Random mutations shot down on this site.

Does this mean that you have some sort of point relevant to the OP which you just entirely failed to bring up or did you just want to bring in some random stuff about your own different strawman to confuse the issue?TTFN,WK

Yes they are, but only when they say 'the two species separated about 6 million years ago', after that they are talking about all te cumulative changes in the protein sequences of those 2 divergent species which have accrued over the 6 million years since they shared a common gene pool.They don't say that speciation has a single thing to do with drift, they do say that the subsequent genetic constitution of the divergent populations was subsequently affected by drift and that 45% of that could be could be attributed to natural selection. That isn't 45% of the changes neccessary for speciation to occur but 45% of the differences which have ocurred in all the time when those two populations seperated right up to the present day. They identify 'approximately 270,000 positively selected amino-acid substitutions' which are different between the 2 species and go on to say... Is the reason why this paper doesn't concern genetic drift as a cause of speciation clear yet?I'm not saying that drift cant be a mechanism for speciation, or at least one forcing acting to cause speciation, it can; but this paper doesn't say that or show it. Did you actually read the paper?TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

Surely until they actually have undergone speciation what you have is simply divergence between two sub-populations of one species, it is illogical to talk about a divergence between species being required to lead to speciation, though clearly genetic divergence between sub-populations or sub-species is required.TTFN,WK

On this site what you think doesn't hold much sway, what you can back up is considerably stronger. Yeah I did that a lot at university, I'd go and spend an afternoon looking up references and photocopying articles, it sure beat reading them. Or did you mean that you got the article and read it? I did, how else did you think I was quoting from the body of the text? Not hugely no, it takes a little bit of massaging of the data before they actually get a significant result. Its probably a good enough model for what they are doing, but I was much more impressed when I first came across Kimura's neutral theory which this is really just supporting evidence for.If you look at the beginning of their explanation of the model you will see. So one of the key elements in the model is the time since the species diverged. Now I will grant that if these were two geographically isolated populations then there is scope for plenty of genetic divergence prior to the establishment of reproductive isolation between the two species, what we might call the definitive point of speciation, but this paper doesn't look for this point at all. This paper simply looks for the genetic differences that have accumulated in the time since the two populations stopped sharing a gene pool.It doesn't ascribe any proportions of drift or adaptive selection to the actual speciation event. If you think it does then show where it does, don't just go 'nuh-uh'. You moan that we are trying to hold you up to the standards of scholarship and peer review but you seem to want to drag the level of debate down to that of the playground.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.Edited by Wounded King, : Because I don't know how to type.

I'll address this and you can consider it a reply to your post to me as well. Why have you completely failed to address is the point that was contentious in what you said and which was actually being objected to, claiming that the Smith & Eyre-walker paper showed a role for genetic drift in speciation, i.e. Message 29. While you may have only wanted to show something no one would argue with, that allele frequencies can be changed by factors other than natural selection, you framed it in the context of speciation and claimed support within that context from a paper which simply does not offer it. This is wholly disingenuous. No one disagrees with Smith and Eyre-walker's paper, what we disagree with is your contention that it says something about the contributions of selection and drift towards speciation, a word you fail to mention once in this reply despite having bandied it about freely.Did you think that if you didn't say speciation this time we would forget about your other posts? Eh? That isn't how it works. You make a contentious claim about what the paper meant and I asked you to substantiate it, the relevant literature to support my position is the same paper because what we are disagreeing on is what that paper says. You say it says something about drift causing speciation and I say that it doesn't except in as much as it estimates a time of divergence for the two species.TTFN,WK

Yes I did miss it, maybe thats because in the very next message which was a reply to me you said exactly the same thing again. I tend to reply to messages to me before messages to other people, and I will often go to a reply to me first of the new posts I look at in a thread and address it.Did you forget that you were wrong between one post and the other?If you knew you were wrong about the speciation thing why didn't you just direct me to your reply to Quetzal earlier? And similarly when Percy asked you to support that contention why not just direct him to your reply to Quetzal instead of justifying a position no one had any problem with?TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

You don't need to run the generator. If you actually bothered to read the page you would have seen that what Taz said early on, and you bizzarely criticised while throwing some ad homs at other people, is right and that Perry's version of evolution is a huge strawman.For a start he chooses a system which rather than 4 discrete states has ~65 possible states, and then acts as if calculations on probability using this set are in any way relevant.He also has a whole section on adding natural selection, but he never does! Not a single one of his examples shows any sign of selection whatsoever, he just keeps mutating the originals with no selection. Not to mention the fact that his proposed form of selection would only generate better click-ads and almost certainly wouldn't be selective for the phrase he nominates as his target.So if you had read the site and seen that in fact he is putting up nothing but a strawman why would you need to run the generator? I'm sure it does what he says it does but that has absoloutely no bearing on the validity of random mutation and natural selection as forces driving evolution.The whole page is so bad that to upbraid him for failing to properly emphasise other factors such as drift, now that my friend is ankle biting.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

I'm pretty sure Perry would categorise all of those intermediate changes as 'fatal' mutations, even though you have done the first thing he said was impossible.TTFN,WK

So in fact you decided that your own particular hobby-horse nit was worth picking even though it was substantially off topic? I called it a strawman because you say 'This is an interesting departure from the POV that microevolution is entirely an adaptive affair cause by natural selection.' as if that was the common point of view of evolutionary biologists which was recently challenged when a lot of people have been accepting the importance of selection-neutral factors in evolution since the early 80's, i.e. subsequent to Kimura's publication. No, I don't think I would. They may well view it as an inevitable outcome given the correct confluence of factors such as population size, geographic isolation, etc... but I don't think I'd say that speciation was a requirement for evolution in cladistics.I might say however that it is the most important thing in evolution from a cladistic point of view, and especially in reconstructing a hierarchical history of evolution. I certainly think the concept of speciation is a vital one for any sensible discussion of the evolution of life on earth but I don't necessarily see it as 'a requiment for evolution'. Not ambiguous enough to encompass all changes between two species over millenia I would suggest. It isn't but continually dodging a criticism, one you then subsequently accepted from another poster but kept on arguing with me, and thinking that just saying 'I think your wrong' is some sort of rebuttal are not a serious form of debate.I had already given my reasons why I didn't consider the Smith & Eyre-Walker paper to support your statement, with reference to the text, and you never addressed them but instead accused me of 'ankle-biting' and told me how wrong I was without actually showing any single thing to support your contention, that is dragging down the standard of scholarship on the site when you repeatedly fail to back up your position with evidence but just make snide comments.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

A button marked 'Revert to selected text' isn't really an element of natural selection.If you think Perry's system adequately models natural selection then why? You saw his argument about Click-ads? Where did he go with it? Nowhere. He brought it up but didn't apply it. What he would need to do is run 50 mutated adds and then take say the top 1% and mutate them. Instead he just drops a pile of mutations on them and acts surprised that most of the results are gobbledigook.So where is there any actual element of something equivalent to natural selection actually applied in Perry's example rather than just mentioned in passing?See also Message 72.TTFN,WK Edited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

But since that wasn't what I was addressing when I lamented your 'standards of scholarship' it hardly matters. Are you saying that 'I don't think so' is all that is needed to contest a substantive rebuttal of a claim in a worthwhile debate?Also technically my opinion does substantially affect the 'standards of scholarship', on this site at least, and that goes even more for Percy. I wish I could say the same.TTFN,WK