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!
How do I reconcile the fact that evolutionists contradict themselves? How do I reconcile that its poor science?
Gee, you make it sound as if this is the only time it has ever happened.
If the definition is “those that survive best” (and sometimes you agree it is and sometimes you argue that its not), then ITS IMPOSSIBLE for deleterious mutations to fix.
So can evolutionists be squirmy and contradictory about definitions? You betcha!
phoodoo,
Define loaded dice please
Its a kind of spicy Mexican dumpling popular in Guadalupe?
Don’t be a coward. Give it a go. What makes a loaded die loaded and how would you find out if it’s fair or loaded?
I will have an occasional nachoes with jalapenos, but I am not that much for spicy food.
phoodoo,
According to your logic, and since loaded dices sometimes throw 1’s and 2’s, and 3’s and 4’s and 5’s and 6’s, there’s no way of telling if it’s fair. The definition of loaded dice is circular
yipee!
dazz,
I think a better analogy is it would be like a pair of dice and coming up an inordinate number of times as 8 and 9, and then claiming the dice is loaded, to roll 5 and 7.
Or just rolling the dice 100 times and having them come up totally random, but still claiming, but yeah, they are loaded. Just because they roll random doesn’t mean they aren’t loaded!
Now we’re talking. So you think rolling a die 100 times is enough to determine with some level of confidence that the die is fair or loaded and how much? Do you understand the math involved?
phoodoo,
So of the two options – phoodoo could be wrong or everyone else is wrong – you go for ‘everyone else’! Hilarious.
No, I have never agreed that ‘those that survive best’ is the definition of ‘the more fit’ (you listening to this, walto?). You completely misunderstand me if you think that is what I have ever said. You see the root ‘surviv-‘ in a sentence and then go ‘yip, yip!’ – and stick it in your sentence. A serious comprehension issue.
I can see what you are not getting. You’re not understanding the full implications of stochasticity. A probabilistic proces is not a deterministic process. I don’t know how to get you to get that you’re not getting it, because of this Dunning-Kruger thing you have going.
The only population in which phoodoo’s (mis)reading of fitness works – where a simple census permits determination of ‘the fittest’ – is an infinite one, which is neither real nor truly countable.
The ultimate satire.
“People who don’t know they are stupid claim others are stupid. You are stupid…”
Masterful.
Considering how much ID “theory” relies on arguments from improbability, concocted boundaries and stuff like that, one would think IDists would at least show an interest in statistical analysis and the (often rather simple) math involved.
But nope..
So. Random. Chance based. Creationists have been pointing that out for decades and evolutionists have been claiming that they are wrong. But Allan and I know the truth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic
I think I got rid of all my books on fitness when I got fat and lazy. 🙂
Now that’s not fair Mung, evolutionists reserve the right to retroactively change their meanings. Survivors survive is true SOMETIMES! Evolution is stochastic SOMETIMES. Stop holding them to positions.
So in a real world population evolutionary biologists identified a beneficial allele and then watched as it disappeared from the population due to stow-kaz-tik evolution?
Hahahaha, look how fast they’ve forgotten about natural selection and the talks of biased sampling. How cute.
Stochastic? it’s CHAOS, nothing follows from that! brbrbrbrbrbrbrbr!
Haha, you mean the kind of biased sampling that can make disadvantages proliferate?
Sort of like how the loaded dies which are loaded to come up 7’s disproportionately come up 9’s?
My intuition tells me that if you make a simulation that defines the fittest alleles as those that appear most often, and you count which alleles appear most often, and conclude they are the least fit, you may just have a problem with your simulation.
Or your definition. You chose.
phoodoo,
Yebbut, on this occasion, you are going against an entire field – not on the reality of the phenomena they study, but on their definitions, and whether you or they have it right. Definitions you won’t even trouble yourself to check in the actual literature. It’s the very essence of Dunning-Kruger.
First it was evolution. Now the dynamic duo have wiped statistics out of the face of the earth… my goodness, what will be next? differential calculus? anything is possible with these two geniuses, stay tuned
Ohhh…., an entire field! A consensus!
Whoa!!
Mung,
Allan, you, and the ‘evolutionists’ themselves. This particular piece of semantic tomfoolery hinges upon deliberate equivocation of ‘stochastic’ with meanings of ‘random’ that do not directly translate to ‘stochastic’. Stochastic does not mean ‘aimless’, ‘unguided’, ‘equiprobable’ or ‘unbiased’, for example. It means subject to a probability distribution. This has been part of the mathematics of evolution – replacing prior ‘deterministic’ models, which were known to be simplifications – since the 1960’s, no help provided by any Creationist.
I know that you can find people who confuse meanings of ‘random’ in the literature, which of course is your next go-to gambit. That they, and phoodo, are confused should give us a nice sense of superiority, shouldn’t it? We know better. And hence, it pains me to see you agree, despite this knowledge, with badly-expressed deterministic definitions of fitness.
Allan Miller,
Allan, there is an entire field of theology. And you don’t believe in it. What an idiot.
Typical Dunning-Kruger…
Mung,
No, they were too busy watching Designers just kind of magic up changes. Hard to keep your eye on the ball with all that going on.
phoodoo,
Better tell Sanford then.
phoodoo,
Yip! Yip!
A field is entitled to have a consensus regarding its definitions, surely? Don’t you also say that there is no consensus on this? Which are they to be criticised for today?
phoodoo,
Nice try, but I have never argued that any theologian’s definitions are anything other than what they say they are. Nor would I say I know more about theology than a theologian. It’s a subject that disinterests me, in general, and which I disbelieve, but I don’t wish to see its overthrow particularly. Contrast your distaste for evolutionary theory, and the unfortunate and futile strategy this prompts you to adopt, absent anything with more bite. I certainly don’t feel any need to attack it on semantic grounds. That would be a bit feeble.
Typically misunderstanding its range of applicability.
So just so I get this right, natural selection is not deterministic? It too is a stochastic process? I.e., random. who knew.
Not so laughing boy. Natural selection too is stochastic. All you have to do is look at the math to see that. Maybe you should write a program.
Oh, so we’re in for some of your exquisitely presented semantic quibbles. I can’t wait for more on that.
You know what stochastic means, don’t you?
And you know that natural selection is stochastic, don’t you?
Now take the Dawkins WEASEL program. Can you predict the outcome?
Now describe what have you learned and immortalize it in software code.
Sometimes, sometimes I don’t
Not really, no. seems to me that if a selection coefficient is set to X in a model, it’s X no matter what. Now the process, as a whole, is stochastic, with the biasing contribution of selection. That’s my understanding. Could be wrong of course
Allan Miller provided this excellent artifcle by Allen Orr on fitness:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2753274/
contrast with physics:
We can measure mass (like with a scale), we can measure acceleration (2nd derivative of position with respect to time), how it is defined isn’t immediately important. I can’t say as much for such a critical concept in evolutionary biology. This is one of the many reasons I soured over the discipline. The math is beautiful, but what it was intended to represent seems a little shaky.
Thank Allan Miller for finding the article.
So you went for the rigor of YECism…
Glen Davidson
Anyone want to help dazz out? Joe? Allan? Rumraket?
keiths, Corneel?
Better to let dazz wallow in ignorance?
Ignorance it is!
The exchange between Mung and dazz was:
dazz is right. The whole process is stochastic (unless the population size is infinite). Selection biases it in particular directions. It is very much like having particles in a solution being moved randomly by Brownian Motion, and also pulled downwards by gravity. The whole process is stochastic, but is it helpful to say that in such a case “gravity is stochastic”? I’d say no.
Creationists and ID advocates are adamant that they must get evolutionary biologists to admit that natural selection “is stochastic”. Why? Because as a point of propaganda, it may persuade the reader that natural selection is not imposing any directionality on the process, that gene frequencies just wander randomly. Of course that would rule out natural selection as an explanation of how adaptation comes about. Although the whole process is stochastic, persuading people that the effect of natural selection is purely random is misleading them.
As opposed to impurely random.
So Joe, like dazz, thinks that selection is not stochastic. Unbelievable.
Mung: And you know that natural selection is stochastic, don’t you?
dazz: Not really, no.
Joe F: dazz is right.
dazz is right that natural selection is not really stochastic? Really?
Yes. Although in particular cases the direction of selection can change from generation to generation, in any one generation it is not a stochastic effect. And when relative fitnesses remain the same from one generation to another, selection is not stochastic.
In the case of Brownian Motion plus gravity affecting suspended particles, does Mung really believe that gravity is stochastic? Really?
Joe Felsenstein,
Equating the predictability of gravity with natural selection. Really?
Let me qualify what I just said. The effect of selection on an individual may bias its probability of survival (and likewise probabilities of producing given numbers of offspring). That bias is nonrandom. Survival might be regarded as random, but with a probability that differs among genotypes in a very nonrandom way.
When we ask about the effect of selection on a population in one generation, it biases the change of gene frequency toward (say) an increase of gene frequency of one allele, nonrandomly.
And again, a creationist debater loudly declaiming to an audience that evolutionary biologists have a theory that explains adaptation by “random change” is definitely misleading them.
In the case of suspended particles, any particle might go either up or down, even though gravity is acting.
Bookmark this- Its random…, its not random…, its random…, its not random.
I think whether evolutionists describe evolution as random or not random is not totally random. I think it is based on what would suit their argument best at the time. Now the argument that they are having at the time may well be random with respect to whom they are arguing, but the answer is most definitely not random. So in that sense you could call it stochastic but not random. Or it could be random if we believe the chemicals in our brains were formed randomly.
Creationist debaters hammer away, persuading their audiences that natural selection is a theory of “random” change. They know that if the audience believes them, it will reject the idea that this could account for any adaptation.
You don’t get it that they are misleading the audience?
I think it is you who is misleading, by claiming that natural selection is doing anything. Natural selection just means some things don’t reproduce.
The only change is the random mutations, and other not named but must be random Neo-Darwinian changes.
Natural selection, if it is a description of anything at all, it is a description of which of those RANDOM combinations continues.
I would call that random. Unless I was an evolutionist, then I would call it random when it suited me, and non-random when it didn’t, just to make evolution sound more believable.
You do get that you’re arguing with creationists, right? They won’t understand because their religion depends on them not understanding. As you can see, even a simple analogy is beyond Bill’s comprehension.
phoodoo,
“..Out of 120,000 fertilized eggs of the green frog only two individuals survive. Are we to conclude that these two frogs out of 120,000 were selected by nature because they were the fittest ones; or rather, that natural selection is nothing but blind mortality which selects nothing at all?– Litynski, 1961, p. 63)
Out of necessity there has to be a strong element of randomness in natural selection…
But it is in Harshman’s and Felseinstein’s best interests and their religion depends on them not understanding it …
I’m pretty sure that speculative population genetics can explain anything because speculations for Darwinists are just as good as scientific facts or even better…