Random Nonsense

Just out of curiosity, has anyone found a creationist who does an honest job of figuring selection into his calculations. Offhand, I can't recall a case of a creationist who even *recognizes* that selection exists. In all the thousands of repetitions of the 747 in a junkyard, not one nod in the direction of selection. Like the concept simply cannot penetrate the creationist brain.

So I don't believe Dembski realizes that mutation without selection is a strawman. For him, there is no selection. He has to my knowledge never registered that it exists or what it might imply. I think Dembski instinctively tunes selection out because his convictions cannot allow it, and then tunes out the fact that he's done so.

Maybe its a bit of street theatre to distract people from the fact that he is happy with Ann Coulters appalling book, you know, the one where she falsley accuses honest scientists of fraud?

For him, there is no selection. He has to my knowledge never registered that it exists or what it might imply.

— Flint

I would just say that it's not hugely relevant

This is actually sort of interesting, in that there are so many ways this random mutator does not capture the complexity of living organisms, and their response to mutation. It might be fun to try and explain some of the dynamics that escapes the model, here.

One big, obvious problem with this simulation is not just that there is no selection (as a poster on UD says, you can always just hit back and try again), but that there is also no replication. If you've only got one individual, giving birth to one child in each generation, you're not going to experience much evolutionary success. If this model were to take a sentence, make 10 million copies of it, and start letting them mutate and reproduce differentially, you could get rater better dynamics.

To a point at least. Another crucial difference is that in living systems, the genome is the recipe for 'baking the cake', rather than a blueprint, and slight alterations in the recipe for a living thing can perturb the entire development of the organism, with all sorts of mechanisms helping to constrain the result into something reasonable, according to the organism's innate capacity for dealing with a variety of insults and sub-optimum environmental conditions. English is a terribly rigid system by comparison, with a simple binary correct/incorrect decision rule for grammatical and syntactical correctness.

Another difference is that this mutator just shows point mutations, there is no mechanism for splicing in redundant copies of portions of the text to serve as a reserve pool of functionality while one or the other copy undergoes additional mutation. Even if such were to happen, the strict rules of English would make the result seem far more bizarre and disturbing to us than gene duplication is to many organisms.

Another difference is that sexual reproduction is not modelled in any way, so there is no mixing of viable alleles into new combinations.

Surely there are more?

simple random mutation generator

Zachriel's page has some good analysis of the mathematics of a mutating system of English words, though the mutation he is using is at the level of substituting English words for English words, not doing letter changes.

It interests me, in reading the comments that follow this post at PT, that the PT people seem convinced that "selection" is so terribly significant in evolution. There seems to be some muddy water on this one, for everyone concerned. I myself have always felt, just at a gut level, that the aspect of random mutations is the only really controversial aspect of RM+NS, since to me, natural selection is just an obvious uncreative static mechanism. Are they referring to other popular new selection mechanisms, and how significant are these in the overall story?

The inimitable DaveScot correctly (for a change) points out that the cited entry at UD was not authored by Dembski.

Ian's Weasel page
http://www.health.adelaide.edu.au/Pharm/Musgrave/essays/whale.htm
has lots of good stuff.

The great divide:

"I myself have always felt, just at a gut level..." -- tinabrewer

"... I try not to think with my gut." -- Carl Sagan

I believe Stephen Colbert pointed out that he and GW are both 'gut thinkers' and don't need to rely on the truthiness of 'facts'. god what an hilarious analogy.

I have to say it's really an incredibly amateurish example.
1) No example of selection.
2) It utilizes language as its example. Language works by a series of interreated symbol systems used by the observer, and communication breaks down if you interfere with these enough. It doesn't compare well to genetic information, in my opinion.
3) It then argues that randomness is irrelevant for science and thus evolution. I'm still figuring out the logic that if it involves randomness it's not science.
4) He has a disclaimer at the end that is exceptionally sad. Scroll all the way to the bottom (it's too large to post politely). Roughly he reveals his ignorance of genetics and experimental design - by his words, it seems that no one could ver do an experiment on evolution because it'd be Intelligent Design since it involves a designer.

I also admit I take this rather personally. I've been doing a site of random creativity. for quite some time and *I* never get used as an example of justifying Intelligent Design.

If randomness is so utterly useless then why do spamers use random generators to fool filters?

Engineer Perry Marshall, creator of the linked random mutation site, can be seen debating in a long thread on IIDB. Utterly impervious to criticism.
(Unfortunately, a few of his interrogators choose wrong lines of attack on Marshall's main claim and no one rolled up their sleeves and gave the general explanation of how the genetic code could have evolved naturally from the RNA world (RNA synthetases, selection for replication effectiveness & efficency, etc.), so Marshall now boasts he carried the day.)

"by his words, it seems that no one could ver do an experiment on evolution because it'd be Intelligent Design since it involves a designer."

Typical ID catch-22. I've seen them argue that a mathematical model that showes how the (adaptive) information content of genomes can increase in time is not a valid argument since the model was intelligently designed. This must be the 6th law of thermodynamics: just when you think they can't get more stupid, they pull it off anyway.

Actually, human language seems to me to be a pretty good example of evolution. Everyone knows that French, Spanish, and Italian all "evolved" (in some sense) from Latin, all since the time of Christ. However, to randomly change words (or letters) in a modern French sentence and expect to still have a valid modern French sentence is laughable. [Well, okay. French is a bad example. You can change all sorts of letters in a French sentence, and it's *still* unpronounceable. :-) ] It's also laughable that that one should expect to be able to change random words or letters in a modern French sentence and eventually come up with a valid modern Spanish sentence, with each change resulting in some valid sentence in some modern language. Same is true for Latin to modern French. Yet we *know* that such changes occurred. Over time. Over *lots* of time. The language itself changed, so that these seemingly "random" changes actually were meaningful at the time they were used, even though those changes may no longer make sense to us today.

Has anyone seen a comparison of the parallels between the evolution of human language, and the evolution of species?

And yet the letters which make up the words are only a symbolic reference to the spoken language. Mere tokens or hieroglyphs, not to be confused with words themselves and words (an aural media) with meaning or the message.
The idolaters slavishly revere words and sentences. So it is appropriate to beat them with their own idols.

Has anyone seen a comparison of the parallels between the evolution of human language, and the evolution of species?

— Scott

And yet the letters which make up the words are only a symbolic reference to the spoken language. Mere tokens or hieroglyphs, not to be confused with words themselves and words (an aural media) with meaning or the message.
The idolaters slavishly revere words and sentences. So it is appropriate to beat them with their own idols.

So I don't believe Dembski realizes that mutation without selection is a strawman. For him, there is no selection. He has to my knowledge never registered that it exists or what it might imply. I think Dembski instinctively tunes selection out because his convictions cannot allow it, and then tunes out the fact that he's done so.

From these observations it is clear that selection can accumulate a lot of information over successive generations. As is noted Joklik and WillettÕs (1976, p. 78) microbiology text, ÒWithin a short period, often as short as 20 minutes, a bacterium can create a complete duplicate of itself, which in turn is capable of duplicating.Ó Over a billion years, at one bit of information introduced every twenty minutes, selection could in principle produce 26 trillion bits of information, certainly enough to handle any conceivable genome. Nonetheless, from these observations it is equally clear that selection can only produce a very limited amount of information at any one generation. 100 bits is certainly too generous. The most fecund breeders with which I am familiar are certain fish whose spawn include a hundred million eggs. A realistic upper limit on the amount of biological information introduced by selection is therefore around 30 bits. For many organisms it is far less. Mammals, for instance, have an upper limit of about 5 bits of information per generation through selection.

Wesley,

Thanks for the reference. Sounds to me as though Dembski really does address selection here, but does so in order to dismiss it as so inadequate to produce what we observe as not really to exist in practice after all.

In other words, he is *explicitly* tuning it out. Or have I misunderstood his intent here?

Having been intimately involved in the nitty gritty of natural selection I'm just flabergasted that creationists can't possibly understand how vitally important selection is to the process. I think that fundamentalists huge problem with sex in general definately colors their understanding and perspective when it comes to natural selection.

It's just so amazingly simple. I've had offspring. They are like me and my wife... only a little bit different. But I recongnize things I "selected" in my wife (or she selected in me) that are in my children.... This sort of thing goes on for a billion years and those incremental changes become monumental.

You add in environmental factors and some random mutation and it becomes staggeringly obvious..

I have come to the conclusion that if you are even remotely capable of functioning at a relatively high mental capacity and you don't believe, when push comes to shove, in evolution then you have severe emotional problems, or are really lacking in imagination.

It's really hard not to turn a post into a rant.... I'm really just amazed that people don't accept evolution as fact....

I think Dembski has made it clear over the years that he believes that genes pop entirely out of random noise - so I think selection hasn't sunk in.

You know what I noticed about that typing monkey website? They only seem to count the shakespeare that is correct from the beginning. So there could be several sentences of shakespeare in the middle, but they're not counted. Evolution works from every beginning and end part of genes. If it is selectable it is selectable - it doesn't have to be right at the beginning only.

It would be interesting to see a program specifically created to show how shakespeare could evolve over time with incremental steps of mutation and selection. All the first website is doing is saying that the chance of getting the entire thing in one fell swoop is incredibly small. Which no one disputes.

I'm sure other examples of selection has been offered here, as in prototyping and markets. For example, I've succeeded in establishing a healthy population of my favourite sugarfree soda at the closest store by selection on an initially random sample. (I'm also sure that an IDier identifies that with intelligent design by the store owner, instead of an automatic reaction from the market mechanism. Sigh!)

Dragon says:
"by his words, it seems that no one could ver do an experiment on evolution because it'd be Intelligent Design since it involves a designer."

Yes, it's reminding of the QM observer that quantum babblers use for special appeals to explain consciousness (or souls, as they want to have it). Here another experimental artifact is taken in custody to purportedly support a dualistic world view.

There are ways to "unobserve" QM, but they have some small problems as all QM interpretations. (Consistent histories with decoherence by thermodynamic equilibria observers, such as the vacuum itself - problems with selection rules. Manyworlds with decoherence without observers - problems with randomness.) So they also don't sell easily, if the public doesn't want to listen to the message.

from the fact that he is happy with Ann Coulters appalling book, you know, the one where she falsley accuses honest scientists of fraud?

I just finished reading Icons of Evolution by Jonathan Wells.

— wamba

TalkOrigins is pretty much your first place to look for things like that, AFAIK.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/wells/

The strawman cited here is especially bad because it doesn't take even selection into account. But another thing missing is any appreciation of the role of populations in actual evolution.

Obviously if there were just one organism, and it had an offspring of exactly 1 before dying, then mutation would not be very helpful given any probability less than 1 that a mutation would lead to non-viable offspring. That would even hold if (contrary to out experience) most actually were beneficial. You could add selection to this strawman example, and you'd still be able to prove the obvious, but in a slightly more subtle way.

In real-life population dynamics, the next generation must have at least the potential to be greater than the current generation by some percentage. Without any limiting factors, this leads to exponential population growth, which is obviously unsustainable, but the percentage of viable offspring (perhaps altered by mutation rate) is not a limiting factor provided there are enough total offspring. Ultimately, the limiting factors may involve food, disease, predation, etc.

Warning, I am not a biologist so somebody correct me if I say something stupid below:

(a) The usual case is that the offspring of some organism has either no significant mutations or maybe some neutral ones. By this I mean the offspring that make it to the point of actually being born, hatching, germinating, etc. Any genetic variation is mostly due to the combination of parents' genes.

(b) A less usual case is that the offspring has a deleterious mutation (that makes it less fit).

(c ) An even less usual case is that the offspring has a beneficial mutation (that makes it more fit).

Case (b) isn't going to hurt you provided your overall rate of reproduction is high enough. Errors don't happen exclusively in biological systems, after all. They happen in "intelligently designed" manufactured products too. As long as they don't happen too often, their cost is borne by the successful copies.

Case (c ) is rare enough that you could ignore it in oversimplistic models of living things. If you're running a farm or a pedigree dog breeder, say, you might classify anything out of the ordinary as a defect without hurting your yield. However, in nature, there is nobody making this arbitrary distinction. In short, there is nothing to stop evolution from happening, so why would you not expect it to happen?

The point that I think people really miss is that the main engine that enables evolution is not mutation, but the opposite: the extraordinarily accurate reproduction of an enormous amount of genetic material across generations. If the next generation were simply riddled with random generations with significant effects on phenotype, then evolution could not progress. Of course, without any mutation it would not progress either. But with a relatively low rate of mutation including some tiny fraction that are beneficial, evolution is the expected outcome.

I wrote: "would not be very helpful given any probability less than 1 that a mutation would lead to non-viable offspring."

I inverted my logic midway through. I meant to say that if you had any probability greater than 0 that a mutation would lead to non-viable offspring, then the "give birth to one child and die" method would eventually fail, even if you had an unrealistically high probability of beneficial ones. So even if you tried to incorporate selection into the silly example on the linked web page, you would still have a very poor model of what evolution entails.

I wrote: "riddled with random generations" and meant "riddled with random mutations"

Sorry for not catching these in preview mode. It's amazing how much the errors stick out after posting.

I'm not sure whether to cheer or scream:

Scientists Taking Cues From Nature

Maybe a bit OT, but the article actually quotes Dembski, which unfortunately means that someone is paying attention to him.

A kind of event that has contributed significantly to the differences among nearly all sexually reproducing organisms is sexual reproduction. I'm quite different than either of my parents. Though I may have been born with some new mutations, they have not had a signficant affect on my observable traits. Yet I'm still significantly different than either of my parents. I'm as different as I am from them largely because they sexually reproduced with each other.

A lot of people seem not to realize how important sexual reproduction was in causing the differences among nearly all sexually reproducing organisms. Whales are as different as they are from their land mammal ancestors partly because vast numbers and combinations of organisms sexually reproduced. Sexual reproduction was one of keys to causing the differences that have existed among nearly all sexually reproducing organisms that have lived on earth.

Also, lateral transfer is a kind of event that was important in causing the differences among many asexually reproducing organisms.

One thing sexual reproduction does is that it sometimes causes an organisms to have two versions of a recessive gene. And an organism having two versions of a recessive gene can trigger an observable trait.

On a different note, sometimes I wonder whether sexual reproduction and varying levels of reproduction success, by themselves, caused a population of land mammals to evolve into whales. But I do have my doubts. Can sexual reproduction and varying levels of reproductive success cause nostrils to evolve into blow holes? I don't know. But I do have my doubts. I don't experience sexual reproduction absent mutations to gametes causing that level of difference across sexual generations. I suspect that mutations to sex cells were important, as well. But then again, Pakicetus evolved into whales in about 15 million years. And I have no concept of that length of time.

Most trained scientists accept RM+NS evolution, however some don't. A smaller group of trained scientists think it's wrong, way wrong.

My question is this:
Which group is right and how do you know they are right?

If the experts themselves can't agree then what should the average Joe think about this? Let me run through some responses that I think will come up and offer my comments. If you have other answers please post them.

1) "The majority opinion says..." - as you know this is an appeal to popularity and is a logical fallacy. Anyway, I want to know how you know the minority opinion isn't correct.

2) "The evidence clearly shows..." - not according to the minority opinion of experts in the field. How do you know the majority opinion has it right?

3) "They aren't real scientists" - they probably aren't 'True Scotsmen' either. Try again.

Lurker:

I vote for candidate #2. The evidence rules. Yes, a tiny handful of Devout Fundamentalists have decided that the evidence doesn't matter, or that the evidence MUST ratify their religious convictions because God said so. But this is a misuse of evidence. And those who disagree about the evidence, instructively, have been 100% totally unable to come up with a single test, hypothesis, or course of investigation that might even *begin* to produce different evidence more in accordance with their faith.

Saying "my faith is incompatible with the evidence, therefore the evidence is wrong" isn't really a sincere disagreement about the evidence. Instead, it's (I will presume) a sincere inability to rectify a conflict rationally.

(Oh yes, I hope you have noticed that this tiny minority of 'experts' does no research, publishes nothing, has failed to convince any judge, and with almost no exceptions is untrained specifically in what they claim "expertise" in. You HAVE noticed this, haven't you?)

program Godsim()
repeat
{
print("obey!\nburn in hell!\nbananas!\n")
call divineintervention(random(99999))
}

Lurker wrote: "Most trained scientists accept RM+NS evolution, however some don't."

Lurker, I urge you to read posts 106703 and 106706, my previous posts in this thread. "RM+NS" are not the only kids of events that were important in terms of causing the differences between bacteria and elephants. For instance, sexual reproduction was hugely important.

As to your question, a tiny percentage of experts don't accept that self-replicating molecules that were on earth about 3.8 billion years ago evolved through reproduction into all the complex organisms that have lived on earth. I think when a non-expert experiences this sort of massive agreement on the part of experts it is relevant to what the non-expert is justified in believing. However, the non-expert still should acquaint oneself with the relevant data. Here is a link to an article that presents some of the data that has helped me determine that cells evolved into elephants:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

I also recommend Ernst Mayr's book What Evolution Is, which was published in 2001. Mayr was a great biologist, and he wrote the book for a general audience.

It is important to note that we are getting a more detailed understanding of the kinds of events that caused cells to evolve into elephants. For instance, we are getting a deeper understanding of the kinds of events that trigger mutations to sex cells.

In Comment #106611, The inimitable DaveScot correctly (for a change) points out that the cited entry at UD was not authored by Dembski.

— Jim Wynne

Re "Can sexual reproduction and varying levels of reproductive success cause nostrils to evolve into blow holes? I don't know. But I do have my doubts."

And actually answering that question would seem to require a rather compute-intensive simulation.

Henry

. "RM+NS" are not the only kids of events that were important in terms of causing the differences between bacteria and elephants.

Henry wrote: "And actually answering that question would seem to require a rather compute-intensive simulation."

I'm not sure that is true. I think it is important to get a better understanding of how much genetic and phenotypic difference can be caused by the first phase of meiosis. Can it be really significant -- like a mutation to a gamete? And some people might even know how much genetic and phenotypic difference can be caused by the first phase of meiosis. I'm not one of those people.

I also think that if we learn more about the organisms that are the closest living land mammal relatives to whales, and if we can compare their genome with a whale genome, that would help a lot in terms of helping us determine how significant mutations to sex cells were (versus vast numbers and combinations of organisms sexually reproducing) in terms of causing the differences between whales and their most recent land mammal ancestors.

It is important to note that I share ancestors with all the chimpanzees that are alive today. And one particularly important difference between my genome and theirs is a chromosomal fusion. So what happened is that one of my ancestors (a long time ago) was born with a chromosomal fusion. It had 47 chromosomes. Two of its direct descendents reproduced, resulting in (following meiosis and fertilization) an organism with only 46 chromosomes, the number we have today. Interestingly, chromosomal fusions are actually not that uncommon in the animal world. Moreover, chromosomal fusions are a kind of mutation that occurs to sex cells. It suspect that this chromosomal fusion was important in terms of causing the differences between humans and chimpanzees. But how important? Had the split already occurred? Was it the proximate cause of the split?

I tend to think that some mutations were important in causing a population of land mammals to evolve into whales. Because I just don't experience sexual reproduction causing events as significant as the kind that caused nostrils to evolve into blow holes. Mutation to gametes preceding fertilization seems to be the combination of events that we experience causing the biggest differences between parent and offspring. For instance, that caused the elephant man, humans with blue eyes and (I believe) the coats of black panthers (also known as melanistic jaguars).

However, it is also important to keep in mind the vast periods of time we are talking about. It is hard for me to extrapolate from my own experience to 15 million years. And a lot of the differences that dogs exhibit were caused by meiosis and sexual reproduction. I suspect that both mutations to sex cells and sexual reproduction were kinds of events that were important in causing the difference between whales and their land mammal ancestors.

If mutations were indeed important in causing nostrils to evolve into blow wholes, how many mutations were involved?

If the experts themselves can't agree then what should the average Joe think about this?

1) "The majority opinion says..." - as you know this is an appeal to popularity and is a logical fallacy. Anyway, I want to know how you know the minority opinion isn't correct.

2) "The evidence clearly shows..." - not according to the minority opinion of experts in the field. How do you know the majority opinion has it right?

3) "They aren't real scientists" - they probably aren't 'True Scotsmen' either. Try again.

nor is RM the only method for inducing genetic change (not that it's always that random to begin with).

Re "1) "The majority opinion says..." - as you know this is an appeal to popularity and is a logical fallacy."

Er, no, that's not an appeal to popularity. It has nothing to do with how many (if any) of those scientists actually like the conclusion, it's whether they think the evidence supports it.

Also consider how many of the minority are in the right field, and whether their argument(s) are based on evidence or not. Case in point: I.D. pushers keep saying they have "explanation" but never get around to saying what that explanation actually is.

Henry

Re "if we learn more about the organisms that are the closest living land mammal relatives to whales,"

Hippotamus, iirc.

Henry

nor is RM the only method for inducing genetic change (not that it's always that random to begin with).

— Longhorn

What do you mean by "method for inducing genetic change?" Sexual reproduction can cause "genetic change," at least given what I think you mean by that. As you know, the first phase of meiosis often results in a genome that is fairly significantly different than the genome that precedes the phase.

Also, you mention "random mutation." I have never fully understood what people mean by "random mutation." Do they mean "uncaused event?" The idea of an "uncaused event" doesn't make sense to me, at least at the non-quantum level. And even at the quantum level it doesn't make that much sense to me. Mutations are caused. For instance, some mutations are caused by exposure to a certain level of radiation. Maybe they mean that humans are unable predict when a given mutation will occur. Okay sure. There are a lot of things I can't predict. I can't predict if England will beat Sweden. But if England does beat Sweden, it is not an "uncaused event." A number of factors will be involved. For instnce, presumably Rio Ferdinand will play a good game.

Lurker, whether or not evolution and speciation occurs it isn't a debate between two opposing groups of scientists. It's between religious fundamentalists and everyone else.

There isn't a single evolution-denier who didn't arrive at that conclusion because of their religious beliefs. If there was legitimate scientific doubt on the matter then it would be more than just the religious nutters more that willing to step forward and point it out. But there isn't. You have to honestly ask yourself, why is that?

I think he's simply agreeing with you. Sexual reproduction, mutation and horizontal transfer all result in genetic change.

If mutations were indeed important in causing nostrils to evolve into blow wholes, how many mutations were involved?

I have to say it's really an incredibly amateurish example. 1) No example of selection. 2) It utilizes language as its example. Language works by a series of interreated symbol systems used by the observer, and communication breaks down if you interfere with these enough. It doesn't compare well to genetic information, in my opinion.

— DragonScholar

Most trained scientists accept RM+NS evolution, however some don't. A smaller group of trained scientists think it's wrong, way wrong.

I suppose then that the fact that learned Biblical scholars can't agree on "what the Bible really means", indicates that the Bible is wrong.

Right, Carol?

Jacques: Confusing the model with its referents is not surprising in an essentially idealist world view ...

Inoculated Mind: What would be much more interesting and much harder to do would be to evolve any play at all, not just Hamlet. After all, this would reduce the artificial "directionality" to the system.

Lurker: #2, basically. However, one has to remember that science does not (especially in the more advanced fields) produce heaps of data but instead systems of hypotheses weaved out of data (so to speak) and tested against yet more. Further, data themselves are not collected mindlessly but refined and processed. If all that gets rolled into evidence, then yes, #2.

Longhorn: "Random" here means "independent of the use to the organism" or something like that. (See various works on randomness and also on causality by various philosophers for more on this sort of use.)

In particular, mutations are unpredictable even in principle (unless someone comes up with a deterministic successor to quantum theory, anyway), and what statistical regularities they do have are uncorrelated with their "value" in terms of selection.

It seems possible that, in at least some populations, the frequency of mutation increases when the organisms are under some kind of stress, for instance, nutrient deficient environments. Is it possible?

— Longhorn

Oh, without a doubt. The overall mutation rate, and even the rate of a particular sort of mutation (e.g. point mutation A->T) in a particular stretch of DNA, can be affected both by environmental factors (like a particular chemical mutation)

and by genetic factors governing DNA topology, repair and so forth.

Here for instance is a study where E. coli was bred to have a higher mutation rate than normal.

It seems possible that, in at least some populations, the frequency of mutation increases when the organisms are under some kind of stress, for instance, nutrient deficient environments. Is it possible?

I wanted to concur with some of the comments about sexual reproduction and other kinds of gene transfer. Mutation gets all the attention (probably from comics and B-movies about radioactivity) but a lot of adaptation occurs without it.

I believe that evolution would be extremely slow if mutation were the only mechanism for genetic variation. It is possible through sexual reproduction to combine two successful adaptations in the same individual even if they arose independently. The extent to which these adaptations are combined is random, but one usually receives copies of genes that already do something useful. Selection then enriches the sample space so it is somewhat biased towards those genetic combinations that are most useful in the current environment. (Note: I don't know the details on the peppered moth studies, but I would imagine that such a rapid adaptation was caused by a combination of existing genes for pigmentation rather than any significant mutation).

If the above were not true, then one would expect genetic algorithms to perform no better than simple monte carlo algorithms when in fact genetic algorithms are better at search kinds of optimizations (and don't help much or at all in certain others).

I realize that mutation does play a significant role, but I think it is overemphasized, especially by critics. Randomness in general gets overemphasized. You need some variability, but evolution is no more random than the process that gets all the air out of a hole in a beachball.

I wanted to concur with some of the comments about sexual reproduction and other kinds of gene transfer. Mutation gets all the attention (probably from comics and B-movies about radioactivity) but a lot of adaptation occurs without it.

Most trained scientists accept that the earth revolves around the sun, however some don't. A smaller group of trained scientists think it's wrong, way wrong. http://www.fixedearth.com http://www.biblicalastronomer.org How oh how can we tell which is right?

— 'Rev Dr' Lenny Flank

One way to answer this is to say personal experience tells you the minority opinion is wrong. However, when it comes to evolution, the personal experience of the minority group says they have the correct interpretation of the evidence.

One way to answer this is to say personal experience tells you the minority opinion is wrong. However, when it comes to evolution, the personal experience of the minority group says they have the correct interpretation of the evidence. So really you haven't answered the question.

Lurker, whether or not evolution and speciation occurs it isn't a debate between two opposing groups of scientists. It's between religious fundamentalists and everyone else. There isn't a single evolution-denier who didn't arrive at that conclusion because of their religious beliefs. If there was legitimate scientific doubt on the matter then it would be more than just the religious nutters more that willing to step forward and point it out. But there isn't. You have to honestly ask yourself, why is that?

— H. Humbert

I wanted to concur with some of the comments about sexual reproduction and other kinds of gene transfer.

Alas, arguments from personal experience are inconclusive, unless one has evidence to show in support. Which evolutionary biologists have (plenty of), and geocentric astronomers have not.

Personal experience would tell us the Sun revolves around the Earth (which personal experience tells us is flat).

Tell me how you know the majority opinion is correct when there is some disagreement among the experts who are trained in such matters and who have looked at the evidence only to conclude differently. Do you simply side with the majority because there are more of them and is that a wise thing to do? I'm curious.

Scientists on both sides have looked at the evidence and reached different conclusions. Who's right and how can we confirm this?

Anyway, you're using this argument to avoid my question. Use another scientific fact if you want - say the Big Bang. There's a minority opinion there too. Tell me how you know the majority opinion is correct when there is some disagreement among the experts who are trained in such matters and who have looked at the evidence only to conclude differently. Do you simply side with the majority because there are more of them and is that a wise thing to do? I'm curious.

Lurker:

when scientists have different opinions on how to interpret data, they discuss among themselves until a general consensus arises.

This is exactly the situation with the theory of evolution, as well as heliocentrism.

Does this guarantee that scientists have reached the Truthâ„¢?

No, of course. That's not even the reason for doing science. Only that they have done their best given the current state of our knowledge.

The only way to overthrow the general consensus of scientists on anything is to pile up more evidence, not to handwave and claim that expert consensus isn't relevant because a few contrarians are unconvinced. Live with it.

Do you simply side with the majority because there are more of them and is that a wise thing to do? I'm curious.

Scientists on both sides have looked at the evidence and reached different conclusions. Who's right and how can we confirm this?

Tell me how you know the majority opinion is correct when there is some disagreement among the experts who are trained in such matters and who have looked at the evidence only to conclude differently. Do you simply side with the majority because there are more of them and is that a wise thing to do? I'm curious.

— Lurker

The pile of evidence must be interpreted by the experts.

— Lurker

It's a pretty subjective process since there are no objective standards available to help us answer these questions.

— Lurker

Anyway, if you want to play around with this, the files are linked below, assuming you know Perl. No, there isn't that much to them. (To make these work, save them in a CGI-capable directory as "index.pl" and "evo.pm", and put in the same directory a world-writable subdirectory named "i" for it to save images in.) I will probably play around with the parameters some more later to see if I can tease the program into doing anything interesting.

A question I have is this: How important was mutation in terms of contributing to the differences between whales and their most recent land-mammal ancestors? One reason I ask is that I have experience with dogs. I like dogs. And I know that all dogs descended from a population of wolves that lived on earth perhaps 130,000 years ago. And some dogs are remarkably different than others, for instance, Chihuahuas and Saint Bernards. How much of a role did mutation play in causing the differences among dogs? I'm sure that plain old sexual reproduction played an enormous role in bringing about these differences.

Granting that sexual reproduction played that role in the diversification of dogs, it is still not that significant as a source of long term genome diversity. To see this, suppose that all genes in modern dogs were found in their wolf ancestors; ie, that all the differences between dog breeds are brought about by reshuffling combinations of alleles, and not by the introduction of new alleles.

What would follow from this is that individual dog breeds have significantly less genetic diversity than the original wolf population, so that they would be approaching a limit to how much further selection could influence their traits. In fact, excluding the introduction of new alleles by mutation, all members of the more extreme breeds (such as chihuahuas) should be effectively genetic clones.

It does seem to me that there has been limits to the phenotypic diversity that sexual reproduction has brought about. For instance, if humans keep on reproducing for 20 million years, I tend to doubt we would get a human with a rhino-like horn, unless there are some mutations that occur affecting the nose bone. A rhino-like horn is a significantly different trait than what any human has now, though I know some humans with some pretty darn big noses and big bumps on their noses. Moreover, the combination of events that seems to bring about the biggest change from parent(s) to offspring is sexual reproduction plus mutations to gametes.

One way to answer this is to say personal experience tells you the minority opinion is wrong.

However, when it comes to evolution, the personal experience of the minority group

says they have the correct interpretation of the evidence.

So really you haven't answered the question.

Not a single one? Somehow I doubt that.

unless there are some mutations that occur affecting the nose bone.

Scientists on both sides have looked at the evidence and reached different conclusions.

It does seem to me that there has been limits to the phenotypic diversity

Hello to the group,

If Dembski likes Coulter, well, that's a problem, but I see no great problem with his random mutation generator. I would have more of a problem with one that is programmed to target a mutation and then select it for survival as is suggested by the initiator of this thread. That's intelligent design isn't it?

This mutation and selection creative force is interesting. Before life there was no life. How did mutation and selection work on lifeless, non-reproducing clumps of whatever to build a non-living organism awaiting only the spark of life to bring it to life as the first living thing in the cosmos?

Thanks,

David Sadler
www.david-sadler.org

it wouldn't.

"Use another scientific fact if you want - say the Big Bang. There's a minority opinion there too."

What minority opinion would that be? Big bang is considered a fact in much the same way evolution is. The observed radiation relicts (cosmic microwave background radiation) together with other observations serve to do this. Exactly as the observed fossil relicts together with other observations makes common descent with variation a fact.

The discussion now is about which mechanisms were acting and how they work. ( http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/03/16/wmap-results-cosmology-makes-sense/ ) Similar to the current discussions of mechanisms within evolution. The difference is that it is a younger science with fewer observations.

BTW, I don't get guthrie's commentary about inflation. It is ad hoc, but it explains many details of bigbang and cosmology, and there are theories explaining its mechanisms. Currently it is the most favored explanation. (See the link above.)

Inflation is not a hint of anything wrong AFAIK but supports the bigbang theory nicely. It explains the flatness of the universe which no other mechanism does for general relativity cosmologies. It explains observed density variations by blowing up initial quantum variations. Finally it extends the principle of universalness by making our universe a non special universe among infinitely many others in some variants of endless inflation multiverse theory.

David says:

"How did mutation and selection work on lifeless, non-reproducing clumps of whatever to build a non-living organism awaiting only the spark of life to bring it to life as the first living thing in the cosmos?"

If you look at abiogenesis ideas, for example pre-RNA and RNA worlds, you see that variation and selection works there too. But it works differently since you start out with chemistries with production instead of replication. Subsequent developments which gave more or less faithful replication as the fitter systems still doesn't give you "mutation" as we know it. It isn't until genetic material appear and gave faithful replication you can start discussing in terms of mutations.

BTW, defining "life" and its demarcation properties ("spark of life"? naa, don't think so.) are as hard to define as the concept of "species". It is as futile to point at any individual system and say "it was the first living thing" on earth as to point at any individual organism and say "it was the first gobbledygook". We know it when we see it, though.

And how do you know that life on earth was first? With the number of galaxies and considering the young age of the earth, the way to bet is that it wasn't.

"It isn't until genetic material appear and gave faithful replication you can start discussing in terms of mutations."

Umm, that goes for "natural selection" as well since it also assumes replicting systems. Before that it is ordinary selection, I think.

David says:

"I would have more of a problem with one that is programmed to target a mutation and then select it for survival as is suggested by the initiator of this thread. That's intelligent design isn't it?"

If you read the thread you can see that this is a tripple straw man. It isn't proposed, any proposal similar to it isn't ID, any proposal similar to evolution isn't ID.

Congratulations, I haven't seen so much straw in one place before!

REF: Comments #106960, 68, 71

"How did mutation and selection work on lifeless, non-reproducing clumps of whatever to build a non-living organism awaiting only the spark of life to bring it to life as the first living thing in the cosmos?"
- dss -

Torbjörn Larsson said:

"... it works differently since you start out with chemistries with production instead of replication."

"... "natural selection" ... assumes replicting systems. Before that it is ordinary selection ..."

What is the survivability or "production" benefit or advantage for any such change in non-living matter leading that matter to change in the direction of a non-living organism waiting for life to enable it to reproduce thereby allowing natural selection to begin?

David Sadler
www.david-sadler.org

Hey David, you know what else gets me? These evolutionists talk about 'gene duplication'. They say 'gene duplication' is sooooo important for evolution. But how was there 'gene duplication' before there were genes, huh? The Darwinists gloss over that little problem with their fairy tale.

awaiting only the spark of life

I see no great problem with his random mutation generator.

There is no "spark of life".

Thanks. But is it reasonable to characterize sexual reproduction merely as "reshuffling combinations of alleles?" Isn't the first phase of meiosis doing something more than that? It can result in significantly different sequences of nucleotides. In other words, you might have sequence ATCGATCG that becomes GCGATATG. Then there is the fertilization event that puts these brand new sequences of nucleotides next to each other. That causes significant genetic and phenotypic diversity. Just look at humans. I'm very different than either of my parents. I received 23 chromosomes from my father, and 23 from my mother. The 23 chromosomes I received from my father consist of nucleotides that are in a very different sequence than are the nucleotides in his 46 chromosomes. The 23 chromosomes I received from my mother consist in nucleotides that are in a very different sequence than are the nucleotides in her 46 chromosomes. Sexual reproduction is not a blending process.

So you are saying that much of the variation that we see in dogs was caused by mutations? Do you have evidence for that or something that I could read? I know that in breading certain dogs, you can get very different offspring. I see it. Especially over numerous. Though I suspect some of these dogs have some new mutations, they don't appear to be any big deal in terms of their phenotypes.

Here is a quote from Mayr on the importance of sexual reproduction/genetic recombination in evolution: "Evolution in sexually reproducing organisms consists of genetic changes from generation to generation in populations, from the smallest local deme to the aggregate of interbreeding populations in a biological species. Numerous processes, particularly mutation, contribute to these genetic changes to supply the phenotypic variation needed by selection. The most important factor is recombination, which is largely responsible for the virtually inexhaustible supply of new genotypes in every generation" (What Evolution Is, p. 157).

after all the discussion so far, it really surprises me that you forgot to include the selection half of the equation.

Re "Where sexual reproduction is truly important for the long term of evolution is the ability it provides to uncouple beneficial mutations from harmful mutations in the same genome; and to combine beneficial mutations from a variety of ancestors into one genome. This increases the pace at which sexually reproducing species can evolve relative to non-sexually reproducing species by about fifty percent."

Fifty percent? All that expense and stuff for just half again? Huh.

Henry

PaulC said regarding the random generator, "[if] the point was to support any claim about evolution, then you should have a system that resembles evolution in some fashion."

Evolution says random mutations and natural selection builds more complex organisms. Right?

What magic creative force caused non-living matter to organize into the first living entity?

I know, evolutionists have a problem with the term 'life' or 'living' because the theory just doesn't address that, so just ignore life for now. What creative force or benefit directs the building of non-living matter towards an organization that leads to life sustaining assembly?

David Sadler
www.david-sadler.org

Lenny said, "There is no "spark of life."

Okay. But do you agree there are things that are living and things that are non-living? Do you agree that a person who is living can die and once dead they are no longer living?

I'm not trying to be cute. I just wish to hear from you that there is life and non-life.

David Sadler
www.david-sadler.org

It is possible that a crossover could take place within the sequence of a gene, and thus create new alleles, but I suspect the possibility is largely irrelevant to the course of evolution.

Actually, for some breeds (such as chihauhua's and daschunds) mutations have almost certainly been necessary to achieve their current form.

I suspect most of the differences between ourselves and chimpanzees would be due to new mutations.

The difference between whales and hippos, on the other hand, would be almost entirely due to new alleles not present in their common ancestor.

New genotypes, not new alleles. A genotype is the whole genome of an individual, and a new genotype is created each time you reshuffle the pre-existing alleles in meiosis.

Okay. But do you agree there are things that are living and things that are non-living? Do you agree that a person who is living can die and once dead they are no longer living?

What magic creative force caused non-living matter to organize into the first living entity? I know, evolutionists have a problem with the term 'life' or 'living' because the theory just doesn't address that, so just ignore life for now. What creative force or benefit directs the building of non-living matter towards an organization that leads to life sustaining assembly?

— David Sadler

Tom Curtis: Very neat links, thanks!

What magic creative force caused non-living matter to organize into the first living entity?

— Sadler

Steve said, "... evolutionists talk about 'gene duplication'. They say 'gene duplication' is sooooo important for evolution. But how was there 'gene duplication' before there were genes, huh? The Darwinists gloss over that little problem with their fairy tale."

Hi, Steve,

Evolutionary theory just can't handle the question of how non-life became life. It can not handle why non-living matter organized itself into a configuration or assemblage capable of becoming alive.

Obviously, at some point non-life became alive in the Evolutionist creation story, but as you say, they gloss over the problem. If they would really think about that for just a little while in search for an answer, they might instead produce some questions about the absence of any chemical or physical creative force to organize non-living matter in such a fashion.

I would just like to hear someone try to answer the question. No where in nature do we see assemblages capable of living that are not alive. Do we?

David Sadler
www.david-sadler.org

To this question...

"What creative force or benefit directs the building of non-living matter towards an organization that leads to life sustaining assembly?"

... Anton and Rilke answered, "chemistry."

That is a claim without proof, is it not?

Can you point to the lab and chemist that can mix chemicals into an assemble of a non-living cell even with the aid of a super computer?

Can you point to any natural non-living entity that has all the parts of a living cell?

David Sadler
www.david-sadler.org

What magic creative force caused non-living matter to organize into the first living entity?

— David Sadler

Evolutionary theory just can't handle the question of how non-life became life.

No where in nature do we see assemblages capable of living that are not alive. Do we?

But here is a 1-paragraph summary of one hypothesis as to what may have predated the universal common ancestor.

Hi, Andrew,

I appreciate you trying on this question.

You said, "Evolutionary theory explains the diversity and development of new life forms. It does not explain where the single common ancestor came from because that is a different subject explained by different theories."

I was taught differently and those teachings are still everywhere.

google: 'primordial soup first cell evolution'

You get things like this...
How Life First Bubbled Up
http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1175&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

It says, "A central question in evolution is how simple versions of these cells, or vesicles, first arose and began the process of competition that drove the evolution of life."

The rest of the article is speculation because no one knows as you and this article admits. This is an odd situation for the "Evolution is Fact" crowd that wishes exclusive exposure in our public schools.

Were you not taught the primordial soup component of evolution in school?

David Sadler
www.david-sadler.org

The rest of the article is speculation because no one knows as you and this article admits. This is an odd situation for the "Evolution is Fact" crowd that wishes exclusive exposure in our public schools.

Hi, Sir_Toejam,

I have read Dawkin's Blind Watchmaker and am aware of the clay and water idea. You say that, "molecules can do these things without significant external input." Do you know of any experiment using clay and running water or any example in nature of non-living assemblages capable of living but which are not alive as the result of such interaction between clay and water?

David Sadler
www.david-sadler.org

sorry, you've made yourself clear. You're not really interested in information, but only your agenda.

if you've read Dawkins, you can just as easily go and check the references listed in the book yourself.

bye bye.

Granting that sexual reproduction played that role in the diversification of dogs, it is still not that significant as a source of long term genome diversity. To see this, suppose that all genes in modern dogs were found in their wolf ancestors; ie, that all the differences between dog breeds are brought about by reshuffling combinations of alleles, and not by the introduction of new alleles.

— Longhorn

Thanks. But is it reasonable to characterize sexual reproduction merely as "reshuffling combinations of alleles?" Isn't the first phase of meiosis doing something more than that? It can result in significantly different sequences of nucleotides. In other words, you might have sequence ATCGATCG that becomes GCGATATG.

Then there is the fertilization event that puts these brand new sequences of nucleotides next to each other. That causes significant genetic and phenotypic diversity. Just look at humans. I'm very different than either of my parents. I received 23 chromosomes from my father, and 23 from my mother. The 23 chromosomes I received from my father consist of nucleotides that are in a very different sequence than are the nucleotides in his 46 chromosomes. The 23 chromosomes I received from my mother consist in nucleotides that are in a very different sequence than are the nucleotides in her 46 chromosomes.

So you are saying that much of the variation that we see in dogs was caused by mutations? Do you have evidence for that or something that I could read?

I know that in breading certain dogs, you can get very different offspring. I see it. Especially over numerous. Though I suspect some of these dogs have some new mutations, they don't appear to be any big deal in terms of their phenotypes. The offspring are as different as they are from their parents because their parents reproduced.

I suspect that sexual reproduction played a very large role in causing the variation among dogs. First, sexual reproduction happens very frequently.

Hi, Andrew, I appreciate you trying on this question. You said, "Evolutionary theory explains the diversity and development of new life forms. It does not explain where the single common ancestor came from because that is a different subject explained by different theories." I was taught differently and those teachings are still everywhere.

— Sadler

google: 'primordial soup first cell evolution' You get things like this... How Life First Bubbled Up http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modl... It says, "A central question in evolution is how simple versions of these cells, or vesicles, first arose and began the process of competition that drove the evolution of life." The rest of the article is speculation because no one knows as you and this article admits.

This is an odd situation for the "Evolution is Fact" crowd that wishes exclusive exposure in our public schools.

Were you not taught the primordial soup component of evolution in school?

I was taught differently and those teachings are still everywhere.

Were you not taught the primordial soup component of evolution in school?

To this question... "What creative force or benefit directs the building of non-living matter towards an organization that leads to life sustaining assembly?" ... Anton and Rilke answered, "chemistry." That is a claim without proof, is it not?

— David Sadler

Can you point to the lab and chemist that can mix chemicals into an assemble of a non-living cell even with the aid of a super computer?

Can you point to any natural non-living entity that has all the parts of a living cell?

What magic creative force caused non-living matter to organize into the first living entity?

Hi, Sir_Toejam,

My questions are honest. I'm just trying to see if anyone has any better answers than the last time I had a discussion on this subject many years ago.

I see more and more evolutionists coming over to the ID side especially since the conclusion of the Human Genome Project. The amount of information required simply has been a tipping point for many who now find the ID model easier to believe than the random assemblage of non-living matter into life capable entities.

You said, "as to whether I myself was ever taught that abiogenisis was part of the ToE, no. I guess my teachers were a little smarter than yours."

I'm sure my teachers didn't understand it either and they taught what was in the text books.

I was taught evolution exclusively until I graduated from college. Right after that, I read some books offering scientific criticism of evolution and over a period of years I accepted ID as the model that best explains what we can actually observe and test.

I won't be here long. Just taking a break from research on a New Energy article I'm writing. It's interesting what people will believe in the absence of evidence. Then I read this article in today's news...

http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/1173
Respected Cornell geneticist rejects Darwinism in his recent book
Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome
by John Sanford

I added it to my evolution file and saw this...

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=315976
Famous Atheist Now Believes in God
Antony Flew: One of World's Leading Atheists Now Believes in God, More or Less, Based on Scientific Evidence
The Associated Press

The link is no longer any good, but genetic complexity has brought Flew over to the ID side.

I see there is still a lot of 'maybe' and 'if' and 'possibly' in the explanations of evolution. 'Maybe this happened. It could happen this way.' Things like that. That hasn't changed. What I do see changing is the number of people becoming aware of genetic complexity due to the visibility of GM food, cloning, the HGP and such. Slowly, attitudes are changing and I believe the glory days of Darwin are definitely over. The discovery of DNA can't be put back into the bottle. The Internet is also a factor in this emerging awareness. The controlled media now has competition. All sides can be heard now if one is willing to listen.

David Sadler
www.david-sadler.org

Though a girl in my high school did replicate the Miller-Urey experiment as her senior project.

I see more and more evolutionists coming over to the ID side

offering scientific criticism of evolution

The link is no longer any good, but genetic complexity has brought Flew over to the ID side.

oh, and one last thing, before you wax philosophical about "all the evidence against the ToE from my idiotic non-evolutionary biologist sources, you might try checking the index to creationist claims over on the Talkorigins.org archive.

I'm sure whatever you think is so novel has already been claimed by a hundred or more creobots before you, and refuted after the first time posted.

the links to the talkorginis archive is right on the front page of PT, from there it's easy enough to get to the index of creationist claims.

go there and stop wasting everybody's time, including your own.

Though a girl in my high school did replicate the Miller-Urey experiment as her senior project.

she had in fact successfully synthesized some of them.

I see more and more evolutionists coming over to the ID side especially since the conclusion of the Human Genome Project. The amount of information required simply has been a tipping point for many who now find the ID model easier to believe than the random assemblage of non-living matter into life capable entities.

— David Sadler

It is possible that a crossover could take place within the sequence of a gene, and thus create new alleles, but I suspect the possibility is largely irrelevant to the course of evolution.

You may well be right. But even if that is true, I suspect that Chihuahuas are as different as they are from their wolf ancestors partly because of sexual reproduction. Sexual reproduction is frequent and results in offspring that are quite different than their parents. Sexual reproduction also results in an organism with a genome that is significantly different than either of its parents has. And we know that genotype affects phenotype. Finally, 130,000 years is a long time.

Um, no. Scientists have studied the evidence and concluded that life evolves. On the other side, a small group of religious nuts has decided that evolution is against their religion. If you disagree, please please by all means go ahead and name five non-religious scientists who disagree with evolution. Heck, name ONE.

— Dr. Lenny

And you still have not answered MY question about a movoing earth. After all, there too, by your own standards, are two groups of scientists who have studied the evidence and reached different conclusions. So how do YOU decide whether or not the earth revolves around the sun .... ......? It's a simple question. Why are you so reluctant to answer it?

OK, John A. Davidson.

Lurker:

Each of us is a minority of one. Of course, when we have to interact with anybody else we need to work from a shared description of reality. The consensus of scientists is just that: a shared description of reality.

It can be wrong. The minority view might be more right. So, what do we do?

We look for further evidence. In the meantime, we adopt the description of reality shared by most experts. It really is as simple as that.

A sign that a minority view might be correct is that it gains acceptance out of the weight of evidence. A sign that a minority view is due to bias is that it gains acceptance due to other reasons.

With evolution, as well as with heliocentrism, this is precisely what happened: the (then) minority views that evolution happens and that the sun does not revolve around the earth won on the field of evidence. The (now) minority contrary views appeal only to people with a theological axe to grind. For the moment, the case is closed.

Yet, in science "cases" do not get "closed"; if those now in the minority manage to produce enough evidence to convince the majority, the pendulum may well swing the other way. But it takes way more than a declaration of contrariness.

One way to answer this is to say personal experience tells you the minority opinion is wrong. However, when it comes to evolution, the personal experience of the minority group says they have the correct interpretation of the evidence. So really you haven't answered the question.

Hey Sadler, do you know what a "blithering idiot" is?

You are "blithering".

OK, John A. Davidson.

And that's my question - how do you know the group with the minority opinion reached the wrong conclusion due to bias? What is the objective criteria for determining such a thing?

I agree with the majority opinion because it seems reasonable to me. I can't prove they are right anymore than you can.

who now find the ID model

I won't be here long.

how do you know the group with the minority opinion reached the wrong conclusion due to bias?

What magic creative force caused non-living matter to organize into the first living entity?

I see more and more evolutionists coming over to the ID side especially since the conclusion of the Human Genome Project.

Respected Cornell geneticist rejects Darwinism in his recent book

The link is no longer any good, but genetic complexity has brought Flew over to the ID side.

What magic creative force caused non-living matter to organize into the first living entity?

— David Sadler

I see more and more evolutionists coming over to the ID side especially since the conclusion of the Human Genome Project.

Respected Cornell geneticist rejects Darwinism in his recent book

The link is no longer any good, but genetic complexity has brought Flew over to the ID side.

Yet, in science "cases" do not get "closed"; if those now in the minority manage to produce enough evidence to convince the majority, the pendulum may well swing the other way. But it takes way more than a declaration of contrariness.

[W]hen people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

That would generally be classed under "mutation," as such a sequence change would actually produce a new allele, not simply reshuffle them.

Well, there's Lindblad-Toh et al., "Genome sequence, comparative analysis and haplotype structure of the domestic dog" (Nature, 2005). They say, "Grey wolf and dog are most closely related (0.04% and 0.21% sequence divergence in nuclear exon and intron sequences, respectively)." .04% or .21% may not sound like a lot of difference, but the dog genome's about 2.5 billion bases total, so that's a lot of mutations.

You get surprising-looking mutts precisely because there's all this variation in the dog gene pool and combining two randomly-drawn genomes tends to give you unexpected results---that doesn't happen with wolves. That suggests that dogs have a lot of genetic variation (of a particular sort, at least, with gross morphological consequences) that wolves lack. And that implies that that variation's due to mutation since dogs split off from wolves.

So does mutation. Nachmana & Crowella ("Estimate of the Mutation Rate per Nucleotide in Humans," Genetics 2000) estimate that each human has about 175 mutations vs. their parents---most not being in coding regions, of course.

But that's not the point.

BTW, you say "that's what I meant when I said that no case is ever closed in science", but I think I understand what you meant better than you do -- people commonly forget the context in which they make their statements, and the context here is about evolution. The case is closed that evolution occurs.

Most crossovers will fall in non-coding sequences.

I don't think you are following the logic of the situation. If a population is under selection for a trait, alleles not favourable to that trait get eliminated from the gene pool. These are replaced by mutation so that the genetic diversity remains fairly constant in the long term. The result is that when further selection occurs, the next population will have a combination of original and mutant alleles. Because some of the original alleles get eliminated after each round of selection, each round results in successively fewer original alleles surviving, and consequently a higher proportion of mutant alleles in the gene pool. Think of a battalion of infantry. After each battle a portion of its soldiers are killed, and replaced by new recruits. After each successive battle, fewer and fewer of the members of the batalion are survivers of the original battalion. If, in each battle, 5% are killed, after 10 battles only 60% of the battalion are original members. After 20 battles only 36%; after 50 battles, 8%. (The formula is ((1 - proportion killed) to the power of the number of battles).) Now instead of a battalion, consider our original population of wolves. Suppose (which seems very conservative) that Chihuahuas have all the alleles present in the original stock except for 5%. On this analogy, after a million years, only 60% alleles of the Chihuahua descendants will have come from their wolf ancestors. After 2 million, only 36%; after 5 million, only 8%. So while sexual recombination is the most important factor in producing variety for selection over the short term (with only 5% of the variety coming from mutation), it is of minor relevance in the long term (accounting for only 8% of alleles). Now, this analysis tacitly assumes that elimination of alleles is solely a matter of chance, whereas it is really a matter of selection and chance. So no doubt numerous alleles will survive because no close variant of the allele can improve fitness. But most of these hoary veterans are found in areas where there is little variation due to selection. They are found amongst our 60 odd percent of genes which have close analogues in yeast, and which consequently have little to do with morphology or behaviour of canines as such. And this analysis, that the majority of alleles for a variable trait get eliminated in the long term of selection, must be correct. If it is not, we are committed to the majority of alleles in modern humans having existed in the first pre-cambrian worm that exploited sexual reproduction, and who is the ancestor not just of all humans, but of all mosquitoes and snails as well.

I think I understand what you meant better than you do.

I think I understand what you meant better than you do. I think you might - just might - wish to reconsider the stunning idiocy of this sentence.

Who needs IDiots, when we have idiots on our own side?

On the subject of vitalism, I've often wondered what percentage of Americans really grasp the fact that vitalism is fully discredited.

Obviously the people pushing ID have to be careful to avoid the impression of being vitalists, and are quick to call everything under the sun a "machine." But I doubt it fully sinks in, as the blithering of a recent contributor to this comment board has made clear.

I'm of the view that the non-vitalist theory of life is far more counterintuitive than evolution. If you believe a cell can do all the things we see it do, including differentiate into heterogeneous populations capable of forming things like elephant tusks, then it's not much of a stretch to suppose its descendants can evolve over generations.

The development process from embryo to adult really looks like a miracle. We have good reason to think every step is the result of chemistry and physics, but we haven't filled in all the gaps. For some reason, most creationists are not stupid enough to look for their god in these fleeting gaps. Why is that? The main difference, I guess, is that we can replay development in the lab. But I think that objectively speaking, it is much harder to believe a single cell can hold the recipe for a cheetah running at 60 mph then it is to believe humans and chimps share a common ancestor.

Popper's Ghost:

I know what my point was, and you do not, your idiotic contention notwithstanding.

The only strawmen here are yours. Science is not in the business of making final pronouncements on Truthâ„¢, and theories are always - always - open to revision. THAT was my point. Your insistence to the contrary counts exactly for nothing.

With this, I'll stop answering your idiotic declarations. You are welcome to your tiny, selfreferential world of arrogance; what I regret is that you pretend you are on the side of science.

Where sexual reproduction is truly important for the long term of evolution is the ability it provides to uncouple beneficial mutations from harmful mutations in the same genome; and to combine beneficial mutations from a variety of ancestors into one genome. This increases the pace at which sexually reproducing species can evolve relative to non-sexually reproducing species by about fifty percent.

The only strawmen here are yours. Science is not in the business of making final pronouncements on Truthâ„¢, and theories are always - always - open to revision. THAT was my point. Your insistence to the contrary counts exactly for nothing.

The only strawmen here are yours. Science is not in the business of making final pronouncements on Truthâ„¢, and theories are always - always - open to revision. THAT was my point. Your insistence to the contrary counts exactly for nothing

Here is what Mayr says on sexual reproduction: "The process of sexual reproduction makes far more new phenotypes available for natural selection than does mutation of any other process."

Aureola, the earth is not flat disk that that rests on the back of a giant tortoise. I know that. And we are not going to learn otherwise. That is just the way it is.

Longhorn:

That's why people should distinguish between data and theories. The proverbial "Precambrian rabbit" is always a possibility.

As I said, colloquially I will cheerfully say "the Earth goes around the Sun, not vice versa"; and I have no doubts that evolution is a fact, and that the current theory of evolution will be further refined but not upturned.

Colloquially, evolutionary biologists sometimes speak of organisms "evolving this or that trait in order to achieve this or that result".

Both are perfectly acceptable shorthands for describing situations that, scientifically, are much more complicated than that.

You're going out of your way to be stupid. I explicitly noted that theories are open to revision. Nonetheless, science does make final pronouncements on truth. There was once a debate as to whether rockets could reach the moon; we now know the truth of the matter. There was once a debate as to whether the continents can move; we now know the truth of the matter. There was once a debate as to whether evolution occurs; we now know the truth of the matter. Those are the facts, your stupid strawman blatherings and capital letters notwithstanding. The notion that science does not make final pronouncements on truth is itself a pronouncement on truth; it's a silly and naive dogma that shallow thinking people like yourself toss around without examination.

That's why people should distinguish between data and theories. The proverbial "Precambrian rabbit" is always a possibility.

Popper's Ghost, please be civil. Even though this is only a blog, feelings can still get hurt. And civil discourse tends to be more beneficial.

Longhorn:

May I suggest that Great A'Tuin is incompatible with the evidence we have collected so far? May I suggest that that is not a matter of theory?

May I also suggest that we were NOT talking about the fact of evolution, but about the theory of evolution, and that my reference to the need for anyone wishing to support a contrary view (such as John Davison, for instance) need to get busy and collect evidence that supports their minority view?

Now, do you see where the strawman was? It was in pretending that I was talking about the fact of evolution, while I was talking of the theory of evolution. This equivocation should be the exclusive domain of IDiots, but apparently someone on our side does it, too.

And of course, when someone claims to know what I meant better than I did, I lose any respect I have for him.

Now, do you see where the strawman was? It was in pretending that I was talking about the fact of evolution, while I was talking of the theory of evolution.

One way to answer this is to say personal experience tells you the minority opinion is wrong. However, when it comes to evolution, the personal experience of the minority group says they have the correct interpretation of the evidence.

And of course, when someone claims to know what I meant better than I did, I lose any respect I have for him.

Longhorn: read Strata, by Terry Pratchett, to see a "rabbit in the Cambrian" at an universal level. There is *always* a way to show that some of our scientific theories are wrong.

Of course, as we research them more and more and accumulate evidence, they tend to what I see as the "thursdaism event horizon"*, and when it is close enough we can probably ignore the possibility of them ever being found mistaken, but science never intersects the truth, only asymptotically gets closer to it.

Hope that helps,

Grey Wolf

*i.e. "Nothing has evolved because we were created last Thursday with memories implanted". It remains a possibility, always, (always discarded because of Occam, of course) and as we research anything, the number of opposing hypothesis become more and more thurdaism. It is an event horizon because there is no hypothesis more utterly useless than thurdaism, of course

May I suggest that Great A'Tuin is incompatible with the evidence we have collected so far? May I suggest that that is not a matter of theory? May I also suggest that we were NOT talking about the fact of evolution, but about the theory of evolution, and that my reference to the need for anyone wishing to support a contrary view (such as John Davison, for instance) need to get busy and collect evidence that supports their minority view? Now, do you see where the strawman was? It was in pretending that I was talking about the fact of evolution, while I was talking of the theory of evolution. This equivocation should be the exclusive domain of IDiots, but apparently someone on our side does it, too. And of course, when someone claims to know what I meant better than I did, I lose any respect I have for him.

It's a pity, then, that I had not suffered a potentially devastating brain injury in between my posting of the comment in question and your reply.

And, if I may point it out, you were not being "a bit glib": you were simply wrong, and arrogantly assuming something about me which you couldn't possibly know.

I would have reacted less intensely had you stated that you understood the implications of my words better than I did (and even this would have been wrong, since you didn't know whether I understood those implications better than you, worse than you, or just as well as you).

Then you compounded this with accusing me of not tolerating diversity of opinion. Well, in that at least you may be right: I dismiss offhand people who claim to know what I mean better than I do. I think that you might do likewise, and rightfully call such people "idiots".

Longhorn: read Strata, by Terry Pratchett, to see a "rabbit in the Cambrian" at an universal level. There is *always* a way to show that some of our scientific theories are wrong.

You have suggested something like the following: no claims are known to be true.

Not as far as I can tell. I have suggested something like the following: in science no cases are closed.

science never intersects the truth, only asymptotically gets closer to it.

It's a pity, then, that I had not suffered a potentially devastating brain injury in between my posting of the comment in question and your reply.

And, if I may point it out, you were not being "a bit glib"

arrogantly assuming something about me which you couldn't possibly know

I would have reacted less intensely had you stated that you understood the implications of my words better than I did

Then you compounded this with accusing me of not tolerating diversity of opinion.

Well, in that at least you may be right: I dismiss offhand people who claim to know what I mean better than I do. I think that you might do likewise, and rightfully call such people "idiots".

What do you mean by "science?"

And is that claim "in science no cases are closed" logically inconsistent?

You seem to be saying that the case is closed that, in science, no cases are closed.

I urge you to focus in the self-referential issue.

Aureola Nominee just can't stand that someone contradicted her/him/it

Then you compounded this with accusing me of not tolerating diversity of opinion.I didn't accuse you of any such thing; you're hallucinating.

Popper's Ghost, first you said I did not tolerate being contradicted, now you claim you never accused me of not tolerating other opinions?

I suggest you might have comprehension problems with your own words, let alone mine.

Longhorn: read Strata, by Terry Pratchett, to see a "rabbit in the Cambrian" at an universal level. There is *always* a way to show that some of our scientific theories are wrong.

Very interesting. What do you mean by science?

What do you mean by "scientific theories?" Your claim seems logically inconsistent. You seem to be advancing the claim as one that cannot be wrong.

— Longhorn

BWA HA HA HA AH AHA HA AH !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

— Dr. Lenny

It's called "the scientific method". I'm quite sure you've never heard of it.

Are you game?

So one need not be an idiot to think that person A could understand something written by person B better than person B does. While brain injury could be the cause, so could the mere passage of time.

You need to distinguish between statements made within some epistemic framework, and statements made about some epistemic framework.

Popper's Ghost, first you said I did not tolerate being contradicted, now you claim you never accused me of not tolerating other opinions?

I suggest you might have comprehension problems with your own words, let alone mine.

Yeah, it's a real problem when the only kind of argument you understand is an argument from authority. Then you are left, like Lurker, asking over and over "But how do we know which authority is right?"

— Popper's Ghost

BTW, I'm sorry about your friend. That's really a tragic story.

Longhorn:

Science is basically the systematic collection and interpretation of evidence, following a process generally known as "the scientific method".
What is the point you are trying to make with this question?

However, I am fully convinced that the accumulation of evidence can overturn specific interpretations of it.

— Aureola Nominee

Popper's Ghost:

You know, I suspected you might try the wordplay approach. Yet, I'm supposed to be the dishonest one, the one hallucinating...

What a blank you are, in the arsenal of science.

Lurker:

today, the evidence points massively in the direction of the theory of evolution and away from any alternatives, so much that it would be perverse to withhold provisional acceptance of it.

You know, I suspected you might try the wordplay approach. Yet, I'm supposed to be the dishonest one, the one hallucinating...

What a blank you are, in the arsenal of science.

Popper's Ghost:

Diversity without contradiction sounds like a very dull diversity to me. Anyway, please feel free to continue offending me. I think that qualifies you way more than I could ever hope to.

Science is basically the systematic collection and interpretation of evidence, following a process generally known as "the scientific method".

What is the point you are trying to make with this question?

Anyway, please feel free to continue offending me. I think that qualifies you way more than I could ever hope to.

Longhorn:

maybe you are right: with the background noise of goalpost-moving that someone else is generating it is difficult to continue trying to concentrate, and we might be better off letting the thread go.

Anyway, in a sense yes, my remark was tautological just as much as (a+b)^2 = a^2 + 2ab + b^2 is tautological.

I was simply restating, for the benefit of someone who insisted on dismissing scientists' consensus as somehow uncertain, that that consensus is basically all we can hope for, and that the theory of evolution is as close to certainty as we can hope to be.

The fact of evolution, on the other hand, is as certain as the fact that the Earth is not the Discworld, i.e. I would sooner doubt my sanity than those facts.

maybe you are right: with the background noise of goalpost-moving that someone else is generating it is difficult to continue trying to concentrate, and we might be better off letting the thread go.

I was simply restating, for the benefit of someone who insisted on dismissing scientists' consensus as somehow uncertain, that that consensus is basically all we can hope for, and that the theory of evolution is as close to certainty as we can hope to be.

I recommend Ben Bova's "Mercury" for its depiction of Bishop Danvers.

And a saucer of milk each for Popper and Aureola.

Acceptance of the theory of evolution among biologists and very well informed laypeople is based on the evidence.

Acceptance of the theory of evolution among the remaining 99+% or humankind is predicated on recognition of one's own limitations, i.e. in deferring to expert authority.

Otherwise, you are stuck: you cannot tell the "minority biologists" (all one or two of them) that they are wrong on the basis of evidence, because they can always turn around and say "nope, evidence supports MY position". And you are back to square one.

But you can tell them "well, state your case and let's see whether we have overlooked something; in the meantime, though, this is what most biologists agree upon."

The key part of this is "in the meantime". Right here and now, we have a consensus, i.e. to the best of our ability this is a good approximation of reality. Should something radically new turn out, we can revise this; and we keep looking.

IDK if Popper moved any goalposts, but the guys at Uncommonly Dense sure did.

Acceptance of the theory of evolution among biologists and very well informed laypeople is based on the evidence. Acceptance of the theory of evolution among the remaining 99+% or humankind is predicated on recognition of one's own limitations, i.e. in deferring to expert authority.

Otherwise, you are stuck: you cannot tell the "minority biologists" (all one or two of them) that they are wrong on the basis of evidence, because they can always turn around and say "nope, evidence supports MY position". And you are back to square one.

But you can tell them "well, state your case and let's see whether we have overlooked something; in the meantime, though, this is what most biologists agree upon."

Oh, sorry. I thought we were discussing about science, not theology or the current U.S. administration's fantasies.

I would be willing to defer to a consensus of experts on the existence of gods if such people as "experts on the existence of gods" existed. I am not aware of their existence, though.

I, for one, was willing to defer to a consensus of experts on the existence of WMDs in pre-invasion Iraq. Unfortunately for... well, basically for all of us, Bush & Co. were not willing to do likewise, and when the experts told them that those WMDs were not there, they pressed on regardless.

AFAIK, "appeal to authority" is not a logical fallacy; "appeal to false authority" is.

Even finding a pre-Cambrian rabbit fossil would not falsify the theory of evolution.

But now, whatever explanation might be found for the pre-Cambrian fossil, it would be integrated into the theory.

Rather than Terry Pratchett, I would look more toward philosopher of science A.F. Chalmers' book "What is this thing called Science?" to understand the evolution of scientific theories.

Since the fact of evolution is already established, there will always be some theory to explain it.

Oh, sorry. I thought we were discussing about science, not theology or the current U.S. administration's fantasies.

I, for one, was willing to defer to a consensus of experts on the existence of WMDs in pre-invasion Iraq. Unfortunately for... well, basically for all of us, Bush & Co. were not willing to do likewise, and when the experts told them that those WMDs were not there, they pressed on regardless.

AFAIK, "appeal to authority" is not a logical fallacy; "appeal to false authority" is.

It should be noted that even a good Appeal to Authority is not an exceptionally strong argument. After all, in such cases a claim is being accepted as true simply because a person is asserting that it is true. The person may be an expert, but her expertise does not really bear on the truth of the claim. This is because the expertise of a person does not actually determine whether the claim is true or false. Hence, arguments that deal directly with evidence relating to the claim itself will tend to be stronger.

You are so driven to be Right in your conversation with Aureola that you have stopped listening, though, so I won't bother with you.

What do you mean by "scientific theories?"

Your claim seems logically inconsistent. You seem to be advancing the claim as one that cannot be wrong.

And with all due respect, I also think the claim is nonsense. The earth is not a flat disk that rests on the back of a giant tortoise. And I share ancestors with Bear from "BJ and the Bear."

Yes, Last Thurdaism is unlikely enough to be ignored, but you cannot discard it except via Occam. It remains a possible explanation that fits all (and any!) of the facts.

It should be noted that even a good Appeal to Authority is not an exceptionally strong argument. After all, in such cases a claim is being accepted as true simply because a person is asserting that it is true. The person may be an expert, but her expertise does not really bear on the truth of the claim. This is because the expertise of a person does not actually determine whether the claim is true or false. Hence, arguments that deal directly with evidence relating to the claim itself will tend to be stronger.

Tell you what, Lurker, I have a way to test your idea that "science is just an opinion, and no one can tell whether your opinion or mine is right". Near my house is the Sunshine Skyway Bridge...

Emphasis added. You will note that this quote speaks in relative, not absolute terms.

And the experts on Iraqi WMDs were the UN inspectors, and they were pretty much unanimous in denying that Iraq was bristling with nearly-finished or even launch-ready WMDs.

If I have the power to intimidate experts to say what I want them to say, basically I've blown away any legitimate authority those experts might have, and any appeal to their "authority" becomes fallacious.

I suspect that sexual reproduction played a very large role in causing the variation among dogs. First, sexual reproduction happens very frequently.

So does mutation.

But beneficial mutations are a small percentage of all mutations.

Popper's Ghost -

Just curious;

Did you ever use the name "Morbius" here on PT by any chance?

It's always possible for the process to be corrupted; that was my point, that it's necessary to look at the process by which consensus is developed.

lurker:

when lenny laughed at you (as we all did, although more privately), the reasons were twofold:

1. You spelled your hero's name wrong, it's Davison, not Davidson.

and

2. He really is completely insane. not only is is his PEH listed as "crankiest" in the evolution section on crank.net, but have you check out his blog? It's tens of pages and hundreds of posts of JAD arguing with invisible phantoms, and rants, that if they came from my own father, would suggest he be commited for observation.

JAD didn't abandon the ToE, he abandoned reality altogether (somwhere around the mid 80's). That's why he was stripped of his teaching duties at UV, and granted "emeritus" status. it's the least embarassing way for a univeristy to rid itself of potential liability suit.

You might as well hold Charles Manson as an opponent of a scientific theory.

If you actually want to argue the case that his PEH has evidentiary support, please do.

that would be a real hoot!

I understand that the following is a picky aside to Longhorn's main points, but a rhino's "horn" is not an outgrowth of bone.

The "horn" is a compacted mass of hair and related keratin material: sometimes the horns can "fray" due to wear and tear, and even appear a little raggedy and hairy.

Ref.:http://www.sosrhino.org/knowledge/faq.php.

Re "My point --- that beneficial mutations are a small percentage of all mutations --- is not important to whether I am warranted in inferring that sexual reproduction caused some of the significant differences that exist among dogs and between, say, humans and chimps. For although mutations that are reproductively advantageous are a small percentage of all mutations, mutations are ubiquitous."

My guess is that both mutation and recombination were prerequisit to at least a lot of the diversity in plant, animals, and fungi. Mutation creates bits of variety, and recombination produces different mixes of those bits. Can't really get there without both, or at least not nearly as quickly.

Henry

actually, in at least angiosperms, a recent paper was released this month (Genome Research: 16:738-749) with further evidence (and a spiffy new analytical technique) to indicate that genome-wide duplications played a significant role in generating diversity.

Yeah, it's a complicated world out there.

Tim Curtis, thanks. Most crossovers will fall in non-coding sequences.

In S. cerevisiae, hot spots correspond to the sites of the meiosis-specific DSBs that initiate recombination. DSBs do not occur at a specific DNA sequence, but rather are dispersed throughout a region of 50-200 bp at each locus examined (de Massy et al. 1995; Liu et al. 1995; Xu and Kleckner 1995; Xu and Petes 1996). Almost all breaks occur in intergenic regions that contain transcription promoters, but transcription is not required for DSB induction (White et al. 1992; Wu and Lichten 1994). Hot spots correspond to nuclease-hypersensitive sites in chromatin isolated from vegetative cells, and these regions undergo meiosis-specific modifications that increase their susceptibility to nuclease digestion (Ohta et al. 1994; Wu and Lichten 1994; Fan and Petes 1996). However, an open chromatin configuration must not be the only determinant of DSB formation because there is an imperfect correlation between the level of nuclease hypersensitivity and the probability of cleavage (Wu and Lichten 1995; Fan and Petes 1996).

I'm sorry, but I don't see what you are getting at. If it is not inconvenient, could you explain it another way? Thanks

Note that DSBs (and hence crossovers) occur in intergenic (ie, between gene) sequences, at or near transcription promoters. The do not occur at a specific sequence, but within a 50 to 200 bp of the promoter sequence. This means that even if they occured at a promotor sequence for an actual gene as opposed to a promotor sequence near a pseudogene or tandem repeats, the break would probably not occur in the coding sequence. It also means that if they occured within a coding sequence, the sequences might be mismatched by up to 150 bps, which would be almost invariably catastrophic for protein function.

I do not think I can explain it more clearly in a small space. The essential points are: Not all original alleles will survive a sustained period of selection; Lost alleles will be replaced by the formation of new alleles by mutation so that, in the long term the amount of genetic variety is near constant; So after a sustained period of selection, the gene pool of a population will consist of some percentage of original alleles, plus some new alleles; Because this is a reiterated process, after a very long period of sustained selection (or containing major intervals of sustained selection), the proportion of original alleles must fall until they represent only a tiny minority of all alleles present in the gene pool. This is the same logic that applies to species. The species extant today are almost exactly those that were extant 100 thousand years ago. There have been some losses which on average have been replaced by new species. (Where in the midst of a human caused mass extinction so this is not entirely true, but over most periods it would be.) It would be wrong to argue that because of this, the species that exist in 50 million years would be largely those that exist today. On the contrary, if only 5% of species are lost and replaced every million years, in 50 million years only 8% of species will be survivors from the present. (Actually, no species would survive from the present, though some genii would, but this approximation will do for the purposes of illustration.)

The question, however, is how important has sexual reproduction been in causing the differences among organisms. Well, first, I'm as different as I am from my parents because of sexual reproduction. Though I may have been born with some new mutations to my coding DNA, any new mutations I was born with have not had a significant affect on my observable traits.

For instance, how much of the difference between whales and Pakicetus was caused by vast numbers and combinations of organisms sexually reproducing? I'm not sure. It is clear that sexual reproduction at least enabled that transformation to occur. Specifically, sexual reproduction at least did something to enable mutations (plus selection) to cause these big differences, for instance, sexual reproduction protected the organisms from disease as mutations caused the important phenotypic change.

For one, the difference among asexually reproducing organisms are fairly trivial compared to the differences among whales and their most recent land mammal ancestors. The whole animal kingdom changed dramatically after sexual reproduction evolved. Just compare.

First, sexual reproduction can result in the existence of an organisms with two versions of a reproductively beneficial gene. Both of its parents can have that sequence, and pass it down to the offspring. For example, the rhino's horn is as big as it is partly because various members of this population have sexually reproduced.

Second, meiosis results in cells that are significantly different than somatic cells. The nucleotides that make up the gametes are in a significantly different sequence than they are in somatic cells, and the gametes tend to have half the number of chromosomes of somatic cells.

Finally, the fertilization event puts two fairly significantly different combinations of chromosomes next to each. The chromosomes don't blend; they don't even touch each other. And then the proteins caused by the genome help build the organism.

Maybe I'm not quite seeing your point. But some populations of organisms don't change much over millions and millions of years. Some of today's bacteria is very similar to bacteria that we had 3 billion years ago. As I understand it, cockroaches are very similar today to what they were millions and millions of years ago. But then some series of events triggers important changes among the members of the populations. Which events? For asexually reproducing organisms, mutation, lateral transfer and varying levels of reproductive success (aka natural selection) were key.

The pathetically arrogant Aureola Nominee just can't stand that someone contradicted her/him/it

Those things are dangerous.

As I understand that article (and the language isn't easy for me), it doesn't say that "most crossovers will fall in non-coding sequences." It says: "DSBs do not occur at a specific DNA sequence, but rather are dispersed throughout a region of 50-200 bp at each locus examined (de Massy et al. 1995; Liu et al. 1995; Xu and Kleckner 1995; Xu and Petes 1996)." As I understand that sentence, most crossovers don't occur at a particular sequence but occur all over a particular region.

Almost all breaks occur in intergenic regions that contain transcription promoters, but transcription is not required for DSB induction (White et al. 1992; Wu and Lichten 1994).

"Intergenic regions" meaning "regions between genes" as "international flights" mean "flights between nations"; and in contrast to "intragenic regions" (or "infragenic"), ie, regions within genes. Coding DNA, of course, are genes, although not all genes need be coding sequences of DNA (depending on how you define it.) So if "almost all breaks occur in intergenic regions" than almost all breaks occur in the regions of DNA between genes (and hence between rather than in coding DNA sequences).

But it does seem not seem reasonable to me that most crossovers occur in junk DNA. Is that what you are saying?

This is not to say that sexual reproduction does not accelerate evolution. It does! But it is not implicated in the diversity of forms that evolution has generated.

Further, it is not clear that it is an advantage. Haploid creatures derive the whole of a given protein from just on version of a gene. Given your rhino example, a haploid "rhino" with allele H, would probably have as strong a horn as a diploid with alleles H/H...

This is a matter of perspective.

This reflects the relative time it took to evolve eukaryotic cells from prokaryotic cells compare to the time it takes to evolve complex multicellurity given eukaryotic cells. This coupled with the large number of multicellular creatures that have reverted to asexual reproduction suggests that it is eukaryotic cells, not sexual reproduction which was the important precondition for the explosion in multicellular diversity.

This is just a redescription of diploidy, which was your first point, so I refer you to comments above.

Here is a quote from Dawkins:

"Sexual selection produces quirky, whimsical evolution that runs away in apparently arbitrary directions, feeding on itself to produce wild flights of evolutionary fancy" (The Ancestor's Tale, p. 263).

Longhorn, IMO, short responces of the form of "what is your evidence for that" are impolite. They are impolite because the place on your interlocuter the entire burden of sustaining the discussion - of providing evidence and reasons - without accepting any of that burden yourself. They also show no engagement with reasons or evidence already provided because they require no engagement to be uttered. Further, as they can be endlessly repeated, and as any cogent responce (other than "just because" or equivalents) must be longer, they result in an exponential increase in the amount of informatin your interlocuter must provide to sustain the discussion.

That pattern of responces is often used as tactic by creationists. Any evolutionist explanation is subjected to multiple brief requests for further explanation, and any responce to those is treated the same. When, at the end of the day the evolutionist cannot keep up with the exponential increase of requests for links and information, the creationist claims to have won the debate because of the number of unanswered questions, even though they have not provided any reasons justifying their position.

I am assuming you are making your short responces not as a debating tactic, but out of thoughtlessness and laziness. Regardless, I am at the end of my tether. The answers to all of your latest barrage of questions are already contained in the prior discussion.

On the assumption that you genuinely want to learn about this topic, here is one more usefull link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_sex

By the way, IMO, with no reasons given, sexual reproduction is important to evolution because:

a) It allows a greater amount of variety to be sustained in a population of a given size, given equivalent mutation rates; and

b) It allows a significantly greater effective mutation rate to be sustained than would otherwise be the case.

Both have significant effects on the pace of evolution, but except in that they generate "frozen accidents", have little effect on end outcomes.

Regardless, I am at the end of my tether.

maybe I've spent too much time here, but I doubt i would have gotten past the second "do you have evidence for that?" type of response.

I am assuming you are making your short responces not as a debating tactic, but out of thoughtlessness and laziness.

The answers to all of your latest barrage of questions are already contained in the prior discussion.

This coupled with the large number of multicellular creatures that have reverted to asexual reproduction suggests that it is eukaryotic cells, not sexual reproduction which was the important precondition for the explosion in multicellular diversity.

What am I suppose to? At what point do you thin I'm wrong.

That is BS. What am I suppose to do? There were unsubstantiated claims, and I'm skeptical of some of them. What am I suppose to? At what point do you thin I'm wrong.

As I understand that sentence, most crossovers don't occur at a particular sequence but occur all over a particular region. And it doesn't say, or suggest to me, that said region is non-coding. Now it might tend to be non-coding. And maybe that is a reasonable inference, given that a significant amount of the entire genome is non-coding. But meiosis is usually presented to the general reader as occurring in coding DNA.

— Longhorn

I would characterize Dawkins in that manner, though that might not be totally fair. At least there is no suggestion made by any author I've read that crossovers tend to occur in non-coding DNA.

My point is this: The first phase of meiosis often results in a sequence of nucleotides being in a significantly different order than what preceded the first phase. So, for instance, we may have the following sequence at particularly location on a chromosomes: AC AT CT GC AC GC AC After crossing over, we may have this sequence: AC AT CT GC AT GC AT

I think the text used in my undergrad genetics course was simply Genetics, by F. Ayala.

It was a decent enough treatise.

meh, it doesn't look like that textbook is available any more.

hmm.

interestingly, a good reference for molecular genetics is not as easy to google as I would have thought.

A good site for online textbooks:

http://textbookrevolution.org/biology/

A good highschool level textbook on Meiosis:

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/M/Meiosis.html

hmm. I really couldn't find a good undergrad level molecular genetics text using either google or google scholar. i searched amazon too, to no avail.

interesting.

well, the reference to Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology works here too. He does cover the basic relevant aspects of both the molecular and population genetics. Just not in as much depth as I would normally recommend.

a good used copy can be had cheap:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0878931899/ref=dp_olp_2/102-5562519-3020154?%5Fencoding=UTF8

Having got a basic understanding of the issues involved, it is quite appropriate to ask for further clarification or evidence; but you ought also to be trying to follow explanations and reasons as given. At a minimum, you should be able to summarise the reasons and evidence already given to you in your own words; and be able to see why someone would consider them relevant. When asking for further clarrification and reasons, you should at least provide that summary so that your interlocuter can see you are trying to understand what they said. You should also provide the reasons for your own beliefs. If you can't do either, then either you do not understand the subject well enough to analyze reasons when given, or your interlocuter is terminally confused. There have been enough signs in this case for me to conclude that it is the former.

Aside from the sources Tom provided, there is much more non-coding DNA than coding DNA in a eukaryotic genome, so statistically most crossovers should occur in non-coding DNA. Can you explain why it seems "unreasonable" to you that they should do so?

Anton wrote:

2) I'm not sure how the above could result from crossover. I'm assuming here that the two columns of bases each represent a single strand from one of the two chromatids---if so, generally crossover should just switch pairs of horizontally-adjacent bases. That doesn't seem to be what you've done above.

If you understand what you are saying, that is what I've done. I've just switch three pairs of horizontally adjacenet bases. Does meiosis never do that?

Aside from the sources Tom provided, there is much more non-coding DNA than coding DNA in a eukaryotic genome, so statistically most crossovers should occur in non-coding DNA.

What is the effect of sexual reproduction on the path and long term outcomes of evolution?

2) I'm not sure how the above could result from crossover. I'm assuming here that the two columns of bases each represent a single strand from one of the two chromatids---if so, generally crossover should just switch pairs of horizontally-adjacent bases. That doesn't seem to be what you've done above.

look, at some point you have to start grasping the things Anton and Tom are trying to point out.

really, it's meant as a postive suggestion that since you exhibit real interest in the topic, that you spend more time reading some basic texts on the issue (apart from Myers).

What am I suppose to do?

Go to a library (the big building with all the books in it) and ask the nice librarian there to show you where all the beginner's science books are.

I've read Dawkins, Mayr, Sean Carroll, Lewontin, Gould, Ridley and Futuyma. I've also read Daniel Dennett.

Lenny, what have I said that you disagree with?

Aside from the sources Tom provided, there is much more non-coding DNA than coding DNA in a eukaryotic genome, so statistically most crossovers should occur in non-coding DNA.

— Longhorn

Unless I am misunderstanding the article that Tom linked to, the article does not show that most cross-overs occur in "non-coding DNA." It shows that most crossover don't break up existing genes.

But these mean exactly the same thing: gene = coding DNA sequence!

But these mean exactly the same thing: gene = coding DNA sequence!

— Longhorn

Yeah, after reading it again and thinking more about it, "intergenic" is considered non-coding. Also, the organism that the article about is S. cerevisiae, also known as yeast. According to the article, crossovers usually occur in the intergenic regions of yeast. However, the article also includes the following: "In many organisms, recombination is concentrated in gene-rich regions (e.g., Civardi et al. 1994; Gill et al. 1996). In contrast, in C. elegans, recombination occurs preferentially in gene-poor regions (Barnes et al. 1995); mutation of the rec-1 gene abolishes this bias (Zetka and Rose 1995b). In mice and human males, crossing over occurs at higher-than-average frequencies near telomeres (for review, see Ashley 1994). Curiously, these telomere-proximal recombination exchanges are not associated with detectable recombination nodules, suggesting that these events are mechanistically distinct from other exchanges. A special case of a recombination hot spot is the pseudoautosomal region that serves as the site of pairing and exchange between the X and Y chromosomes in mammals (for review, see Rappold 1993)" (emphasis added).

Kareem may have been born with some new mutations. But if he was, those mutations probably were not the cause of his being the height that he is.

I've got through about half the posts in this thread and I'm surprised that no one has pointed out why dogs have so many different varieties that basically come down to visual differences.

Dogs, all breeds, and wolves are the SAME species. There is very little genetic difference between a Chihuahua, Saint Bernard and a grey wolf. About the same genetic difference between You and someone that lives next door to you or even half way around the world.

The differences we see in dogs is no different from differences in humans. It's expressions of genes that cause slight differences in people. Do you have blue eyes or brown, grey or green or something in between? (hey that rhymes) Do you have Blonde hair or black, brown or red or are you bald instead? (hehehe to easy). Are you as tall as Robert Pershing Wadlow, short as Verne Troyer or maybe even shorter? Do you have muscles like Phil Hill or can run like Michael Johnson, do you have reflexes of a 7 year old boy or or or ....ok I've run out of the patience to continue rhyming.

This is the reason why if you let a pack of dogs into the wilds they will, over a course of many generations, "revert back to gray wolves". It isn't that mutations are slowly turning them into gray wolves. They are Canis Lupus. They have just been selected to produce certain traits. Its like 2 short people have a kid their child is more likely to be short. The big thing about dog breeds being different from gray wolves seems to come mostly from the trait making them more docile. Breeding wolves and selecting them for being more docile shows that this also has many secondary effects like:
1. coat colour and pattern changes
2. floppy ears
3. Upturned tail
4. smaller brain

What is the evidence for this you say? Well they've tested it. Not only for wolves but another member of the Canidae family the Red Fox or Vulpes Vulpes. Not only is the Red Fox a different species it is a member of a different Genus. Despite this Red Foxes when breed and selectively breed for docile traits show the same changes as happens with Grey Wolves.

From American Scientist Vol 87 No 2
"Other physical changes mirror those in dogs and other domesticated animals. In our foxes, novel traits began to appear in the eighth to tenth selected generations. The first ones we noted were changes in the foxes' coat color, chiefly a loss of pigment in certain areas of the body, leading in some cases to a star-shaped pattern on the face similar to that seen in some breeds of dog. Next came traits such as floppy ears and rolled tails similar to those in some breeds of dog. After 15 to 20 generations we noted the appearance of foxes with shorter tails and legs and with underbites or overbites. The novel traits are still fairly rare. Most of them show up in no more than a few animals per 100 to a few per 10,000. Some have been seen in commercial populations, though at levels at least a magnitude lower than we recorded in our domesticated foxes."

So this seems to something genetically tied to, atleast, the Canidea family but maybe even the order of Carnivors.

The reason dogs revert back to wolves is because they ARE wolves. Wolves are more suited to life in the wild then dogs are. Thus if you put dogs in the wild they'll do what they do. They'll form packs. They'll hunt. They'll breed. Over generations the more aggressive wolves will do better. They'll be head of the pack. They'll breed more. They'll be more healthy because they eat better.

After many generations where that original pack of dogs is now looking like a normal pack of wolves you could do a 2nd test. Have people move into their territory. Watch what happens over generations. You'll see that it's the more docile wolves that approach the settlements more. They'll eat the scraps of food humans throw away. The more docile they are the more they'll encroach on the settlements. Being more docile the humans will start to tame them. The humans can then selectively breed for certain traits. But the basic mutt is there....its just a docile wolf. The visual differences between these dogs and wolves are VERY superficial and really not much different then differences between humans.

So people should stop using dogs as a great example of "Macro Evolution"
Don't get me wrong Macro Evolution, better called just "Evolution" does occur. Dogs are not a different species then wolves and shouldn't be said to be.

In a case where you have true speciation where Species A splits into 2 species and over large amounts of time you get species A and B. Species B evolves differently then species A due to many factors. Species A may even change over these long periods of time. In any case if you dumped Species B back into Species A environment and real speciation occurred you would not see Species B "revert back" to Species A.

Dog are only separated from wolves by 10k years or so. Just like you could take a human from 10k years ago and they would still be able to have children with modern humans. 10k years ago qualifies as "modern human".
Step back 2 million years ago this wouldn't be the case. Sticking humans alone in a jungle won't make them revert back to some ancient ape any more then sticking a wolf in an African environment would make them turn into a Hyena. They may evolve into a similar predator but they would not be the same species or even genus.

Crossovers can occur within gene-rich regions without occurring actually within individual genes.

Probably not, but Kareem also isn't remarkably tall given his genetic background---there're lots of seven-footers in West Africa. I know nothing of his particular people of origin or family history, but if he has some extremely tall distant relatives, that supports his height being due to a particular assortment of extant alleles. Maybe neither of his parents got that exact combo, but the population as a whole occasionally produces someone who does, and Kareem was one of them.

That reasoning doesn't really work for dog evolution from wolves, because we don't see the occasional wolf who's, say, even half as small as a Chihuahua.

I've got through about half the posts in this thread and I'm surprised that no one has pointed out why dogs have so many different varieties that basically come down to visual differences. Dogs, all breeds, and wolves are the SAME species. There is very little genetic difference between a Chihuahua, Saint Bernard and a grey wolf. About the same genetic difference between You and someone that lives next door to you or even half way around the world.

— Wayne E Francis

The differences we see in dogs is no different from differences in humans. It's expressions of genes that cause slight differences in people.

This is the reason why if you let a pack of dogs into the wilds they will, over a course of many generations, "revert back to gray wolves". It isn't that mutations are slowly turning them into gray wolves.

Breeding wolves and selecting them for being more docile shows that this also has many secondary effects like: 1. coat colour and pattern changes 2. floppy ears 3. Upturned tail 4. smaller brain What is the evidence for this you say? Well they've tested it. Not only for wolves but another member of the Canidae family the Red Fox or Vulpes Vulpes. Not only is the Red Fox a different species it is a member of a different Genus. Despite this Red Foxes when breed and selectively breed for docile traits show the same changes as happens with Grey Wolves. From American Scientist Vol 87 No 2 "Other physical changes mirror those in dogs and other domesticated animals. In our foxes, novel traits began to appear in the eighth to tenth selected generations. The first ones we noted were changes in the foxes' coat color, chiefly a loss of pigment in certain areas of the body, leading in some cases to a star-shaped pattern on the face similar to that seen in some breeds of dog. Next came traits such as floppy ears and rolled tails similar to those in some breeds of dog. After 15 to 20 generations we noted the appearance of foxes with shorter tails and legs and with underbites or overbites. The novel traits are still fairly rare. Most of them show up in no more than a few animals per 100 to a few per 10,000. Some have been seen in commercial populations, though at levels at least a magnitude lower than we recorded in our domesticated foxes."

So people should stop using dogs as a great example of "Macro Evolution" Don't get me wrong Macro Evolution, better called just "Evolution" does occur. Dogs are not a different species then wolves and shouldn't be said to be.

Dog are only separated from wolves by 10k years or so.

domesticated 130k years ago, yes, but active selective breeding programs are likely far more recent.

I think this is what he was referring to.

OTOH, he could have been relying on the same dates that are commonly quoted in several older textbooks, I could be wrong.

Moreover, the first phase of meiosis does result in new sequences of nucleotides than what existed before the phase, and often significantly different sequences. In fact, in at least some organisms, recombination creates protein sequence diversity at a faster than does mutation.

— Longhorn

Finally, according to an article published in April of 2005 the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), "intragenic recombination rapidly creates protein sequence diversity compared with random mutation." Here is the abstract:

But my point is we often see organisms that have a more pronounced trait than either of their parents. And sexual reproducers often come into being with a trait that no one their sexual lineage possessed, and a new mutation did not cause the difference. Just look at certain mutts that are different than any dog I've ever seen.

Again, what you're describing is a mutation in the general sense---it's simply a mutation which is due to intragenic recombination rather than, say, a stray gamma ray. (Some sources may speak of "intragenic recombination" versus "random mutation," but I think that's just terminological shorthand.) So you're really asking the question: Of the mutations which arise and become fixed in a population, how many of them are due to intragenic recombination? I don't think anyone knows the answer to that yet, and no doubt it varies wildly between taxa.

Again, what you're describing is a mutation in the general sense---it's simply a mutation which is due to intragenic recombination rather than, say, a stray gamma ray. (Some sources may speak of "intragenic recombination" versus "random mutation," but I think that's just terminological shorthand.) So you're really asking the question: Of the mutations which arise and become fixed in a population, how many of them are due to intragenic recombination? I don't think anyone knows the answer to that yet, and no doubt it varies wildly between taxa.

Note that this paper doesn't tell you how often intragenic recombination occurs. Perusing the online literature provides answers ranging from "very rarely" to (in the case of one particular human locus) "often enough to contribute more variants than the inferred point mutations did." So it doesn't seem like there's a general consensus on this.

Well, you'd need actual evidence for this---you don't know, for instance, that that mutt didn't have a cousin to his great-uncle who happened to have the same trait.

And you'd have to check, as you mentioned earlier, that the trait is actually genetic and not environmentally induced (like increased body size due to a richer diet.)

And you certainly don't know that a new mutation didn't cause the difference.

Here is a quote on the increase on the sugar content of the sugar beet through breeding:

"In the United States, sugar beets are grown extensively from Michigan to Idaho and in California, accounting for more than half of United States sugar production. Since the 18th cent. selective breeding has raised the root's sucrose content from 2% or 4% to 15% and even 20%."

Here is a link:

http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/b/beet.asp

The point is that the genetic sequence is caused by the chromosomes swapping nucleotides. I'm talking about the event that caused the nucleotides to be in the order than they are in.

— Longhorn

Note that this paper doesn't tell you how often intragenic recombination occurs. Perusing the online literature provides answers ranging from "very rarely" to (in the case of one particular human locus) "often enough to contribute more variants than the inferred point mutations did." So it doesn't seem like there's a general consensus on this. I haven't see anything that says "very rarely" when it comes to mammals or highly complex organisms. Here is the quote from the article that Tom Curtis linked to:

Fair enough. But what are you saying? That breeding hasn't caused any trait to be more significant than what preceded the breeding?

And you'd have to check, as you mentioned earlier, that the trait is actually genetic and not environmentally induced (like increased body size due to a richer diet.)

And you certainly don't know that a new mutation didn't cause the difference.

Thing is, a change in gene expression is a genetic change. It's just a mutation to a regulatory gene rather than to a gene coding for some extranuclear protein. So, continuing from my comments above, here's an example of a "small" genetic change that turns out to really really matter, by affecting the regulation of lots of other genes.

— Anton Mates

When left to breed freely, dogs revert to a generalized pariah-type often associated with the dingo or pariah dog of India or generic husky Ñ a medium-sized, prick-eared animal with a ginger, black, black and tan, white, and parti-colored coats," notes Derr. He adds: "The dog doesn't have to revert to the wolf. The dog is a wolf Ñ albeit a wolf who exists in human society.

Probably the populations of once-domestic dogs which have been wild for the longest are the dingo and New Guinea singing dog. While they have certain traits in common with wolves---notably, enlarged carnassials and once-a-year estrus cycles---they clearly aren't becoming wolves either morphologically or behaviorally. They're off on their own evolutionary tracks.

Give the dingo in Australia a million years or more and I would not be surprised that the dingo could be classified as a new species.

Right---that was recombination, and it produced a mutation.

None of the quote you provided speaks to the above question, though. This paper says that "Intragenic recombination is a relatively rare, but evolutionarily important phenomenon occurring in mitosis and meiosis in a wide variety of organisms,"

In this study on corn, they get recombination frequencies generally below 1/10,000. It certainly seems that recent work in humans is arguing for increased importance of recombination in producing mutations.

In other words, it doesn't make sense to say "If you can do it through breeding, mutation must not have been important."

In fact, generally breeders are more dependent on mutation since they're working with a smaller population, hence there's a bottleneck effect stifling initial variation.

Not sure what that has to do with anything.... Anyway, according to Wiki, the Big Show has acromegaly, which generally isn't heritable at all---it's due to a spontaneous pituitary tumor. So that's environment, not genetics.

Ok...how do you know?

Anton wrote: "This paper says that 'Intragenic recombination is a relatively rare, but evolutionarily important phenomenon occurring in mitosis and meiosis in a wide variety of organisms,' although they proceed to prove that it's not particularly rare in the ciliate they're writing about."

What do you mean by "intragenic recombination?" Do you mean the swapping of nucleotides that occurs among coding DNA? Or do you mean recombination that causes a "new allele?" The paper you linked to was published in 1998. The one I linked to was published in 2005. Here is what it says:

"Intragenic recombination rapidly creates protein sequence diversity compared with random mutation, but little is known about the relative effects of recombination and mutation on protein function."

Anton, why is this important to you? What is your point in all this?

None of the quote you provided speaks to the above question, though.

Here is a link to a study on corn:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/99/2/1082?ijkey=0a23271149e8c0537a818b76f5c3dec06fb37d55

According to the study, "Recombination was almost 2 orders of magnitude higher in the distal side, which is gene-dense and lacks retrotransposons, than in the proximal side, which is gene-poor and contains a large cluster of methylated retrotransposons."

Re "I've often mused about exactly where to draw the line on the "species" thing."

I'm left with the impression that there is no "line". It's a bit like looking at a tree branch that divides into two branches furthur up, and trying to decide exactly where the boundaries are. But the only places with unambiguous boundaries are where the interconnections have died (gone extinct).

Henry

Actually I believe from what I've read that the changes we see from wolves to dogs and dogs back to wolves is a positive feed back mechanism that can be altered and reversed.

When left to breed freely, dogs revert to a generalized pariah-type often associated with the dingo or pariah dog of India or generic husky, a medium-sized, prick-eared animal with a ginger, black, black and tan, white, and parti-colored coats," notes Derr. He adds: "The dog doesn't have to revert to the wolf. The dog is a wolf, albeit a wolf who exists in human society.

— Wayne Francis

They don't need to look like grey wolves. Point is they loose all the differences we see very quickly.

C.Lupus is a species simply because in many instances if you throw a subspecies of Canis Lupus into the wild with another subspecies of Canis Lupus they will often interbreed.

Probably the populations of once-domestic dogs which have been wild for the longest are the dingo and New Guinea singing dog. While they have certain traits in common with wolves---notably, enlarged carnassials and once-a-year estrus cycles---they clearly aren't becoming wolves either morphologically or behaviorally. They're off on their own evolutionary tracks.

Just because things look visually different doesn't mean much. Humans are very diverse. Our primary sense is sight. We notice visual differences more then any other sense. C. Lupus has very acute sense of smell. The smell of that Chihuahua is much more important to that wolf deciding if the Chihuahua is its next lunch or how the wolf will be able to root the Chihuahua.

Give the dingo in Australia a million years or more and I would not be surprised that the dingo could be classified as a new species. But until dingoes stop sniffing the butts of domesticated dogs and thinking "Hmmm I wouldn't mind rooting this one" I'll classify, along with most other people that understand the species, them as the same species.

So I put it badly that dogs will revert to grey wolves. They will change into a common pariah-type....which is wolf enough for me. Either way they don't have big issues breeding with wolves in the wild.

To a great example of evolution is genus Equus. We have lots of data about it and can see large scale changes that dwarf the minor changes we see in C.Lupis. Why is this....because evolution at the species level will always be concidered by creationist to only be "Micro evolution". To get "Macro Evolution" you need to look at the Genus level and higher. There are 3 species of "Zebras". Try to convince a creationist of this and you'll hear a bunch of nonsense and babbling. But if we look at just these 3 species in the genus Equus you can see truely large differences between them. Most people might look at the 3 together and just see 3 black and white striped horses but tho they look very similiar there are levels magnitude more difference between then any 2 breeds of C. Lupus. Just because they are closer in size and shape and colour doesn't mean much.

I didn't say mutation has not been important in producing differences among organisms. And I didn't mean to suggest it. My point is that sexual reproduction has been important in causing differences among sexually reproducing organisms.

— Longhorn

In fact, generally breeders are more dependent on mutation since they're working with a smaller population, hence there's a bottleneck effect stifling initial variation.

Correlations. New mutation in organisms aren't correlated with people to be able to jump that high and have that good coordination. And the combining of chromosomes during sex is.

Also, look at the sugar content of beets.

Anton wrote: "This paper says that 'Intragenic recombination is a relatively rare, but evolutionarily important phenomenon occurring in mitosis and meiosis in a wide variety of organisms,' although they proceed to prove that it's not particularly rare in the ciliate they're writing about." What do you mean by "intragenic recombination?" Do you mean the swapping of nucleotides that occurs among coding DNA? Or do you mean recombination that causes a "new allele?"

The paper you linked to was published in 1998. The one I linked to was published in 2005. Here is what it says: "Intragenic recombination rapidly creates protein sequence diversity compared with random mutation, but little is known about the relative effects of recombination and mutation on protein function."

Anton, why is this important to you? What is your point in all this?

So intragenic recombination could insert (or delete) one or two base pairs from a gene? (i.e., a frame shift).

I recall reading that chlorophyll originated from a frame shift; was that likely to have been from a recombination event?

Henry

(Btw, the spelling checker doesn't like "intragenic".)

So intragenic recombination could insert (or delete) one or two base pairs from a gene? (i.e., a frame shift).

— Henry J

Re "So I'd say any given frameshift is unlikely to be due to recombination."

Oh. Well, so much for that idea, then.

Henry

Google "dog genome" and look at any of the more recent papers; most of them discuss the bottlenecks at the initial domestication and the founding of initial modern breeds.

I'm not sure how precisely you're using the term "correlation" there. But every human ever born, good jumper, lousy jumper or mediocre jumper, is the product of "the combining of chromosomes during sex;" thus it is mathematically impossible for jumping ability to be correlated with that. I think you might mean that there are no mutations in humans which are individually associated with jumping ability, while there are new allelic combinations due to sex which are so associated. Is that correct? If so, I'd like to know your sources.

Intragenic recombination is defined as the former, and usually it results in the latter (and is the only type of recombination which does so.)

Which, again, doesn't tell you anything about the relative contributions of intragenic recombination versus other forms of mutation to a given evolutionary lineage. In other words, that paper is saying, "Intragenic recombination, when it happens, can produce variation faster than other forms of mutation (IIRC they were comparing it specifically to point mutations." It's not saying how often that actually happens.

I'm not really sure what you're looking for at this point, so perhaps there's no reason to continue.

That doesn't tell you much---the beet plants could have acquired mutations for greater sugar content during the course of artificial breeding, or they could have recombined existing alleles with the same effect, or both.

In addition, the data suggests how dogs were domesticated. The amount of genetic diversity across breeds is consistent with a "bottleneck"---a strong reduction in genetic variety---that occurred between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago. "This bottleneck is likely to have been [due to] domestication," Ellegren said. Within breeds there are also signs of strong bottlenecks just 50 to 200 years ago, suggesting most dog breeds have a very recent origin.

In fact, generally breeders are more dependent on mutation since they're working with a smaller population, hence there's a bottleneck effect stifling initial variation.

I want to know what evidence there is that "breeders are more dependent on mutation since they're working with a smaller population."

Google "dog genome" and look at any of the more recent papers; most of them discuss the bottlenecks at the initial domestication and the founding of initial modern breeds.

— Longhorn

I didn't see anything on that. Do you have a link?

Michael Jordan didn't have new mutations to cause him to jump the way he did. That was my point. Do you disagree?

That is not how I was using the term. I was just meaning nucleotide sequences caused by the swapping of nucleotides in coding DNA during the first phase of meiosis.

Which, again, doesn't tell you anything about the relative contributions of intragenic recombination versus other forms of mutation to a given evolutionary lineage. In other words, that paper is saying, "Intragenic recombination, when it happens, can produce variation faster than other forms of mutation (IIRC they were comparing it specifically to point mutations." It's not saying how often that actually happens. It is saying that intragenic recombination happens more frequently than random mutation. Here is the exact quote: "Intragenic recombination rapidly creates protein sequence diversity compared with random mutation, but little is known about the relative effects of recombination and mutation on protein function."

But that is not so much what I'm interested in. Here is the quote of yours that I'm interested in: In fact, generally breeders are more dependent on mutation since they're working with a smaller population, hence there's a bottleneck effect stifling initial variation. I want to know what evidence there is that "breeders are more dependent on mutation since they're working with a smaller population."

Let's say that, within a population of beets, there are 30 different genes that contribute to sugar content. Sexual reproduction can combine all 30 of those genes together in some organisms. And as a result, the organism may have a higher sugar content than the other members of its population.

Yes. Have you established that none of Jordan's ancestors or relatives have a comparable genetic talent for jumping? Have you examined the genomes of Jordan and his parents, listed all of his mutations and confirmed that none of them are relevant to this talent? If not, you don't have evidence for this claim. I don't deny the possibility, but you need evidence.

No, nothing in that quote refers to the relative frequencies of the two processes.

A bottleneck, as mentioned above, causes a "reduction in genetic variety." That means that there are fewer alleles available for each gene, therefore combining alleles can't do as much and mutations are more necessary.

But once all those genes (actually, alleles) have been combined, you hit a dead end. If your beet already had the best possible combo of existing alleles in terms of sugar content, and there was no mutation, further breeding would not produce any improvement. In practice, this doesn't happen---sugar beets keep getting sweeter, high-oil corn keeps improving its oil content, and so forth---therefore mutation must be adding alleles that weren't there before.

For it is clear that vast numbers and combinations of organisms sexually reproducing was correlated with the diversity subsequent diversity.

In practice, this doesn't happen---sugar beets keep getting sweeter, high-oil corn keeps improving its oil content, and so forth---therefore mutation must be adding alleles that weren't there before.

And that can cause the offspring of X and Y to have higher sugar content than either X or Y has.

Moreover, without mutation sexual reproduction would do nothing for variation---different combinations of alleles would be impossible if mutation hadn't created different alleles per gene in the first place!

Don't I recall that for some protein the coding gene is split up into sections that might be in way different locations in the chromosomes? In that case could recombination change a protein formula without being technically intragenic?

Henry

Yes. Have you established that none of Jordan's ancestors or relatives have a comparable genetic talent for jumping? Have you examined the genomes of Jordan and his parents, listed all of his mutations and confirmed that none of them are relevant to this talent? If not, you don't have evidence for this claim. I don't deny the possibility, but you need evidence.

— Longhorn

Maybe I didn't make my point clear enough. Jordan was not born with a new mutation that gave him that ability. In other words, when his parents had sex, a mutation to his father's sperm did not cause that ability.

No, nothing in that quote refers to the relative frequencies of the two processes.

That there was a bottleneck does not enable you or me to reasonably infer that mutation caused the diversity subsequent to the bottleneck. For it is clear that vast numbers and combinations of organisms sexually reproducing was correlated with the diversity subsequent diversity. Maybe mutation also contributed to the diversity.

But once all those genes (actually, alleles) have been combined, you hit a dead end. If your beet already had the best possible combo of existing alleles in terms of sugar content, and there was no mutation, further breeding would not produce any improvement. In practice, this doesn't happen---sugar beets keep getting sweeter, high-oil corn keeps improving its oil content, and so forth---therefore mutation must be adding alleles that weren't there before.

Don't I recall that for some protein the coding gene is split up into sections that might be in way different locations in the chromosomes? In that case could recombination change a protein formula without being technically intragenic?

— Henry J

Yes, you've said this several times. What you haven't done is provide any evidence for this claim. How do you know what abilities Jordan's individual mutations did or did not cause?

How do you know Jordan even has an exceptional jumping ability not shared by anyone else in his family?

"Faster" in the sense of "per event," not "per unit time."

By definition, if new alleles are found that weren't in the ancestral population, that's mutation. An increase in genetic diversity (in terms of number of alleles per locus) subsequent to a bottleneck can only be due to mutation. It may be primarily mutation which occurred during recombination, but it's still mutation.

I don't think I can explain it more clearly than I did above. Without the appearance of new alleles, which is by definition mutation, sugar content would eventually plateau when the breeder happened to get plants with the optimal combination of existing alleles.

Anton, here is a quote from another article on meiosis and "new alleles:" "During meiosis, alleles are shuffled and new alleles are created." Here is the link:

http://www.virtuallaboratory.net/Biofundamentals/lectureNotes/Topic5-2_LifeCycle.htm

I'm saying the mutation didn't occur during the very reproductive event that resulted in the creation of the gametes that brought us Michael Jordan. It didn't occur in the egg-cell that became Jordan or the sperm-cell that became Jordan.

Because those kinds of events are correlated with longer limbs and fast-twitch muscles occurring in one person.

Anton,
Re "I've heard of proteins being made of smaller subunits, each of which is coded for in a different location"

That may be the sort of thing I was thinking of.

Henry

Here is a good quote from Mayr on the importance of genetic recombination in sexual reproducers:

"Evolution in sexually reproducing organisms consists of genetic changes from generation to generation in populations, from the smallest local deme to the aggregate of interbreeding populations in a biological species. Numerous processes, particularly mutation, contribute to these genetic changes to supply the phenotypic variation needed by selection. The most important factor is recombination, which is largely responsible for the virtually inexhaustible supply of new genotypes in every generation. Selection, then, is responsible for the elimination of all but on the average two of the offspring of two parents. Those individuals that are best adapted to the abiotic and biotic environment have the greatest chance to be among the survivors. This process favors the development of new adaptations and the acquisition of evolutionary novelties, thus leading to evolutionary advance, as stated in the language of evolutionary biology" (What Evolution Is, p. 157).

Also, here is a quote from a book by A.B. Korol, I.A. Preygel and S.I. Preygel entitled Recombination, Variability and Evolution (1994):

"Estimates from various Drosophila species indicate that 25-40% of variation of fitness observed in natural populations is regenerated by crossing over in one generation from the gene content of a randomly drawn chromosome pair. This lead Dobzhansky to conclude that a temporary arrest of the mutation process would not result in a significant decrease in variation over a large number of generations.

"In fact, variation generated de novo by the mutation process is lower by orders of magnitude. This is particularly the case in view of the large amount of genetic variability (and heterozygosity) present in natural populations discovered in the 1960s by the method of protein electrophoresis and subsequently confirmed at the DNA level (Hubby and Lewontin, and many others). All other things being equal, genetic variance for a sexual population with free recombination may be several times that for a population with no recombination" (p. 10).

Hi, Rilke's Granddaughter,

You are very wise.
How did the first replicators arise?
Did they arise all over the planet independently?
Or did they arise in one or two locations and then spread out?

Thanks,
David

The intelligent design model explains why the fossil record shows the sudden appearance of fully-formed, fully-differentiated and fully-functional life forms.

The Darwinian model demands a fossil record that blurs life forms between the form they were and the form into which they are changing in the never-ending diversification of one life-form into many life different and distinct life forms.

This sudden appearance in the fossil record gave Darwin pause, yet it is ignored and waved-off as not important by today's true believers of Evolution.

Can anyone help Darwin out on this point?

David Sadler

"There is another and allied difficulty which is much more serious. I allude to the manner in which species belonging to the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks."
-- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species --

"The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species appear in certain formations has been urged by several paleontologists ... as a fatal objection to the belief of the transmutation of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, that fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection. For the development by this means of a group of forms all of which are (according to the theory) descended from some one progenitor, must have been an extremely slow process; and the progenitors must have lived long before their modified descendants."
-- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species --

"Most of the museums classify the deepest rocks that contain fossils of multicelled organisms as Cambrian rocks. Dr. Preston Cloud, writing in Geology magazine in 1973 stated that not a single indisputable multicellular fossil had been found anywhere in the world in a rock supposedly older than Cambrian rocks. But in the Cambrian rocks is found a multitude of highly complex creatures with no ancestors. These rocks contain fossils of trilobites, brachiopods, corals, worms, pelecy-pods (clams), and soft-bodied creatures like jellyfish. As stated in a 1961 book, Prehistoric Life on Earth, 'The invertebrate animal phyla are all represented in Cambrian deposits.' It was then believed that vertebrates had not appeared until the Lower Ordovician, but in 1977 fully developed heterostracan vertebrate fish fossils were discovered in the Upper Cambrian of Wyoming. The discovery, reported in Science magazine, May 5, 1978, placed every major animal phylum (group) in the Cambrian rocks. This extremely significant information comes as quite a shock to most people for it is not discussed in school or in university textbooks. The museum officials, however, freely talked about the explosive appearance of complex life in the Cambrian rocks. They explained that the sudden appearance of all animal phyla with no ancestors was called the 'Cambrian Explosion.'"
-- Luther Sunderland, Darwin's Enigma --

"To the question why we do not find rich fossil-iferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer."
-- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 309 --

Just what we need, another clueless moro--

Excuse me, I got carried away there for a second. But it does get old.

Let's just say instead another clueless, quote-mining, strawman-erecting, refuted-"critique" recycling, close-minded, evidence-ignoring, anti-intellectual, pizza-hating, true-believing lackey of the creaIDiot scam artists.

But who knows, maybe he's polite to his mother and dad, even after they ground him for bringing home those terrible grade reports...

Kid, get a clue. Go check out your fusty claims on TalkOrigins. They're so nicely indexed, even you can probably find them in a jiffy. Then, when you've learned a little, come back with some actual evidence and knowledge and give us a whirl again. You'll probably still be a moro--er, all that other stuff, but at least you might be a little more entertaining.

At the moment, you're just a stale bore.

The intelligent design model explains why the fossil record shows the sudden appearance of fully-formed, fully-differentiated and fully-functional life forms...

— David Sadler

The intelligent design model

The intelligent design model explains why the fossil record shows the sudden appearance of fully-formed, fully-differentiated and fully-functional life forms...

Flank, Coin and Steviepinhead - probably your real names - couldn't even begin to answer Darwin and Sunderland so you insult the poster. How intellectual and scientific. How mature.

This is why IDers win public debates with Darwinists and why Darwinism is on the way out.

Yes, hearing the words of evolutionists questioning their own theory is too much to handle for the true believers. It's heresy in the church of Macro-Evolution.

Start here, David, and perhaps move on to this.

Suffice to say, Darwin was a very cautious thinker and searched for every possible hole or defect in his theory. That's called being a good scientist. Why IDers openly criticize him for rigorously applying critical thinking to his own theories, I'll never understand.

As to why they would use a source 150 years out of date to discuss the Cambrian explosion...that I understand all too well.

Hi, Anton,

Let's move forward then.

"What is so frustrating for our present purpose is that it seems almost impossible to give any numerical value to the probability of what seems a rather unlikely sequence of events. . . . An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle.
-- Francis Crick, Nobel Prize winner and co-discoverer of DNA, Life Itself, p. 79 --

"I don't know how long it is going to be before astronomers generally recognize that the combinatorial arrangement of not even one among the many thousands of biopolymers on which life depends could have been arrived at by natural processes here on the earth. Astronomers will have a little difficulty in understanding this because they will be assured by biologists that it is not so, the biologists having been assured in their turn by others that it is not so. The "others" are a group of persons who believe, quite openly, in mathematical miracles. They advocate the belief that tucked away in nature, outside of normal physics, there is a law which performs miracles (provided the miracles are in the aid of biology). This curious situation sits oddly on a profession that for long has been dedicated to coming up with logical explanations of biblical miracles.... It is quite otherwise, however, with the modern miracle workers, who are always to be found living in the twilight fringes of thermodynamics."
-- Fred Hoyle, "The Big Bang in Astronomy," New Scientist, v. 92, no. 1280, November 19, 1981, p. 521-27 [explaining that "there are 2,000 complex enzymes required for a living organism but not a single one of these could have formed on earth by random, shuffling processes in even 20 billion years," comments by Luther Sunderland, Darwin's Enigma] -

Hi, Anton,

The author of http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC300.html uses a lot of qualifiers 'may' 'probably' and so on.

What leaps out is that the author is pushing back the sudden appearance of the life forms but they are still fully formed, fully functional and fully differentiated. Their appearance is sudden.

If all these life forms are the end result of the slow process of mutation, selection and differentiation, where are the 'morphs' between A and Z?

If all life emerged and differentiated from a single organism or even (by some miracle) a thousand living cells of different types, mutation and morphing had to be the rule, not the exception. Since mutation is going to produce as many mistakes as successes and if fossilization is a rare event, then fossilization would snapshot the rule, not the exception. Yet what stands out and what the author you suggested above is saying is that the fossil record snapshots unique life forms that can be classified with their own name thus differentiating them from other similarly differentiated life forms.

The fossil record observes sudden appearance of fully functional, fully differentiated life forms, when the math of (first life + mutation = how many species?) is an incredible equation missing only the proof of all this mutation and change in the fossil record. Considering the number of mutations required to get a positive mutation, the majority of the mutations would have produced a mass of grossly deformed and classifiable creatures. Yet, as any trip to the museum shows, the life forms are very nicely unique, functional and fully formed.

The linked author did nothing to counter the essential claim of Darwin or the evolution critics of his day regarding the point of sudden appearance. He merely 'pushed' the dates back.

Do you see the point?

Here are some more quotes, many from well known evolutionists. Insulting me will not change the quotes for the facts which these men were confronting regarding their profession...

David Sadler

"The known fossil record fails to document a single morphological transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model of Darwinism can be correct. Doubts about gradualistic evolution have been for long years suppressed."
-- Steven Stanley Professor of paleontology at Johns Hopkins University, --

"We paleontologists have said that the history of life [the fossils] supports the story of gradual adaptive change, all the while knowing that it does not."
-- Niles Eldridge --

"Each new generation, it seems, produces a few young paleontologists eager to document examples of evolutionary change in their fossils... of the gradual progressive sort. The fossils, rather than exhibiting the expected pattern, just seem to persist virtually unchanged. This extraordinary conservatism looks to the paleontologist keen on finding evolutionary change as if no evolution has occurred. These studies are considered 'failures' and are not even published. Paleontologists see stasis [no change] as 'no results' rather than a contradiction of the prediction of gradual progressive evolutionary change."
-- Niles Eldridge --

"That theory [macroevolution] as a general proposition is effectively dead despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy."
-- Stephen Jay Gould, professor of paleontology at Harvard and a preeminent figure in evolution theory wrote in Paleobiology --

"Darwin's theory of natural selection has never had any proof. There may be wide discrepancies within species (microevolution), but the gaps with between the species (macroevolution) cannot be bridged."
-- Richard Goldschmidt, professor of geology at the University of California at Berkeley --

"Evolution has not taught us how birds descended from reptiles, mammals from earlier quadrupeds, quadrupeds from fishes or vertebrates from invertebrates. To seek the stepping stones between the gaps is to seek in vain, forever."
-- D'Arcy Thompson in one of the great classics of biology On Growth and Form --

"Species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record. It is rarely clear that the descendants were actually better than their predecessors... biological improvement is hard to find."
-- From the Bulletin of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History --

"This is true of all 32 orders of mammals. In no case is an approximately continuous sequence of one order to another known. The break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculation. The absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals. It is an almost universal phenomenon and has long been noted by paleontologists."
-- George Gaylord Simpson who preceded Gould at Harvard --

"Most species exhibit no directed change during their tenure on Earth, nor does a species arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestry. It appears all at once and fully formed."
-- Stephen Jay Gould, professor of paleontology at Harvard writing in Natural History --

"Modern gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees spring out of nowhere, as it were. They are here today, they have no yesterday."
-- Donald J. Johanson (discoverer of Lucy) --

"The first and most important steps of animal evolution are even more obscure than those of plant evolution."
-- Boston University biologist Paul Weiss --

"We are in the dark concerning the origins of insects."
-- French zoologists, Pierre-P. Grasse --

"The lungfish, like every other group of fish that I know, have their origins firmly based on nothing."
-- Said E. White, world-class authority on lungfishes --

"The origins of the higher categories are shrouded in mystery; they appear abruptly in the fossil record without evidence of transitional forms."
-- David Raup, professor of geology at the University of Chicago --

"I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualize such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader?"
-- Dr. Colin Paterson, author of "Evolution" for the British Museum of Natural History in a letter to Luther Sunderland dated April 10, 1979 --

What leaps out is that the author is pushing back the sudden appearance of the life forms but they are still fully formed, fully functional and fully differentiated. Their appearance is sudden.

— Sadler

The midsummer holiday was long and eventful, apparently so was this thread.

David says:
"What is the survivability or "production" benefit or advantage for any such change in non-living matter leading that matter to change in the direction of a non-living organism waiting for life to enable it to reproduce thereby allowing natural selection to begin?"

A combination of raw material production and products that produced fastest and was most robust to environmental change become the more common. Of those systems, those that had the ability to somewhat reproduce would be amongst the most common. And so on.

I agree with 'Rev', you argue like a vitalist. There was no non-living organism (an organism is by definition living) and it wasn't 'waiting'. As in evolution, the fittest survived. It is merely that before reproduction you can't say "natural" selection since it assumes replication.

David says:

"But do you agree there are things that are living and things that are non-living?"

There is a difference between "life" and "being alive". Life started once about 3 billion of years ago, and haven't stopped since. Evolution tells us it is this "life" that has branched out in the currently living organisms. In a very real sense each organism starts to die as soon as it is spawned off as an individual - sooner or later it will stop metabolise. Defining "being alive" has a different meaning for higher organisms though - as soon as our brains are dead we are medically and legally dead.

David says:

"Let's move forward then." And continues, to again, discuss abiogenesis though it has nothing to do with evolution and the fossil record.

As Anton has already explained: "It is easy to prove that natural chemical reactions can produce a replicator; even the creationist's caricature "a whole lot of atoms banged into each other just so..." is clearly not physically impossible. What is not yet known is the feasibility and likelihood of each particular chemical pathway leading to a replicator. The field of pre-biotic chemistry is concerned with exploring this."

David says:

"What leaps out is that the author is pushing back the sudden appearance of the life forms but they are still fully formed, fully functional and fully differentiated. Their appearance is sudden."

That isn't what he says. He presents earlier fossils to answer the claim on "the Cambrian explosion, with no ancestral fossils". The earlier in strata you look the lifeforms are smaller and harder to fossilise by their internal construction. The record naturally and predictively peter out. The earliest fossils are traces in seabeds, mineralised colonies of bacterias or traces of bactrias in rocks. We don't expect fossils of early life such as RNA worlds.

Fossils do not appear suddenly. Their appearance and the progressively richer record is explained by evolution and contradicts creationism. Do you see the point?

David says:

"Here are some more quotes, many from well known evolutionists."

You are quotemining, expressing quotes out of context. This will not impress anyone and move a discussion further. Make a point instead.

"Life started once about 3 billion of years ago,"

Lest someone starts to argue age, let me rephrase to "Life started once billion of years ago,"

BTW, if I come out as concentrated on David here, I noted the interesting discussion about modelling observational facts and theories on one side and philosophical claims on Truth on the other. OTOH, it is a complicated mess where different models are feasible, quite like QM interpretations, thus conflict prone. :-)

Let's move forward then.

— David Sadler

"What is so frustrating for our present purpose is that it seems almost impossible to give any numerical value to the probability of what seems a rather unlikely sequence of events.... An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle. --- Francis Crick, Nobel Prize winner and co-discoverer of DNA, Life Itself, p. 79 ---

"I don't know how long it is going to be before astronomers generally recognize that the combinatorial arrangement of not even one among the many thousands of biopolymers on which life depends could have been arrived at by natural processes here on the earth. Astronomers will have a little difficulty in understanding this because they will be assured by biologists that it is not so, the biologists having been assured in their turn by others that it is not so. The "others" are a group of persons who believe, quite openly, in mathematical miracles. They advocate the belief that tucked away in nature, outside of normal physics, there is a law which performs miracles (provided the miracles are in the aid of biology). This curious situation sits oddly on a profession that for long has been dedicated to coming up with logical explanations of biblical miracles.... It is quite otherwise, however, with the modern miracle workers, who are always to be found living in the twilight fringes of thermodynamics." --- Fred Hoyle, "The Big Bang in Astronomy," New Scientist, v. 92, no. 1280, November 19, 1981, p. 521-27 [explaining that "there are 2,000 complex enzymes required for a living organism but not a single one of these could have formed on earth by random, shuffling processes in even 20 billion years," comments by Luther Sunderland, Darwin's Enigma] -

The author of http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC300.html... uses a lot of qualifiers 'may' 'probably' and so on.

— David Sadler

What leaps out is that the author is pushing back the sudden appearance of the life forms but they are still fully formed, fully functional and fully differentiated. Their appearance is sudden.

If all these life forms are the end result of the slow process of mutation, selection and differentiation, where are the 'morphs' between A and Z?

Yet what stands out and what the author you suggested above is saying is that the fossil record snapshots unique life forms that can be classified with their own name thus differentiating them from other similarly differentiated life forms.

The fossil record observes sudden appearance of fully functional, fully differentiated life forms, when the math of (first life + mutation = how many species?) is an incredible equation missing only the proof of all this mutation and change in the fossil record. Considering the number of mutations required to get a positive mutation, the majority of the mutations would have produced a mass of grossly deformed and classifiable creatures. Yet, as any trip to the museum shows, the life forms are very nicely unique, functional and fully formed.

Here are some more quotes, many from well known evolutionists. Insulting me will not change the quotes for the facts which these men were confronting regarding their profession...

One of the more amusing such cases is that of fossil hominids, as touched on here (although I saw more on this in a lecture by Jeff McKee and I don't recall if the comparison in question is available anywhere online). Creationists all agree that such fossils are either "apes" or "men," but the transitional fossils are labeled "definitely man" by some creationists and "definitely ape" by others!

This is why IDers win public debates with Darwinists and why Darwinism is on the way out.

— Ministry of Truth

The paradigmatic figure for that general comparison is on Talkorigins. Which skull is human and which is "ape" is not agreed amongst creationists. See here for various creationist classifications.

— RBH

"relics of the RNA world in contemporary organisms"

Ooops, I completely forgot that class of fossils. The scarcity still applies, I guess.

""Life started once about 3 billion of years ago,"

Lest someone starts to argue age, let me rephrase to "Life started once billion of years ago,""

Today I have the energy to check: "life is theorized to have evolved from non-life somewhere between 3.5 to 3.9 billion years ago." "3500 Ma Lifetime of the last universal ancestor; the split between the bacteria and the archaea occurs." "In 2002, William Schopf of UCLA published a controversial paper in the scientific journal Nature arguing that geological formations such as this possess 3.5 billion year old fossilized algae microbes." (Wikipedia).

Um, either my memory didn't completely expire during midsummer festivities, or I made a lucky guess.

>> This program starts with "seed" words <<

And where did these seed words come from?

It doesn't matter. One creationist said "Just try a little experiment yourself. Start with a short 2 or 3-letter word ..."; he didn't say where the word should come from. And now another creationist illustrates his failure to comprehend by asking a pointless and irrelevant question.

P.S. This thread is 7 weeks old. Surely there must be something more recent that creationists can ask foolish questions about.