in nature, and that environment plays a role.
No Paul.
DNA differences lead to differences in phenotype – trait differences. These are objective.
It is only the labels that we apply to them that is subjective.
What we call “horns” would have the same effect on fitness, whether we called them something different, divided them into multiple categories with different labels, or lumped them into a single category with other keratinous traits.
In the same way the existence of colour is objective – it is differences in wavelength of visible light, irrespective of the subjective labels we give it.
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Fair enough. But, in that case, people don’t exist either, except in the minds of people. Oops, I can’t say that, because people don’t exist. I should have said that they exist only in the minds of whatever it is that have minds (but only if minds exist).
Oh, and fitness doesn’t exist, DNA doesn’t exist, and GE doesn’t exist.
That makes this whole thread pointless.
As @Paul_King says, you are shooting yourself in the foot.
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That is exactly what quantitative genetics addresses in contrast to qualitative. In quantitative genetics, traits are… quantitative. Under this framework, we are not concerned by questions like how many grains make a heap. We can still do the statistical analysis. We can still breed animals and plants for small, medium, or large sizes, even when there is no objective boundary between these vague categories.
The functional output are traits.
Not true. Fitness is also dependent on the environmental context. One mutation may be deleterious in one environment, but beneficial in another.
…okay so if subjective traits like coloration can still “work”, then what is the problem?
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I think you misunderstand the subtleties of Paul’s reasoning Neil.
Traits don’t exist, because it was useful to his argument at the point he made it, for them not to exist.
Whether people exist or not, will depend on the usefulness of their existence to his arguments, at any given time.
I’m sure you will find popping into, and out of, existence, depending on what stage Paul’s argument is at, to be somewhat inconvenient – but I assure you you’ll get used to it.
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Okay… so what scientists should have done instead is asking the moths very nicely to stay still long enough for a photo in order to illustrate how well they could blend in with their background.
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If the abstract of that paper is any guide to its contents, it promises to be one big heap of sophistry and circular reasoning. And most likely written by AI.
Schrödinger’s PRATT
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In Nature Ecology and Evolution? This is evidence that you dismiss any science that you can’t quote-mine to support your claims.
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Here is the CV for the supervising author Jianzhi Zhang.
That, Paul, is what is considered an expert.
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@UncensoredPilgrims, are you denying that there are actual photos of peppered moths resting on the exposed parts of tree branches during the day?
Are you claiming that the original pictures were presented as being of live moths that had settled naturally?
Finally, are you objecting to current textbooks still using the same pictures?
It would help greatly to know exactly what you think the problem is.
The list of authors, by their names, appear to be asian, so it’s entirely possible they used AI to clean up their grammar and spelling. As long as they don’t rely on AI to do their thinking for them and only use it to improve their English, I don’t have a problem with that.
Paul himself asked claude AI to give him a summary (which was only partially correct, but the objection irrelevant) of a website I linked in an earlier post. So he must himself consider some forms of AI use fine.
It’s also possible Paul had AI help learning and using SLiM. LLMs are excellent coders after all.
I can’t quite grasp that peppered moth pictures are still being discussed more than 30 years after I first came across them, and discussed as if those 30+ years had never happened. It’s surreal.
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And in a thread about genetic entropy, at that…
It’s a diversion because the peppered moth simply and obviously explodes the whole idea that traits are merely a subjective human assessment that don’t matter to fitness. It is odd indeed that someone would try to discuss fitness without understanding that fitness depends on the properties of the phenotype - and even odder that they would so determinedly and aggressively cling to their misunderstanding well past the point it had become untenable. That this attempted diversion backfired is merely the icing on the cake.
We might also consider the Uncensored Pilgrim’s flameout over traits in the light of this remark:
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Admitedly, the controversy was only finally put to bed 14 years ago with the posthumous publication of Michael Majerus’ “last experiment”:
Selective bird predation on the peppered moth: the last experiment of Michael Majerus
Abtract
Colour variation in the peppered moth Biston betularia was long accepted to be under strong natural selection. Melanics were believed to be fitter than pale morphs because of lower predation at daytime resting sites on dark, sooty bark. Melanics became common during the industrial revolution, but since 1970 there has been a rapid reversal, assumed to have been caused by predators selecting against melanics resting on today’s less sooty bark. Recently, these classical explanations of melanism were attacked, and there has been general scepticism about birds as selective agents. Experiments and observations were accordingly carried out by Michael Majerus to address perceived weaknesses of earlier work. Unfortunately, he did not live to publish the results, which are analysed and presented here by the authors. Majerus released 4864 moths in his six-year experiment, the largest ever attempted for any similar study. There was strong differential bird predation against melanic peppered moths. Daily selection against melanics (s ≃ 0.1) was sufficient in magnitude and direction to explain the recent rapid decline of melanism in post-industrial Britain. These data provide the most direct evidence yet to implicate camouflage and bird predation as the overriding explanation for the rise and fall of melanism in moths.
“Are you still unaware in 2026”, 14 years after the posthumous Michael Majerus’ “last experiment”, that the accusation of “fraud” is “baseless slander”?
The evidence for this was never fraudulent, merely based on an imperfect experiment. More rigorous experimentation later confirmed the results.
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Maybe he thinks that picture of moths placed on the tree trunk was part of the experiment, and not just to provide an illustration.
Of course I do. That doesn’t mean I approve of any use of AI.
From the Science Direct writeup:
Using large deep mutational scanning datasets from their own lab and others, the team looked at the effects of many mutations in model organisms such as yeast and E. coli. In deep mutational scanning, scientists create many mutations in a gene or region of the genome and then measure how those changes affect the organism.
This just screams AI algorithms and machine learning are being applied to genetics datasets to come up with “new discoveries” that happen to contradict what actual human scientists have said for many decades. Is this something you genuinely trust? I know I wouldn’t.
But it gets wierder.
the team calculated that more than 99% of amino acid substitutions should be adaptive. Gene evolution should also happen much faster than scientists actually observe in nature.
What is this trash?
The team calls this framework Adaptive Tracking with Antagonistic Pleiotropy. In plain terms, it means populations may constantly respond to changing surroundings, while many mutations have tradeoffs that depend on the environment.
Wait … you mean Continuous Environmental Tracking?? I can’t believe I’m seeing this.
A mutation that boosts fitness today may reduce fitness tomorrow. As a result, evolution can be filled with beneficial changes that never become permanent.
Okay … so evolution is impossible then. Environments change too quickly for anything to be helpful long enough to spread to fixation.