If you will check out Symbiosis on the Wikipedia all those that you mentioned are included as aspects symbiosis. If I am the non-science person here, why do I have to educate you and others about ecology and evolution. I can assure you that I have done my homework and take there problems seriously. The internet, if used properly, can be an excellent educational tool, and there are many good books on ecology, like the new one by E. O. Wilson. .
We could look at real life examples. For example, it took less about 1E9 chances to produce a functioning beta-lactamase protein in an antibody library:
We have about as many attempts to produce a beta-galactosidase function:
@glipsnort linked to a study earlier in the thread where it only took ~1E12 attempts to get a protein that bound ATP.
https://www.nature.com/articles/35070613
It would seem that real life isn’t matching up to these back of the envelope probabilities.
symbiosis: interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association, typically to the advantage of both.
https://www.google.com/search?q=symbiosis&cad=h
The problem is you aren’t educating anyone. You are constantly repeating your misunderstandings and misrepresentations, ones that have been repeatedly addressed over the course of four+ years. Stop. Please review the guidelines:
State your case and then respect other people’s right to agree or disagree. Avoid repeating the same ideas over and over because you have failed to convince everyone to accept your viewpoint.
Your “case” has been stated ad nauseum. No one agrees with you. Drop it, or we’re just going to have to start deleting your posts.
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But wait, @Daniel_Fisher is not arguing against the ability of microevolution to improve on something that is already working. There are at least two issues here.
This card deck analogy is a microevolutionary argument, but if I’m reading right, Daniel is not opposed to that.
But regarding Daniel’s echolocation point, once you get a “working” hand (whatever that means in cards), microevolution can improve it until it reaches a local maximum. Then it cannot de-optimize much even if a few coordinated changes would allow it to then optimize a thousandfold. If getting rid of the two nines in his hand would allow him to pick up two aces, he still won’t discard a nine because all his competitors have two nines and he’ll go extinct before he picks up the aces.
Also we’re only dealing with a very small number of cards here! When scaling to protein sizes, the improbabilities don’t add, they multiply. So let’s get a deck with 6.02x10^23 cards in it made up of 20 types of cards, lay out 100 of these (like Chris and I are attempting), and see what happens.
Then he shouldn’t be opposed to macroevolution which is just the accumulation of microevolution.
That local maximum would change with the environment. If a terrestrial mammal starting hanging around bodies of water then there is a chance to adapt to the new local maximum within the body of water.
There is only a ~2% difference between humans and chimps.
essentially correct, yes.
then you also shouldn’t be opposed to my theory that a person can swim unaided from California to Hawaii… since a person can indeed swim the English channel, and the trip from California to Hawaii is simply the result of repeated accumulation of channel-length swims.
“only” about ~60,000,000 genetic differences, yes. seems to me a big hand of cards to have to go through, looking for that proverbial royal flush, especially when in such a case there will be so very many proverbial “dead ends” (fours of a kind) that don’t result in the “bulls-eye” manifold majestic beauty of humanity.
The difference at the single nucleotide substitution level is only around 1.24%, and only a tiny, tiny amount of those differences have any impact at all. The vast majority are neutral. But we’ve been over this before.
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What you are saying is that you can swim one stroke and travel 1 foot but you can’t swim 100 strokes and cover 100 feet.
Can you point to a single difference between the chimp and human genomes that could not be the product of microevolution?
I already covered this in a previous post. Here it is again:
Let’s do the math.
Each human is born with about 50 point mutations, and about 25 years for each generation. In a constant population of just 100,000 humans that would be 200,000 mutations per year in this model population. If humans diverged from the chimp lineage 5 million years ago that would be 1x10^12 mutations total that did happen in the human lineage. The human diploid genome is only 6 billion bases, so that’s enough mutations to change every base in the human genome more than 100 times. In fact, it only takes 180 million births (on average) to get all possible point mutations in the current human genome.
We are separated from chimps by about 40 million mutations. Let’s say half of those mutations happened in the human lineage, so about 20 million, or 2x10^7. This means that for every 50,000 mutations we only needed to keep 1 in order to get humans from a common ancestor shared with chimps.
I read the last 3 articles as well. admittedly, beyond my area of expertise, but from what i gather, it sounds like i would respond essentially the same way I would to the previous points… whatever other mechanisms evolution has to utilize, whatever other mechanisms exist, they are all still “channels” trough which the natural-selection/random-mutation still has to function. Polyploidy, transposition, duplication, etc… these all seem to provide additional channels or alternate pathways or alternate arrangements through which or in which or on which the natural selection+random mutation process may work, sure, and thus may give said process additional opportunities, or perhaps even some some shortcuts, or the like.
But essentially, my core objection is as to whether the natural selection/random mutation process itself has sufficient explanatory power to achieve complex innovation. These mechanisms or processes that offer multiple new pathways, or rearrange the existing complexity in various ways, or the like… simply don’t in any significant way address my core skepticism.
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um, no…
I am saying that a person can swim (unaided, nonstop) 100 strokes and cover 100 feet, but a person cannot in a similar fashion swim 10,000,000 strokes and cover 10,000,000 feet.
Are you actually disputing this?
Can you point to any single stretch of 100 feet between California and Hawaii that I would be unable to swim?
Or if i set up a random letter generator cross linked to a dictionary and grammar checker on my computer, and started substituting, adding, or subtracting letters, and I claimed this process had turned “A Tale of Two Cities” into “MacBeth”… could you point to a single difference between the two works that could not be the result of this process?
Not a valid analogy because mutations don’t get tired. They keep accumulating, and there is nothing to slow them down.
Not a valid analogy because DNA is not in English. Here is the amino acid sequence of a protein. Do you see MacBeth in there anywhere?
MGDVEKGKKI FIMKCSQCHT VEKGGKHKTG PNLHGLFGRK TGQAPGYSYT AANKNKGIIW GEDTLMEYLE NPKKYIPGTK MIFVGIKKKE ERADLIAYLK
Quite true, not a valid analogy. but only tossed out to point out that just because one part of something is possible, it does not automatically follow that a large event that is theoretically the result of the accumulations of many small ones is equally possible.
True, but i don’t see any Jacks, Queens, Kings, or Aces in there, either. Are you acknowledging that your poker analogy is equally invalid?
That is where other evidence comes in. The pattern of different types of differences does indicate that the overall difference between the human and chimp genomes is due to mutations.
https://biologos.org/articles/testing-common-ancestry-its-all-about-the-mutations
I also showed you that the mutation rate is more than capable of producing the number of mutations that separates the human and chimp genomes. The conclusion is that the observed natural processes that produce mutations are more than adequate for producing the differences we see.
My analogy works a lot better since selection is included. Your analogy does not include selection.
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I guess I’m on the obverse end of it. When you say complex innovation my thought is “What is complex innovation other than the consequences of mutations?” If we have evidence of the variety of the types of mutations that occur what’s prohibitive about certain DNA sequences being the eventual result.
I would like note that there is a distinction between various claims.
- Whether common descent via evolution is plausible.
- Whether or not we should hypothesize a designer(s).
- Whether there are promising hypotheses for abiogenesis.
I have the feeling that you may be switching between 1&2 at times (I could be wrong) but these are separate questions (that can have relevance to each other). My questions So far have been geared towards (1).
For now the only other question with regard to (1) is whether you think evolution absolutely cannot account for humans having common ancestry with the great apes.
I’ll present thoughts about (2) later.
Thank you, Daniel
perhaps so, but unless you wish to further clarify, i shall assume your essential answer is, no, you could not point to a single difference between Tale of Two Cities and Macbeth that could not be explained as result of continual modification by a computer repeatedly and randomly mutating the original text.
to be clear, this is not what is in dispute. please don’t confuse common descent via mutations & natural selection with common descent via random mutations & natural selection. plenty of ID supporters… I understand Michael Behe for one, would take no issue with common descent from HCLCA to humans via mutation and natural selection… they are disputing that unguided, or random mutations would be sufficient for said process.
As I pointed out, yes your model is right because it includes selection, but I note that the other evolutionists did Not include natural selection either. You are the one and only person, except for me, who made natural selection a part of their defense of evolution. The primary weakness of evolutionary theory is that people overlook the meaning of Natural selection.
The problem with your using an artificial selection as your model is that artificial selection has clear rational criteria for selection, basically gaining a winning hand. Survival of the Fittest does not have such guidelines, so it is not rational. .
So you are saying that you couldn’t get from one to the other by changing one letter at a time?
The natural processes that produce mutations are observed to be random with respect to fitness in the scientific and statistical sense. This was established clear back in the 1940’s and 50’s with the work of the Lederbergs and the pairing of Luria and Delbruck.
https://www.genetics.org/content/28/6/491
I will stress again that this is a scientific and statistical conclusion, not a metaphysical one. If there is a designer guiding mutations then those actions are indistinguishable from random mutation in a statistical test. To put this in the language of Jonathan Wells, random mutations are an adequate process for producing those differences.
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I see this sort of response a lot, essentially an appeal to authority. The experts have some inscutable knowledge of evolution which convince them it is beyond the limitations of search algorithms, but I never see more of an explanation as to what this mysterious capability actually is. The fields I am an expert in I can explain to anyone who is willing to take the time to listen, and I can address any objections they may have. I’ve read a fair sample of books about evolution ranging from a hardcore functional genomics graduate textbook, to bioinformatics, to high level books by Koonin and Kauffman, to popular level like Dawkins and Darwin, and a smattering of scientific papers. Now, I am going to read through the BL archives, and hopefully find something substantial there. I’ve also looked at articles and books with titles to the effect “why evolution is true”.
But, none of it has any coherent way to deal with the combinatorics problem that looks really obvious, nor explain why it is not really a problem. Dawkins has come the closest so far to a straightforward attempt, and I like his honest, clear style a lot. However, he is woefully uninformed about the limitations of search algorithms, which is what he is describing in TBW.
Anyways, I see no one here has a ready response either to the combinatorial explosion, so I shall be on my merry way. Have a fantastic day, everyone!
Combinatorics is only a problem looking down the wrong end of the telescope.