Hi @dcscccc
Hope you have been enjoying God’s grace since we last conversed.
You dramatically misunderstand convergent loss. Convergent loss means that independent lineages experience loss of similar genetic functionality under similar selection pressures. It does not mean that the loss of genetic functionality occurs as a result of identical mutations.
Here is an example of how convergent loss happens as a result of differing mutations, from the research report “Convergent loss of PTEN leads to clinical resistance to a PI(3)Kα inhibitor”:
We conclude that parallel genetic evolution of separate metastatic sites with different PTEN genomic alterations leads to a convergent PTEN-null phenotype resistant to PI(3)Kα inhibition. [my emphasis]
Convergent loss demonstrates plenty of randomness; it in fact illustrates precisely what @bren and I have been saying throughout this thread. The evidence confirms the prediction of evolution.
Thanks for the affirmation, dcs, I appreciate your explanation. I would suggest that you use an online service like translate.bing.com or translate.google.com. Enter what you want to write in your native language, then ask the service to translate it to English. Then edit the generated English to correct the occasional error. The services are quite good, actually. I have used them myself to translate from English to French, although I find I do need to edit the output a little bit to make it a little more au courant.
Not in the least. I am simply stating that you need to use a test that recognizes the stochastic, probabilistic nature of what is being studied. And to do that, you need to understand statistical methods. You seem not to have understood what I was trying to illustrate by the German soccer team analogy. Here’s a suggestion: Please state how the German soccer team analogy applies to the discussion of DNA sequence analysis. Do your best. You will learn a lot from the effort. If you misunderstand something, you have friends here to help you learn.
I want to offer two more statistically-based reasoning exercises for you. If you will answer these questions to the best of your ability, perhaps we can really make progress together.
(1) [A thought experiment] Physicists have declared that Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.5B years under conditions prevailing on our planet. Geologists use this half-life to calculate the age of geological formations in terms of billions of years.
You decide to test the half-life of U-238 by observing 2000 atoms of the substance. After 4 years of observation, you observe one atom decay into Thorium-230. You stop your observations, and perform a calculation of how long it would take for one-half, or 1000 of the atoms, of U-238 to experience radioactive decay:
1000 atoms x 4 years per atom = 4000 years
So you conclude that the half-life of U-238 is really a million times lower than the physicists have been claiming. And in turn, all of the geologists need to reduce their estimate of the earth’s age by a factor of a million; the earth must only be a few thousand years old.
Is this a good scientific approach? Can you overturn the physicists’ estimate of the U-238 half-life on the basis of an observation of the decay of a single atom?
(2) The second example comes from a 2014 study of the relationship between street lights and crime in Chicago. On average, the crime rate increased 7% when street lights were not functioning in a neighborhood. There was, however, one neighborhood where the crime rate decreased when the street lights were not functioning.
Should officials in the city of Chicago conclude, on the basis of that one neighborhood, that functioning street lights actually cause crime to increase? Since non-functional street lights were associated with reduced crime in that one neighborhood, should the city of Chicago shut off the street lights in all the neighborhoods in order to reduce the crime rate? If not, how can we explain that one neighborhood that exhibited a different relationship between lighting and crime than everywhere else in the city?
Once you have demonstrated an understanding of these examples, I think you will be able to understand what @bren and I have been saying about similarity of DNA sequence in pseudogenes. So please try to answer the questions about the half-life of U-238 and Chicago street lights. Thanks!