The original paper refers to 2956 genes in humans not orthologous to any genes in other species sampled. (Of course there were only 3 other species sampled.) Bill seems confused about this, since his sole example so far is of a human gene and its mouse ortholog.
I’m aware of that and it appears to be derived from incompetence and/or dishonesty. I am proposing to demonstrate that to Bill by challenging him to list 20 of them.
Indeed. Is there anything in biology that Bill is not (at best) confused about?
You’re saying that those genes (or perhaps most of them) have orthologs in others of the three sampled species?
I’m saying that there’s no list in the paper or supplement. I’m saying that they appear to be using definitions of “orthologs” and/or “genes” that I have not encountered to date. Perhaps their definition of the latter has nothing to do with function. Or I could be dead wrong and have an antiquated knowledge of genomics. Either way, throwing around disembodied numbers isn’t helpful because it enables Bill to avoid evidence. That’s why I am demanding that he designate specific genes.
We could choose 100 human genes at random and see how many of those have murine orthologs. If reasonable definitions were used in that paper, then we predict 15 of the 100 to lack orthologs. Shall we start a pool?
Well, this table in a paper reporting on the zebrafish genome gives a very similar figure for genes present in human but not in zebrafish, and it gives a source for methodology, at least.
I looked at that one too before you linked to it. It’s disturbing that neither lists genes. How hard could that be? I can’t even imagine that the programs they used wouldn’t provide that output..
True, they both should have listed them. But on the plus side, they both got more or less the same result and they both get approximately the standard number of genes. I see no strong reason to believe that their orthology assignments were not mostly correct. There would be some problems as shown by the table. For example, when there’s tetraploidy event, as in teleosts, each of the genes on the duplicated chromosomes would be orthologous to a single gene on the ancestral chromosomes, so assigning orthology to human vs. zebrafish hox genes would be a little odd.
Incidentally, a quick search discovers this:
It provides a simple process using the Ensembl database to find all the orthologs (or if you prefer the non-orthologs) between human and another species, for which they use the example of mouse (Mus musculus, they mean). Perhaps Bill or someone could try that.
The design argument is supported by evidence. Your ideological objection to it makes it difficult to see the evidence. RMNS is not supported by the evidence.
Of course I know what a model is.
The evidence in your mind is the evidence that supports that God is not a tinkerer. Have you ever engaged in Behe’s model that shows the limitations of gene duplication and divergence as an evolutionary mechanism?
I have looked at papers that show sequence comparisons between species. I have agreed that the nested hierarchy is positive evidence for common descent. The challenge is the gene differences where we have no good explaination for these patterns other than genes are gained and genes are lost.
Nothing about living organisms suggests that anything about them is or even could have been produced in accord with an engineer’s intentions.
Both random mutations and natural selection have been and continue to be observed, both in the field, and under controlled conditions in laboratories. How their combination alters, adds, and removes functions, is all experimentally verified and fairly exhaustively documented. Since you have been presented with numerous examples of all of that in this very forum, this does alas not stay in the humble boundaries of a mere “bold assertion”, but decisively crosses the line into “blatant lie” territory.
You mean the sort of gains and losses – both of which have in fact been observed happening in laboratory experiments, by the way – that happen to always also match not only a nested hierarchy, but more or less (i.e. where conclusive) exactly the same nested hierarchies as those obtained from subtler gene alterations? Yeah, what about any of that is a challenge again?
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I will be charitable and believe you have very little understanding of what has been shown in labs especially regarding the origin of unique gene sequences. Yes gene duplication has been observed beyond that not much else has been observed.
Subsequent divergence, too. So pretty much the thing that’s been claimed is the thing that’s been observed.
The answer to the question of how novel genes arise is that they do by heavy alteration to of copies of existing ones, which the lineage can afford, since the original gene needn’t be forfeited to grow the new one. There is no theoretical problem with this, the hierarchy of gene gains and losses and their variants matches the hierarchy of other inheritance trees, and afaik the mechanism itself can and has been observed in part or in full.
Still waiting on what’s supposed to be the challenge there. Are you missing fully formed genes magically poofing into existence within a child whose mother has nothing remotely like it? That’d be something rather like a miracle, I’d say. Tough luck that it doesn’t happen, then. Too bad that’s not what the claim is either.
Please provide a citation.
Literally the first result googling “divergence of duplicated gene”:
https://doi.org/10.1093/dnares/dsy005
You’re welcome.
One would think someone throwing rocks around themselves about how little or how much their interlocutor knows or the abundance and shortage of results from an entire field of research wouldn’t sit in a glass house whence he couldn’t spare a minute to glance even at as much as the very first search result.
And yet, you were right. Indeed, I have very little understanding of the subject and the state of the literature on it. One dreads to imagine what embarassment you’d be facing, had we been debating just now on something I actually do know a thing or two about – if you only were someone who actually can feel shame occasionally, of course…
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Well, by all means, Bill. Avail us of your vastly superior knowledge and summarize the findings of these studies, along with the relevant citations.
What a shameless little man you are.
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Bill can just say that the gene wasn’t duplicated, just created that way. We’re you there? Remember that Bill, like most creationists, rejects historical science.
If you believed that, you would cite evidence. Real evidence, not what anyone says about it.
That’s some projection.
Sure it is. It even works in a lab setting. Can you ever be accurate about anything? Why are you switching from common descent to RMNS? What about RMAS? Hasn’t that been shown to work beautifully?
If you did, you would explain what you wrote. You didn’t.
No, Bill, real evidence–that stuff that you’re afraid to look at for yourself.
How does one “engage in a model”?
It’s a joke, and models aren’t evidence. Every word you write affirms your fear of actual evidence.
So what? Your avoidance of my point all but screams that you are afraid to look at evidence.
“I have looked at papers” does not indicate that you looked at any evidence. Did you examine the evidence presented in those papers, or did you just look at the words?
But you relentlessly misrepresent it as post hoc evidence, not a unique prediction that has been tested literally hundreds of thousands of times.
And your agreement does not even suggest that you examined any evidence yourself.
Common descent is perfectly consistent with them, as losses and gains form nested hierarchies.
You’d see that right away if you had had the courage to examine ANY of the evidence for yourself. I hypothesize that you lack sufficient faith to dig in.
I’ve shown Bill a number of my papers, and he has indeed looked at them. But he has also shown that he didn’t understand anything about them. And you can easily find many instances here of Bill failing to understand many other papers on the subject. He has looked at some of the evidence; he just didn’t comprehend any of it.
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