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Author | Topic: WTF is wrong with people | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
frako Member (Idle past 328 days) Posts: 2932 From: slovenija Joined:
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Yea its been fun watching you ignore everything we said, ignoring examples of mutations that you claim dont exsist, provided examples of beneficial mutations that you claimed dont happen. Even shown you how insane your statement is that evolution ends when you get to a certain point, because magically mutations (or as we call them additions of new genes, deletions of old genes, duplications of old genes, retro viral implantations, chromosome duplications, chromosome fusions ...) what stop happening i dont know you never said.
Christianity, One woman's lie about an affair that got seriously out of hand What are the Christians gonna do to me ..... Forgive me, good luck with that.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1466 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
It doesn't matter. All that could happen, as I just said, and it isn't going to do anything more than provide the stuff that gets selected and isolated to form a new "species" and that always requires losing genetic diversity, and that's where evolution comes to a halt, mutations or no mutations.
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frako Member (Idle past 328 days) Posts: 2932 From: slovenija Joined: |
It doesn't matter. All that could happen, as I just said, and it isn't going to do anything more than provide the stuff that gets selected and isolated to form a new "species" and that always requires losing genetic diversity, and that's where evolution comes to a halt, mutations or no mutations. You never explained how a mutation in child of the new species is not an increase in genetic diversity. this is where evolution continues . You have a new species filling a whole new nieche possibly outcompeating the old species multiplying and with every new member new mutations increase its diversity. why do mutations suddnely stop in this new species or what. Christianity, One woman's lie about an affair that got seriously out of hand What are the Christians gonna do to me ..... Forgive me, good luck with that.
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NoNukes Inactive Member
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Speaking as one of the 10 from 1966, I'd like to reassure my fellow rationalists that I am doing all I can to propagate the benefit. Or as my buddy Randy would say. I've got your benefit --- right here!Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.Richard P. Feynman 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
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PaulK Member Posts: 17825 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2
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quote: I think that we are all satisfied that you proved that there is something seriously wrong with you in those rants,
quote: Of course the problem with that argument is - and always has been - that it is necessary to also account for increases in diversity. Indeed, the mere existence of any increases in diversity is a challenge. When there are processes acting in opposite directions the final state is almost always a dynamic equilibrium. Indeed, given that we can justifiably conclude that evolution has gone on for hundreds of millions of years the reasonable position is that overall that balance has been achieved (although human activities may be driving diversity down in many species). You may object that you do not accept the timescales, but that would be a different argument altogether, and we are certainly entitled to accept solidly established scientific facts,
quote: Mutations represent an increase in diversity and as I point out above that is a serious challenge to your argument. I guess that in your world 5 + 3 - 3 = 2. Because that is essentially what you are saying. In the real world it is possible for an increase to counter a decrease and just insisting that it is absolutely impossible is silly,
quote: A decrease followed by an increase followed by a decrease is different from a decrease followed only by more decreases. That is not a difficult concept. As I pointed out the first time I you trotted out this argument it is necessary to take the increases into consideration. Simply trying to hand wave them away as irrelevant is an obvious falsehood,
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
Change in allele frequencies refers to POPULATIONS. And it used to be a major definition of EVOLUTION. You are completely correct. What you state is in fact the current definition of evolution.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.Richard P. Feynman 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
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NoNukes Inactive Member
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As usual everybody wants to add in mutations as if that would change this basic picture, but of course it wouldn't. Here is a place where you could advance your argument without even providing evidence. Just explain in detail why mutations don't change the picture without making yet another assertion. Because so far your answers when asked about this haven't been helpful. Or viable.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.Richard P. Feynman 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
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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Faith writes: No, I have no interest in pursuing the actual topic of this thread beyond what I said in my first response to it.... So I'm happy with my participation on this thread to this point and will probably wrap it up here. Okay, thanks Faith. For the rest of us it's time to take the data Faith has provided and see if it helps us answer the question of this thread, "WTF is wrong with people?" Naturally she cannot provide a full answer, but she is probably representative of a significant segment of fundamentalist mindset. I think it's important that we keep distinct Faith's beliefs about evolution, the techniques she employed to maintain them, and the psychology behind both of those. In my view this thread is about the psychology. The belief Faith focused on the most is that reduced genetic diversity leads to a type of speciation where there's a reproductive barrier but no genetic barrier, and further that this is the only type of speciation that ever really happens. She employed various techniques to defend this belief, which I list here:
Just like everyone else Faith wants to be right, and also just like everyone else Faith recognizes that knowledge of the facts is key to being right. But Faith is faced with the additional problem that only some of the facts are consistent with her position, so she has to ignore some facts. Faith deeply believes that she is a good person, that she isn't the type of person who would employ the underhanded debate approaches listed above, so she has to find valid reasons, at least within her own mind, for what she has to do to ignore inconvenient facts. She must believe that the facts contrary to her views are mistaken, or that they're not really germane. In many cases I think she doesn't understand the facts or their implications, and so believes they're not important. But I am mystified how she justifies running off like this every time she's presented with stark evidence of error. Speaking personally I can't count the number of times I've witnessed a discussion with Faith narrow in on a key point of error only to have her quit. I think this irrational behavior is driven by anger, because in the past her exits have often been accompanied by outbursts of insults and innuendo. She seems to have expressions of that anger under control now more often than in the past, but I nonetheless believe that anger is behind this latest exit. Fundamentalists do not come to their beliefs through evidence. For them it isn't evidence that holds primacy but belief. In their hierarchy belief is uppermost, while fact is subservient and malleable to be molded into a foundation of support for belief. --Percy Edited by Percy, : Grammar. Edited by Percy, : Fix typo.
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Tangle Member Posts: 9504 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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The exit - not just of Faith but of other fundamentalists I've argued with - is often straight to their blog to report how right they are and how wrong we are.
It's actually a retreat to the pulpit to preach to the converted; a safe harour beyond criticism. Another thing happens too, Faith's kind of belief requires not only a rejection of all the natural sciences, but also a re-invention of them for their own purposes. Seemingly they can't accept miracles, it must all have naturalistic explanations - just not those of science. But the hubris of it! How can any individual, with no formal learning of any of the sciences they're criticising, think that they can sit on their own at a computer and prove hundreds of years of science from literally millions of scientists in multiple disciplines wrong? Where does that kind of ego come from? Delusion is an amazingly powerful thing.Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1466 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Really, I've realized that most of my posts haven't been off topic because they are answering Frako's allegations.
You never explained how a mutation in child of the new species is not an increase in genetic diversity. It is but it won't counteract the loss of gen. diversity which is what is claimed. The loss is very great if we're talking about its only being a few individuals from the parent population that formed the new "species" with their greatly reduced gen. diversity as a population unto themselves, which was the case with that lizard example you gave. Also, mutations mostly just replace functioning alleles which isn't necessarily a good thing you know, and if you get one mutation that you want to call "beneficial" that would be an extraordinarily high incidence in such a small population, and so on and so forth. And again, you don't NEED mutations to get a new "species" because the new allele frequencies are quite sufficient to accomplish that. And again, even if you DID get quite a few useful ones, when they get selected AGAIN the genetic diversity will be reduced all the more and you'll have FEWER alleles, albeit supposedly NEW alleles, to form the next new breed or species.
this is where evolution continues . First of all, the idea of evolution "continuing" after such a drastic reduction in a population's gen. diversity needs to be recognized as a far cry from the usual evolutionist picture of continuous increases in gen. diversity as new species continue to be formed. At best you've got a big step back in gen. diversity and then mutations are going to come along and give you what, some very little step forward if at all, in a new addition or two to the diversity? And then if a new selection and isolation occurs you'll have further gen. reduction and so on. Seems to me in this one step forward one step back scenario the reduction always wins in the end. No amount of mutations could ever catch up.
You have a new species filling a whole new nieche possibly outcompeating the old species multiplying and with every new member new mutations increase its diversity. why do mutations suddnely stop in this new species or what. Well, you are implying that all these mutations are changing things for the better but in reality it is recognized that beneficial mutations are very rare for one thing, and again, to get a new "species" all you need is the new allele frequencies that are brought about by the mere fact that fewer individuals make up the new population. What you are picturing is a completely hypothetical scenario anyway. I've been pondering that video you put up back in Message 41 about the lizards because it's such a perfect example of just what I've been talking about in general, and it may be an opportunity to clarify some things about mutations too, I don't know. This is a typical case of evolutionists getting all excited about "evolution" while a creationist looks at it and says uh uh, just another typical case of microevolution, or getting a new breed from a relatively small number of individuals. You present the usual view this way:
So i cant place a few say 5 pairs lizards on an island and watch them evolve in to a different SPECIES (unable to breed with their ancestor species), because they will never be enough geneticly diverse to EVOLVE And you seem to think this would be regarded by creationists as a "miracle" too, but in fact it's exactly what we'd expect. What I've been arguing is that in order to GET evolution, that is, a new species characterized by new traits, you need REDUCED genetic diversity, NOT an increase as you are saying. Your five pairs of lizards microevolved due to their small numbers, which brings out new allelic combinations which brings out new traits. THAT is how those lizards formed a new "species" on their isolated island. If another ten had been taken out of the same original population and put on yet another island to inbreed you'd most likely have gotten a new "species" there too but with different characteristics because it would have had a different mix of alleles, that is, different allele frequencies. But that's not how evolutionists see it. Here's the video with Dawkins giving the usual explanation: The changes observed in the new lizard as compared to the original (assuming the original was still present on the original island and had not also evolved as they point out) mostly have to do with a larger head with a larger jaw that makes eating vegetable matter easier, and in fact these new lizards do eat more vegetable matter although they also eat insects as the original population did. They also seem to have a change in their digestive system that tends to go with a vegetarian diet. Now, Dawkins doesn't say exactly but isn't the usual evolutionist understanding of these things that somehow the ENVIRONMENT brought about the changes? But he doesn't say if there is either more abundant or more desirable vegetable matter on the new island; presumably it's about the same. Apparently there are also insects there so it isn't a dearth of that kind of food that drove the changes either. A creationist view of it is simply that the new allele frequencies brought about the changes in the lizards themselves, and since these changes are conducive to eating and digesting vegetable matter that's what they naturally do more of. It's all driven by the new allele frequencies brought about by the reduced genetic diversity brought about by the smaller number of individuals that originated the new population. Very straightforward, requiring no mutations. And of course although Dawkins is impressed that it only took 37 years for these new traits to be established in the new "species" this is exactly what would be expected of a new mix of alleles, and in reality it probably took a lot less than those 37 years to establish the new breed, but apparently nobody checked on them earlier to find out. All it should take is enough generations for all the individuals to thoroughly inbreed among themselves. In the laboratory experiment I described a while back, that would be designed to demonstrate the loss of genetic diversity from new breed/species to new breed/species, you'd now take five pairs out of the NEW population of lizards, put them on another lizard-free island with similar lizard food and let them inbreed for some number of generations and see if you get a new breed/species there too. One thing is certain, since the vegetarian lizard was formed from less gen. diversity than the original population, taking ten from it to form a new one is going to reduce that gen. diversity all the more and that SHOULD bring out new traits, or a new "species." I don't see any role in all this for mutations, or if they occur they'd be rather superfluous it seems to me. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1466 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Seems to me if you want to make mutations the big influence in this scenario you have to first calculate how big the population is going to have to become for a single beneficial mutation to arise, and what the effect of the other mutations that aren't so beneficial might be as well, because it seems to me they might succeed in interfering with this new phenotype. And then you'll have to figure whether a given beneficial mutation is dominant or recessive because if it's recessive it won't contribute anything to the trait picture until after a few generations of its being passed on. And then you have to calculate the odds of the new mutant allele's being favored among the others, selected for its particular trait. And so on.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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Faith writes: But that's not how evolutionists see it [speciation]. Here's the video with Dawkins giving the usual explanation: This error goes back to Frako in Message 41 where he claims the video is about speciation. It's not. Right at the one minute mark the video says that DNA analysis shows that the population on the new island was still the same species as on the old. The Dawkins video is about evolutionary change, not speciation. Frako was wrong to present it as an example of speciation.
And again, you don't NEED mutations to get a new "species" because the new allele frequencies are quite sufficient to accomplish that. But scientists don't believe a breed with all the same alleles as the parent species, just at different frequencies, is a new species, nor even a new "species", whatever you think putting quotes around it means, so you're wrong. And you *do* need mutations to produce a new species, because otherwise the daughter population has merely a subset of the alleles as the parent population, and DNA analysis would quickly reveal that they're the same species. So you're wrong again.
First of all, the idea of evolution "continuing" after such a drastic reduction in a population's gen. diversity needs to be recognized as a far cry from the usual evolutionist picture of continuous increases in gen. diversity as new species continue to be formed. Increasing genetic diversity is not what evolutionists believe is the driving force behind speciation. Descent with modification (involving both allele remixing and mutation) and natural selection are the driving forces behind speciation, so you're wrong again. --Percy
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
And you *do* need mutations to produce a new species, because otherwise the daughter population has merely a subset of the alleles as the parent population, and DNA analysis would quickly reveal that they're the same species. I don't think this is true. You do need mutations of course, but mutations are not timely. At any given time, there may be small numbers of mutants in the population. If the circumstances are that the mutants have no benefit over the main population in producing offspring, we get drift. At some point in the future, circumstances may change so that those mutations provide an advantage, and over time nearly all of the population or some isolated subset of the population will possess that mutation and others. However that does not make them any less diverse than any other members of the species prior to isolation. And of course mutation will continue to form in both species. Not only that, but there can continue to be some cross breeding between populations. Isolation need not be perfect in order for speciation to occur. At times we talk about evolution as if it happens as soon as beneficial mutation shows up. But the time of the creation of a mutation may be well distinct from the time the animals with that mutation actually have a survival benefit that allows selection to act. 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 believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.Richard P. Feynman 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
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1466 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Faith writes: But that's not how evolutionists see it [speciation]. Here's the video with Dawkins giving the usual explanation: This error goes back to Frako in Message 41 where he claims the video is about speciation. It's not. Right at the one minute mark the video says that DNA analysis shows that the population on the new island was still the same species as on the old. The Dawkins video is about evolutionary change, not speciation. Frako was wrong to present it as an example of speciation. Evolutionary change is enough for it to be about for my purposes in responding to Frako. But since you bring it up it seems to me that Frako got the right idea about it if the lizards can no longer interbreed with the former lizard population on the original island, which I thought was said, but maybe I'm misremembering. Inability to interbreed has been THE defining characteristic of a new species as I've understood it. Also as I've understood it speciation isn't really presented as something all that special. Wikipedia gives that familiar little chart that shows four different ways speciation occurs and all four of them have in common that they involve a smaller population being reproductively isolated from a larger. That seems to be the basic formula and that's certainly what happened with the lizards on that video. Then if you look up the definition of Speciation you'll find it described as two new species forming from a former single species. That begs all sorts of questions I'm not sure we need to get into yet. But it does suggest something closer to what you keep saying, that DNA analysis shows that the new species is clearly not the same as the former species. So let me ask: where do you get this information, please supply a source.
And again, you don't NEED mutations to get a new "species" because the new allele frequencies are quite sufficient to accomplish that.
But scientists don't believe a breed with all the same alleles as the parent species, just at different frequencies, is a new species, nor even a new "species", whatever you think putting quotes around it means, so you're wrong. Yet that certainly looks like the case in that chart of the four ways speciation occurs. However, I don't think a breed is a species either, of course, and the reason I put "species" in quotes is to show that I don't believe what scientists call a species is a species either. It looks to be a new variety that's formed by the usual isolation of a small number of individuals, that just happens to be unable to interbreed with the former population after some generations of inbreeding. Nothing different about HOW it occurs from how all the other kinds of varieties, breeds etc. occur.
And you *do* need mutations to produce a new species, because otherwise the daughter population has merely a subset of the alleles as the parent population, and DNA analysis would quickly reveal that they're the same species. So you're wrong again. Only if DNA analysis identifies any population formed in this way as a different species in very clear terms. Do you have a source for this?
First of all, the idea of evolution "continuing" after such a drastic reduction in a population's gen. diversity needs to be recognized as a far cry from the usual evolutionist picture of continuous increases in gen. diversity as new species continue to be formed.
Increasing genetic diversity is not what evolutionists believe is the driving force behind speciation. Descent with modification (involving both allele remixing and mutation) and natural selection are the driving forces behind speciation, so you're wrong again. I didn't say it is considered to be the "driving force" behind speciation or anything else. I was referring back to the discussion where people keep insisting that genetic diversity and phenotypic variation go hand in hand on down the supposed chain of descent from species to species without anything to stop microevolution from becoming macroevolution. I believe it may have been PaulK who made that equation somewhere back there, when he was so astonished at the idea that evolution or phenotypic diversity requires a reduction in genetic diversity. Allele remixing only occurs when you get a population split. Descent with modification either by allele remixing or mutation, and natural selection, amounts to the processes I'm describing, that form new phenotypes by reducing genetic diversity. Anything that selects and isolates a portion of a population has this effect: it creates new allele frequencies and if the population is small enough it creates a reduced genetic diversity, and this creates a new trait picture or phenotype that becomes population wide after some number of generations of inbreeding. Sure you'd need mutations if you ever really did get a new species, but most mutations are just substitutions for alleles that are part of the species genome and couldn't do anything other than vary that one trait for that species in any case. Seems to me you need some special kind of mutation if you're ever going to get speciation as you envision it. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
Allele remixing only occurs when you get a population split. What do you mean when you say allele remixing? So that you don't feel like I am setting you up, I'll tell you upfront that I think you believe that 'allele remixing' is a description of Mendelian genetics, and I maintain that 1) evolution has nothing to do with that and 2) you are not really describing Mendelian genetics accurately.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.Richard P. Feynman 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
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