Punk Eek for Redwolf

redwolf, Eldredge & Goulds formulation of PE is indeed marred by their insistence that PE be associated with cladogenesis, from an evidential perspective, at any rate. It is also true that there is no fossil evidence of cladogenesis being associated with evolutionary rate change (hereafter ERC). This is sciences problem with strong PE.Your claim that PE is to be proved by a lack of evidence is a horrific distortion. The lack of evidence of cladogenetic ERC is appealed to because of allopatric small populations & the low chance of fossilisation. No one other than creationists & yourself would so grossly misrepresent the case as to allege that the lack of evidence is purported to prove the case. It isn't. Gould would have loved palaeontological evidence of cladogenesis being associated with ERC, I'm sure!However, there is plenty of evidence of anagenetic rate change, or weak PE, if you will, in the fossil record. Globoritalia plesiotumidia (Malmgrem et al. 1983). See also volume changes in the genus Calciolispongia (Teichert 1949) for two examples. There are many others. This is patently false. Accelerated fixation of alleles does not require inbreeding. It requires a smaller population size &/or a stronger selective pressure.The attraction to a cladogenetic ERC is that it involves small populations, & that new variation can be fixed (or eliminated) rapidly by dint of a small population size (located allopatrically in a new environment with different selective pressures).PE appeals some/all of the following; the founder affect, accelerated fixation & elimination of alleles, & different selective pressures relative to the parent population (regardless of whether speciation has occurred or not). PE IN NO WAY "AMOUNTS" TO INBREEDING!!!! Nope, weak PE, even Gouldian PE for that matter, just requires changing environments, & potentially changing population sizes to shift the balance of selective pressures & get the new variation fixed faster."Tiny peripheral groups"? You overstate the case, however; cats, rabbits & rats; see below. Most evolutionary radiations occur after extinctions against what Andrew Knoll calls a "permissive ecology". That is, many niches are unoccupied because of extinction, allowing the colonisation of habitats to occur by organisms against much less competition. This does occur in real life.Man has introduced VERY small populations (cats, rabbits & rats) to locations that never had them before, & they have done very well. They managed to "beat" the competition, that's three examples of small populations being enormously successful off the top of my head. This also occurs in real life. Both of which falsify your point.Regardless, anagenetic ERC doesn't require allopatry. Indeed, many examples of ERC in the fossil record happen in the same geographical location. Firstly, there is nothing to stop larger numbers of any given species spilling over from one habitat to another, they just need to be able to interbreed & have different selective pressures. Interestingly very, very small numbers of any given species seem to do very, very well when introduced by man to a foreign environment. Cats, rabbits & rats! The fact that this has been observed falsifies your point. Um, they did exactly that, & I've noted the salient points above.ERC is observed in the fossil record. It may not be as Eldredge & Gould envisaged it, but there is a raft of palaeontological evidence in support of it.Mark

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"Physical Reality of Matchette’s EVOLUTIONARY zero-atom-unit in a transcendental c/e illusion" - Brad McFall

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.I'll also point out that there is another recently active excellent (IMO) "Punk Eek" topic at Rate changes for evolution.Adminnemooseus[This message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 04-21-2004]

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WHERE TO GO TO START A NEW TOPIC (For other than "Welcome, Visitors!", "Suggestions and Questions", "Practice Makes Perfect", and "Short Subjects")Comments on moderation procedures? - Go to
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3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.

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Nope, weak PE, even Gouldian PE for that matter, just requires changing environments, & potentially changing population sizes to shift the balance of selective pressures & get the new variation fixed faster.

That being the case, i.e. if Gould and Eldredge's theory does not require the new creatures produced by PE to spread out and overwhelm older herds, then we should still observe vast herds of pleistocene creatures with handsfull of modern animals penned up in tiny "peripheral areas".The basic problem with PE, as with any version of a theory of evolution, is that it requires limitless sequences of probabilistic miracles, and the only difference with PE is a difference in the KIND of probabilistic miracle.Now, a reasonable person might yet listen to a theory which required one or two probabilistic miracles to have occurred in the entire history of our planet, but NOBODY should listen to or want to hear about a theory which stands everything we know about mathematics and probability on their heads and requires that basic mathematical laws be INVERTED.That's the problem.Aside from that, there's still the problem of providing a mechanism for PE type changes and the creation of entirely new kinds of animals with new organs and new basic plans for existence, and your claim to have provided such by dropping a name rings rather hollow. In fact a google search on "anagenetic ERC" turns up exactly nothing and an unbiased observer would assume you'd invented the term.Moreover, your claim that man introducing cats, rats, and rabbits into new areas and their surviving only indicates that globally adapted animals are globally adapted, and is in no way a refutation of the principal I'd noted, i.e. that globally adapted animals generally win out over locally adapted ones, i.e. that the first time ordinary cats, rats, dogs etc. are introduced to one of Darwin's island paradises, the exotic animals tend to get wiped out and that's a fact which is in stark contradiction to Gould and Eldredge's punk-eek idea.

An unbiased observer wouldn't rely on Google for specific scientific knowledge, but rather, would actually perform a search of scientific literature:Comparative evolution: latent potentials for anagenetic advance.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...
{Added title, shortened display form of URL to restore page width to normal - Adminnemoosues}Just wondering if we can expect you to be this intellectually lazy throughout your term here.[This message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 04-21-2004]

redwolf, Why can't the Pleistocene extinctions have been due to non-biological factors? You are assuming that organisms must become extinct because of biological reasons alone. The "herds" you mention may have become extinct because the climate changed & their habitat vanished. The new habitat being subsequently recolonised by other critters. Nonsense, & you know it is. Beneficial mutations have been observed, hell, even new operons have been observed to evolve in the lab (Hall 1982). The actual number of mutations that were culled before a beneficial one comes along is not a probablistic miracle. Nor is a probablistic miracle for a second one to come along that facilitates the function of the first. Increased enzyme efficiency requires this & it is well studied.It would be more of a probablistic miracle to not get the beneficial mutations. Like I say, these multiple beneficial mutations have been observed. Rubbish. This is like saying a miracle occurred because two cars whose registrations are X590 1DZ & G790 7WE followed on from each other. The odds of this are (26*10*10*10*10*26*26)^2 = 30,891,577,600,000,000 : 1. Praise the Lord!! After the event reasoning.You assume that entire sequences have to appear in situ. They don't. If they did you'd have a point. Mutations are retained or culled by natural selection, they don't all occur at the same time. You are basically equating PE with saltationism.An analogy; consider the number 12345678900987654321. The chance of me rolling a 10 sided die for each loci & getting the correct no is 10^20:1. Effectively impossible to do in my lifetime. However, if I get to throw away the wrong numbers & roll again, whilst retaining the right ones the whole proposition becomes much more likely. I could do it in about half an hour. So much for a probablistic miracles. Let's keep those goalposts right where they were, please.We are talking about PE, not macroevolution. They are different things. That's because I DID invent the term, I abbreviated "evolutionary rate change" to ERC for the sake of brevity in my last post. Not only that but I gave two cites to support my claim. I can give you more if you want, it just didn't seem necessary to swamp you with cites. Maybe it is. Anagenetic means in a single lineage, which juxtaposes with cladogenetic, which in this context means one lineage splitting into two. How on earth can a "globally" adapted organism be introduced into a new habitat? There is no such thing. Perhaps you mean organisms with a large range? Regardless, cats, rats & rabbits are NOT found everywhere, even when there is no geographical reason for them not to be.The original points were, that you claimed that tiny populations were unviable, I showed they were not.You claimed "tiny peripheral groups" could not conquer vastly larger groups. I showed they could, or at the very least didn't have to.Mark[This message has been edited by mark24, 04-21-2004]

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"Physical Reality of Matchette’s EVOLUTIONARY zero-atom-unit in a transcendental c/e illusion" - Brad McFall

For the benefit of newcomers to this thread, the original post went thus:The big lie which is being promulgated by the evos is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion. There isn't. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be voodoo and Rastifari.The dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

God hates IDIOTS, too!

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:

Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now:

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OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....

You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.But it gets even stupider.Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

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1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be
proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the
missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed
that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was
proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn't
BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the
logic they used to teach in American schools. For instance, I could
as easily claim that the fact that I'd never been seen with Tina Turner
was all the proof anybody should need that I was sleeping with her.
In other words, it might not work terribly well for science, but it's
great for fantasies...

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2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of
genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw
Deliverance...

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3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger
groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like
requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions
of years.

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4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically
adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are
globally adapted, which never happens in real life.

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5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal
to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in
overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the
heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few
thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter,
a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and
it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out
over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into
one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the
salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:

The don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"

They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:

ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!

Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?Splifford the bat says: Always rememberA mind is a terrible thing to waste; especially on an evolutionist.
Just say no to narcotic drugs, alcohol abuse, and corrupt ideological
doctrines.

The original points were, that you claimed that tiny populations were unviable, I showed they were not.

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You claimed "tiny peripheral groups" could not conquer vastly larger groups. I showed they could, or at the very least didn't have to.

What you conveniently ignored in so doing is that, while something like that might happen here or there, and very rarely, you cannot base an entire theory of the origins or our present biosphere (like punc-eek) upon such a notion because, in the overwhelming majority of cases as I note, geting penned into a "peripheral area" DOES make a population of animals unviable or at least reduces its viability in a major kind of way (as in the case of the heath hen), and the globally adapted creatures (like dogs) DO win out and prevail over locally/perochially adapted creatures (like the tasmanian wolf which perished after dogs were introduced to its habitat).The problem is that evolution, regardless of stripe or flavor, demands that we stand everything we know about probability theory on its head and believe that, whenever any sort of a question of the theories of Chuck Darwin of Steve Gould come up, the laws of probability get stood on their heads and reversed.

I love it when people get snotty about their strawman arguments. It's pure comedy gold.

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"As the days go by, we face the increasing inevitability that we are alone in a godless, uninhabited, hostile and meaningless universe. Still, you've got to laugh, haven't you?"
-Holly

I love it when creationists think that they are capable of making probability arguments.

quote:

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The problem is that evolution, regardless of stripe or flavor, demands that we stand everything we know about probability theory on its head and believe that, whenever any sort of a question of the theories of Chuck Darwin of Steve Gould come up, the laws of probability get stood on their heads and reversed.

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Can we see you make the necessary calculations to show that everything we know about probability is reversed? Probability is mathematics, so if you are going to make a statement about probability you should be able to show us the calculations. Or reference your source. I mean the source that actually does the calculations; I don't want to hunt down some obscure creationist tract only to find that they simply say "according to probability theory" without doing the calculations, either.

quote:

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The problem is that evolution, regardless of stripe or flavor, demands that we stand everything we know about probability theory on its head and believe that, whenever any sort of a question of the theories of Chuck Darwin of Steve Gould come up, the laws of probability get stood on their heads and reversed.

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What training do you have in probability and math? You seem to have trouble applying probabilistic models to real life occurences. Assuming you know poker, imagine if I had to be dealt a flush (in five cards) in order to go to the next round. Any flush will do. After numerous deals, I get a 3, 5, 7, 8, and Queen of clubs. Aha, I pass to the next round. But someone in the background yells "Cheater!". They claim that the odds of me being dealt that exact hand are astronomical, so I had to be cheating.So lets step back. All I needed was to be dealt a flush. However, the person yelling "cheater" misconstrued this and claimed that I won with an impossible hand by pointing to the impossibility of getting a 3, 5, 7, 8, and queen of clubs. With beneficial mutations, there are several possible mutations that will result in an increase in fitness. Therefore, before assigning probabilities, you must first show every possible beneficial mutation with respect to the environment, just like the person yelling "cheater" should have used the probability of any flush instead of a precise hand.Let's further this analogy. I am now in the second round. What I need to advance is a straight (not a straight flush mind you). After severl deals, I end up with a hand of 3C, 4H, 5C, 6S, 7D. Again, the person in the back yells "Cheater!". This time he claims that it is impossible to get a flush and then a straight in two hands. Of course, he is ignoring all of the "misses" and the number of deals that preceded each winning hand. Not only that, but again he cites the very low probability of being given 3C, 4H, 5C, 6S, 7D. The odds of this happening are 1/52*51*50*49*48, for just one of the hands. Multiply the odds of me getting both hands and you get 1:97,266,140,375,040,000 or 1 in about 1*10¹⁷. Pretty poor odds, but what is missing is that I only needed a flush (much easier to get) and then a straight (much easier to get). You are doing the same thing, saying that ONLY THAT MUTATION could have lead to what we see today. And, that all of these mutations had to happen at the same time. This is not what evolution states, no matter how many times you say it. Evolution is the accretion, or the building up, of beneficial mutations. Just like the flush got me to the next round (any flush), so will a beneficial mutation. That mutation will become entrenched in the population until it no longer offers a benefice, such as a change in environment.So, for you to claim that the probability is to high for a certain organism to evolve, you must show us every single possible beneficial mutation (whether they happened or not). You must then show us how the current mutation rate in that organism can not account for the beneficial mutations that it does have. Of course, the hardest part is figuring out every possible beneficial mutation, but since you claim that it is impossible you must already know.

>What training do you have in probability and math?My university degrees were in math.In fact, on several occasions in the last century, symposia were held in which a number of the best mathematicians in the world attempted to explain the nature of reality to a number of the leading evolutionary biologists", and the later have been in a state of shock and denial since then. They don't seem to be able to handle it.

From the link: This old argument? Needless to say, I didn't bother to read further. I am sure that the mouths of the biologists weren't gaping due to shock - they were yawning.

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My university degrees were in math.

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So you are then aware of the mistakes that you are making?Again, you seem to be stating that the beneficial mutations observed are the only possible beneficial mutations. This is obviously wrong. For you to claim a low probability of these beneficial mutations happening, you must show how many possible beneficial mutations are possible in a given genome. You have yet to do so.

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In fact, on several occasions in the last century, symposia were held in which a number of the best mathematicians in the world attempted to explain the nature of reality to a number of the leading evolutionary biologists", and the later have been in a state of shock and denial since then. They don't seem to be able to handle it.

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Nothing more than a quote mining project. Science doesn't rest on the opinion of scientists, no matter how prominent. Science rests on evidence, of which your site is severely lacking. It does offer a few scant hypotheses which are testable. Lets go over those.From 2021, 10 "Murray Eden showed that it would be impossible for even a single ordered pair of genes to be produced by DNA mutations in the bacteria, E. coli,with 5 billion years in which to produce it! His estimate was based on 5 trillion tons of the bacteria covering the planet to a depth of nearly an inch during that 5 billion years. He then explained that the genes of E. coli contain over a trillion (1012) bits of data. That is the number 10 followed by 12 zeros. "So then we shouldn't see any beneficial mutations in E. coli. However, this is false. Not one, but three different mutations occured in one E. coli strain that resulted in a new pathway for lactose metabolism. From http://www.naturalselection.0catch.com/...daseevolution.html: "In this study, Hall deleted a gene (lacZ) in a type of bacteria (E. coli) that makes a lactase enzyme (galactosidase). This lactase enzyme converts a sugar called lactose into the sugars glucose and galactose. E. coli then use glucose and galactose for energy. One might think that when Hall deleted the gene that codes for the lactase enzyme that these bacteria would never be able to use lactose for energy again. However, when Hall exposed these mutant bacteria to lactose enriched growth media, that they quickly modified a different gene, which Hall named the "evolved -galactosidase gene" (ebg), to produce a pretty good lactase enzyme. Despite its being a different protein it had the same lactase function as the previous lactase enzyme." And notice I didn't have to include any ellipses, unlike your quote mining site.Next, we have this lovely statement from your evolution destorying site:"George Wald stood up and explained that he had done extensive research on hemoglobin also,and discovered that if just ONE mutational change of any kind was made in it, the hemoglobin would not function properly. For example, the change of one amino acid out of 287 in hemoglobin causes sickle-cell anemia. A glutamic acid unit has been changed to a valine unitand, as a result, 25% of those suffering with this anemia die."Hemoglobin C is a mutant form of regular hemoglobin. It does not differ in its ability to supply oxygen, but it does give it's carriers some immunity towards malaria. Hmm, a beneficial mutation in hemoglobin. Seems to rebutt what the author above was stating.I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Your authorities are either being misquoted or don't know what they are talking about.

>Again, you seem to be stating that the beneficial mutations observed are the only possible beneficial mutations.In real life, mutations all have names, such as Down's Syndrome, Tay-Sachs disease, cystic fibrosis etc. etc.Ever notice the women going door to door collecting money for the Mothers' March of Dimes? Ever notice that they are ALWAYS collecting money for research to PREVENT mutations, and not to CAUSE them? Think there might be a reason for that?In real life, there are no beneficial mutations; even the tiny few claimed to be beneficial invariably amount to information and complexity being LOST and not gained. All others produce things which either amount to diseases or candidacys for freak shows. For instance, from the Drudge site this very day:
The real world version on what mutations are.

This is an example of a beneficial mutation. This mutated version of the Apo-AI reduces the risk of arteriosclerosis. All of the probability calculations in the world cannot erase real-life data.