But not all of them. It’s interesting that even the most hardened creationists who have exposure to some science still cannot quite bring themselves to rule out the possibility of a beneficial mutation. Here’s Sal:
Much (not all) the heterozygosity and alleles were created and thus differences were strategically positioned to not cause functional compromise and most of the mutations thereafter are rare variants and slightly damaging.
So if most are slightly damaging then a few are beneficial. And if a few are beneficial then even fewer will be highly beneficial.
It’s not just Sal, but many IDCreationists seem to allow the possibility that a mutation may occur that is beneficial. Indirectly, of course, usually similarly phrased to the above. I don’t even think most of them know they are doing it.
So, Sal et al. What is it that is stopping the tiny number of beneficial mutations that you unwittingly admit happens spreading in a population? As presumably what you give with one hand you take away with the other. There must be some other mechanism preventing that, otherwise you are basically agreeing with the evilutionists. That is the topic of this thread.
Go team!
phoodoo,
If you can’t say something sensible, say something.
That’s true. And a couple of times they were even almost the same.
Well, Ok, if that’s your strategy.
I’d like to ask phoodoo: if we observe a certain allele getting fixed in a population at a rate significantly greater than neutral, how would you explain that?
Well, I guess that depends.
If we let Allan decide, he might call that a detrimental allele becoming fixed, because, well, that’s his prediction. He also might call a neutral mutation beneficial, or a detrimental mutation beneficial, or a neutral mutation detrimentally beneficial.
But he wouldn’t say that has anything to do with fitness, because then he would have to reveal the secret of what fitness means.
So I have no idea what you mean by neutral.
I think it’s pretty straightforward. Alleles are passed to the next generation by their carriers by means of reproduction. If an allele is neutral, the rate at which it gets fixed is predictable. Why would an allele get fixed at a much greater rate if not because it provides a reproductive advantage? how else could it beat the odds?
phoodoo,
I think you credit me with way too much influence. I don’t inform the usage in population genetics, I reflect it.
The secret of what fitness means is closely guarded in textbooks freely available for as little as a couple of dollars. I even offered to fund a charitable donation if you purchased one. I think 5 dollars was the sum. I actually did fund a donation on Mung’s behalf, even though I didn’t have to – he already had it. Such is the secret of fitness; we are steadfastly determined that you shall not be privy to it, by telling you what it is at every available opportunity, and inviting you to consult educational works.
What it doesn’t mean, in any of the Stonecutter Texts we guard so closely, is ‘whatever survives’. But you have no way of knowing that. None.
I’ll give it a try. An allele is neutral if it provides no reproductive advantage or disadvantage vs the predominant one. So if a new neutral allele arises in a population, the probability of getting fixed is 1 divided by the total number of alleles at that site. 1/N in a population of size N (haploid organism) or 1/2N (diploid)
dazz,
You have to be careful here. There is a frequency distribution. A neutral allele can be fixed at a greater or lesser rate than the mean expectation on any one run – neutral ‘expectation’ is the mean of the frequency distribution. This, of course, will work phoodoo into an apoplectic victory jig, with much play on who is actually doing the ‘expecting’, because of the lack of perfect knowledge that inevitably results from stochastic process.
Allan Miller,
I still remember the good old days, when Allan used to use his sports analogies, to tell us the winner wins isn’t circular, its just true. I think at the time he was using that analogy to refer to fitness, but that was then. Who knows what the analogy really meant.
phoodoo,
Ah, still faux-bamboozled by the colloquial associations of multiple meanings of the term ‘fitness’, I see, even after all this time. Well, I had a go at dumbing it down.
That’s evolution destroyed by obtuseness, then. How are you going to spend the rest of your day?
Yes, I understand this will follow a normal distribution, right? According to wikipedia the average fixation time is 4Ne generations, where Ne is the effective population size. So I guess the question is what’s the standard deviation? Back to google…
Not a normal distribution. If you think of mutations as rare, random, discrete events … I’d think Poisson (?).
Wow. Well said. 🙂
What I had in mind was a binomial approximated to normal. with p= 1/4Ne to model the probability distribution of how many generations it takes to fix a neutral allele.
But that doesn’t seem right, because the probability that it gets fixed in a few generations is literally 0
dazz,
Mendel’s Accountant by Sanford and Sons simulates Kimura’s famous equations quite well. Maybe someday they’ll make their latest freely available as the old versions are retired.
Exact formulas for the distribution of fixation times when starting from one copy, and conditioning on ultimate fixation, are not known for the Wright-Fisher model of genetic drift. For any one finite value of the population size
you can set up a 
matrix for the transition probabilities, calculate its entries numerically, and from that derive the numerical values of the distribution of times to fixation, conditional on fixation. They are not Poisson. They cannot be binomial since that has an upper bound.
Even when making the approximation of the process by a diffusion process, a very accurate way of approximating it, the equations are not solvable. We do have good approximations for the mean fixation time for the process when it is conditioned on fixation.
To get a rough idea you could try my lab’s teaching program
which can be downloaded from
http://evolution.gs.washington.edu/popgen/popg.html
Is this the one? https://sourceforge.net/projects/mendelsaccount/
Thanks Joe. The meaning of those parameters are gonna take a while to grasp, LOL
I should add that the theory for stochastic processes of gene frequency change, conditioned on ultimate fixation, is to be found in Warren Ewens’s excellent book Mathematical Population Genetics. I. Theoretical Introduction (Springer-Verlag, 2004) especially sections 2.12 and 4.6.
In reading it, I didn’t promise you easy going.
And (some) creationists will have us believe that there are no mathematical models in evolution, heh
Yet we all know that it’s the fit ones who survive and that the survivors are the fit ones. And the more that survive the fitter they are. Probably.
Selective breeding.
But first, how did you determine which alleles were neutral and therefore being fixed at the neutral rate?
But if it’s not neutral, the rate at which it gets fixed is not predictable?
Silly dazz. How do any of us beat the odds? By getting lucky, of course. And that’s evolution. The theory of lucky-ducky.
*sigh*
That’s what population genetics is. Mathematical models. It came from mathematicians. It sure didn’t come from real biologists.
dazz,
Dazz,
I’ll have to ask John Sanford. I’ll back to you about it. Thank you for your interest.
Sal
Mung,
Jeez, another one. Squirt out a paraphrase that is completely wrong. Evolution destroyed, dusts hands, time for din-dins. How evolution withstands these surgical attacks, I shall never know.
I guess we will never know if its wrong until someone opens the secret vault and shows us what fitness really means.
I don’t think any of us should hold our breath waiting for Oceans 14 however.
phoodoo,
I’ve told you what it means, I’ve told you where to look for cross-verification of that in freely available public resources, and still you insist that it is a closely guarded secret and your pathetic paraphrases are the best you can do in the circumstances.
It appears there is an enormous celestial reward awaiting those who can be the most obtuse. God’s sitting there in his ‘Go, phoodoo!’ gimme cap and foam finger as we speak.
Which time? When you made the runner analogy about the best runner is the winner?
Which definition are we using today? Its Thursday.
phoodoo,
Gah, you can’t even remember that right. Hallowed Be Thy Obtuseness.
Go, phoodoo!
dazz,
I would urge people to beware – I downloaded a virus when I tried to have a squint at his work.
Well, you are one to talk, you can’t even remember what definition of fitness you supposedly gave last. Because if you could, you would probably just state it, instead of whining that you have many times, in some alternate universe…
phoodoo,
Are you trolling me, phoodoo, perchance?
Allan Miller,
Asking for your definition is trolling?
Is it stored in the same place as the theory of evolution?
Are you trolling keiths?
I was going to say that phoodoo is a case study, but the truth is that he’s no different than your run of the mill creationist
phoodoo,
We are indulging a pointless derail
Allan Miller,
Asking to clarify the definition of fitness, in a thread about mutations is derailing?
It really pains you to give that secret away, huh?
So if you really don’t want to give what current definition you are using, but continuing to say-“Hey, that’s not it” you shouldn’t reasonably expect not to be called on it.
So I will just repeat the last definition I remember you giving. Winners win. Survivors survive.
Omagain, when you talk about beneficial mutations, which give the owner a reproductive advantage, or you referring to things like tongue rolling, male pattern baldness, near nearsightedness? Things like that?
Are these some of the beneficial mutations you are talking about?
Shh… Don’t tell Allan.
Mung,
Mung let the cat out of the bag!
The best cats get let out of the bag, because the definition of the best cats are the ones who get let out of the bag!
Mung,
Hang on, phoodoo was telling me that that was his recollection of my most recent definition of fitness. So surely I should not be surprised?
Mung,
Oh, hang on again, I decided to bold another part of the quote.
Now, that looks awfully familiar. Perhaps phoodoo or Mung would like to comment on this approach to fitness, since the author of Improbable Destinies is the authority du jour? Is he in fact saying ‘what has most offspring has most offspring?’. Or ‘what survives survives’?
I am not wholly convinced of the reading comprehension skills of either Stadtler or Waldorf.
Allan Miller,
That’s your problem Allan, its saying the same thing. If all we are counting is numbers, then it is by definition impossible for detrimental mutations to become fixed, or numerous.
So baldness is fitness. Near-sightedness is fitness, being able to roll your tongue is fitness, getting cancer is fitness.
That which is fit survives, that which survives is fit.
phoodoo,
I thought you were saying I changed my definition daily? Yet I’ve been saying the same thing all along?
That’s not the case, because evolution is stochastic. Sto-cha-stic. So, a detrimental allele may become fixed, due to that stochasticity, and clearly a beneficial one may be lost. That, indeed, is what Sanford’s whole case is about. The case that you swallow whole, while decrying the entire approach that underlies it. Not for the first time a Creationist supports the conclusions of a methodology he doesn’t believe in. It’s my daily chuckle. Go tell Sanford how much bother he could save himself if he’d only pretend to be incapable of comprehending the concept of fitness instead of working with it.
One only has to imagine an organism with perfect eyesight being hit by a rock, and its myopic neighbour surviving, to see the idiocy of your interpretation, a definition no-one uses. That’s the idiocy of your interpretation – your own personal take on what the definition means. No-one else’s. Well, maybe Mung’s, because the cellophane wrapper on some of his books seems awful tough to prise off.
Funnily enough, I do have reservations about the concept of fitness, in some instances. But not for stupid semantic reasons – I do, at least, know what it is.
My ‘Evolution of Sex’ thread was substantially based upon my dubiousness at the validity of the common representation of sexuality and asexuality in the same terms as an allele within a recombining population, and the correct choice of stance for the beneficiary of the ‘reward’. But, those arguments are subtle and not, I suspect, for the likes of phoodoo.
Allan, there you go again.
It doesn’t matter if its stochastic, it doesn’t matter if its because of selective breeding, it doesn’t matter if its because of a hurricane, if the definition is those that survive (reproduce, whatever Allan) then mitigating factors are irrelevant. All factors are irrelevant. Those that survive are beneficial.
Fight it all you want Allan, you are still wrong.
phoodoo,
And yet Sanford uses that, and the textbooks, likewise, say otherwise. There is an extensive literature on the fixation of deleterious mutations. NOOOO! How can that be? Well, it could be that phoodoo is talking shite again. Yeah, let’s go with that.
Allan Miller,
Allan, if you say the definition of a horse is any animal with four legs and a tail, then I show you an animal with four legs and a tail, and you say, no that is not a horse, a horse is not like that, the problem isn’t me.
All of your objections in the world are meaningless, as long as we are using English.
phoodoo,
The basic problem is a curious reluctance to understand on your part. You have to admit the possibility – I hope you’re sitting down and not in a public place when you read this – that you could be wrong.
I am merely a conduit from the textbooks to yourself. I accept any failure on my part to convey that information accurately, but in view of your unwillingness to verify this directly, and your bizarre insistence that I change what I say yet always say the same thing, we are where we are.
How do you reconcile these two things:
1) Evolutionists always define ‘the fitter’ as some tautologous variant of ‘that which persists’.
2) Evolutionists frequently discuss the fixation of deleterious alleles, and the loss of beneficial ones, complete with equations, simulations, or real-world data.
Is your response to say that 2 is a lie? That they can’t sensibly say that because their own definition must make 2 impossible? Perhaps they don’t use the definition you insist they use. Perhaps – perish the thought – phoodoo may have got this wrong?