Darwin in the Genome

I must confess this isn't the direction I hoped this thread would take. I expected that PB and Dr. Caporale would engage in a longer dialogue. Dr. Caporale said that non-random mutations fit within a Darwinian framework, thereby disagreeing with PB's views on their origins. PB has ignored this but keeps painting a picture that attempts to make it seem like Dr. Caporale supports his views, like mentioning areas of inconsequential agreement such as the impact on phylogenetics and expressing support for her book. I would have liked to see a discussion about the origins of non-random mutations, which is the primary area of disagreement that evolutionists here have had with PB.--Percy

The significant issue is the causative agent of NRM. Dr. Caporale argues it fits within a Darwinian framework, while you, other than repeating your initial premise, have suddenly clammed up. Why are you replying to me and not Dr. Caporale?--Percy

I believe Dr. Caporale is probably waiting for a reply to her Message 41. She doesn't use the reply button that's at the end of messages, so perhaps you didn't notice it.--Percy

The frustration is well understood, but giving vent to it? Well, that's understandable, too, I guess, but it can make it hard to tell which person in a debate is the rational one. If you really have the evidence on your side then you don't need the help of sarcasm and disparagement.--Percy

I look at it like this:Let's say there's a debate between two people where one person has the facts on his side and the other does not. Let's say you're the person whose position is unsupported by the evidence. Your strategy is thereby dictated by this fact. Since you can't argue your position based on the facts, you have to find another approach.Initially you hope that your opponent is a poor debater who doesn't have command of the facts available to him, but when you find that he's able to forcefully make his points and support them with evidence you decide you have to go to plan B. So you begin a campaign intended to encourage confusion and frustration. Since you can't win the debate on the facts, the best you can hope for is that your opponent will "lose it," leaving you to seem the sane and rational party. At worst it's a draw because the audience becomes so confused it can't tell who is winning the debate.Moral of story: just because the other side doesn't play fair doesn't mean you have to play right into their hands. There are various ways to counter an obfuscative style, and they all require staying tightly focused on the topic under discussion.--Percy

Hi Peter,I'm still curious about how you reconcile this... ...with Dr. Caporale's statement in Message 3 of this thread: --Percy

But you've been claiming that Dr. Caporale's book overturns NDT, which is incorrect and misleading. What you must instead say, if you're at all interested in accuracy, is that adding your insights to the information in Dr. Caporale's book overturns NDT. Dr. Caporale's book by itself does not support your conclusions, and Dr. Caporale herself is on record as rejecting them.On a side-note, it may just be me, but even after reading your GUToB thread in the Welcome, Visitors! forum I can't say I understand it. We just discussed this in another thread. It was described in detail for you how even simple point mutations can add information to the genome. See Message 166 of the Where is the evidence for evolution? thread in the Evolution forum, to which you replied, "In accord with GUToB rule 3. I forgot about rule and prediction 3." If even a simple point mutation can add information, then most certainly more complex mutations such as gene duplication can. To deny this would be akin to saying you can fill a barrel with water using an eyedropper but not a bucket. Since duplication is only one of the processes by which unique genes are thought to arise, such a conclusion would be faulty. If you do a search on peter borger posts that mention "alpha actinin" or "alpha actinins" you'll see that all you did was claim you demonstrated this in some letter, after which you simply claimed that you'd demonstrated it. You've never actually made the argument here at EvC Forum. Until you present your information here, I can't even guess what phenomena you're talking about.Added by edit:Went through the search list one more time and found your actinin explanation in Message 28 of the scientific end of evolution theory (2) thread in the Evolution forum. From what I can tell it didn't receive much discussion. Unsupported assumptions necessary to your conclusions are:

• 10^-9/nucleotide/year neutral evolution rate
• Only point mutations contributed
• The gene was neutral from its inception
• Is the gene really neutral, or does it compensate for deactivated ACTN2 genes or some other gene?

And that list is probably incomplete - Scott should take a look.Anyway, it may turn out that you're able to provide the necessary support for these assumptions, but until you do so your conclusions are premature.--Percy[This message has been edited by Percipient, 02-18-2003]

Just asserting that you're correct is scant justification. Why would I concede a point that hasn't been made? And whose opinion should we give greater weight - the author of the book or the reader of the book. In general one must give pretty sizable weight to the author's opinion, wouldn't you agree? Especially since you're given to making unsupported assertions, leaving us nothing upon which to question Dr. Caporale's opinion of her own book, not to mention our own.The worth of your ideas is measured by their power to persuade others, not by how unshakably you hold them yourself. You're going to have to explain that one. It *is* on track, because you're quickly turning GUToB into the most common word on the board. If you're going to keep saying "GUToB explains this" and "GUToB explains that" then it would be helpful if you could explain your theory in terms understandable to others, because I'm sure that most people have very little idea what you're talking about. What you said before was that it was in accord "with GUToB rule3" (whatever the heck *that* is). Changing your answer is fine, but this new one is just a bald assertion. As I've already explained, since a base substitution change can cause a unique allele to arise, and since the allele can be expressed in the phenotype, and since allele's represent information, therefore base substitution mutations give rise to new information. That and more, but this means that you accept that your statement, "if we find only one family not in accord with this view, we know that it is false," represents faulty logic, and since this is the basis for your claim that you've overturned NDT, the claim falls apart. First, I don't have the letter, so to me it says nothing. Perhaps it's time to provide a link to it again.Second, I don't understand the rest of what you said. You say it as if you believe it represents a logical progression, but I wasn't able to follow it. Perhaps you could try again. Since there is no conclusion to be reached from a letter not answered, I don't understand how this constitutes a meaningful response. The point I was making was that your supposed actinin evidence that you tout at every opportunity (you're also making "actinin" a very common word on the board) not only isn't conclusive but is very weak. It is up to you to provide the support for your assertions, not others.--Percy

Hi Peter, welcome back!There were a few issues that were raised before your brief absence that you haven't addressed.In Message 131 Scott says that he thinks your statement about alpha actinins ignores published literature, for which he provides a reference. I also addressed the actinin issue in Message 135. PaulK provides additional argument in Message 133. They all point out different ways in which your alpha actinin evidence doesn't support your premise.In Message 132 Scott pointed out the false logic you use to reach your conclusion about how novel genes originate. I also pointed out the same thing in Message 135.Concerning the unanswered letter, you mentioned it in Message 126 to support your actinin argument, and the point made in my Message 135 was that no conclusion can be reached from an unanswered letter. Scott was merely making the same point in Message 136. The bottom line is that you still haven't provided any rebuttal to the arguments pointing out the weaknesses of your actinin evidence.And in Message 137 Adminnemooseus has some requests concerning bringing some focus to discussion of your theory.--Percy

I think the thread is still on topic. Dr. Caporale's book deals with NRM, and NRM is the primary justification Peter Borger cites in support of his GUToB theory.But you're right about the topic being badly wounded. Some participants seem more interested in posturing than discussion.--Percy

So many fallacies packed into so little space. No one is claiming that common descent is free of NRM. You're issuing a valid defense, but it's of a challenge that wasn't made. It is your claim that the presence of NRM invalidates the ToE that is being challenged, and which you seem unable to defend. Hence you defend that which was not challenged and ignore that that was. It does not matter whether we can convince you or not. What is important is that the ToE is the accepted theory of the vast majority of scientists working in evolutionary biology, while your views seem to be confined to you alone. In other words, the explanatory power of the ToE has convinced many, while your view has convinced only you. By this measure your proposals fall far short of the ToE. Science is tentative. There is no way to permanently exclude all but one possibility. You are incorrect to state that the scientific method includes such a requirement. The extraordinary claim is that which is out of the ordinary. Since the ToE is the ordinary everyday theory accepted by most scientists and described in all textbooks and supported by mountains of evidence gathered over a couple centuries, it is therefore your claims that are the extraordinary ones and require extraordinary evidence.--Percy

It's hard to escape the feeling that you're being purposefully evasive. No one here, except you, is proposing anything other than the standard ToE, which you can find in any textbook on evolutionary biology. There is no need for you to wait for PaulK's personal "evo vision," because there is no such thing. We're all waiting for some convincing evidence or argument supporting your views, but about the best you can muster is bald assertions with no supporting evidence or argument, such as this: And evasive non-sequiturs like this: Why can't Peter Borger muster any defense of his views? Must be metaphysics.--Percy

Sure you're the evasive one. The theory of evolution is clearly stated in literally thousands of books and has been reiterated here many times, yet you have yet to clearly state your own theory. All we get is weird statements like, "which = GUToB rule 3". No one but you has any idea what that means. It seems that your goal is to avoid discussing your ideas by forcing discussion into attempts to get you to discuss. The reality is that Dr. Caporale contradicted you. She clearly stated that NRM fits within a Darwinian framework, which is the opposite of what you believe. This has been pointed out to you many times, yet you keep repeating this statement that clearly isn't true. If you could make a convincing case that Dr. Caporale somehow inadvertently supported your view you would have made it by now. And NRM. Its an area of ongoing research that grew out of the discovery some time ago that there are genetic "hot spots" in the genome where mutations are more likely, and that environmental stress tends to increase the mutation rate in certain genes. Your opinion that NRM represents a challenge to modern evolutionary theory reflects an ignorance of both history and the current state of research. You've misunderstood. There is no such thing as "PaulK's personal 'evo vision'" because he has doesn't have a "personal 'evo vision'". He accepts the same theory of evolution that the rest of the evolutionists here accept. Unlike you, we haven't all gone off and formed personal theories. On the contrary, you avoid discussion as much as possible and just make substanceless assertions. For instance, you replied to the citations PaulK included in his Message 133 with this in your Message 151: The above is nothing but the long way of saying, "Aw, those guys don't know what they're talking about," but nowhere do you provide any evidence or argument or even say anything that hints that you might know what *you're* talking about. This isn't discussion, it's argument by aspersion and the fallacy of ad hominem. No I didn't forget. It contained a repeat of your misstatement about evolutionary theory and didn't seem worth addressing. Specifically, you said: As I've already pointed out, NRM is already part of evolutionary theory. You can find it in evolutionary textbooks. Just look in the index of a book on evolution under "hot spots". It might be a sub-heading under "mutation".A further note on the same subject. I don't understand why you keep repeating a statement so obviously false. You yourself can look in a book on evolution and find discussions of NRMs, yet you insist here that they are not part of evolution. I've just pulled out one of my own books on evolution, Evolution by Monroe W. Strickberger, and on page 215 it says, "Also, in some instances specific nucleotide sequences cause increased mutations among adjacent nucleotides. Such 'hot spots of mutation' may act by coiling the DNA molecule in ways that influence DNA polymerase enzymes to produce replication errors. The replication accuracies of polymerase enzymes also differ; some strains carry enzymes that are apparently more prone to produce mutational errors than others."In other words, you are clearly wrong to state that NRM is not part of evolutionary theory.--Percy

We've been over this before. In cases where common descent was established through only a single gene then NRM might be a significant factor, but as you increase the number of tracking genes NRM rapidly decreases in relevance as a possible factor.The power of your ideas lies in their ability to persuade others. So far you're not persuading anybody of anything except that you like to make unusual claims, like that even though the author of Darwin in the Genome is on record as saying NRM fits within a Darwinian framework that she somehow supports the opposite. Or that NRM isn't part of evolutionary theory. Or that "evolutionism is a non sequitur." (whatever "evolutionism" is)Evolution is the better theory because of its power to persuade, which it does through it's ability to successfully explain evidence gathered over the past couple hundred years and to make successful predictions.Your theory isn't really a theory at all, but merely the idea that NRM has been a much more significant contributor to evolution than currently thought. Plus it adds more questions than it answers. For example: What is a "morphogenetic field"? What is a "creaton"? The stuff on the Internet about morphogenetic fields is New Age nonsense, for example: "Empower and heal the body, heart, spirit using sacred geometry and the Language of GeoTran." And the only place that Google finds "creaton waves" on the entire Internet is here at EvC Forum in messages posted by you.What can you tell us about "morphogenetic fields" and "creatons"?--Percy(Edit explanation: In quoting Peter I erroneously corrected what I thought was a spelling error, changing "creaton" to "creation". I changed it back to "creaton", and added a comment about it in the text)[This message has been edited by Percipient, 03-04-2003]

All we're asking is that you address the issues. My message contained nothing complex and nothing that calls for a "massive counter attack." To summarize:

• Dr. Caporale disagrees with you. Repeatedly claiming her as a supporter cannot make it true, and only makes you seem immune to common sense and logic, which naturally hurts your cause.
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• NRM is already part of evolutionary biology.
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• The evolutionists here all accept the same theory of evolution. We do not each of us have our own "personal 'evo vision'", to use your words.

Our "outdated views on life", as you call them, are just mainstream evolutionary biology accepted by thousands of professional scientists in this field around the world. The consensus of the many is how science neutralizes the biases of individuals, and consensus is something you lack. In order to develop that consensus you need to develop arguments that attract rather than repel followers, and for that you need evidence tied together with logical arguments that are consistent with the real world. Mere posturing, like calling existing views "outdated" and evolutionism a non-sequitur, combined with made up things like MPG, GUToB, morphogenetic fields and creaton waves, and an elusive debating style, do not lend an impression of cohesion and rationality, prime requirements for developing a consensus.--Percy[Correct spelling. --Percy][This message has been edited by Admin, 03-05-2003]