Randomness shorn of people and books

[benkirk (Benjamin Kirk)]

@Eddie

So you should be able to provide the evidence that the transition, say, from artiodactyl to whale, would take place almost as fast if there had never been a single new mutation between the two endpoints of the process.[/quote]
Hello Eddie,

Why should I be able to do that? Because you are unwilling to have an actual discussion and give-and-take without putting words in people’s mouths?

Here’s my actual claim:

@benkirk

This is correct, but my question to Eddie or anyone else has nothing to do with the source of heritable variation. It’s about whether most evolution is acting upon existing or new variation.

How did you twist that into your silly challenge? Please show your reasoning in detail. I really don’t think you have even the most basic mechanistic understanding of evolution.

[quote=“Eddie, post:9, topic:4327”] I.e., if it allegedly took 9 million years with mutations, you should be able to show that it would have taken only 10 or 12 million years without any mutations. I look forward to your name-free, book-free demonstration.

For starters, if you had 10% of the understanding of evolutionary theory you pretend you have, you’d clearly know that you would have to stipulate the size of the initial population and the polymorphism of the population.

Secondly, real scientists are doing real, empirical work on the subject, unlike your buddies at UD and DI, who just talk.

A good intro is provided right here:

Whale Evolution: Theory, Prediction and Converging Lines of Evidence - BioLogos

and here:

The evolution of whales - Understanding Evolution

As for specifics, we can discuss:

Physicochemical Evolution and Molecular Adaptation of the Cetacean Osmoregulation-related Gene UT-A2 and Implications for Functional Studies
Scientific Reports 5, Article number: 8795 (2015)
doi:10.1038/srep08795

Comparative genomics reveals conservation of filaggrin and loss of caspase-14 in dolphins
Experimental Dermatology, 2015, 24, 365–369
DOI: 10.1111/exd.12681

Insights into the Evolution of Longevity from the Bowhead Whale Genome
Cell Reports 10, 112–122, January 6, 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2014.12.008

Convergent evolution of marine mammals is associated with distinct substitutions in common genes
Scientific Reports 5, Article number: 16550 (2015)
doi:10.1038/srep16550

And let’s not forget your rant:

@Eddie

If you don’t have time to read whole books, that’s your business. But you have spent a great deal of time writing and arguing on this site. A very rough estimate, based on the number of words you have posted here, plus the reading time for the scores of posts you respond to, suggests that you could read Denton’s entire book (which is not that long, when you subtract the endnotes) over the next three or four weeks and still have time to engage and comment here for a few hours a week. So it’s not as if you lack the time to read whole books; it’s that you prefer to spend your time debating rather than reading. And that’s your choice, which I would never take away from you. But your unwillingness to read the works you are arguing about completely destroys the credibility of the things you say about them. Reading whole works would make you a much more competent critic in this subject area. Refusing to read them limits you to traditional, bar-room style debate, which never did and never can settle anything, because it is mostly ad hoc improvisation based on rumor, not informed reasoning.

How much of your insincere attempt to debate here is based on familiarity with the latest relevant evidence?

[gbrooks9 (George Brooks)]

@Eddie

So you should be able to provide the evidence that the transition, say, from artiodactyl to whale, would take place almost as fast if there had never been a single new mutation between the two endpoints of the process. I.e., if it allegedly took 9 million years with mutations, you should be able to show that it would have taken only 10 or 12 million years without any mutations.

@Eddie,

WHAT ON EARTH!? ? ?

Did you really write that?

Surely I must be misunderstanding this discussion …

Did you just suggest that evolution from Artiodactyl to Whale could take place WITHOUT mutations? Is this part of that older “madness” about evolution just being a change in allele ratios?

Unless there is already a WHALE in that gene pool somewhere … we are NEVER going to get a whale without mutations …

If I’m misunderstanding the “Index of Facetiousness” or the “Barometric Hyperbole of Sarcasm” in this particular discussion, just let me know … and I’ll take a nap.

George

[Image below focuses on EAR STRUCTURES for various whale phenotypes… fairly interesting …]

[benkirk (Benjamin Kirk)]

@Eddie

You missed the context. That’s why you are confused.

Eddie, YOU are confused and you know it. That’s why your posts are about people, not ideas. That’s why you put words into the mouths of others instead of engaging in substantive discussion.

That’s why you don’t support your claims about what other people have written here.

[gbrooks9 (George Brooks)]

@Eddie

My own belief agrees with yours – that one would need mutations to get from artiodactyl to whale.

I think we are on pretty solid ground with this belief!

George

P.S. I liked the pictures too!

[beaglelady]

Let us see what @benkirk actually asked:

If all mutation stopped tomorrow, leaving behind only the existing variation (which clearly exists and has been measured), would evolution still occur?

More specifically, would both natural selection (nonrandom) and drift (random) still occur, acting only on existing variation?

If one or both continued, which would be the first to stop or slow down?

He doesn’t claim that evolution would continue forever if new mutations stopped. And he certainly doesn’t claim that the transition from artiodactyl to whale would have taken place at nearly the nearly the same rate and with the same results had there been no new mutations after about 50 million years ago. (That’s about the time of Pakicetus attocki)

[benkirk (Benjamin Kirk)]

@beaglelady

Let us see what @benkirk actually asked:

Correct. Let’s see what Eddie actually answered:

[beaglelady]

@Eddie

I’m not going to let Benkirk play teacher with his questions to the class. If he thinks I have made an erroneous statement, he can provide the statement and provide a correction. I’m not his student and won’t answer his quizzes. So he is wasting time and energy asking questions which I never intend to answer. He could use that time to read Shapiro and Denton and Wagner and broaden his intellectual horizons. That is what I’m recommending that he do.

I suppose that’s just as well. Especially since you preached post after post about internal whale testicles not that long ago.

[gbrooks9 (George Brooks)]

@Eddie

I’m not going to let Benkirk play teacher with his questions to the class. If he thinks I have made an erroneous statement, he can provide the statement and provide a correction. I’m not his student and won’t answer his quizzes.

AT LAST, @Eddie! Perhaps now you can understand how some people react to you …

Blessed tidings on you and yours.

George

[benkirk (Benjamin Kirk)]

[quote=“Eddie, post:23, topic:4327”]
I’m not going to let Benkirk play teacher with his questions to the class. If he thinks I have made an erroneous statement, he can provide the statement and provide a correction. I’m not his student and won’t answer his quizzes.[/quote]
You won’t discuss anything of substance, Eddie! I think that we are all aware of that.

So he is wasting time and energy asking questions which I never intend to answer.

I don’t think that showing you dodge and bob and weave, when faced with a simple question that goes to the heart of the sophistry you promote here, is a waste of time. You are very, very predictable.

Are you really so deluded that you think that I think that you would ever intend to address such simple questions?

[quote]He could use that time to read Shapiro and Denton and Wagner and broaden his intellectual horizons. That is what I’m recommending that he do.
[/quote]I’ve read Shapiro and Denton. They are tedious.

Why don’t you explain the “logic” that you used to convert my questions about the relationship between mutation and natural selection into a straw man claim about whale evolution?

[benkirk (Benjamin Kirk)]

@Eddie

Assuming for the sake of argument that Benkirk’s position is essentially the same as Joao’s (I have strong circumstantial evidence for thinking they would be 100% in agreement, but for now let us treat it purely as a working assumption rather than a fact), then Benkirk would have to believe that the evolution between artiodactyl and whale would proceed “almost as fast” with no new mutations, just on the basis of the existing variation in the artiodactyl population.

Why? I don’t see any logic or more importantly, understanding of evolution underlying that leap that the first part somehow necessitates the second. Kindly explain instead of baldly asserting.

[benkirk (Benjamin Kirk)]

[quote=“Eddie, post:28, topic:4327”]
To answer Benkirk’s insulting question, it’s of course obvious that if “evolution” is defined as “change in allele frequency in a population,” then “evolution” can occur even without any new mutations; e.g., “selection” can and sometimes does alter the allele frequency.[/quote]
Hallelujah!

And invoking your favorite word, would such evolution be completely Darwinian? How rapid (relatively) would it be in the generation following the abolition of mutation?

(Again, your scare quotes are unnecessary and look silly.)

But it does not follow that an artiodactyl can turn into a whale without any new mutations,

Of course not, because one animal never changes into another. Evolution only occurs with populations.

and that is the sort of change that the man on the street has in mind when speaking about “evolution.”

Many people who deny evolution share a gross misunderstanding and describe evolution as happening to single animals so that they can simply view it as impossible. Many people who promote evolution denial describe evolution as occurring to single animals. From my perspective, they do so to promote misunderstanding and deceive the man on the street.

So, Eddie, are you a man on the street, a deceiver, or something in between?

Isn’t the mission of BioLogos to help correct such gross misrepresentations of biology?

[quote] I wanted Benkirk to commit himself on the point whether major transitions of that sort could occur without any new mutations
[/quote]“Major transitions of that sort” is far too vague to be useful, but I’m pretty sure you’re smart enough to know that.

I know! Let’s look at real, relevant evidence!

Rod Monochromacy and the Coevolution of Cetacean Retinal Opsins

Let’s look at a real figure: Figure 1.

Simple question for you that illustrates the population-genetic incoherence of your ill-conceived gotcha: do the inactivation events (X in a circle) represent:

1. mutations, or
2. fixation of a previously-rare null allele in a population because the selective environment changed?

Kindly keep in mind that inactive or null alleles are virtually always recessive, and population genetics–that mathy stuff that your ID/DI colleagues love to ignore–tells us why deleterious alleles can’t be eliminated from a sufficiently large population even when they are (homozygous) lethal. I’m saying they are far less deleterious than lethal alleles.

Do you see now why I demanded that you stipulate the population size before I addressed YOUR question?

[beaglelady]

@Eddie

The scare quotes are necessary because I think the “allele” definition of evolution is a poor and misleading one. I don’t intend to drop them.

Evolution is a change in allele frequency in a population. I’ve heard that definition from scientists, e.g. Brian Hare at Duke. (And no, that is not all he knows about the subject!)

What is the ID definition of evolution?

[benkirk (Benjamin Kirk)]

@Eddie

The scare quotes are necessary because I think the “allele” definition of evolution is a poor and misleading one.

Hello Eddie,

You’re hilarious!

Let’s discuss that issue with your favorite example of evolution denial: whales.

How many differences in functional genes between any hippo and any whale, separated by ~120 million years, are not merely allelic? All of the relevant data are readily available.

[benkirk (Benjamin Kirk)]

[quote=“Eddie, post:30, topic:4327”]
I’m going to ignore the technical shop-talk in the rest of your post, which will be lost on at least half of the readers here, and probably more like 80% of them.[/quote]
I don’t think so. I think that YOU don’t understand it and you know that you don’t understand it.

You can answer my question without it. Is it your belief that the “population” of primitive artiodactyls from which whales sprang already contained within it all the genes needed to produce whales?

Why don’t you look at the DATA, Eddie? We have a hippo genome and we have at least one whale genome. How many hippo genes lack an ortholog in whales and vice versa?

Or is it your belief that new genes arose due to mutation, and that some of those mutations were necessary to produce whales?

What new genes? Name them. Eddie, you don’t have a clue!

Suppose the original population to be however large you want; just tell me whether you think it contained all the genes that would ever be necessary to produce the whales. That’s plain English,…

And there are plain data to address it. Why wouldn’t you look for yourself instead of pretending that I or anyone else would need to guess? Why are you apparently so afraid of evidence? Why is it all people almost all the time?

and I believe that the vast majority of evolutionary biologists alive would not duck the question the way you are ducking it.

They, like me, would laugh at your preening and posturing from a position of such willful ignorance.

I believe that virtually every one of them would say that some new mutations would be necessary.

Eddie, you’re not making any sense. You just switched between genes and mutations. Mutations are not genes!!! Mutations, alleles, and genes are all different things. I’m pretty sure that no evolutionary biologist would conflate any of them.

Your answer can be short and simple, e.g., “Given an ancestral artiodactyl population of X, I believe that no new mutations would be necessary for the evolution of the whale” or “Given an ancestral artiodactyl population of X, I believe that some new mutations would be necessary for the evolution of the whale.”

Given an infinite LCA population, only a handful of new mutations at most would be necessary. Given an LCA population of a few hundred, millions would be necessary. Satisfied?

[quote]If you are interested in communication rather than scoring a victory, you will answer in such a manner.
[/quote]If YOU were interested in communication rather than supporting your political position, you wouldn’t portray evolution as one individual animal morphing into another. You wouldn’t equivocate between mutations and genes. You would know what an allele is. You would eliminate “Darwinism” from your vocabulary instead of deliberately using it in ways that have very different meanings. Most importantly, you would learn the basic facts of the nature of the genetic differences between species and higher taxa.

So I’ll ask again, just for laughs:
How many differences in functional genes between any hippo and any whale, separated by ~120 million years, are not merely allelic? All of the relevant data are readily available.

[benkirk (Benjamin Kirk)]

[quote=“Eddie, post:30, topic:4327”]
On your next point, I am not “many people,” as should be evident from the level of discourse I carry out here.[/quote]
I agree there!

With respect to evolution, the level of discourse you carry out here is almost entirely pseudoacademic name-checking and recycled creationist tropes. One could produce close facsimiles of your comments on evolutionary biology simply by changing names and terms at the Postmodernism Generator:

Communications From Elsewhere

[quote]I have not spread the misconception you are talking about, and in fact have said ten thousand times that I am not disputing common descent.
[/quote]The misconception you continuously promote is orthogonal to common descent.

So we finally agree that selection acts upon existing polymorphisms in a population. Isn’t this pure, unadulterated Darwinian evolution WITHOUT MUTATION? And doesn’t this represent the vast majority of real-world evolution?