Rebuttal To Creationists - "Since We Can't Directly Observe Evolution..."

ringo:

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What does "Department of Medicine, USA" mean?

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You will have to ask the publisher. When they inquired what kind of work I did, I told them "Primary Care Physician". I'm glad to see that you pay attention to details. Let's see if you can do that as well on the math. I doubt it based on your previous performance.

Your math has been done to death. I'm more interested in your disdain for science and your unwillingness to discuss it.

Kleinman:

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Let's see if you can do that as well on the math.

ringo:

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Your math has been done to death. I'm more interested in your disdain for science and your unwillingness to discuss it.

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What science could ringo want to talk about, fossil tea-leaf reading? We are certainly not going to get an explanation of the physics and mathematics of the Kishony and Lenski experiments from ringo. Aren't any of the other C- team out there going to give it a shot? Or are we going to see the Sixth Extinction set in on the EvC forum?

The Crown thinks not.You have shown, again, like the last time we talked, your understanding of the experiment is bogus, your mathematics is bogus, and your conclusions are ... well ... bullshit.A couple years ago you were adjudged bogus by this site but you were supposed to go get published again and achieve the accolades of your peers. Obviously that didn't work.You just can't get the recognition your brilliance deserves. Your peers rejected you so you seek solace in trolling us mere mortals at EvC. Your trying to recover your injured pride.Taq and Tany and nrw and I wish I hadn't started this cuz now I'm going to miss someone, have all taken you down, again. I'm not inclined to continue your game.But, since the subject came up ...... if you think evolution will save the human species from climate change then, again, you misunderstand that it is evolution that will kill us. Our unfitness to the new environment will, not could, but will cause our lineage to dwindle in our ever more toxic environment until the last human chokes or roasts to death. Our species cannot adapt faster than we are changing this environment.There are 8 billion separate human genomes spread in a great diversity. That's a lot of material to work with. But my crystal ball assures me that, with the environment we seem to be headed toward, if anything evolves from that pool then it most certainly will not remain H. sapiens.

Kleinman:

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Won't random mutation and natural selection work things out?

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AZPaul3:

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But, you being a religionist with your bag of dysfunctional math books can't comprehend that anymore than you could basic genetics.

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I said you were too stupid to understand and I thank you for the verification.

Kleinman:

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Perhaps you will come down off your throne and explain the physics and mathematics of the Kishony and Lenski experiments?

AZPaul3:

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The Crown thinks not.

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That figures, the crown thinks not. Any other on the C- team want to give it shot explaining the physics and mathematics of the Kishony and Lenski experiments? The Sixth Extinction descends upon the EvC forum. Nothing left but some fossils with soft tissue.

-30-Have you ever thought of giving up with this nonsense for a bit and contributing to other discussions? I'd be interested in what your twisted logic comes up with. Lots of math opportunities for you to mis-model.

For a guy who claims not to know what a Gish Gallop is he sure uses a lot of the same arguments, with his own twists, and even the exact same phrases as most the other creationists.It's like they shot their wad a decade and more ago and none of them has been able to come up with new material.Meanwhile on our side, I love the molecular work that's being done on insects the last couple years. Whole genome sequencing and gobs of grad students entering the field is starting to give us an unprecedented view of insect phylogeny, and lots of new studies of Odonates, too!

Yes. You've mentioned it several times in a perjorative sense but you seem to be afraid to discuss it.

Kleinman:

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Nothing left but some fossils with soft tissue.

AZPaul3:

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-30-

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AZPaul3, no one is interested in the score you got on your last math test.

AZPaul3:

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Have you ever thought of giving up with this nonsense for a bit and contributing to other discussions? I'd be interested in what your twisted logic comes up with. Lots of math opportunities for you to mis-model.

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Tell us all about your training and experience doing mathematical modeling.

AZPaul3:

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I'd be interested in what your twisted logic comes up with.

Tanypteryx:

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For a guy who claims not to know what a Gish Gallop is he sure uses a lot of the same arguments, with his own twists, and even the exact same phrases as most the other creationists.

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We got Taq's twisted logic on the fixation of multiple adaptive alleles simultaneously and saw how far it got him in explaining the reproductive fitness advantage that humans have over chimps. Tany, when are we going to see your twisted logic on the subject? All you have to do is explain the physics and mathematics of DNA adaptive evolution, biological competition, and random recombination. I hope that doesn't overwhelm you.

Tanypteryx:

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It's like they shot their wad a decade and more ago and none of them has been able to come up with new material.

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It just goes to show you how difficult it is to explain physics and mathematics to laymen and biologists.

Tanypteryx:

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Meanwhile on our side, I love the molecular work that's being done on insects the last couple years. Whole genome sequencing and gobs of grad students entering the field is starting to give us an unprecedented view of insect phylogeny, and lots of new studies of Odonates, too!

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I wonder if any of your students will be able to explain why combination pesticides suppress the evolution of pesticide-resistant insects. First, the teacher needs to learn that. Did you know that insects are complex, multicellular, sexual replicators?

Kleinman:

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What science could ringo want to talk about, fossil tea-leaf reading?

ringo:

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Yes. You've mentioned it several times in a perjorative sense but you seem to be afraid to discuss it.

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I've talked about fossil tea-leaf reading. The Lenski and Kishony experiments demonstrate that each adaptive evolutionary step (adaptive mutation) requires about 1/(mutation rate) replications. For a mutation rate of 1e-9, that's about a billion replications for each adaptive step. You should be drowning in transitional fossils. And if you are interested in the mathematical reason for this, it is the multiplication rule of probabilities.

Wow, really? Thanks for letting me know!Too bad you are not as knowledgeable about evolution. You're still begging for the C team to explain high school freshman math to you and you can't even get anyone other than yourself to cite your papers. You should probably stick to counting bacteria.

You have neglected to consider the rate of fossilization. I mentioned that a long time ago. Compared to the vast number of organisms that have lived, the number that have been preserved is vanishingly small.I also mentioned that, strictly speaking, ALL fossils are transitional, not just the obvious ones like archaeopteryx.And I also mentioned that even ONE transitional fossil would be sufficient to demonstrate that there was a transition.So your calculations about mutation rates are not really relevant to the supposed scarcity of fossils. Even IF your calculations are correct, you still lose.

Kleinman:

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Did you know that insects are complex, multicellular, sexual replicators?

Tanypteryx:

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Wow, really? Thanks for letting me know!

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You are welcome, I'm here to help clear up your confusion.

Tanypteryx:

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Too bad you are not as knowledgeable about evolution. You're still begging for the C team to explain high school freshman math to you and you can't even get anyone other than yourself to cite your papers. You should probably stick to counting bacteria.

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Pay attention, it is the C"-" team. The grade you get when you barely pass your survey of mathematics and survey of physics courses. And if you want to learn how adaptive evolution works, you had better learn how to count whether you are talking about bacteria or any other kind of bug. Taq has now learned how to do that accounting and he bugged out.

Kleinman:

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You should be drowning in transitional fossils.

ringo:

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You have neglected to consider the rate of fossilization. I mentioned that a long time ago. Compared to the vast number of organisms that have lived, the number that have been preserved is vanishingly small.

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How many T Rex has ever lived and how many fossil specimens exist of T Rex? Then consider that each adaptive step (mutation) in a lineage requires 1/(mutation rate) replication, for a mutation rate of 1e-9, that's a billion replications.Consider this thought experiment. You have a population of reptiles. In that population, a lineage starts the evolutionary process into a bird specie. Initially, that reptile doesn't produce any feathers but some member gets a mutation that would transform a scale into a feather. That subset of the population with that first mutation has to replicate about 1/(mutation rate) times before there is a reasonable probability that a new variant will have a second adaptive mutation to produce feathers. For a mutation rate of 1e-9, that's another billion replications. That lineage must do 2 billion replications for the first two adaptive mutations to occur on some member of that lineage. That process must go on for each adaptive mutation in the coding genes and the portion of the genome that controls the expression of those coding genes to cause the correct differentiation of the stem cell to form these feathers in the correct position at the correct time. Toss in recombination in this process if you want but it will still take hundreds of billions if not multiple trillions of replications to do a few hundred or thousand adaptive evolutionary steps. And you want to argue that none of these vast number of transitional variants exist in the fossil record.

ringo:

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I also mentioned that, strictly speaking, ALL fossils are transitional, not just the obvious ones like archaeopteryx.

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You are confusing the concept of diversity with a transition. The idea that humans and chimps can transition from a common ancestor in a billion replications each to two new species does not make mathematical sense. A billion replications are barely enough for a population to diversify slightly. Otherwise, the over 7 billion people on earth today could form multiple different species just in our generation. In reality, there is only diversification. Populations diversify, and transitions occur on lineages. You should study the Markov model I wrote for the Kishony experiment and perhaps this would make better sense to you. And fossils are a snapshot of the dead, you don't know whether they had offspring or not.

ringo:

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And I also mentioned that even ONE transitional fossil would be sufficient to demonstrate that there was a transition.

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There are dozens of T Rex fossils, an apex predator that couldn't have existed in large numbers, yet one fossil of some strange extinct life form out of the multiple billions of replications for adaptive evolution to operate is enough to convince you that a reptile lineage can evolve into birds? Save that argument for naive schoolchildren and biologists that haven't studied introductory probability theory.

ringo:

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So your calculations about mutation rates are not really relevant to the supposed scarcity of fossils. Even IF your calculations are correct, you still lose.

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ringo, you still aren't getting the significance of these calculations and the results of the Kishony and Lenski experiments that substantiate these calculations. Adaptive evolutionary transitions are a very slow process even when under ideal conditions of a single selection pressure acting at a time. When you have events that occur at the frequency of the mutation rate (such as adaptive mutations), it is going to take a lot of random trials to give a reasonable probability of one of those adaptive events occurring. And the random trial for adaptive evolution is a replication. It doesn't matter whether you are talking about bacteria evolving to an antibiotic selection pressure or starvation selection conditions, or reptiles adapting to some selection condition, or humans and chimps adapting to their environmental conditions. This is a mathematical fact of DNA adaptive evolution. You must interpret the fossil record in the context of these mathematical facts, otherwise, you are just storytelling.