Share your experience, tips, advice, questions…
As it seems most communities world-wide are going into voluntary or enforced quarantine that involves staying at home and avoiding physical contact as much as possible, I thought we could have a thread where we could try a bit of mutual support by cheering each other up over the next few days, weeks, months… Who knows?
I don’t know: suggestions on films to watch, books to read, gardening tips, exercise ideas
Usual rules apply plus a guideline. Let’s be kind and supportive to each other.
My apologies, phoodoo, if I was unclear.
You asked why anyone would believe that multicellular organisms could mutate fast enough to overcome the rate at which bacteria change. [emphasis added]
Alan pointed out that no-one would think anything that stupid, and I pointed out why there is no need to believe anything that stupid.
My response began with an unwritten (but assumed)
“There’s no need to, because multicellular organisms’ responses are not limited to germline mutations.”
You may not be aware of this, but human beings are generally capable of mounting an effective defense against a novel pathogen in a matter of days; there’s no germline mutation involved. For example,…
Right.
Not evolution.
It was but one of a three-pronged attack on the idea.
What are we to call this mysterious process by which genetic change in bacteria gives them an advantage? 🤔
Two things.
1) Your original complaint was ‘why hasn’t the earth been overrun by flying flesh-eating bacteria’ and the answer involves predator/prey dynamics and innate and adaptive immunity.
Which things do evolve, albeit more slowly than RNA viruses evolve.
2) Some human beings will be unsuccessful in their efforts to mount a defence against a novel pathogen. To the extent that genetic factors (say ACE2 polymorphism) may impact survival rates, then the human population as a whole IS evolving to better resist coronaviruses. That is evolution. See?
Cue the predictable “that’s just microevolution but what about BODY PLANS????” in 3 . . . 2. . . 1 . . .
Kantian Naturalist,
Well, there’s a slightly smarter response, but let’s see if any of the resident IDists can come up with it. (Hint: if they do, I will mention cancer in response…)
You made more effort than me to engage with phoodoo. Masochist!
ETA not literally, of course!!! 😉
Kantian Naturalist,
I’m still unsure as to what qualifies as a “new body plan.”
I’m waiting, poised like a coiled spring, ready to pounce if anyone takes that gambit!
(Ooh I do like mixing my metaphors!)
I thoroughly recommend the Guardian on-line as a source of news and opinion not under corporate influence. a story I came across:
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/apr/02/how-money-heist-became-netflix-biggest-global-hit
induced a bit of déjà-vu. I mentioned balcony singing “Bella Ciao” a while back and whiled away a few moments checking various versions on Youtube. I liked this “flashmob” version by the Romanian singer Delia but was puzzled by the red boiler suits and masks. The penny drops.
“Viral evolution” is when the mama virus has sex with the papa virus and oops, hocus-pocus “descent with modification” something something.
Alan Fox,
I tend to go to the Guardian, but by Christ they paint a gloomy picture! You think I’m bad! 😃
Oh yeah, hilarious strawman, it’s just like that. Perhaps you’d like to join phoodoo in the search for a name for the mysterious process by which a genetic change in a pathogen enhances its net ability to spread.
Nonlin.org,
Would ya look at how well that strawman burns.
“Process”?!? I hear that “process” not only “enhances”, but also “diminishes”. Also brings you a cold beer and turns on the TV. Is there anything that “process” doesn’t do? Oh yeah. Making any sense is what it’s not doing.
Indeed. If one variant is increasing in frequency, it is inevitable that another is decreasing, since frequencies must add up to 100%. This is not controversial, surely?
A career in comedy beckons.
You should see what Benzer, Brenner and Barnett were able to do with virus sex. That’s how they figured out the genetic code was a triplet code…
The very thing that you are now arguing couldn’t happen, and the reason it can’t happen is because Jock says humans ALREADY HAVE DEFENSES against this so don’t need to evolve.
Haha.
Oh and because bacteria would be too fat!
What I’m arguing couldn’t happen is a bacterium, through natural selection, consuming the entire biosphere. The reason, in fact, being broadly encapsulated by the same term ‘natural selection’. It constrains moves in some directions for the bacterium (an argument central to ‘islands of function’, indeed, so accepted by many IDists), and operates in the other species with which it interacts, limiting its spread.
But you and nonlin don’t like that term. So when a pathogen mutates to enhance – or diminish – virulence, and that has the effect of increasing its frequency, what are we to call that? It’s not evolution, apparently (since evolution has no link to genetics, haha), so what is it?
I wonder about this. (I’m wondering about too bloody much at the moment). It’s easy (I guess – at least there are many examples) for those who believe in some higher creative power, some ultimate source of being (who/that is invested in producing humans – I guess a disinterested God would be a bit scary) to come up with stories to explain our existence.
Not having that option, I wonder at the disconnection, the gulf of mutual incomprehension, I sometimes see. Phoodoo’s “need to evolve” is one such. The need seems to be for humans to explain their existence. But a need to evolve? Where would that be?
Why do we have a need to explain our existence? What evolutionary advantage could that bestow? Perhaps it’s a spandrel?
Inexact reproduction? Natural slip-ups in duplication?
Bacteria, for all their limitations, have, as a category, been pretty successful in the process of existing – if we take biomass as a metric. I’ve posted the diagrams from this paper before but in case phoodoo didn’t spot it, biomass for bacteria is reported as 70 Gigatonnes. Animals, including humans, 2 Gigatonnes. But the biomass of all plants is 450 Gigatonnes.
Bacteria, then, are not as successful as plants as the bulk of that mass is on land and bacteria are limited to aqueous environments. Except plants are able to be so successful with the help of chloroplasts. Who gets the benefit and who needed whom?
What law of natural selection says that one organism can’t be so successful and replicate so fast, that no other organism can adapt before the one organism consumes every other form of life?
That is a law of natural selection? It is a prediction? Why?
Why can’t someone predict that this is exactly what natural selection would eventually evolve, one super organism that is too powerful for others to overcome before they are extinct? So now that this prediction is made, if it doesn’t happen, then it is one way to falsify evolution.
But your side seems to be woefully short on explaining what evolution can’t do, so nothing can falsify it. If humans can fight off every parasite without ever need to evolve a new defense, then now you are claiming evolution is magic. But then again, that has always been the claim.
Well, you might be right. Looking at the coronavirus live blog, I see a test for antibodies is still a way off.
The UK still does not currently have a reliable home test at the moment to carry out home blood tests that would enable people to know if they have had coronavirus, Britain’s health secretary has said.
Matt Hancock has been pressed in morning interviews on how many of the new UK target of 100,000 tests a day – up from much lower figures – would be composed of the blood, or antibody test.
Hundreds of formulas and details for proposed ways of doing the antibody tests had been sent in to the government by experts but a good enough one has not been found.
I think it is more to do with the laws of physics. The second law of thermodynamics, for instance.
Because there are physical and ecological constraints on resource acquisition. The branch of biology dedicated to its study is known as life history theory.
The creature you are describing is known as a Darwinian Demon.
ETA: I like how you always manage to ask interesting questions, but you should be aware that you are not the only one capable of asking tricky questions. Most of the issues you bring up have been addressed a long time ago, and some spawned entire research fields, so it pays to go look for answers yourself.
It’s not a law of natural selection, it’s constraint. Firstly, IDists are forever telling us how constrained protein space is. Secondly, I don’t know why natural selection, to be true, has to run away in one species at the expense of all others.
You are presenting a classic false dichotomy – as usual. Either NS is false or one species takes all. There is a huge middle ground.
So, if natural selection is untrue (because if true there would only be one organism on earth, heh heh), what are we to call the observed phenomenon in which pathogens genetically mutate to increased or decreased virulence?
Not a bad introduction, I googled there (Daniel Fabian and Thomas Flatt are very skilled people). Here is the money quote, I suppose:
Alan Fox,
There was a piece a bit back that bugged me. Outcomes in intubated patients were ‘only’ 50% survival, it trumpeted. I checked, and that’s pretty much the ballpark anyway in respiratory ICU – and there were far more, in the analysis, ‘still not dead’. Given different timescales for recovery and death, that stat looked like scaremongering. My daughter (my go-to expert!) concurred.
Corneel,
I think some consideration of biochemistry is required too. Our superorganism is imagined capable of digesting lignin and cellulose, despite being sated on human flesh. It can live aerobically and anaerobically, in both fresh water and salt at all ranges of temperature and pressure. And the only reason such an organism does not exist is that evolution is untrue! 😃
Corneel,
What you are describing, with your idea of constraints, is exactly the problem I have brought up before, about why the typical novel trait development story that evolutionist give is so flawed. The idea of constraints is just another way of saying trade-offs. So every time you select for one trait, you are trading off selection for another trait which might also have been beneficial. So when evolutionist make the claim that one small mutation to a small light sensitive patch would have conferred a slight survival advantage, and thus that allele becomes more prevalent, then you must also apply the same trade-off theory, and say that because you selected for one little trait, you didn’t select for an organism that was perhaps slightly faster than the organism that had the slightly more indented eye patch. This is why the trajectory of evolution could never be expected to progress, because each time you select for one thing, you trade off other benefits.
So since biologist want to use this argument for why you won’t get runaway successful organisms, then they should have to live with the consequences of such beliefs. But of course, we know how slippery the theory of evolution really is. Nothing can falsify it, because if you say it can’t do one thing, then you just make up a story about why it can do another. And the stories are of course just after the fact observations about what exists. Whatever exists is what evolution can do. What doesn’t exist is what evolution can’t do.
So you don’t really want to apply your “trade-off’ theory across the board, you only want to say it is so when it suits your argument. Trade-off is suddenly NOT a problem for more complicated features to evolve, because you can just say, well, time, or well, eventually it can still happen.
The idea of trade-offs is a trade-off. You only like it sometimes.
That’s your need. Its your inability to see that is your need that is the problem, not mine. I just look at the evidence. Animals have the ability to adapt without the need for the slow-ridiculous process of accidental help.
Why you have the need to dismiss the obvious is not my problem.
What about the effect of the change on its own subsequent progress?
phoodoo,
Constraints also exist in the available mutations. Natural Selection, to be true, does not demand that genomes be infinitely malleable. As I have said, that lack of malleability is an ID argument – which itself, if you did but know it, depends on natural selection. If some changes are penalised by reduction in spread, instead of increasing, that is simply selection against them. NS is a 2-way process: frequency increase is inevitably coupled with frequency decrease, because frequency always adds up to 100%
Where did you get the idea that the occasional fitness benefit of every mutation will be exactly balanced by a disadvantage in another trait? For example, why would the presence of a light sensitive patch not increase the total amount of resources that an organism can acquire, because your presumed cost to speed does not exist or is negligible?
Constraints only explain why fitness cannot increase indefinitely to produce the Darwinian demon you brought up, but it doesn’t imply that it can never increase.
Most students in the classes I taught accepted that 100% survival and immediate production of an infinite number of offspring would be slightly too ambitious for most organisms, whatever the reasons might be.
Corneel,
Look, this is the same point Nonlin has been giving you guys, that you all have tried to hand wave away, not successfully I feel. Its regression to the mean. Its why you don’t have runaway bacteria that are resistant to every antibiotic. Because when some do pop up, they have to trade-off other survival aspects. So the bacteria always end up reverting back to an ancestral stage. They certainly never become more than bacteria (which we should in fact expect them to if evolution were real) , and in fact they just become the same bacteria again, until they have a need to adapt again, then right back they will come.
The trade-off notion does not help your theory, you all don’t seem to get that.
If you select for eyes, you trade of for speed, or for height, or for better lungs or for a better heart, there are a million things you trade off each time you select for one. This just becomes even more improbable if you claim you are selecting for all good things, as if you really don’t belief the trade-off idea.
You bought into Nonlin’s “regression to the mean” nonsense? LOL.
Then, please tell us, because Nonlin was unable to: What mysterious force is pulling populations back to the mean? If it’s trade-offs, like you seem to be suggesting, that means you accept natural selection, right?
There are some pretty resistant strains out there. Which antibiotics are mean pathogenic bacteria resistant to, if any? What’s the infectivity of the average Coronavirus? Can you articulate the cause of the present global crisis without reference to genetics, population or otherwise?
Corneel,
Wrong, natural selection could never work as they claim, precisely because of the trade-offs limiting innovation.
Its why bacteria never evolve.
Not sure. Is curiosity necessary to existence? but I digress…
Well, the problem is simpler I think. It’s a failure to communicate. Is that a need; the ability to communicate? I can certainly see the advantages.
I’m struggling to take that at face value. You didn’t seem very interested in the research over tusk length and poaching regarding the African elephant.
They do? Genomes do change accidentally. It’s called drift.
Apart from the scoffing, what obvious evidence am I ignoring?
And the evidence you looked at to arrive at this statement?
And yet they do.
Here is how I read your argument:
When a bacterial strain acquires resistance to an antibiotic, it ALWAYS does so at the cost of something else. The benefit of the antibiotic resistance must outweight this cost, otherwise nothing would happen. Agree?
Then, when the bacteria encounter an environment free from antibiotics, the cost of the resistance forces the population back to its ancestral condition.
Is this a fair summary of your argument? If it is, then you have need for two episodes of evolution by natural selection: One where the bacteria acquire resistance, and one where they return to the ancestral condition.
You tell me who this ‘they’ are and I’ll go round and sort ’em out.
What do they do, then, when a genetic change results in a pandemic?
PS evidence of bacteria evolving!
@ phoodoo
Please watch the Harvard Medical School video, it’s only a couple of minutes.
When I watch it, I’m convinced the bacteria are undergoing genomic and phenotypic changes which allow some strains to survive stronger concentrations of antibiotic.
What do you think is going on?
Well, if you’re relying on infinite offspring as your clincher … 🙄