The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism

Yes, Bill, that’s why pseudogenes exist. No one is making the argument that all duplication and divergence events lead to the introduction of new genes and functions of what they encode. As long as some do, that is all that is needed. Evidence pretty clearly shows us that some do.

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And here we are witnessing the mental processes that occur in the brain of a person who accepts Intelligent Design Creationism. Appalling, isn’t it?

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How do you define “informatiion” here? Obviously you aren’t referring to Shannon information, as duplicating a gene necessarily increases Shannon information. Is added information necessarily beneficial? Do deleterious mutations necessarily decrease information? If so, under what definition of “information”?

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EDIT: I mistakenly quote @John_Harshman when I intend to address @colewd. Apologies for my error.


You have no idea what you are saying.

ETA: @colewd we have discussed information in this context many times. It hardly seems possible you have anything new to add on this subject that has not been previously address multiple times.
/ETA

I’ve been trying to leave you alone, and perhaps I should, but so much WRONG is hard to ignore.
While I’m at it …

Then it’s a good thing change isn’t random, isn’t it?

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That may well be. Can you explain?

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A post was split to a new topic: Functional Information (again)

Apologies, that was meant for someone else.

Apologies again that it took me two days to figure that out.

Edits have been made.

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What? Do you mean that I may in fact know what I’m saying?

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Yes yes, you know what you are saying. Hold on a minute, I think I have a sword I can throw myself on. :grin: :dagger:

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My advice: If you have a choice, throw yourself on the non-pointy end.

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I plan to aim badly. '-)

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You could always throw yourself on a chocolate sword

Face first! :laughing:

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That was actually the ending scene of Quentin Tarantino’s very dark remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

It did not score well with focus group test audiences—especially the under age 9 demographic—so it went direct-to-video and can now be found in the $1.99 bin at Walmart. (If you sit through the entire end-credits, there’s a brief shot of an Umpa Lumpa pilfering the battlefield and looting that sword. Not a great visual image.)

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I don’t know if it would have scored any better than this scene that was actually kept in the original. :wink:

I preferred Sam Peckinpah’s rendition of Salad Days.

The Ennio Morricone soundtrack was outstanding.

However, this argument is premised on the notion that genes and proteins evolve through a process analogous to tossing a coin multiple times. This is untrue because there is nothing analogous to natural selection when you are tossing coins.

But this argument is only used for abiogenesis, such as Koonin’s calculation of the probability of the emergence of a coupled translation-replication system (Koonin, The Logic of Chance).

When it comes to biological adaptations, we have no base of experience for distinguishing design-suggesting patterns from the ones explicable by natural processes.

But this has nothing to do with mathematical arguments. Yet we can examine evolution, as a natural process, and calculate the probability of various events, as Behe does with chloroquine resistance.

The evolutionary process is affected by so many variables that there is no hope of quantifying them for the purposes of evaluating such a probability.

So let’s observe what evolution actually accomplishes, as Behe does, to do our calculations.