Is there perhaps an argument morgue?
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What do you mean by “break down”? Surely, a changed sequence is also a sequence, is it not? It’s not the same sequence, I grant, but in what sense is it “broken down”? Given two slightly distinct coding DNA sequences, what experiment can you or I perform on them to determine, which, if either of them, is “broken down”?
And if it changes back - unlikely though that may be - would that constitute a further breaking down, or a restoring of some measure? If it’s a further breaking down, then in what sense is the initial sequence not already broken down? If it’s a restoring, then how does nature know that any given sequence change is not a restoring but a breaking down to begin with? Does it keep a log of all the sequences it ever went through somewhere, or perhaps a catalogue of non-broken-down sequences?
I say there is some heavy load of premises missing here, before we can infer from “coding DNA is a sequence” to “therefore, it could/would break down (what ever that means) when randomly changed”.
Sometimes, when there are mass casualties of reason, we need an Argument Triage Area so that the most serious cases can receive priority treatment.
This is the poster child of evolutionary denial. This sentence is a functional sequence as coding DNA is a functional sequence. Let’s make 10 changes to this functional sequence. Ahis aa roster child df evoluzionary zenial. Now you have a meaningless set of letters. This is what happens to sequences when they are randomly changed. After a few changes this sentence can still have meaning and be selected but eventually it will lose its meaning with random change.
In the blind watch maker Dawkins tried to show how cumulative selection would fix this and his solution was to compare the random sequence to the target sequence. The problem is biological reproduction does not have a target sequence for generating new genes.
This line of reasoning requires you to be able to answer this question you never answered…
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Typical incoherence. We aren’t talking about generating new genes here. We’re talking about maintaining function of an existing sequence. You claim that function will inevitably be lost despite selection. Why?
Based on the mathematical properties of a sequence.
It’s why the the 39 letter sentence became gibberish after 10 changes. Selection can only slow down the process as random change moves the sequence away from function. Behe wrote a book (Darwin devolves) on the empirical observations of this mathematical problem.
Why? Selection gets rid of changes that diminish function. What prevents that from preserving the function?
Even better: given your assumptions, why aren’t we all dead?
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Not true. Populations are full of people with deleterious mutations that can reproduce.
DNA repair, selection and loss by drift slowing down the process.
You seem to think that selection only gets rid of lethal mutations. Not true at all. How fast it gets rid of mutations depends on the how deleterious they are. Again, you’re being incoherent.
DNA repair doesn’t preferentially get rid of deleterious mutations. It gets rid of mutations, period. And repair is factored in to the observed mutation rate. And how does slowing down a process prevent it from going to completion — extinction — over billions of years?
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Again, you are using the inference of universal common descent to assume billions of years for humans.
You need to think about the mathematical challenge which is substantial.
We had an entire thread asking you to demonstrate a single mathematical claim, and you ran away from it at every opportunity.
The conclusion: There is no mathematical challenge.
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No, it’s a general question, not just about humans. Why aren’t taxa you do think are billions of years old dead? How long should it take for a lineage to deteriorate to the point of extinction? Why don’t we see it happening?
So, in other words, your analogy with the sentence is completely inadequate for the point you are trying to illustrate. While we are assuming a language with pre-defined and mutually agreed upon character sequences being meaningful, the function of DNA is entirely chemical and is not functional based on how well some language parser can make sense of it. See, Ahis aa roster child df evoluzionary zenial is a perfectly “functional” character sequence. The cache and memory of the computer you typed it up on had no trouble dealing with it, neither do the servers that now host these messages. It is only you and I who have some preconceptions about what well-spelt English looks like (a space of “target sequences”, if you will), who notice that there is something “wronger” with that sequence than with This is the poster child of evolutionary denial. To the actual electronic information processing – or the chemistry, as would be the case with DNA – there is no difference.
Excellent point, actually. Please, cite a study documenting a parent-offspring pair in nature, between whom more than a quarter of the coding DNA sequence is mutated.
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No one thinks humans have been around for “billions of years”. Do you not understand even the most basic facts about evolution?
Anyway, Lenski’s bacteria have been reproducing for over 70,000 generations. That’s roughly 1.4 million years in human terms. And the bacteria are only getting more fit, not less.
What excuses do creationists make to explain way this unambiguous refutation of “genetic entropy”?
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When you change DNA you can get a functional failure if you get the wrong AA substitution based on missense mutations. Even though DNA will remain with the mutated state it can lose function when changed.
Even though the computer can store the gibberish in memory if it is not corrected by error correction it will remain gibberish in the computer memory.
If you believe in the single ancestor of life hypothesis (LUCA) then you will find this level of difference in comparing many organisms. You will find much greater differences in protein families which are believed to come from a common ancestor such as the WNT family of proteins.
In the single origin hypothesis you need lots of variation to try and explain it. Showing a single reproduction event has little variation is not supportive of the LUCA hypothesis.
Maybe. Still, to get back on topic, you were saying about random changes to a sequence breaking down the sequence, and if memory serves, you elected to ignore all attempts at clarifying what that means experimentally, or how it is coherent semantically, considering that presumably a “random” change is not a change “towards what ever some arbitrary board user decided is closer by an unspecified metric to ‘broken down’ than the preceding state”.
Oh, my mistake. When I asked that you “cite a study documenting a parent-offspring pair in nature, between whom more than a quarter of the coding DNA sequence is mutated”, what I meant was to ask that you cite a study documenting a parent-offspring pair in nature, between whom more than a quarter of the coding DNA sequence is mutated. It may have sounded like “please, babble something entirely unrelated to the point you yourself raised”, but rest assured, that was not the intended meaning of my message. I promise I shall make more of an effort to not sound like I’m saying something other than what I’m saying in future and apologize for rudely expecting an interlocutor to pay attention to the conversation they are engaging with.
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A broken down sequence means to move away from function in the case of genes or to moving away from meaning in the case of a written language.
I did not answer this as it obviously is not true that between a parent and child having 25% dissimilarity is not likely possible. Changes happen slowly over many generations.
DNA does not work like human language, so the analogy to language is fatally disanalogous. Any argument based on such an analogy can be dismissed out of hand.
Also, you said it was a mathematical argument and you refuse to show your math. Until you do, I recommend everyone else refuse to respond beyond pointing and laughing.
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