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!
@Jmac
derp
@Mung
see above
Glass houses…
This is an interesting quote, the primary source is elusive.
From ENV there is this version:
“For agreement on and further documentation of the principle of natural selection, see the group of authors cited above, beginning with Bell (1997). However, in the 1950s, French biologists, such as Cuénot, Tétry, and Chauvin, who did not follow the modern synthesis, raised the following objection to this kind of reasoning (summed up according to Litynski, 1961, p. 63):
Which makes one wonder why Cuénot? And what did he conclude from his question?
This quote (which phoodoo undoubtedly got from Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig’s recent use of it) Is mistaken. Sure, if there is density-dependent population size regulation in a population, the average frog may have 120,000 fertilized eggs and on average 2 of them would survive. But more fertile frogs will have more than 120,000 fertilized eggs, and less-fertile frogs will have fewer. And of all the eggs deposited in the pond, those with more viable genotypes will be more likely than random to survive.
It is those biases that are natural selection. They are nonrandom. It is just like the advantage of the house in a gambling casino. It is not random, sometimes positive and sometimes negative. It is always there, and if you think that it is “just random”, I invite you to play repeatedly — you will be surprised to find that you lose your shirt. (Salvador, kindly spare us the card-counting stories this time).
How do you know that?
So once there is a favorable mutation in a population, mutation was “doing something”. But a process that then results in the frequency of that mutation rising from 0.000001 to 0.999999 in frequency is “not doing anything”?
Wow, just wow! There is a subtle and complex term for this view: it’s “silly”.
Are there any of phoodoo’s allies here who would agree with this view of phoodoo’s?
Maybe we need a little stick it note, that all creationists should be able to attach to their messages, that says:
Then perhaps your side would cease with reminding us of the non-random component you tote so often. That what dies isn’t random.
As long as your side keeps insisting that natural selection “is random”, we will continue saying this. Because you may acknowledge that OK, natural selection does involve some nonrandom processes, and OK, those do result in favorable alleles fixing more often than random.
But we know that when a hotshot creationist debater comes to town and starts loudly declaring that evolutionists have a theory that all these beautiful adaptations result from random chance, you won’t be up there saying “wait a second, that’s not actually what they say”.
You will be nowhere to be seen.
Right, what gets created is random. Exactly.
Now about your 0.000001 to 0.999999 transition, how can you calculate what percent of that WAS ALSO random? Maybe 98% of that is also random. Maybe 99.7 %.
So what’s created is random, 99.7% of what survives is random, but you want to harp on the .3% that survives but isn’t random.
Yes. Why does the atmosphere not disappear overnight when lots of it is slowly lost to space over time? Because it’s predictably biased downwards by gravity.
Remember Bill, when you thought “randomness” would make independent gene trees incongruent? Your intuitions about stochastic processes consistently fail you.
phoodoo, we’re getting somewhere. It is late here so let’s pick this lesson up tomorrow. Remember that, in addition to random mutations and natural selection, there is also genetic drift.
… but consistently biased towards having adaptive value.
So, what evolves is due to stochastic sampling consistently biased towards adaptive value.
This is very different from saying “what gets created is random full stop”. Just saying “selection is random” without clarifying that it is biased towards adaptation is misleading.
Your statement is very misleading and neglects to factor in what creationists mean when they say evolution “is random”.
They don’t merely wish to point out that natural selection is a stochastic bias to the sampling process. That evolution is “chance based”.
What they intend to convey, the idea they wish to implant in your mind, is the idea that evolution is sort of like if you took a large collection of limbs and organs, and then just tossed them haphazardly into a large pile, and then they’d randomly stick together and make a functional animal.
Or that there is something like a dog-like animal, and then some miraculous mutation, which can potentially change anything on this animal (and therefore there are many more ways for this mutation to fail to create anything useful), by sheer luck happens to turn the dog-like animal into a fully functional whale.
That’s why they are so infatuated with the tornado in a junk yard-analogy. The random assembly of parts into a functional whole, by chance, in one fell swoop. Or the random change of some fully functional organism, into another but almost entirely different fully functional organism.
This is obviously preposterous nonsense, which is why creationists insist on using these terrible analogies. They wish to take advantage of the entirely reasonable intuition that organism don’t just randomly and blindly assemble themselves, or fully change into something else, in a single event as if determined by rolling a giant quadrillion sided die that lands with the only successful side up.
But even though natural selection is chance based, it is not like the creationist tornado-in-a-junkyard analogy. Natural selection is a bias in an iterative sampling process. A bias towards adaptation. And the process only operates with something that is already capable of reproducing itself. And yes there are many failures, as all organisms produce many more offspring than can survive. In part exactly because many of the mutations will be failures, outputting lots and lots of offspring radically increases the odds that there will be adaptive mutational combinations among them. And then these offspring go through life, where the phenotypical effects of those mutations is stochastically biased towards aiding survival and reproduction.
And even a weak bias in a stochastic process is effective over time when it has lots of “events” to manifest it’s effect. A casino won’t knowlingly let you play with a set of loaded dice, no matter how small and “random” you argue the bias is.
Yes, I fully acknowledge that without any reservation. I will systematically and consistently argue a particular case when up against creationist bullshitters with an agenda to mislead.
In arguing with a creationist, I will insist that evolution isn’t “just random” in the sense that the creationist is misleadingly trying to portray it as. I’m fine with saying evolution is a stochastic process but that it is biased towards function and adaptation.
The creationist HATES that sentence. The creationis will want to keep the sentence short and misleading. The creationist will want to cut off the piece of the sentence that says “…but that it is biased towards function and adaptation”, so it only says “evolution is a stochastic process”. But when creationists say “evolution is random/a stochastic process”, they are being very misleading.
Because the latter part is much more useful to the creationist agenda for reasons I clarified in the post above.
Because the alternative is that the average survive over the ones eliminated by random processes, which doesn’t suite the evolutionary narrative…
That’s how Joe “has to know”…
Lonnig exposed it here….
Out of sheer statistical curiosity. Which are the average viabilities? Could you bracket that, please?
I take it from your question that you do not consider Joe’s statement tautological?
N, I do find it totally tautological. That’s why I asked him how he knows that.
Maybe its biased towards the lucky.
Or maybe its not random at all.
Or maybe no matter how biased it is, dogs always remain dogs and bacteria always remains bacteria. Because so far, in all of our experiences in life, that is all we have ever seen happen.
Skeptics believe in evolution and in aliens, both things we have never seen, but which you believe in through faith.
Thank goodness, you had me on the wrong foot.
Perhaps you could tell J-Mac. He appears to have come up with an alternative.
That’s tautological.
I guess that depends on what the word random really means.
Can you define how you understand the word “random”?
The bias in the sampling process has little bearing on whether dogs will remain dogs. Dogs can evolve into something else without any systematic bias at all.
Bacteria is a domain of life. They will never stop being bacteria. That doesn’t mean they don’t evolve or change.
We have also not seen life, the universe, the solar system, or the sun and moon created by a divine being. Or a man tortured to death by crucifixion, staying dead for two days and then magically resurrected into immortality.
We must observe it happening can’t be your standard of evidence, or there are countless things you are not in a position to personally verify that you must disbelieve. Pretty much all of both human and natural history is now out the window because “we weren’t there”.
Regardless, your generalization from superficial observation violates the inductive principle of total evidence and is thus guilty of the fallacy of exclusion.
To specify, you are ignoring (excluding) the observed evidence of change. They also change as a consequence of genetic recombination (mixing of alleles when breeding dogs with different traits), and due to mutation. The bodily proportions, morphology, metabolism and all sorts of performance characteristics of both dogs and bacteria change as a consequence of these genetic changes.
While you can just assume they will remain like dogs despite mutation and genetic recombination, this merely asserts the conclusion you are trying to reach with your inductive generalization.
Besides, we know their evolutionary histories. We know that dogs have evolved from their wolf-life ancestors, and that these in turn have evolved from even more different ancestors too.
Again with your fallacious fallacy of exclusion. There are many skeptics who don’t believe in aliens: I’m one. I will be convinced that alien life exists the day it is found.
And I have in fact seen evolution happen. I have not watched all of natural history in real time, but one doesn’t need that kind of evidence in order to have good evidence-based reasons for accepting it happened.
We can entirely reasonably claim to know that sedimentary rock was deposited in an aquatic environment by the types of fossils it contain (shellfish and fish), for example. Despite not having been present to see it happen. This isn’t faith, it is just inference.
I thank you for tacitly admitting that blind faith without evidence or supporting reason is a negative noone should be proud of having.
No you don’t, you just have faith.
Change into what, into something other than bacteria? That will never happen?
No you haven’t.
So is fitness, doesn’t seem to bother you much.
Depends what you mean by change.
People all look different, does that mean they changed?
That’s the fallacy of calling something a fallacy.
I agree, we both believe in things based on faith.
No it’s just evidence.
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution
The Scientific Case for Common Descent
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
I don’t know what bacterial will change into. Technically bacteria haven’t changed into anything else in the history of life. All bacteria are still bacteria. But some archaea engulfed some bacteria and became eukaryotes through endosymbiosis. And from that eukarotic ancestor all the multicellular life we see around us evolved. You’re still a eukaryote btw. That doesn’t mean you are not the result of an evolutionary process of change from very very different and very distant ancestors.
Now you’re just assuming what you intensely desire to conclude.
How do you know that?
It isn’t, but I see you tacitly accept that your statement was a meaningless tautology. That’s progress of a kind. I guess you’re evolving. 🙂
All forms of phenotypical change that accumulates over time.
From their ancestors, yes.
It would have been if I had said “your conclusion is false because you reached it through comitting a fallacy”.
But that’s not what I said, so my response is not guilty of the fallacy-fallacy. You understand that the fallacy-fallacy only works if your argument is dismissed only because your conclusion is sought by a fallacy?
What I said was conveying is that you do not REACH the conclusion you assert with the argument you make.
Perhaps I do believe something on faith. I have to admit that I believe you can reason properly if you really want to. I have to admit that I keep believing this despite the total privation of evidence in support of it. In fact in spite of the colossal amounts of evidence against it.
Doesn’t count, its an evolutionist, pro-materialist website.
Isn’t that the standard defense evolutionists use to dismiss creationist websites?
What matters is the evidence described, not your religious prejudices.
I don’t know if evolutionists use the equivalent excuse against creationist web sites, but I have visited plenty of creationist sites, read plenty of their bullshit. It’s all rhetorical crap. So, by experience alone, I’m biased against creationist bullshit. It makes me puke from the very beginning. They can’t help themselves starting with some bullshit about materialism, then proceeding with ridiculously loaded premises, straw-men, etc. Yet again, if I want to learn about science, I prefer to consult scientists, not creationist propagandists who don’t know their right front their left.
Yes, we understand that you don’t get basic statistics or evolution.
Do you think that all outcomes have to be equiprobable for a process to be stochastic?
There’s so much hidden here, but we can see that Joe is really agreeing with me.
There is a bias in favor of the house, yet people can still go to the casino and win. How can that be possible Joe? There must be some random component. They can’t all be card counters.
And yes, as you say, it is just like that with natural selection. It’s stochastic.
The claim I made was that natural selection is stochastic. And I believe you have as much as admitted that is in fact the case. So dazz ought to change what he believes about whether or not selection is stochastic.
Anything can live, its not an upward trajectory, its a sideways one.
If there are a billion different solutions for how to live, choosing any one per round, doesn’t tell us anything about the next round.
The cards get reshuffled after each hand.
It’s not a prejudice, it’s a bias.
dazz needs to read the recent posts by Rumraket. Then if dazz still doesn’t understand he can ask questions rather than mock people who do understand.
Mung,
The issue here, Mung, is that creationists use the word “random” for quick rhetorical dismissal of evolutionary science.
If you want to call any process “random” or “stochastic,” just because some step or another is, as far as we understand, random, or stochastic, fine by me. The important point would be to understand how the whole process works. But, if what you want is to dismiss scientific understanding using rhetorical effect, then you’re just making a fool out of yourself.
The issue here, is that evolutionists use the phrase “not random” for quick rhetorical dismissal of creationists. 🙂
For quick rhetorical dismissal of creationists’ rhetorical dismissal. 😀
Derp works far better
I’m pretty sure that not anything can live, but I agree evolution is not an upward trajectory.
I think that is correct to a limited extend. What happened “this round” biases by a matter of probability what will happen the next round.
Remember, in very large part what constrains future change is the medium of DNA.
DNA is copied from one generation to the next, and small errors slip in. But very rarely. That means the vast, vast majority of the time, the direct cause of next generation’s genome, was the genome it was copied from.
You’re going to have a genome sequences that says TATATAGTACGATCGTAGC… because that’s what your parent’s DNA was. A change into another nucleotide by copying error (mutation) happens on average once every ten billion nucleotides have been copied.
The human genome is roughly 3.2 billion nucleotides in total. That means on average three cell divisions happen before a single mutation is introduced. Nevertheless, there are several hundred cell divisions between each human generation, so out of that 3.2 billion nucleotide genome, somewhere between 90 and 150 mutations have accumulated. Every new human being is born with ~120 mutations out of those 3.2 billion nucleotides.
150 out of 3.2 billion is a tiny fraction. And it is very unlikely that among those mutations, they happen to land in something that immediately detectably alters body morphology. It happens once in a rare while still, as some people for example are born with a mutation that give them 6 or 7 fingers.
So for that reason all by itself, large-scale evolutionary transitions in very shor time is unlikely. This is the reason why most of the evolutionary change we see with the naked eye, in human lifetimes, is small. Because the DNA copying is from a template and the copying process only very rarely makes errors.
It is very unlikely to see a fish completely change into a totally different animal in a single generation. Or a species of cactus become a palm-tree in a single generation. The vast majority of the time, the changes that happen are changes into something that is in the immediate genetic and phenotypical neighborhood. As in, the changes are usually always small. Which implies that larger changes require more time.
I’m sorry but I think I’ve lost track of your analogy here. What does the cards, hands, and reshuffling represent in biology?
Rumraket,
You have 7 billion people on the planet, each one surviving for a different reason (because they are smart or fast or fat or slow, or good with numbers or have nice hair, or have a nice smile, or live in the right trailer park at 9 pm, or drank rum the same time as someone else, or , or..). Each time they survive to reproduce, the next time will be for a different reason. That’s just the problem with humans, for beetles there might be 100 billion beetles and 100 billion reasons. To call that a bias in any direction is not accurate, its a bias in 100 billion directions.
That’s probably not the best way to build a great eyeball, when you think about it. A designer could probably do a lot better.
But Nilsson and Pelger proved in a mathematical computer simulation that an eye only needs to evolve in one direction.
Stochastic. Read about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_process
The whole process, with mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift, can be modeled as a stochastic process, yes. Of those processes, the stochastic part comes from mutation and from genetic drift. The natural selection is not necessarily stochastic.
In the analogy I made with particles in suspension undergoing Brownian Motion and also under the influence of gravity, do we say that gravity is stochastic? Do we?
And there we have it. Why do creationists and ID advocates consider it so important to say that “natural selection is random” or “natural selection is stochastic”? Because then people will conclude that natural selection could not build a great eyeball, or fins, or wings, or digestive enzymes, or nerves, or leaves.
Likewise that is why it is important to some of them to try to establish that “natural selection does not do anything”.
In the end, it is not a matter of gaining conceptual clarity, but obscuring it, by persuading the audience that natural selection could not “build” anything or “do” anything. Just like the creationist debaters who hope that their audiences are gullible enough to accept their characterization of natural selection as a theory of achieving adaptations by purely random changes.
Joe Felsenstein,
But Joe, this is of course why YOUR side so desperately needs to refer to natural selection as NOT random. You must slip that into the discussion every time, because you know your audience is never going to buy that an unguided process is going to build a perfect eye. Its too preposterous. And its happened dozens of times now? If you told people it was random, they will laugh you out of the colleges. You need the illusion of direction to sell your oil.
But how does a RANDOM set of mutations give you just the right mutation at just the right time to give you a cornea? “Oh, oh, but its not random, natural selection is not random…you scream.” So what, the mutations supposedly are. So how do you get a random pupil? Random tear ducts? Random eyelids? Random eyelashes? Random optic nerves? Random rods and cones?
These ALL must be random first. Random, random, random,…live with it. because that is what your side claims. Make them random first select them second.
I can understand why you don’t advertise this in your ads. Medicine companies also would never advertise their adverse side effects if no one made them.
You want to sell the oil, but you don’t want to tell the whole truth about what it does.
“Unguided”? The whole point of a mechanism that has natural selection which filters the mutations and preferentially perpetuates the ones that yield better adaptation is that one doesn’t just have the result that would come from the mutations.
Or haven’t you heard of that?
(And if you are tempted to repeat your usual litany of “natural selection doesn’t do anything”, I’m quite happy to replace the term with “differences of fertility and viability in different genotypes”).
Joe Felsenstein,
But let’s keep our eye on the ball here, so to speak, Joe. The pupil, that was random, but it got selected. The iris, again, random. Optic nerve, totally random, but was useful. Tear ducts, again, completely random, I know , I know, hard to believe, but again, they sure were useful, I can see why we kept them.
So let’s just make sure we remember what parts we are claiming are random, and which aren’t.
So in the future, we shouldn’t confuse what we mean by random. Its the keeping the lucky parts that is not random.
Um, it doesn’t work that way — you don’t put a random head on a random body with random legs, etc. There are random changes in nucleotides in a DNA sequence. And they occur not all at once but gradually over time. And it is not a matter of a single individual, but a population of individuals. And they are not just “kept’ some are more able to survive and reproduce than others.
But OK, the “keeping of the lucky parts” is not random. So natural selection is not random. Glad we’re finally in agreement on that.
No they probably survive mostly for the same set of reasons that overlap quite a lot. Being good at thinking and thinking quickly has use in almost anything you can think of. The same is true for having good cooperative skills and hand-eye coordination.
They can move, see, hear, smell, touch, think and learn. Most of the things encountered in daily life involve the same overall but limited set of skills which are useful in many different situations.
And the different events and encounters people (or any animal) goes through usually involves application of some combination of this overall limited set of skills. Stay and fight or flee? Sneak or sprint? Travel or stay? Use your senses to gather information, think about that information, make a plan – act accordingly. Or react quickly and instinctively to some sensory stimulus.
The selection is to maintain and enchance these basic overall skillsets and abilities because they are the same general skillset used almost every time. And human beings are the result of a bias in the selection, towards the particular distribution of skills we have. We have pretty good, but far from the best eyesight out there, we have pretty crappy hearing and sense of smell, and we aren’t particularly fast or strong, but we are very good at cooperation, communication, and planning. That’s why we live in large societies, mostly in huge cities, cooperating and communicating and using technology. Our skillset is mostly cognitive, social, verbal communication and fine motor manipulations. If we need lots of muscle, we get together in a group (which requires social skills, communication and therefore brains), or build a machine (which requires fine motor manipulations, and brains, and probably special difficult-to-get resources, which requires a group to get, so again social skills and planning and communication).
Not really no. Beetle species populations’ are very large yes, but that actually enhances the power of whatever selective pressure is operating on them. There are lots (hundreds of thousands) of species of beetles, but they’re all recognizably beetle-like, which seems to imply that the general beetle-like organism is overall very successful in all those different circumstances. It seems to work, as some variation on a general theme, in most situations.
I’m sure it’s not the best way, but that isn’t an argument against evolution. At no point has anyone argued “evolution is the best way to build a great eyeball”.
Yes let’s. This is a different discussion from whether fitness is a meaningful concept, or whether beneficial mutations exist (which happens to be the subject of the OP). Will you please let go of these ridiculous objections, then we can have a discussion whether complex adaptations need to be designed.
Phoodoo seems to have got a strange idea sort of like there has to be a different mutation or selective pressure for every life-event you go through.
You need to climb a set of stairs? There has to be a selective pressure and unique and different set of mutations for that.
You need to walk along on the sidewalk? There has to be a selective pressure and unique and different set of mutations for that.
You need to run to catch a train you’re late for? There has to be a selective pressure and unique and different set of mutations for that.
You need to not slip on ice? There has to be a selective pressure and unique and different set of mutations for that.
You need to tread along in some foilage? There has to be a selective pressure and unique and different set of mutations for that.
You walk around in big city traffic? There has to be a selective pressure and unique and different set of mutations for that.
You need to be able to see approaching cars? There has to be a selective pressure and unique and different set of mutations for that.
You need to be able to see approaching buses? There has to be a selective pressure and unique and different set of mutations for that.
You need to be able to see approaching trucks? There has to be a selective pressure and unique and different set of mutations for that.
No. These abilities aren’t really different abilities. All significantly overlap. It is silly to think these are all that different and would constitute a “pull” or bias in a radically different, rather than similar and overlapping direction of selection. Also, they’re learned abilities as part of your experiences. There is a lot of plasticity involved in development and learning. You don’t need new mutations to learn a new skillset. This idea that everyting that happens in life is a life-and-death situation that selection has to hone before you can ever get remotely competent is preposterous.