Register | Sign In


Understanding through Discussion


EvC Forum active members: 65 (9162 total)
2 online now:
Newest Member: popoi
Post Volume: Total: 915,821 Year: 3,078/9,624 Month: 923/1,588 Week: 106/223 Day: 4/13 Hour: 0/2


Thread  Details

Email This Thread
Newer Topic | Older Topic
  
Author Topic:   Increases in Genetic Information
Just being real
Member (Idle past 3936 days)
Posts: 369
Joined: 08-26-2010


Message 181 of 193 (698715)
05-09-2013 2:21 AM
Reply to: Message 155 by Percy
05-04-2013 9:49 AM


Percy: "Specified information" is a term made up by creationists, specifically William Dembski.
Actually, your thinking of his "complex specified information," which is a term he may have coined into a catchy little phrase, but it doesn't mean he invented the concepts that go into it. Of course it is nonsense because complexity does not equate to intelligence. Again we observe complex patterns form all the time by natural laws of physics. However specificity (anything identified to have a specific purpose or intent) is only observed coming from intelligent agents and is very useful in identifying something with an intelligent source. I also would point out that your disdain for anything Dembski uses, seems a bit paranoid to me. Something akin to refusing to ride in automobiles simply because Hitler used one.
Percy: We presented evidence of advantageous mutations, and you presented your excuses for why you're ignoring that evidence.
Really? All I have seen so far are examples of natural selection of pre-existing genes in the gene pool, or of a loss of information that happened to be advantageous to the organism. Nothing that would demonstrate that molecules to man is possible. But if you have at least one in particular you feel qualifies, could you please redirect my attention to it?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 155 by Percy, posted 05-04-2013 9:49 AM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 183 by Dr Adequate, posted 05-09-2013 2:46 AM Just being real has not replied
 Message 186 by Percy, posted 05-09-2013 8:50 AM Just being real has not replied
 Message 189 by Taq, posted 05-09-2013 1:35 PM Just being real has not replied

  
Just being real
Member (Idle past 3936 days)
Posts: 369
Joined: 08-26-2010


Message 182 of 193 (698716)
05-09-2013 2:21 AM
Reply to: Message 156 by bluegenes
05-04-2013 3:52 PM


Re: Observation of past events in the present.
bluegenes: How do you expect something to be observed before it exists, and how do you expect natural selection to act on anything other than "already existing genes"?
I don't expect anything to be observed before it exists. I expect that evolutionists will continue to study fruit flies and bedbugs etc... in a controlled lab and observe them develop the ability to digest something they never could before or some similar trait that never existed in the gene pool prior to then. And that the change be the result of added new information. What I wont accept is the same old shuffle game where they keep moving the ball from cup to cup and try and tell me this explains the existence of 8.7 million different balls.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 156 by bluegenes, posted 05-04-2013 3:52 PM bluegenes has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 190 by bluegenes, posted 05-09-2013 3:55 PM Just being real has not replied

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(1)
Message 183 of 193 (698719)
05-09-2013 2:46 AM
Reply to: Message 181 by Just being real
05-09-2013 2:21 AM


However specificity (anything identified to have a specific purpose or intent) is only observed coming from intelligent agents and is very useful in identifying something with an intelligent source.
Well, no. Because you have to find out if it has intent, i.e. an intelligent source, as a pre-condition for knowing if it was specified.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 181 by Just being real, posted 05-09-2013 2:21 AM Just being real has not replied

  
Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.8


(1)
Message 184 of 193 (698721)
05-09-2013 3:05 AM
Reply to: Message 178 by Just being real
05-09-2013 2:20 AM


JBR writes:
First I want to draw your attention to the fact that this is not a case of observed added new information that never existed before. As I suspected prior to reading the paper, this is a case of observed pre-existing information being selected to become dominant in a group or population.
So when you read this:
Pyrethroid insecticides target the sodium channels within the insect nervous system. Point mutations in the sodium channels, termed the kdr mutations, reduce or eliminate the binding affinity of insecticides to sodium channels causing insecticide resistance6. Two mutations, V419L and L925I, in voltage-gated sodium channel α-subunit gene had been identified as very important substitutions responsible for deltamethrin resistance in bed bugs21, 30. A causal link between one or both mutations and deltamethrin resistance was reported21. A dual-primer Allele-Specific PCR (dASPCR) approach was developed to identify these two kdr mutations. Two PCR reactions performed with Susceptible Allele-Specific Primer (SASP) and Resistant Allele-Specific Primer (RASP) primers conclusively show status of kdr mutations (Fig. 2A).
...with it's talk of point mutations, you reckon they're not mutations? What are they then? Where did they come from?
A mutation can occur in the insect’s DNA which makes the site that DDT attaches to, less specific
So a mutation CAN occur? Now I'm confused.
A mutation can occur in the insect’s DNA which makes the site that DDT attaches to, less specific (loss of information), preventing the DDT from binding to its intended site and rendering the insect immune to DDT.
So if I have a word 'CHAIR' and I lose the letter "H" to get the new word "HAIR" no new information has been created?

Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android

This message is a reply to:
 Message 178 by Just being real, posted 05-09-2013 2:20 AM Just being real has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 185 by NoNukes, posted 05-09-2013 8:00 AM Tangle has not replied

  
NoNukes
Inactive Member


Message 185 of 193 (698735)
05-09-2013 8:00 AM
Reply to: Message 184 by Tangle
05-09-2013 3:05 AM


So if I have a word 'CHAIR' and I lose the letter "H" to get the new word "HAIR" no new information has been created?
Ignoring the typo (a 'C' was lost, not an 'H'), I think you are conceding a bit too much here by proposing that something was lost. I don't read the following as saying a letter was lost, but rather that a letter was changed, e.g an R in chair to an 'N':
From the article...
quote:
Point mutations in the sodium channels, termed the kdr mutations, reduce or eliminate the binding affinity of insecticides to sodium channels causing insecticide resistance6.
The point mutation did not remove a site; the mutation changed a site from binding to non binding for pyrethroid insecticides. The site did not get destroyed, it was reconfigured. And Who knows what new molecule can bind at the reconfigured site? And what did the site do originally?
JBR writes:
As I suspected prior to reading the paper, this is a case of observed pre-existing information being selected to become dominant in a group or population.
Total BS from someone motivated not to see the unavoidable. Nothing like the above is described in the article.
Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.
Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846)
I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.’ Galileo Galilei 1615.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass

This message is a reply to:
 Message 184 by Tangle, posted 05-09-2013 3:05 AM Tangle has not replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22394
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 186 of 193 (698738)
05-09-2013 8:50 AM
Reply to: Message 181 by Just being real
05-09-2013 2:21 AM


Just being real writes:
Percy: "Specified information" is a term made up by creationists, specifically William Dembski.
Actually, your thinking of his "complex specified information," which is a term he may have coined into a catchy little phrase, but it doesn't mean he invented the concepts that go into it. Of course it is nonsense...
Yes, of course it is nonsense.
(By the way, instead of [qs][b]Percy:[/b] you can just use [qs=Percy].)
I also would point out that your disdain for anything Dembski uses, seems a bit paranoid to me.
Really? You called it nonsense, so what's that make you? Maybe you could keep your focus on the topic instead of attempting to psychoanalyze your fellow participants. When you're ready to deal with what I actually said about Dembski and "specified information" then you just let us know, okay?
However specificity (anything identified to have a specific purpose or intent) is only observed coming from intelligent agents...
Except for your apparent dislike of the "complex" modifier, you're just describing Dembki's theory, which let me remind you again you called nonsense. Dembski provided no method or analytical technique for determining whether information was specified, and you don't seem to have one either. All you really have is what everyone else also has, the ability to say whether or not something appears to have been produced by people. For those things falling into an indeterminate category you have nothing. You also have no definition of intelligence, and so no basis for saying whether something was produced by an intelligence.
Really? All I have seen so far are examples of natural selection of pre-existing genes in the gene pool, or of a loss of information that happened to be advantageous to the organism. Nothing that would demonstrate that molecules to man is possible. But if you have at least one in particular you feel qualifies, could you please redirect my attention to it?
How is adding or subtracting an ingredient for a recipe not a change in information? As I said, I have a feeling that at the foundation of your position lies a misunderstanding of information theory. Any copying error during reproduction will, by definition, introduce new information.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 181 by Just being real, posted 05-09-2013 2:21 AM Just being real has not replied

  
Taq
Member
Posts: 9975
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.7


(1)
Message 187 of 193 (698778)
05-09-2013 1:26 PM
Reply to: Message 179 by Just being real
05-09-2013 2:20 AM


How does this difference demonstrate the "observation" I am talking about Taq?
Those differences are mutations that have occurred in one lineage or the other, and they are responsible for the physical differences between humans and chimps.
You are using circular reasoning here. You are saying in effect that chimps are related to humans via evolution. And that we know evolution is true via differences between chimp and human genomes.
That is false. We determine common ancestry by the PATTERN of similarities and differences. That pattern is a nested hierarchy.
How do you "know" that is what that means Taq? No one observed which specie is the oldest and therefore it is merely an assumption.
Not an assumption. It is a conclusion drawn from constructing phylogenies. Chimps and humans have a much more recent common ancestor than humans and gorillas, and the even more distantly related orangutan. These are all conclusions drawn from real life data using real genetic techniques, not assumptions.
A conclusion drawn completely on similarity arguments which do not aid in the debate between intelligent design or evolution.
Why doesn't it aid in the debate?
No this is what one would expect if a highly intelligent designer were responsible for creating all forms of life to all exist and function within the same biosphere. The auto manufacturer known as Saab also once created aircraft.. Just because there are some similarity between the two forms of transportation does not imply that Saab intentionally meant to deceive us into thinking evolution had occurred.
Cars and airplaines made by Saab do not fall into a nested hierarchy. Human designs do not fall into a nested hierarchy. There is absolutely no reason why any designer would be forced to limit designs to a nested hierarchy. However, that is the only pattern of shared and derived features that evolution can produce.
What do we see with life? Life falls into a nested hierarchy just as we would expect from the process of evolution and not intelligent design.
Look Taq, I don't care how many ways you randomly change the "Roses are red violets are blue" poem, It will never become the classic novel "Wuthering Heights," unless a good deal of new information is added along with the changes.
No one is claiming that poems evolve from one another through mutation and selection. We are talking about DNA which is not a poem.
Likewise you can't get from bacteria to humans just by changing DNA sequences.
Evidence please.
I am saying that this process has never been observed that I know of.
Of course not. This is because you define any change in DNA sequence as a loss in information. You have really defined yourself out of the debate. Using your definition of an "increase in information", evolution does not need to increase information as you define it in order to produce the biodiversity we see around us. The mutations that separate species are all that is needed.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 179 by Just being real, posted 05-09-2013 2:20 AM Just being real has not replied

  
Taq
Member
Posts: 9975
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.7


Message 188 of 193 (698779)
05-09-2013 1:29 PM
Reply to: Message 180 by Just being real
05-09-2013 2:21 AM


Re: Nuclear contamination?
Yes if it can be shown that such a mutation actually added new information to the genome which gave the organism a selective advantage over its relatives, then I would agree. But what I was describing was not anything like that.
That is exactly what we have with the differences found between the human and chimp genome.
Perhaps you can tell us why these differences could not be produced by the observed processes of evolution?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 180 by Just being real, posted 05-09-2013 2:21 AM Just being real has not replied

  
Taq
Member
Posts: 9975
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.7


Message 189 of 193 (698780)
05-09-2013 1:35 PM
Reply to: Message 181 by Just being real
05-09-2013 2:21 AM


However specificity (anything identified to have a specific purpose or intent) is only observed coming from intelligent agents and is very useful in identifying something with an intelligent source.
So how do you determine if a sequence is specified or not?
From what I have seen, the specificity argument is nothing more than the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy:
Texas sharpshooter fallacy - Wikipedia
All I have seen so far are examples of natural selection of pre-existing genes in the gene pool,
Those genes come from mutations.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 181 by Just being real, posted 05-09-2013 2:21 AM Just being real has not replied

  
bluegenes
Member (Idle past 2478 days)
Posts: 3119
From: U.K.
Joined: 01-24-2007


Message 190 of 193 (698797)
05-09-2013 3:55 PM
Reply to: Message 182 by Just being real
05-09-2013 2:21 AM


Re: Observation of past events in the present.
Just being real writes:
I don't expect anything to be observed before it exists. I expect that evolutionists will continue to study fruit flies and bedbugs etc... in a controlled lab and observe them develop the ability to digest something they never could before or some similar trait that never existed in the gene pool prior to then. And that the change be the result of added new information. What I wont accept is the same old shuffle game where they keep moving the ball from cup to cup and try and tell me this explains the existence of 8.7 million different balls.
You see new information every time a mutation changes a phenotype.
Why don't you just learn to read history on genomes? Here's the rest of the post you clicked on the reply button to, but avoided the point of:
quote:
Mutations that have happened in the past can be observed on genomes.
Just being real writes:
bluegenes writes:
Information enters population groups from the environment.
Huh? Every bedtime story I’ve ever been told about evolution has the information building up by the process of random mutations (in the genetic code) and natural selection, selecting those traits which give the organism an advantage to survive over the others.
And that last bit is how information enters population groups from their environments.
JBR writes:
I’ve never heard anyone claim that the environment actually puts the information in there. If you have some new scientific theory on this, I’d love to hear it.
It's called the theory of natural selection. But it's not new, and I can't take credit for it.
JBR writes:
I have a question for you to consider when it comes to claiming that the antifreeze gene is an example of added new information to the DNA code. If two species in any order are compared, who determines which of the two species are the oldest and possesses the genes of the original configuration? This is important because once again, how do we know the antifreeze gene may not have been the original, and the others without the gene aren’t the result of loss of information?
Evolution of an antifreeze protein by neofunctionalization under escape from adaptive conflict.
The paper answers your question. Geneticists know how to distinguish duplications from deletions. The original anti-freeze gene is on an insertion. Then there are multiple copies of it on tandem duplications. The sequence of mutations involved are traceable. The effects of past events can be observed in the present.
Just being real writes:
Did someone invent time travel and go back to take samples of the original?
When you go out of your house in the morning, and observe that the ground is soaking wet and the trees are dripping, you can figure out that it has rained during the night. Have you invented time travel in making an indirect observation of a past event? Is time travel necessary in order to convict a murderer on forensic evidence beyond all reasonable doubt? Is time travel necessary to infer a past river from a dried river bed?
History can be observed on genomes.
Just being real writes:
Rather it is bacteria, fossils, or fish, if you are trying to demonstrate A is related to Z there must be at least one observed path somewhere to show relationship is even possible.
You can look at the genomes of two species and see that the differences which are at fixation between them are caused by exactly the same processes that cause the differences between different breeds of the same species and different individuals within a species. If you can get the big roarer cats (lions ,tiger, leopard, jaguar) from a common ancestral group, as the O.P. suggests, then you can get lions and domestic cats from a common ancestral group, and cats and dogs from a common ancestral group. There's nothing to stop the quantity of differences that separate them happening. If you think common descent is impossible, you need to tell us about this unknown mechanism of yours which limits the quantity of mutations that can go to fixation in diverging population groups.
Just being real writes:
You cannot use speculated relationship to prove added information, in order to prove relationship. If you do, now you are employing circular reasoning.
A novelty in one species isn't used to show its relationship to another species which lacks that novelty. We infer close common ancestry from similarities, not differences! And you've misunderstood the fish paper. Paralogs can be identified by looking within just one species. In the paper, they show the area in which the L. dearborni insertion has happened in G. aculeatus to show what the area was probably like before the event, but that is not how they know that a duplication has taken place. It is by the sequence identity of the duplicated section. Paralogs have been observed in the genomes of all species whose genomes have been examined, and duplications occur regularly in individual organisms. The researchers trace the mutational history of the formation of the AFPIII genes from LdSAS-B.
JBR writes:
If you are trying to establish relationship with anything organic, you obviously can't observe this path over millions of years,.
You can if you know how to read history on genomes.
JBR writes:
..so relationships between species are limited to what you can physically observe over relatively recent generations.
That demand for direct observation would invalidate all hypotheses on the origin of species, and all science that deals with the past. How many non-biological intelligent beings have we directly observed making genes, life, or anything else?
JBR writes:
Yes, with speciation, we have observed small changes occur. But these changes can be (in most of the cases) shown to be the result of natural selection, selecting already existing alleles, and over time a loss of information.
Alleles have to exist before they can be selected, and if by "loss of information" you mean loss of diversity, that is caused by bottlenecks and extinction events, not by speciation.
JBR writes:
The paper cited compares DNA of different species in order to conclude that fish have evolved an antifreeze protein.
That's not how they conclude it. The paper is actually about how it evolved. It did it by insertion, deletion, point mutations, and tandem duplications. All are common forms of mutation. There's no big mystery about "increases in genetic information", the subject of this thread. They do not require intelligent design, but all known intelligent designers do require them.
Just being real writes:
bluegenes writes:
No-one designed your unique genome
My unique genome is a combination of pre-existing genes from my mother and my father. I did not receive some completely new information that did not exist which gave me spider man abilities or the ability to see infrared light.
But you do have your own mutations, and so did your parents have theirs, some of which you will have inherited. But even without those, your uniqueness, by definition, involves very specific information, yet no-one designed you, which was my point.
JBR writes:
I thought jbozz21 did a good job of explaining what is meant, but allow me to try to simplify what I am talking about here. Imagine asking Donald Trump how he got so wealthy. If he said, Well I started out as a wee lad with only five dollars to my name, and I opened a bank account in one bank and then I transferred all the money across town to another bank and then to another, and kept doing this, occasionally losing a penny here and a penny there, but over time I amassed my great wealth. You would scratch your head in confusion because obviously you know that a person cannot get wealthy just moving the same money back and forth. Somewhere along the way a good deal of new funds has to be added to Mr. Trumps account in order for him to be so rich. Likewise you can’t start out with a simple single celled organism and claim that through millions of years of transferring the same gene pool of information back and forth, it can eventually evolve into an astrophysicist. Somewhere along the way we would have to introduce a whole lot of new genes that produce a whole lot of new and advanced phenotypes.
Dollar bills don't duplicate themselves, but genes do. You can start out with a "simple single celled" organism, and watch it evolve into strains with duplications in less than one year, if you want to.
If you disagree with the analysis of past mutations in this paper, tell us why.
Evolution of an antifreeze protein by neofunctionalization under escape from adaptive conflict.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 182 by Just being real, posted 05-09-2013 2:21 AM Just being real has not replied

  
bluegenes
Member (Idle past 2478 days)
Posts: 3119
From: U.K.
Joined: 01-24-2007


(1)
Message 191 of 193 (698810)
05-09-2013 6:21 PM
Reply to: Message 157 by jbozz21
05-04-2013 4:15 PM


Increases in genetic information in real time.
On your second article:
Bacteria 'evolving in the lab'? (Lenski, citrate-digesting E. coli) - creation.com
The article was written in 2008, and the author speculates on what happened in the Lenski experiment when one strain of E. coli evolved the ability to utilize citrate in oxic conditions.
Here's a 2012 paper in which the researchers identify some of the mutations that contributed to the adaptation. So, you can see for yourself how wrong Don Batten's speculations are. A new regulatory gene was created by duplication and fusion after (probably) at least two potentiating neutral mutations, and then further mutations refined the system. There may well have been 7 or more mutations involved in some of the current cit+ organisms, and the process of refinement is "open ended" as the paper puts it (it is probably still going on).
As one of the things you are asking about in the O.P. is increases in genetic material and increases in functional genetic material, the Lenski results with their multiple duplications are a good example of such increases happening in real time.
Batten's also wrong and misleading on the development of chloroquine resistance in malarial parasites, but that's another very interesting subject.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 157 by jbozz21, posted 05-04-2013 4:15 PM jbozz21 has not replied

  
Meddle
Member (Idle past 1271 days)
Posts: 179
From: Scotland
Joined: 05-08-2006


(2)
Message 192 of 193 (698834)
05-09-2013 9:14 PM
Reply to: Message 169 by jbozz21
05-07-2013 12:08 AM


This is not helping your assertion that man evolved from a lesser species. That is not an improvement.
Plus a vitamin C producing gene DESTROYING mutation is not beneficial mutation that is selected for against those that don't have the mutation. If anything those without the vitamin c mutation are more fit than those without it. For many people you cannot get too much vitamin c and if you do you just pee it out. But in times of famine or plague high amounts of vitamin c would boost your immune system and make you more fit to overcome the infection.
If anything this only helps the idea that man was created and not evolved, because any organism not being able to produce vitamin c we would either be selected out or randomly mixed with others that can produce vitamin c. Those that can produce vitamin c would not be selected out of the population because they are not less fit. That goes against the theory of evolution.
So on the one hand we have the theory of evolution suggesting that we share a common ancestor with the great apes and it was in this common ancestor that the ability to produce vitamin c was lost due to a mutation on the gene. This did not pose a problem because, like the majority of the great apes, this common ancestor existed in tropical rain forests which have different species of fruiting trees throughout the year, providing a constant supply of vitamin c in their diet. As this common ancestor evolved, this same vitamin c pseudogene was inherited by it's descendants, today's great apes including humans.
On the other hand we have the argument we were specially created with a broken vitamin c gene, carrying the same disabling mutation as the other great apes, but not bats, guinea pigs and capybaras. And the reasoning behind this is what, exactly? Is it the same reasoning we share other pseudogenes with apes, or the shared ERV sequences, or that extra centromere sequence on chromosome 2?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 169 by jbozz21, posted 05-07-2013 12:08 AM jbozz21 has not replied

  
Meddle
Member (Idle past 1271 days)
Posts: 179
From: Scotland
Joined: 05-08-2006


(1)
Message 193 of 193 (698835)
05-09-2013 9:43 PM
Reply to: Message 144 by jbozz21
05-03-2013 11:20 AM


Percy, humans have always have had the ability to digest lactose. I think what your refering to is the adult human's ability to. We are born with it and then loose it after we stop breast feeding. We stopped loosing the ability as adults when we started drinking other animals milks, mainly cows. So that is not new information just old genes that don't get turned off.
You talk of this as if changes in regulation of genes is unimportant, yet in multicellular organisms it is of fundamental importance to how species evolves. As a general idea consider the skeletal structure of tetrapods, whether it's a human, bird, lizard or amphibian. The basic structure is the same, but it is through changes in gene regulation that allows this basic structure to be adapted, so for example an arm becomes a wing.
It can also be seen in human evolution with the gradual increase in brain capacity from Australopithecus to Homo Sapiens (a picture of this was posted recently but can't remember if it was this topic or another). So consider Human Accelerated Regions. These are regions that are highly conserved, the example in the article is HAR-1 which is a 118bp section which only has 2 nucleotides different between chickens and apes. But from apes to man, this region acquired 18 mutations. What is important is that this region includes part of two non-coding RNA genes which are expressed in the brain during foetal development in the telencephalon, and in adults throughout the cerebellum and forebrain. So this change in expression of regulatory genes could have precipitated the evolution of our brain.
Another 48 HAR's have also been identified and many of these have also been associated with neurodevelopment.
Edited by Malcolm, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 144 by jbozz21, posted 05-03-2013 11:20 AM jbozz21 has not replied

  
Newer Topic | Older Topic
Jump to:


Copyright 2001-2023 by EvC Forum, All Rights Reserved

™ Version 4.2
Innovative software from Qwixotic © 2024