In science, “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
–Stephen Jay Gould
[quote]tedro wrote:
Mattlebee wrote:
Disadvantageous mutations don’t have to be directly fatal to cause their owner’s premature death. Any inefficiency in a competitive environment where food is scarce or predators numerous will ultimately cause those genes to be removed more often than the normal form.
Like extra bright, shiny feathers? That is an extremely disadvantageous mutation where predators are numerous, yet one that has seemed to thrive despite no known competitive advantage for survival.[/quote]
Almost certainly an example of sexual selection. There will always be a balance between basic survival and sexual ornaments. Those that get it right will be alive and attractive, those that get it wrong will be dead or frozen out of the mating game.
[quote]We don’t need to know. If individuals with it consistently increase in number in the population, and the only difference between them and others is the mutated gene, then it is advantageous.
We do indeed need to know. If the bias itself came about randomly, then the result is still random.[/quote]
Bias is a pattern. Random is a lack of pattern. They are mutually exclusive. If you can detect a bias - however inexplicable its cause - then randomness has been lost.
With selection, it doesn’t matter how or why the selection starts, but as soon as it does the system is no longer acting randomly. It may be confusing or perplexing how/why the selection starts, but that is a separate issue to that fact that it has started and can be seen to be happening.
[quote] If a poison-resistant rat happened to have crinkly whiskers then, where food is poisoned, all the rats would end up with crinkly whiskers. Crinkly whiskers had nothing to do with the selection process, but nevertheless became the norm through association with poison-resistance.
Let me get this straight. You accept then that crinkly whiskers came about because of a random mutation, and further acknowledge that they had nothing to do with the selection process, yet you reject that the preponderance of crinkly whiskers is a random occurence?[/quote]
Yes. Crinkly whiskers only came to be the dominant form of whiskers because the rats with straight whiskers were killed by poison. If the first crinkly-whiskered rat hadn’t had the selective advantage of poison-resistance then the number of rats with crinkly whiskers would have remained low in the population.
[quote]
Explainable, yes, but it is still random. Curly whiskers may have had just as much a probability as occuring along side the poison-resistance as the crinkly whiskers.[/quote]
That’s true. It could have been anything, because this other mutation was basically irrelevant. If you’re poison resistant and there’s poison around then you’re a winner whatever freakish appearance you have.
Well I was thinking of rat posion deliberately put down by humans, so it wasn’t random at all, but even if the food was randomly poisoned there would still be one rat who could always eat and not die. Once all the non-poisoned food had been eaten and only posioned food was left he’d be the only one who wouldn’t be killed by it.
[quote]It can be entirely arbitrary to begin with, but if a feature makes a male more attractive to females then he will have more offspring.
Unless of course this feature (mutation) proves fatal before the male can reproduce.[/quote]
Yes, you have to both survive and be attractive to pass on your genes to the maximum.
It could be, but if either the sexiest female, or the majority of the females, like it then it ceases to be a mere random variant and becomes a sexually-selected-for trait that they (and their daughters) will be drawn to.
Once humans evolved our current brainpower the game was changed. The human brain makes us able to override simple instincts and create ways of reproducing with otherwise infertile mates, or mates who would die in childbirth, use sperm banks etc.etc. Couples who would not have had children in our ancient past, now can. Slim-hipped women who couldn’t have delivered a baby can now have Caesarians and survive. People can have plastic surgery to fabricate better sexual ornaments to increase their chance of finding a good mate. Predation is more or less extinct; once-fatal diseases are curable.
Basically survival and sexual attraction are much more under control of our brains than our genes these days.
The other big thing is that people can now choose not to have children, by using contraception. No animals do that.
This could indeed be the case (the flip-side of the fecund mother/gay son observation) and extra-horny sons may keep the hairy lip gene going by impregnating more women than other men. Alternatively, the gene that caused higher testosterone in the mother may not add enough testosterone to the already higher levels in a son to make a difference.
[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:
Perhaps Prof Wise is indeed a close student of S J Gould. Hidden away in one of his essays is his comment, to which I have alluded, that creationism and evolution (or faith and science) belong to different majesteria. Some would dismiss this as double-think; how can both propositions be true? Well, perhaps Prof Wise understands that each process is absolutely true in their separate realms, even when contradictory.[/quote]
That would be a valid point is Wise wasn’t still trying to reconcile both majesteria by trying to fit scientific observations into a global flood narrative; a process some have aptly described as “jaw-dropping lunacy.”
[quote]Aragorn wrote:
tedro wrote:
Mattlebee wrote:
We don’t need to know. If individuals with it consistently increase in number in the population, and the only difference between them and others is the mutated gene, then it is advantageous.
We do indeed need to know. If the bias itself came about randomly, then the result is still random.
Here’s the crux I think. This is what I subscribe to and why I was having difficulty with you saying evolution is non-random. There’s a clear bias shown, but the bias is a result of random forces (earth’s changing environment, which animals, save industrialized humans, cannot alter on any meaningful level)[/quote]
While there’s always going to be a place for unpredictable post-catastrophe evolution, it’s not all about randomn environmental changes. Much of nature is predictable.
Gazelles are eaten by lions, or more specifically: the gazelles the lions can catch are eaten by lions. Since lions deliberately hunt gazelle and gazelles deliberately flee them, it’s not a random process whether or not a lion catches and eats a gazelle.
Natural selection will remove the slower gazelles (as only the ones who could outrun the lions will reproduce), so gazelle as a species will get faster each generation. At the same time the lions that can’t catch the slowest gazelles will starve. In this scenario, both lions and gazelles are evolving in a completely predictable way to become ever faster. Since fast gazelle evolve from slower predecessors (and never vice versa) there is a clear directionality to this sort of evolution.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
Why Do We Invoke Darwin?
Evolutionary theory contributes little to experimental biology
By: Philip S. Skell
The Scientist
August 29, 2005
Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming’s discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin’s theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.[/quote]
Since antibiotic resistance is a major and ever-present problem in modern medicine and is entirely predictable from Darwin’s ideas, it’s a pity they didn’t give it more thought. Failing to recognise bacteria would develop resistance to penicillin could be seen as a major blunder.
Hmm. It seems flushy got highly stimulated by my “honest creationist” post.
I think he used every technique in the book:
Evolution as a religion.
Really? I fail to see the meaning and morality teachings from that “religion.” They seem to have no rites, no dogma, none of the apparels and concepts that all the other religions seem to have and hold so dear. No buildings on street corners, no sacraments, nothing. Except for a damn good explanation about how life changes and adapts over time to its environment, they seem to have very litte else on offer.
Rejecting the supernatural (AKA “the Divine”).
Richard Lewontin seems somehow amazed that science won’t allow the supernatural as a valid explanation; but he doesn’t seem to understand why. Yeah, flushy, you’re the guy to find great scientists. Hint for those who don’t get it: Using magic to explain something is no explanation at all.
Impugn reputations.
Ah yes, that bad marxist Stephen Jay Gould. What’s funny is that so many other creationists are so extremely happy to parade Wise’s credentials as being legitimizing for them. “Hey look, this guy went to Harvard and studied under Gould! No ICR diploma here, you evil evidence worshipper!” Because usually, they have to use guys like Sunderland, an aerospace engineer (that’s the degree he claims when he puts BS next to his name) who apparently was also an expert in biology and paleontology. I mean, who could be better qualified to comment on the fossil record that some guy who builds autopilots for a living? When I say “fossil”, isn’t “automated system to fly a plane” the very first thing that spring to your mind?
Great example of double standards here. If a guy has a degree in any unrelated field, then he proudly displays it next to his name when writing about completely unrelated fields. But the guy who actually has a degree and education that’s related to the field in question? The guy who sees that the evidence fits evolution “so well” and that has the honesty to say that his faith will always be first? Fuck him, he studied under a marxist.
I guess Wise’s credentials are ok when the point calls for it and crap when it doesn’t. Amazing flexibility on display here. I guess such flexibility is pretty much required if you’re going to stick your head that far up your ass. (Fun fact: Your ass is the best place to look to flood geology evidence.)
We even got stuff from Henry Morris the clown, a perfectly objective guy who definitely didn’t have a theological agenda. So open minded, his brain fell out at some point. Understands evolution so well that he mixes in the Big Bang theory. Just throw anything you don’t like in the mix. Guess he knew his audience well.
What flushy hasn’t done, yet again; it must be the third or fourth time in this thread, is address how the flood could have so nicely sorted all the fossils all over the world so that we don’t find rabbit fossils in the pre-cambrian or trilobites after the Permian. I predict yet another dodge. Will it be a bad pun, some mangled french, will he “fix something for me” or just paste in a ton of links that also fail to address the question?
[quote]pushharder wrote:
Evolution? Prominent Scientist Reconsiders
by Luther D. Sunderland, B.S.
The first example Patterson used in leading up to his dramatic conclusion involved data obtained in Ann Arbor only a month earlier on the amino acid sequences for the alpha hemoglobins of a viper, crocodile, and chicken.[/quote]
Problem one is that comparing a single gene (rather than which genes they have) can lead to an anomaly being represented as definitive.
If birds evolved from reptiles, and reptiles had had eons to diverge, then a late reptile could be closer to a bird than an early reptile. Also in this particular case, both birds and crocodiles have more extreme requirements for oxygen transfer than lizards, so the converge of sequence could be related to functional requirements rather than simply ancestry.
All of these values fall below the 20% identity required for confidently suggesting a shared ancestry. The % similarity will always be above 0% due to chance matches, so these are deeply unimpressive values for trying to make any claims.
At any one position it’s 25% chance (1 in 4) of a match, but two matches in a row is 1 in 16, three in a row 1 in 64, and so on. Across a whole gene the % match by chance is 1 in millions.
Must be a very odd method of comparison they’re using. Standard bioinformatics tools will give values in the 90%+ range for humans and either type of chimpanzee.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
pookie wrote:
Highly stimulated ranting.
Settle down, Abbot. E’erythang gonna be alright. We’re just having a little discussion here and ye need not be gittin ye panties wadded up so tightly. Step outside of your Quaqtaq igloo, take a deep breath, amble down to your abbey, and begin your day’s work with a skip in your step and a glint in your deluded eye.
[/quote]
Argh! It was the lame jokes… I knew I missed something when I listed the various dodges.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
Just look at it this way, Friar, I’m your George Carlin. You need me.[/quote]
You’re to George Carlin what Janet Reno is to Playmate of the Year.
As for needing you, can’t disagree. We all need a little bacteria for effective bowel movement.
Do you read these things?
[quote]Fergy wrote:
In the case of DNA, Patterson continued, we should expect a 25% match by chance alone (since there are only four possibilities for each position), yet among five presumably closely related species (man, chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, and gibbon) there was only a 7% match.
If he cannot dazzle us with brilliance, he baffles us with bullshit.
[quote]orion wrote:
Fergy wrote:
In the case of DNA, Patterson continued, we should expect a 25% match by chance alone (since there are only four possibilities for each position), yet among five presumably closely related species (man, chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, and gibbon) there was only a 7% match.
If he cannot dazzle us with brilliance, he baffles us with bullshit.[/quote]
Well, as it turns out like usual with creationists, it is just another case of intellectual dishonesty, and an epic fail when it comes to statistics/probability in this case.