What’s odd about the way I stated it? Carter mentioned a portion of the data I just pointed to – and then proceeded to do nothing to account for it in a creationist model.
Why? It’s an obvious expectation under the conventional evolutionary model. In any case, you can find the first attempt to test the expectation (that I know of) in this 2002 paper, for which the authors had access to only a tiny fraction of the chimpanzee genome: Genomewide Comparison of DNA Sequences between Humans and Chimpanzees - PMC
So it will hold true when comparing the same species’ genomes to each other, and when comparing other species to each other? What are the limits of the prediction? Should it have any?
When I made the plots above, I excluded a small part (approximately 1%) fraction of DNA because it is known to mutate much faster than the rest.
I’m not understanding why it’s OK to exclude data because it’s mutating faster. Wouldn’t that be very important for the prediction to hold up to scrutiny?
But thanks, this is interesting. All these terms and processes are still new to me and I have to get them ingrained into my brain.
You would need to be able to align orthologous DNA for this comparison to be meaningful, so there are limitations. You need a fair amount of homology so that you know you are comparing the same stretch of DNA, and this can be difficult if there are a lot of mutations separating the two species. If you are comparing two distantly related species there is also a higher chance that a difference between the two genomes is due to two mutations at the same position. This would also throw the calculations off.
Sure. It should start to fail as the genetic distance between species gets large enough that we can expect multiple mutations to have happened at the same site. This will obscure the pattern I’m talking about. This becomes an issue quite quickly for CpG sites, which are the ones that mutate very quickly – even between humans and chimps a nontrivial number will have mutated twice. So as you look at more distantly related species, the rate of CpG differences will not keep up with the differences in the rest of the genome, because it can’t – the genome runs out of CpG sites. And that’s what we see:
As the genetic distance between species increases, the distance at CpG sites initially plummets, but then levels out because there aren’t many CpG sites left to mutate.
It means that those sites should be examined separately, as another class of mutations – which is what I did, and showed in a subsequent figure.
It is - since it’s the first thing he acknowledged in the paper in his list. It’s still important to acknowledge what data supports the opposite position. I believe doing otherwise can be misleading and later on people will not trust you if you don’t acknowledge it. I often look for data I think could be misleading, when I read news or otherwise. It does bug me that scientists have so much trust in the current theory when there are obvious holes and problems, and they (including people here) don’t acknowledge that creationist ideas have some merit when they obviously do. That’s part of the reason I don’t fully trust many here. I don’t see many people very willing to correct each other. Sometimes it happens and that’s good! But the wagons must always be circled, it seems like.
There are plenty of conspiracy theorist groups that say the same thing about their beliefs.
Also, every single theory in science has holes and problems. That’s why there are still scientists. If we threw out every theory in science that wasn’t perfect we wouldn’t have any theories. In science, we go with the BEST model, not the perfect model. You need to show us how evolution is not the best model, and why creationism is a better model. You haven’t come close to doing that. There are mountains and mountains of observations that evolution easily explains that creationism can not, such as the mutations @glipsnort has spoken about. I could go create a very long list of these observations, but would it matter to you? Would it change your mind?
I’m not a scientist, so mainly I want to know if my interpretation of the Bible is completely ruled out. I’ve found it’s not.
The most important points here still seem to be whether drift and selection can create the changes we see to get from a common ancestor to humans. I see no observational evidence of selection and drift being able to do that. Patterns can be misleading. They don’t mean anything if the actual mechanisms don’t work.
The idea that selection is relaxed so that’s what makes Sanford is wrong is too convenient. Other arguments against it seem to be just as theoretical or less based in reality and I can’t tell that we know enough about genetics yet to determine he’s wrong. Experiments in bacteria aren’t going to cut it. I’m continually impressed with how little we know actually after I read papers you link. There’s so many areas left to explore.
Other creationist ideas also seem to make sense of the small-scale changes we observe in the present.
There’s way too much design for evolution to make sense as a product of random chance: too many complex processes and structures in biology. I found studying the basics of physics much easier.
But did he do so accurately? You have no way of knowing unless you get into the data yourself.
I believe that PRETENDING that you are addressing the evidence is far more effective, because he knows that his readers won’t bother to go to the real evidence.
But not when it comes to evolution.
We don’t ever trust theories. Our greatest successes come when we change current theories.
According to someone who refuses to examine a single datum for herself? How can it possibly be obvious if you won’t even get into the evidence?
No, they obviously don’t if one evaluates them against the evidence, something that many people here literally produce.
Try to be empathetic here, Valerie. How would YOU feel if you spent decades producing evidence that supported a young earth, but I simply ignored it in favor of hearsay?
The wagons are always open to evidence. Care to present any, instead of copying hearsay?
Modern geology has falsified a historical global flood and in concert with modern physics has falsified a young age for the earth. Modern evolutionary theory has also falsified the YEC flavor of a literal reading of Genesis. I don’t know what parts of your beliefs remain, but if they conflict with data then they are wrong.
Its strange that you have had countless discussions here on evolution but you still make very basic mistakes. The differences we see between humans and chimps are due to mutations. Generally, mutations and recombinations are the sources of all genetic variation in living populations.
Selection and drift only affect existing variation, created by mutations and recombinations.
These patterns are misleading because they don’t support your religious beliefs? Try again Valerie.
We know enough about genetics to know Sanford’s claims are bogus. On the other hand, you don’t know enough yet to clearly understand how the objections raised against GE undermine the idea.
Go learn the basics first.
Experiments using bacteria soundly refute GE and that’s why Sanford has to resort to microsplaining to get out of the trouble those pesky critters cause him.
The lot of them have been equally debunked, here and in other places.
You obviously have learned nothing from discussions here. It’s mildly irritating, but not surprising that you still think that evolutionary processes are purely random events.
There are mechanisms that explain this pretty well. Not surprised again.
Yet you still think radiometric dating based on very simple physics is wrong because it doesn’t fit with your outdated interpretation of Genesis.
So how did he account for that data in his creationist model? That was what you were looking for, right? Data that creationists were not able to account for?
It’s equally obvious to me that creationist ideas – which I’ve been looking at for the last 30 or 40 years – are utterly divorced from reality. The same thing is obvious to the vast majority of other scientists, whether Christian or not. Why do you think your impression, which you admit isn’t based on any kind of deep knowledge, is more valid than that of all of those who’ve spent their lives studying the subject?
?? What makes Sanford wrong is that his core idea is, to be blunt, dumb. Or maybe sophomoric would be a better description. I don’t know where he got the idea that there should be all of these very slightly deleterious mutations – maybe from that figure by Kimura, which wasn’t drawn with this subject in mind at all, and which was based on no data – but he simply decided it had to be true. No empirical basis, no theoretical basis, he just decided. When confronted with real data, about human codon adaptation, or from the long-term survival of viruses, bacteria, and lots of other things, his idea always gives the wrong answers.
So your complaint is that Sanford’s idea, which has neither theoretical nor empirical support, and which fails every test when it’s applied, hasn’t been disproven enough to satisfy you – and therefore evolution must be wrong. Why have you never stopped and asked why this idea should be given any credence at all? Why are we even talking about it?
See, already here your misunderstandings are fundamental. Science literally cannot rule anything out. It cannot possibly do that. By it’s very nature science is and always will be tentative, and it will always be possible to give an alternative explanation for the data you have. This is logically unavoidable.
You are asking for certainty from a method that cannot offer it. Nothing in science is absolutely certain. Nothing.
So what is it you see it has any problem explaining? Point to some genetic difference and explain what the difficulty is.
Yes. They always can be misleading. Evidence can be faked, or planted, or the product of mere coincidence. There is always going to be some alternative conceivable explanation for a pattern.
But it’s still a pattern, and the pattern needs an explanation. Some explanations just make much less sense than others (like independent creation resulting in consilience of independent phylogenies), and some explanations make testable predictions that can be tested against more data.
But you have no evidence that they don’t work. You’re just clining to that idea because some creationist guy said it and it feels comfortable to believe it.
Speaking of creationists denying reality, here we see a perfect example. The real-time denial of relaxed natural selection on humans. Thank you for proving the point.
Remember that table of historical infant mortality rates compared to the present? Apparently not. Mysteriously absent from your recollection, and now you’re espousing a sort of emotional conspiracy theory against demonstrable reality. It’s “too convenient”.
So if you got an infection 600 years ago after having had surgery because you had an accident and bone was sticking out of your arm and you lost a lot of blood and had to get a transfusion, what antibiotic did your doctor prescribe?
Oh wait, you didn’t get antibiotics from your doctor, because you didn’t get any surgery because you lost a lot of blood and simply died because there was no ambulance that came to get you and no phone to use to call 911, and nobody would even have known that people have different blood types. Or what the cause of infections are, much less what to do about them.
Now add everything else that medical science and industrialization helps provide people. Food, shelter, protection from predators, clean and abundant drinking water.
Nope, none of this helps people survive things they would have to contend with in nature. Systematic and industrialized agriculture has no effect on reducing rates of starvation. Nope, none at all. Being able to fill a train and and airplane with food and transport it across the globe never helped anyone who would otherwise have been dead. Never happened. Too convenient.
You mean like the idea that thinking can take place in the absence of a physical brain, outside of time and space, and make universes, planets, time, space, and living organisms simply pop into existence out of nothing?
So better take him to be right and demand others prove him wrong by completely ruling out that he’s correct using a method literally incapable of ever doing such a thing. Because that is a rational methodology if I ever heard one.
Clearly nothing is going to cut it since you so obviously don’t want anything but what you already believe to be true. But mostly because you’ve fundamentally misunderstood the nature of both science, and evidence.
We don’t know everything, in fact very little. But we know enough to know that evolution is the explanation for the diversity of life, and that it simply isn’t necessary to know the world-history of every molecule of life at sub-angstrom resolution to be able to say that. Like with the tomato soup.
There sure is, and our understanding of the evolutionary history of life is constantly improving.
Do you have a calculation that shows this or is this just another one of your too convenient feelings?
Are even you aware that you didn’t actually study the basics of physics? You read popular press news articles on findings in cosmology.
The basics of physics are found in textbooks, and they’re full of mathematical expressions.
Of course not! You don’t see evidence because you avoid looking at any evidence.
That’s astounding. You just went, in a couple of sentences, from claiming that (nonrandom) selection can’t do something to claiming that (nonrandom) selection doesn’t even exist!
All without a speck of evidence. You gotta be kidding.
Do I win a prize if I’m the 1000th person to point out to you evolution isn’t just random chance? It’s an iterative process with a random component (genetic variation) and a non-random component (selection).
The evidence that @glipsnort presented is one example I was thinking of. The fact Carter mentions it is great, but he did not deal with the evidence. That is the issue.
what will happen if we will test that idea in coding genes among two far related species (such as human and fish) instead of non coding regions in closely related species? will we get the same result? (most changes are due to mutations).
