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Author | Topic: Exposing the evolution theory. Part 2 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: The distinction between how the system is built and how it becomes IC doesn’t seem that great to me. And I am explaining how a non-IC system can become IC.
quote: A system with a non-essential part is not IC therefore it is a non-IC system.
quote: Changing a non-IC system into an IC system seems to qualify to me.
quote: Of course there is nothing wrong with changing functions, so long as it doesn’t break the system. And let me remind you that you were insisting that the parts don’t need to be “finely tuned”, just to work with each other. Indeed, it might change by becoming more finely tuned, or losing a non-essential part of its function, or gaining an additional function.
quote: And I tell you again that it is only the feature of being IC that is of concern.
quote: I’m going to repeat a question I asked you before. Do you know when a scientist first suggest that evolution should be expected to produce IC systems ?
quote: In other words you can’t conceive of a non-IC system.
quote: No plausible route that Behe could think of. Sadly for him, the flaw was in his thinking.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: Indeed. But since I was only describing the basic algorithm I still wasn’t making any assumptions about the landscape.
quote: Now you are making assumptions.
quote: No, it’s not. It’s quite possible that RNA-based life was using proteins before DNA-based life existed.
quote: Of course I was referring to an actual example of an overlap. It’s interesting that Axe’s chosen example isn’t isolated, isn’t it ? If overlap is so rare what is the probability against that ?
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: Which only means that they are non-IC systems.
quote: No, you only wish I was getting hung up in your semantic games. Remember we are talking about part of the system, just one that is not essential. Which is necessary for the system to be non-IC.
quote: There’s a perfect example of not using a definition properly. An IC system cannot have non-essential parts. But we are talking about a non-IC system! Which is not an IC system, and so cannot fit the definition of IC !
quote: And that is the way - by losing the “fluff”. No I do not have to start with an IC system. If I did you would immediately declare my argument a failure - or you would if you had the sense to realise it.
quote: Not if the original function was still performed. Adding an extra function is fine, modifying the function in a way that keeps the essential elements of the original function is fine.
quote: That is really your problem
quote: By which you mean “without having a working system” ? Or can you tell me how it is possible to have a working non-IC system without a minimal subset of parts that would adequately perform the necessary functions of the system.
quote: I didn’t ask about mentions of irreducible complexity. I mean that idea that evolution would produce irreducible complexity. Seriously, if the theory predicts that there should be some IC systems around Behe’s argument is in trouble.
quote: Which means that you can’t imagine a non-IC system. Too bad.
quote: The whole point is that it is the indirect paths. Don’t forget that evolution works without foresight. It doesn’t care about constructing systems, all that matters is what works now. One of the problems in Behe’s thinking was that he didn’t see that.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: That is, of course, why Axe’s response to Hunt is so inadequate, on isolation. Hunt looks at reality, Axe simply invents an “analogy” without any comparison to reality.
quote: You do realises that that is the probability of a single - specific - mutation ? Hill climbing doesn’t help there. It isn’t even applicable.
quote: Except that hill-climbing does help accumulate useful mutations. More, cases where one very specific mutation is absolutely needed are rare.
quote: This is a change of subject, to one where very little is known for sure. I will point out that the translation of DNA to protein goes through RNA. Whether the original replicating RNA formed naturally or evolved from a simpler predecessor is unknown, but both are possible.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
It’s better than you think, Ned.
Behe originally argued that two mutations were needed to get any resistance. When it turned out that only one was needed to get some resistance and the second improved it, the odds of evolution succeeding in getting both went way up. And that is because evolution is basically a hill-climbing search (to the extent it is a search).
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: I don’t because Hunt’s statement was not restricted to that and the rest of it is consistent with what I’ve seen in other sources. Axe didn’t dispute it either.
quote: I am not suggesting that there is one single group and I wouldn’t expect there to be. However I am sure that there is a lot of overlap. Consider the existence of gene families quote: Not to a single mutation, as should be obvious. The advantage is in accumulating mutations.
quote: There is one (neutral) mutation that seems to be required, but there are several known routes to achieving resistance in combination with it. Summers et al (2014) quote: It certainly does. That is why evolution works better than a random search.
quote: The problem for you is that hill-climbing algorithms can and do work. So long as one of the perturbations (mutations in evolution) finds a higher point it can move on. There is no need for the perturbations to automatically find a higher point and it is not a problem if many do not.
quote: That is a failure of logic on your part since the inverse includes the case where many mutations will do, and that makes it better for Darwinian processes.
quote: No, I don’t. I can live with unknowns. So long as it is the case that we do not expect all proteins to be related your point is answered.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: That is what the movement in sequence space equates to. Or if you want details it’s natural selection keeping successful variants (in the simplified version).
quote: “What is being searched for” is not closely related to the search algorithm. Evolution search’s for improvements in fitness - in the current environment. I’ve already explained how hill climbing differs from random search.
quote: And that leads us to the point where you would need numbers to say anything useful. Numbers you don’t have,
quote: No, I’m hinging my point on there typically being a number of mutations that would do rather than one particular one. Which is what I said in the first place.
quote: No it is the point you are trying to divert from. If we don’t expect all proteins to be related then we should also expect there to be groups of related proteins that may well be isolated from other groups - at least so far as evolution is concerned. I don’t need to explain the rest because THAT is irrelevant. We don’t know how it happened but by the evidence we have, it seems more likely that we somehow got from RNA life to proteins and DNA. And I don’t expect to know without a lot more research - if it is even knowable this late in the history of life. It is a complex problem and evidence is hard to come by.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: Since improvement in fitness is success (and performing a useful function or doing it better will often improve fitness) natural selection will automatically tend to keep successful variants. And the probability of variants in sequence appearing is the probability of a mutation occurring which I am sure you can look up. (And in the long term evolution may have “tuned” that probability, so it may not be completely true that natural selection can’t affect it)
quote: It’s true. After all you imagine a random search rather than a hill-climbing search for evolution but still searching for the same things.
quote: Nope, I already have explained. But here it is again. A random search simply picks points in search space at random. A hill climbing search explores points around the a location in search space until it finds a “higher” point, whereupon it moves to that point and starts exploring around there.
quote: So I gave an explanation of a hill climbing algorithm that is clearly distinct from random search. And you can’t see how that relates to evolution since I used general terminology and you can’t see how it relates to evolution. Even though it is pretty simple. The fact that you keep wrongly equating evolution to Natural Selection isn’t helping you either. To put it simply mutation varies the sequence of a gene - that is perturbing a parameter.
quote: No. The perturbations are random. The search process is more than that,
quote: In a random search the next sequence tried could be anything. Mutations do NOT completely randomise the genome at every generation. But that is what you would need for it to be a random search.
quote: The random search does not use feedback in any way to help it choose the next point. A hill-climbing search does, as I have explained.
quote: I think you need more than one example to justify using it as a general probability.
quote: Nor does it dent the confidence in evolution explaining a great deal of what is observed in biology. Evolution has always required some initial state which it cannot explain - and the earliest life has left so little evidence that any explanations involving it will tend to be highly speculative at best. So really the point doesn’t change a thing.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: As I said before, the mutations are just the perturbations, it’s the overall movement through sequence space that matters, and Natural Selection is a major factor there.
quote: Evolution does not have a target as such. There is no end state, other than extinction - which evolution works against.
quote: The descriptions are very similar, although that just means that random search isn’t so bad. At least that version of random search.
quote: I’m certainly not talking about morphing anything I’d consider the landscape. Evolution works on the whole genome, so selecting a random point in the space would be selecting a random point for the whole genome.
quote: It certainly manages new proteins and IC structures. I see no reason why it can’t manage body plans. Granted the theory could do with improvements, such as integrating better with developmental biology, but there doesn’t seem to be any reason to abandon it, rather than augmenting it, for anything in its scope.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: When that happens - and it does - there’s no movement.
quote: We’re only talking about search insofar as it relates to evolution. And evolution doesn’t have a target. If you want to talk about aspects of search that are irrelevant to evolution then you are trying to change the subject.
quote: And “random search” - in that sense - isn’t very random and should be quite effective.
quote: A purely random search would. And would be ineffective because it has to search large parts of sequence space and can’t even capitalise on near-misses.
quote: It should be obvious. Evolution produced examples of those things.
quote: I’ve yet to see a good reason to think that if can’t.
quote: More importantly you cannot infer that it can’t.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: What you are essentially doing is stating a logical truth. Which can be known with 100% certainty. You could try to nitpick that but I don’t see how you could do it without undermining your claim. Unfortunately that’s really not what science is about. Science is much more about the empirical world. And in the actual empirical world you can’t have absolute 100% certainty that you’ve rolled a die or that it’s a “regular dice” or that it has landed with one of it’s six sides up. Cartesian doubt can’t be overcome so easily.
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