It also perhaps should be mentioned that @lee_merrill is getting his quotes from some dubious source. He quotes Durrett and Schmidt as saying: “Conclusion: Achieving two coordinated mutations in humans (where the first mutation does not confer a benefit) would take > 100 million years!”
That quote does not appear in Durrett and Schmidt’s paper. Most likely it came from AI or from one or another of the Internet’s many creationist garbage heaps.
I think Jonathan Wells was the first one to publicly mischaracterize that paper, in his ridiculous Zombie Science, where he used it to argue that whales couldn’t have evolved. As you have already pointed out, the question addressed there is two pre-specified mutations, and Wells was using it as though the frequency of occurrence of something like that was equivalent to the rate at which evolution could effect change.
Why did Wells do that? I don’t think he was dim enough to do it out of mere ignorance. I think it was classic creationist “slander by embrace,” probably as a way of taking some sort of revenge against Durrett and Schmidt for undermining a Dishonesty Institute fellow. He probably thought it was pretty funny that a paper debunking creationist claims would now be cited by creationists as though it supported them.
That you wou would base definitions of mental illnesses on a dictionary is further evidence of how ignorant and incompetent you are on the topic Lee.
Ideally, we would base our definitions on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but I don’t have a copy on hand. I do however know, from previous perusing this book that it does not treat “paranoia” as a single disorder.
Paranoid personality disorder (PPD) is a personality disorder characterized by paranoia, and a pervasive, long-standing suspiciousness and generalized mistrust of others. People with this disorder may be hypersensitive, easily insulted, and habitually relate to the world by vigilant scanning of the environment for clues or suggestions that may validate their fears or biases. They are eager observers and they often think they are in danger and look for signs and threats of that danger, potentially not appreciating other interpretations or evidence.[2] … It is one of the ten personality disorder categories in the DSM-5-TR …
Delusional disorder is a mental disorder in which a person has delusions, but with no accompanying prominent hallucinations, thought disorder, mood disorder, or significant flattening of affect.[7][8] Delusions are a specific symptom of psychosis. Delusions can be bizarre or non-bizarre in content;[8] non-bizarre delusions are fixed false beliefs that involve situations that could occur in real life, such as being harmed or poisoned.[9] Apart from their delusion or delusions, people with delusional disorder may continue to socialize and function in a normal manner and their behavior may not necessarily seem odd.[10] However, the preoccupation with delusional ideas can be disruptive to their overall lives.[10]
…
An earlier, now-obsolete, nosological name for delusional disorder was “paranoia”. This should not be confused with the modern definition of paranoia (i.e., persecutory ideation specifically).
Persecutory type: This delusion is a common subtype. It includes the belief that the person (or someone to whom the person is close) is being malevolently treated in some way. The patient may believe that they have been drugged, spied upon, harmed, harassed and so on and may seek “justice” by making reports, taking action or even acting violently.
So again, “paranoia” covers a wide spectrum of psychological issues. Thus ramming it into the pigeonhole of the Aristotelian category of “unreasoning cause” “is to lose a great deal of information, insight and understanding.”
Most probably because psychiatrists are generally neither theologians, apologists or practitioners of a specific, semi-moribund, thread of academic philosophy – so would likely never have been exposed to the Aristotelian framework – and thus could not be expected to “keep this in mind”.
@Faizal_Ali’s “claim” would thus appear to be not merely credible, but obvious.
You appear to be laboring under an imperfect Theory of Mind (which includes “the understanding that others’ beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, and thoughts may be different from one’s own”). Just because you are aware of the Aristotelian framework, and appear to have completely internalised it into your worldview, does not mean that others are even aware of it – let alone employ it pervasively.
Interestingly, the DI never seems to quote this part of the paper:
The edge of evolution?
Our final example of waiting for two mutations concerns the emergence of chloroquine resistance in P. falciparum. Genetic studies have shown, see Wootonet al. (2002), that this is due to changes in a protein PfCRT and that in the mutant strains two amino acid changes are almost always present—one switch at position 76 and another at position 220. This example plays a key role in the chapter titled “The mathematical limits of Darwinism” in Michael Behe’s book, The Edge of Evolution (Behe 2007).
Arguing that (i) there are 1 trillion parasitic cells in an infected person, (ii) there are 1 billion infected persons on the planet, and (ii) chloroquine resistance has arisen only 10 times in the past 50 years, he concludes that the odds of one parasite developing resistance to chloroquine, an event he calls a chloroquine complexity cluster (CCC), are ∼1 in 1020. Ignoring the fact that humans and P. falciparum have different mutation rates, he then concludes that “On the average, for humans to achieve a mutation like this by chance, we would have to wait a hundred million times ten million years” (Behe 2007 p. 61), which is 5 million times larger than the calculation we have just given.
Indeed his error is much worse. To further sensationalize his conclusion, he argues that “There are 5000 species of modern mammals. If each species had an average of a million members, and if a new generation appeared each year, and if this went on for two hundred million years, the likelihood of a single CCC appearing in the whole bunch over that entire time would only be about 1 in 100” (Behe 2007 p. 61). Taking 2N = 106 and μ1 = μ2 = 10−9, Theorem 1 predicts a waiting time of 31.6 million generations for one prespecified pair of mutations in one species, with having reduced the answer by a factor of 31,600.
We are certainly not the first to have criticized Behe’s work. Lynch (2005) has written a rebuttal to Behe and Snoke (2004), which is widely cited by proponents of intelligent design (see the Wikipedia entry on Michael Behe). Behe and Snoke (2004) consider evolutionary steps that require changes in two amino acids and argue that to become fixed in 108 generations would require a population size of 109. One obvious problem with their analysis is that they do their calculations for N = 1 individual, ignoring the population genetic effects that produce the factor of . Lynch (2005) also raises other objections.
I can’t speak for Wells. But I personally find it utterly hilarious that one of the few papers the DI can scrounge up to misrepresent as supporting DI actually calls out and refutes Behe by name.
In the interest of full disclosure, Behe responded to Durrett and Schmidt’s article, and actually pointed out an error (which, nonetheless, did not invalidate their overall conclusions).
In Behe (2009), the accompanying Letter to the Editors in this issue, Michael Behe writes, “… their model is incomplete on its own terms because it does not take into account the probability of one of the nine matching nucleotides in the region that is envisioned to become the new transcription-factor-binding site mutating to an incorrect nucleotide before the 10th mismatched codon mutates to the correct one.”
This conclusion is simply wrong since it assumes that there is only one individual in the population with the first mutation. There are on the order of 1/2Nu1 u21/2 individuals with the first mutation before the second one occurs, and since this event removes only one individual from the group with the first mutation, it has no effect on the waiting time.
Behe is not alone in making this type of mistake. When Evelyn Adams won the New Jersey lottery on October 23, 1985, and again on February 13, 1986, newspapers quoted odds of 17.1 trillion to 1. That assumes that the winning person and the two lottery dates are specified in advance, but at any point in time there is a population of individuals who have won the lottery and have a chance to win again, and there are many possible pairs of dates on which this event can happen. The probability that it happens in one lottery 1 year is ∼1 in 200 (Durrett 2009).
Oh God, tell me about it! I’m tired of trying to teach you basic molecular biology and evolution with every god-damned post in the vain hope we can even get to a stage where you understand the implications of your own arguments, but here we are.
To clarify: They intentionally selected two functionally critical sites in the TrpA enzyme (that is responsible for synthesizing the essential amino acid tryptophan), then selected two mutations which in combination would render the enzyme nonfunctional, inserted the mutations into the gene encoding the enzyme, and then let the bacteria go on to evolve but with this nonfunctional enzyme being actively expressed. Only two specific reversals could then restore the enzymatic function of TrpA.
So even if, hypothetically, another compensatory mutational pathway to the restoration of function exists for these two specific disabling mutations, there’s no reason to think that hypothetical route is going to be as short/likely as the two direct reversals would be, so hence any such alternative pathway is unavoidably less likely than the double reversal itself.
So the gene trpA is now deleterious to the organisms, because it expresses a nonfunctional protein. Which costs the cells energy. Since the growth medium contains tryptophan already (otherwise the bacteria could not grow and divide, since the cells now lack the capacity to create their own tryptophan), the much more likely benficial mutational disabling of trpA expression (any mutation that reduces or abolishes trpA expression would now be beneficial as it reduces wasted energy) consistently occurred before any of the much more unlikely reversal mutation (many more mutations are possible that can reduce expression, than the only two specific reversals).
While another adaptive path was found immediately (abolish expression of trpA gene), it dit not involve the restoration of the function of the TrpA enzyme. The function did not re-evolve.
That’s not because two mutations is a limit. It’s because the other adaptive pathway was much more probable. So do you understand now how this paper cannot substantiate any claim that there’s a two-mutation limit to evolution?
Both great and fine? Well thanks.
Make sure going forward that you remember that the experiment detailed in that paper demonstrated that numerous adaptive pathways existed simultaneously, and that in multiple experimental re-runs different paths were taken. So this is a concrete empirical reality that organisms can find themselves in such a situation.
There were no such reasons stated in the post I was responding to.
Well you’re welcome to state what you think those reasons are instead of just declaring that you believe them to exist.
Then you have no explanation for the observation of ancestral convergence, and the data therefore de facto is evidence for common descent that (at least your version of) independent creation cannot account for.
Nothing stated by any EES proponent concerns the observation of ancestral convergence between phylogenetic trees derived from independent data sets.
I reiterate: Common descent predicts that as we go back in time on different phylogenetic trees, the data should become increasingly similar (we are getting nearer to a common ancestor). This prediction is overwhelmingly confirmed by comparative genetics.
I repeat. It is a direct prediction of common descent that we should see this pattern in the data. We do in fact see this pattern in the data. You have admitted you have no such prediction on independent creation. It is therefore evidence overwhelmingly favoring common descent and not favoring independent creation at all.
A brianfart of sorts? Fair enough, it happens.
I don’t particularly care when you put the divergences. I am pointing out what I see as a tension between two views you have expressed in your recent posts.
The two views are:
On the one hand you think two mutations create a problem for the divergence of chimps and humans from a common ancestor, because that took much less than those >100 million years you think it takes for a function requiring two mutations.
You must think innumerable other species do share common descent (say rats and mice for example, which diverged approximately 11-13 million years ago), which are at least as as genetically diverged as human-chimp, often even more so.
Do you start to see the problem?
I can’t make sense of the sentence “Bible readers have done just fine without knowing this” as a supposed response to what I am saying. Perhaps my point wasn’t clear, but I have now elaborated above.
Oh great, new function that requires two individually deleterious mutations then ala Behe & Snoke’s 2004 model, Right? Got any examples of those in humans or chimps?
Well for one we have zero evidence that any possible new function in the human lineage required two individually deleterious mutations. So even if we have a model that says such an event is unlikely to have happened in less than 100 million years, we have no reason to think it models anything that would have had to occur in the human lineage since the split from the human-chimp common ancestor.
Of course, there’s also the question of whether alternative pathways existed at the time, so even if such an individually unlikely path was taken it could just have been one out of numerous possible, greatly increasing the odds that at least one of them was taken.
Grey arrows are mutational pathways that lead either to no new adaptations, or are much more improbable. Black arrows are the most likely pathways to new adaptations.
(A) Only one improbable pathways exists to one new function, all others lead to nothing (or are even more improbable). The scenario modeled by Behe & Snoke 2004.
(B) Several roughly equivalent pathways exist to the one new function. Even if any one specific pathway is unlikely, the fact numerous alternatives are possible increases the odds one of them will be found in the allotted time.
(C) Five possible new functions are available with roughly equivalent probability. As with B above, the fact that multiple are possible increases the odds that at least one of them will be found.
Of course you could combine them into a (D) option where five new possible functions exist, and all five each have multiple possible pathways to each of them.
It is no use only modeling scenario A and then pretending your work is done. To undermine evolution you also need to show options B, C, D etc. weren’t actual possibilities at the time the new function is inferred to have evolved. If you don’t do this work all you’re doing is assuming a restrictive scenario to get a conclusion you want. You have not demonstrated evolution is then unlikely, you have merely assumed it in a hypothetical model not based on empirical facts about the species in question.
Yes, in situations where we have reasons to think only scenario A is/was “in effect”, evolution is difficult and slow. It’s just we can’t just assume this is the case for some historical adaptation, since for every example we can find experimentally that conforms to scenario A, we can find others that conform to B, C, D etc. (I already showed you a paper that exhibits elements of both scenarios B and C as you agreed above).
Do you understand this?
Not exactly. Yes neutral mutations get fixed in the population as fast as they occur in a single individual, but that doesn’t mean all neutral mutations that occur in the population get fixed. The vast, vast majority are still lost.
It matters because it is out of this background rate of fixation of neutral mutations we get the degree of divergence between humans and chimps, for example. Some miniscule fraction of those have led to new adaptive factions in both species, but we have no evidence that they conformed to the scenario (A) above that Behe & Snoke models.
So the fact that the rate of fixation of neutral mutations is so high accounts for the degree of divergence of humans and chimps in those ~7 million years since our common ancestor.
The good news for the DI is that their followers very seldom actually read any of the cited papers, and the even-better news for the DI is that most of them are not sufficiently literate to understand those papers or understand what’s the matter with the DI’s reliance upon them.
Here we have a perfect example: trust in a misquote of the paper was badly misplaced, and it’s obvious that he didn’t even read the paper or he’d have known that no such quote either appeared or was likely to appear in it.
One sees the effectiveness of this approach with Stephen Meyer’s books; reviews of Darwin’s Doubt by creationist clowns generally express their admiration for what a huge amount of scientific evidence is cited by Meyer, not realizing that the material is often mischaracterized to an extreme degree.
I have a hard time imagining myself trying to upset any scientific paradigm as solid as biological evolution, but if I DID think that was my gig (“hey, I’ve discovered that all of what we call ‘rocks’ are actually just styrofoam!”) I do think that I would understand that in order to mount a proper criticism of, say, geology, I’d probably need to study actual geology and become a real expert in it. Sniping from the margins, relying upon dishonest sources and evading questions seems like a strategy in rhetoric rather than in science, and if one is seeking to fool children (or, in the case of the DI’s followers, mental children) it may work; if one is actually serious about the underlying subject, it will not.
Yes, but I think this may be a fundamental difference in viewpoint between the two sides of the debate.
You, along with myself, and the scientists on this forum, value hard evidence and rigor. This may be termed (without too much inaccuracy) the ‘scientific view’.
The other side appear to value intuition, rhetoric and authority. This can be seen from @Lee_Merrill explicitly claiming beliefs as “evidence”, and implicitly claiming his intuitions as such as well. This would appear to be the Aristotelian view – and all the more problematical when, rather than being based upon a explicit formal study of Aristotelian metaphysics, with the possibility of critical engagement with it, it is based rather on it as filtered through the likes of CS Lewis’ writings (and his uncritical acceptance of this framework).
For this reason, I think those “trying to upset any scientific paradigm as solid as biological evolution” will almost never feel the need to “to study actual geology [or whatever field] and become a real expert in it.”
I don’t know where this leaves even the possibility of meaningful engagement – but would suggest that it should significantly lower expectations.
I have had useful engagement with people who hold points of view akin to that; but it depends greatly on the individual. Now and then one meets someone who has been drinking the Kool-Aid only because in his neck of the woods, it’s the only beverage there is. And such a person, sometimes, turns out to have a yet-undiscovered taste for the good stuff.
Entirely outside of the realm of metaphor, I do recall once buying a Guinness for someone who said she “didn’t like beer.” A few years later, she was an expert, judging beer in competitions. If all you know is Bud, you don’t even actually know beer. It’s a bit like that.
But then one meets the hard-drinkers, the people who are saturated with Kool-Aid, who cannot avoid its sweet call for more than a minute or two at a time.
I’m not sure I am unhappy enough with Aristotle to call the rhetorical splatter which has characterized this thing an Aristotelian view. Rather, the fellow who is trying to pull a Wile E. Coyote stunt, hoping to run off the edge of the cliff while somehow not falling, tends to draw from philosophers of all stripes on an as-needed basis. It’s often been noted how much postmodernism creeps into creationist thinking, despite the fact that postmodernism doesn’t really seem quite like the right arrangement of ideas for people who are wedded to a rigid, unyielding supernaturalism. But when they get into a pinch, its ability to produce a universal solvent that renders all ideas meaningless comes in handy, even if it is hard to bottle. And so your Aristotelian becomes a Platonist, a postmodernist, an existentialist, or whatever the situation requires, so long as it relieves him of his dread of being an empiricist.
One of the things I sort of miss about the practice of law is the finality of arguments. You argue your motion; your opponent argues back; the judge may allow a bit of reply and counter-reply, but at the end, there is a resolution, and nowhere to go but an appeal. In the wild, of course, arguments may rage on forever. Empirical destruction of one side of an argument may cripple it for anyone interested in understanding the world, but what it cannot do is force an end to the process of argument itself, which the obstinate may engage in until time itself ends.
Most people do run out of steam at that sort of thing, eventually, but the proliferation of chatbots has made the production of run-on controversies-without-a-genuine-controversy much easier. Not only has the thinking been outsourced to the churches, but the writing has been outsourced to something even less capable of dealing with the issues than they are.
And the ability of debate to rage on long after it has lost all point does encourage some people to go on. They imagine that so long as they are still arguing, the ball is still in play, like a bunch of kids making a dozen lateral passes after the expiration of time in a close game; the game, they suppose, can still be won. The difference between the kids and the creationist is of course that the kids can win, though the odds are against them. The creationist can’t; but the illusion that all is not lost is seductive.
I have posted the cartoon below in one of these threads, as it captures for me the feeling of these sorts of things. The earnest inquirer into biology, if he is a creationist, will find that there are many people who will welcome him and will help him out by disabusing him of the various strange things that have got him stuck; he may sometimes find this a bit rough-and-tumble, but if he is sincere, he’ll learn a great deal. But there are people who regard their own opinion as the most precious jewel, surely an object which everyone will seek to win! And they imagine that so long as they can squint hard, pray hard, and keep refusing to get it, others will just go on catering to them, trying to win that opinion.
My father, no Christian, used to say that such things are driven out only by prayer and fasting. I’m not sure that works. But I don’t know anything else that does.
having reduced the answer by a factor of 31,600.
