I’m all in favor of mocking stupidity, and here’s something definitely worth mocking.
In arguing for evolution, author Alan R. Rogers appeals to the Nilsson and Pelger paper on how simple it is to evolve an eye. He writes:
If eyes evolve, they must do so often and easily. Could it really be so easy?
Dan-Eric Nilsson and Susanne Pelger have answered this question. They constructed an evolutionary story much like the one that I told above.
– The Evidence for Evolution. p. 42.
And what did he write about the story that he told above?
This story is of course a fabrication. p. 40
I’m serious! Can it get any more stupid than that?
Do evolutionists believe fabrications? When it comes to how to evolve and eye it would certainly seem so.
Man, and I thought my mocking had about run its course. But there seems to be no end to the stupidity of evolutionist arguments.
Keep fighting the good fight Rumraket!
What about the baby mice, where do they figure in?
Of course that is how they define it, as Joe keeps reminding us.
Only its a little more vague. SOMETIMES its those that exist, sometimes it those that will give birth, sometimes its those that can give birth, sometimes it is those that have already given birth, and sometimes it is those that have been birthed.
Any of those can be fit if you want. Depends when you ask basically.
They have a fitness first of zero, because they don’t exist yet, then 1 after they exist, then zero again if they don’t reproduce, then 1 if they could reproduce, and then 1 if they do reproduce, then 0 again after they die.
Its like spacetime, you can’t separate fitness from time. Fitness-time.
No, it does apply, just not in the way that caricature you made implies. It applies in the sense that the analogous concept is that a particular domino is both a cause and an effect. It was not intended to apply in the sense that natural selection keeps causing natural selection.
Though I suppose an evolutionary arms race could be an example of natural selection on both predator and prey causing each other in a cycle of positive feedback.
The cheetah became ever faster, more agile, more silent and sneaky in the arms race with the gazelle, which became faster, more agile, more vigilant and easily startled.
I don’t need to be a mind reader for that one. It’s so obvious when your arguments are so persistently catastrophically inane. As soon as we start talking about something else not really related to religion, you can be both lucid and sensible. We switch to evolution or the origin of life, or something else regarding religion, you’re straight back to a cognitive meltdown.
No you haven’t. lol
No I can’t do that because I don’t know. Not that such a number would have anything to do with what you said which inspired my reply.
Please give proper references to where you get the Simpson and Futuyma quotes.
If the assumption is that the improbable should only happen once, or not at all, then no there’s no flaw in that logic.
You keep getting basic logical reasoning wrong.
Still Buttmad about that one. Haha, oh well..
… are you okay phoodoo? That is unusually incoherent even for you.
I suspect the information they’ve been receiving is working it’s magic and the cognative dissonance is peaking.
After all, when you cannot answer a single question put to you but every single question you ask has a reasoned answer it’s got to make you doubt your commitment to that empty worldview that just does not do questions.
Their unconscious is panicking.
Mung,
And what conclusions does ID draw regarding the origin of eyes? Probable? Improbable? Something else? Were eyes designed?
Rumraket,
Hahaha! Phoodoo on phitness! Plus ça change …
Welcome back Allan!
dazz,
Ta very much!
in other words they become the existing population and that population has slightly different proportion of genotypes?
newton,
Fitness is an individual, not a population.
So what you are saying is irrelevant.
Why? You already know that I’m quote mining. I live in the US. I can’t be compelled to give testimony that might be used against me. 🙂
Welcome back Allan.
Cat toys!
Mung,
Thanks!
Please explain how the conclusion follows from the premise.
Eyes evolved independently many times.
Therefore, the evolution of eyes is not improbable.
Populations are the sum of the individuals, just like a global temperature is the sum of all the individual temperatures. You seem to be making the same argument that if it snows somewhere climate change is false.
Eyes were independently designed and caused to exist somehow many times.
Therefore the design of eyes is not improbable.
Does not seem very convincing either
How does one choose the most explanatory between the two?
LoL. Oh newton. Don’t do this to yourself. The last thing this site needs is another Rumraket.
So? Does that somehow increase the probability that eyes will evolve?
Everything is an eye. Therefore it is highly probable that eyes evolved!
Well, people certainly have unusual ideas about what fitness is! Just to get back to the example of two genotypes that I raised upthread, recall that in that case we had a simple life cycle in which newborn individuals end up surviving to adulthood (or not), and if they survive, having offspring. Genotype A had probability of survival 0.8 and expected number of offspring 2. Genotype B had survival probability 0.7 and expected number of offspring 3.
The fitnesses for those genotypes would be the products, 1.6 and 2.1. They tell is the expected numbers of newborns in the next generation for each newborn in this generation. Those in turn can be used to calculate the expected changes in gene frequencies. (If these are asexual organisms, genotype frequencies too). There’s more than a century of mathematical work in theoretical population genetics based on that, and adding in random mating, mutation, migration, and genetic drift. We can calculate things like the probability that a single copy of a mutant allele will rise to have its descendants be the entire population.
And no, phoodoo, just because every individual ultimately dies, fitnesses are not all zero. Wrong bookkeeping. And yes, Mung, fitnesses are just “a label we give to a numerical value”. So are masses, velocities, and, for that matter, all the numbers in physics, chemistry and biology. And as for causation, one can either say that all of the processes of life are caused by the relevant chemistry and physics, or one can conveniently summarize that by saying that the fitnesses are involved in causing the changes of gene frequencies. Doesn;t matter which approach you take, as far as I can see, and this not worth obsessing about.
Does that mean you agree with me that fitness is a label we give to a number? Because it sure looks to me like that’s how you are using the term just now.
So it’s neither a cause nor an effect.
Any objections? Speak now or forever remain unfit!
ETA: OOPS! LoL. Guess I should read the whole post before responding to just part of it. 🙂
Since I value your expertise, set me straight.
The question of this thread is not that.. But Mung wants to have some number on “how much of evolution is due to one or the other”. Not a well-defined question:. Do we count changes of gene frequency by genetic drift that make it go up and down by adding up the absolute values of the changes? Or do we count only the net change added up over time? Unclear when the question is posed the way Mung has.
Larry Moran also tends to ask such a question, and equally unclearly. If we come up with a fraction (say 85% of gene frequency changes are due to genetic drift), that number will reflect the very large fraction of DNA that is junk (yes, it is, no,, ENCODE didn’t disprove that). Does that then prove that there can’t be strong effects of differences of fitness in the nonjunk part of the genome? Any such number is ill-defined, and even when well-defined, hard to use to argue about individual parts of the genome.
If eyes evolved , the more occurrences of the event increase the probability based on the same number of trials. If eyes evolving is improbable does that increase the probability they were designed?
Seems unlikely.
If you sum up all the individual temperatures on earth you obtain the global temperature of the earth? Just think about it. Number one, it’s wrong. Number two, as an analogy, it fails miserably.
Yet Jerry Coyne claims that natural selection is the mechanism of evolution and the process of evolution. I guess given how he tends to get other things wrong I shouldn’t be surprised if he got that wrong too. I like your position better.
Mung,
A bit of a non-sequitur there, but we have an added problem here: our view of his understanding on this is filtered by your reporting. Are you sure Coyne says anything along the lines of viewing NS and evolution as one and the same?
Hmm. I wonder who wrote that.
No, Coyne doesn’t say that evolution and natural selection are the same.
But he does seem to think that modern evolutionary theory and Darwinism are one and the same.
Joe Felsenstein,
I see the junk DNA assumption being poorly supported because the assumptions of orthodox common descent and mutation rate are not adequately tested at this point in order to discount the ENCODE results. The accuracy and frequency of DNA repair should result in a much lower mutation rate then the junk assumptions. Although it is accurate to 10^10 and that would create some errors, those errors will be eliminated on the second pass during transcription.
Wat?
You’ve got this the wrong way around. ENCODE didn’t get any results that “need to be refuted”. Rather, ENCODE made claims their data cannot be used to support.
Please show your math.
Also, junk isn’t an assumption, it’s an evidentially derived conclusion.
Since you asked nicely.
The George Gaylord Simpson quotes are from The Meaning of Evolution.
p. 221, p. 174, and p. 171 respectively.
The Futuyma quotes are from his textbook, Evolutionary Biology 3rd Ed.
One reason for Darwin’s gradualism … p. 679
… the phylogenetic sequence of photoreceptor evolution… p. 683
Salvini-Plawen and Mayr (1977) estimated that … p. 683
The definition of fitness is from the glossary.
Mung,
All these weasel words. He ‘seems to’. If you define Darwinism as such, they are. If you don’t, they aren’t. If Coyne does either, he’s right as long as he’s consistent.
All these weasel words!
As the author of that, I’m surprised that you can’t see that “the primary force which causes evolution to be adaptive” is not a statement that it is the only, or even the primary, force in evolution.
After all, you’re the great word-lawyer.
For Joe F:
It would seem (with apologies to Allan Miller) that I missed my calling. But at least I am content where I am at. 🙂
I am quite sure Coyne does not know what the word “force” means.
There is absolutely no “force” within the observation of natural selection.
Joe’s posts have forced me to write this!