Hey @Giltil did you forget the IC stuff and the Cit+ trait? I see you have no response to it.
Anyway:
Really? Because here you seem to understand it perfectly fine. When a sequence of higher fitness replaces a sequence of lower fitness, FI increases.
And here you seem to comprehend that the quantity of information is the product of a probability. In other words, we can simply convert probabilities to bits. A principle you’ve stated yourself previously multiple times.
These are principles YOU have agreed to. You have even suggested them yourself before. The “eminent”, “esteemed”, and “world-renowned” Joseph Felsenstein whom you’ve wasted no opportunity to glaze in similar fahsion when he bothered to reply to your posts, agreed.
Taken together, we can take the probability of beneficial mutations (which would be mutations that change a lower fitness sequence into a higher fitness sequence), compound their probabilities as they accumulate, and then convert the total probability into the change in FI of this series of events.
That’s it. That’s the principle. Simple, really.
No, they’re not. That’s exactly what cumulative selection ensures that they aren’t. If you allow us to keep successful die throws, we can pile up towards extremely improbable outcomes. We’re never going to get 25 simultaneous beneficial mutations in an E coli cell. But that’s where population size and natural selection comes in. We can accumulate them over generations.
That’s deeply confused. The probability of any single, arbitrary mutation being beneficial, is not to be confused with the probability that a beneficial mutation will occur in a population of sufficiently large size.
That response seems almost delusional. Are you in denial that it happened? They really did accumulate 25 or more beneficial mutations, independently, 12 times in parallel. It happened.
Since you believe each beneficial mutation has a probability of 10-6, that’s approximately 500 bits. Your magical insurmountable barrier.
You complain that nothing is demonstrated by mere assertion, and then you merely assert the things twice and call them both demonstrations. Are you trying to undermine ID or something?
That’s also not necessary. We’re not trying to calculate the total FI of the E coli genome. We are calculating the CHANGE in FI as a product of a series of compounding chance events. We do not begin by first trying to determine what the total FI of a living organism is. It’s irrelevant. What we can calculate is how FI changes over time.
In the present case with the LTEE, we are simply calculating the change in FI due to accumulating beneficial mutations.