This has long been an interest of mine. It dates back to the old talk.origins days, prompted by a Creationist taunt with familiar tone – “I’d like to see someone explain the evolution of sex …” (with the implicit “hurr, hurr”). I articulated some thoughts, then was rounded on by the ‘mainstream’ community. I got a flavour of the world through Creationist eyes – an equally familiar tone: some very sharply expressed contempt and an invitation to f*** off back to high school and learn meiosis.
But, the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that the ‘twofold cost’ picture traditionally presented, one that demanded an offsetting benefit of similar weight, was simply incorrect, however lofty the figures proposing it. The problem as expressed for a dioecious population (one with separate males and females: the ‘twofold cost of males’) or from the perspective of a locus on a genome (the ‘twofold cost of meiosis’) leads to the same result: an apparent halving of reproductive output for a female, or of survival odds for an allele. Yet since dioecy is quite rare, and ‘selfish alleles’ only exist when recombinant sex does, these cannot be taken as relevant to the origin of sex, and not all that relevant beyond it. The sensible perspective, it seems to me, is that of the haploid genome. From such a perspective, we are binary organisms – temporary unions of haploid genomes. It cannot be inherently more costly to unite then separate than simply to do nothing. The view that sex (as syngamy: gamete fusion) should have existed for only a moment before being erased by permanent diploidy seems wrong. Meiosis is the brief return of the native organism – the haploid. Permanent diploidy is cancer: a trap.
It’s more complicated than that …
I have written the above essay summarising my views. It is a bit of a dry and technical read – few pictures, even fewer jokes! This venue is not particularly conducive to a sensible discussion of the subject. It may be of interest to no-one: too amateurish for the professionals, too technical for the interested layman. Almost none of it is really original thought, being more a synthesis than anything groundbreaking. Beyond the choice of perspective, there are only a couple of ideas I have not seen elsewhere (I might remain coy about which those are!).
I’d prefer comments to be held off until the paper has been read (a big ask; it’s 50 pages!) but I hope it doesn’t descend into yet another discussion about semantics, metaphysics, the evidence for common descent, or any other of the conversations we have all had on a few dozen other threads.
My own time defending this is limited – I’m off to the Pyrenees for 5 weeks on June 24th. But, if anyone is interested …
If you had even a speck of self-awareness you’d be mortified at having posted such a stupid strawman understanding of evolution.
But you don’t.
It’s much more believable that, er, well, don’t know, phoodoo’s never actually said what his alternative actually is. He only knows what’s wrong, not what’s right. Same for coled, Mung et al. They only know what’s wrong, not what’s right. And that attitude gets you sitting in a cave for eternity, not in front of a computer. Just lucky for them I guess there are more people in the world then their ilk.
Actually this is a very common misconception about evolution that any species is “perfectly adapted” to, or optimal for their environment.
No species is really perfectly adapted to their environments, and many aren’t particularly well adapted at all and do in fact struggle. Extinctions happen, species struggle and it often takes relatively little to tip the scale and population size to decline.
This is one of the arguments for why anthropogentic climate change is so dangerous because it introduces global rate of change in the Earths climates for which the process of evolution won’t have time to occur and effectuate adaptation. Which can potentially alter the make up of food chains on which humanity rely.
Speak for yourself. I think this is really just a personal problem you are describing. We can go out in the wild right now and observe species in population decline, and others on the rise, where one is outcompeting the other.
I agree, on both evolution and on design, in so far as it predicts a diversity of life adapted (but no, not perfecfly) to different environments, it is going to be the case that some organism A will be very badly adapted for the environment of organism B.
I’m not saying this phenomenon (different organism are suited for different environments) is some unique prediction of evolution, nor am I bringing this up as somehow “proof” of evolution.
So the falsifiability of the mere phenomenon that different organisms are more suited to different environments isn’t actually in question here. I’m not sitting here arguing that this phenomenon is a proof of evolution (of sex, or otherwise).
I’m wondering about whether some hypothetical gradual change of selective pressures can explain the origin of the sort of sexual reproduction we see, from an initially asexuallly reproducing species, and if so, is there something from real biology we know that would in effect predict the evolution of sex under the right conditions?
No, and very badly.
I’m sorry but this is just what the evidence shows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction.
Environments change, the surface of the planet constantly changes, though usually very very slowly. Continents move apart or together, islands form, mountain ranges erode, glaciers melt, lakes and rivers drie out and so on and so forth. So species either adapt, or move, or go extinct.
Actually we constantly see this. Fish fail to escape other fish predators. They fail to escape the tides and become beached or caught in a shallow pool with a diminishing oxygen supply, and everything in between. Some make it, some don’t. Those that make it some times make it because they carry mutations that ever so slightly helped them make it in some way. They were very slighly more well adapted to the challenge they faced. They can go on to have children with that same mutation.
I presume you meant limbs. I don’t think they have to be useless, in fact for evolution to occur it has to be ever so slightly useful. Turns out the fins of fish can help just a tine bit for crawling on land.
Try to just search for “crawling fish” on Youtube and you’ll find lots of stuff like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00509MQxRB8
But I guess it never happens and these videos are docted by the evolution-illuminati.
I’ve never personally seen an entire continent form. Or a giant redwood grow from sapling to over 100 meters tall. Or an entire glacier melt. And so on and so forth. Yet we know these things happen. Because small changes in a short time can become great changes over long time. And because this is just what the evidence shows.
For it (a limb, for example) to serve as a substrate for further evolution, it has to already be slightly useful. It doesn’t have to be perfect, in fact it can be comparatively shitty, but it can still work. And if it works, even so little that it can barely be detected, that’s enough for the process of evolution to occur and enhance it.
I presume you meant dispose of that. Regardless, this caricature has nothing to do with how evolution occurs.
No actually I think for the person who has a great wish to reject evolution for religion reasons, one is forced to make up caricatures of it like that, and then pretend that’s the real thing.
Rumraket,
How does one make a caricature of a theory that relies solely on wild speculation?
I think I will just start using that line anytime anyone says anything about the concept of a designing God. “That’s a caricature! No one believes that!”
Evolutionary theory doesn’t at all (never mind solely) rely on wild speculation. That’s why it’s an actual scientific theory. Because it makes very specific quantifiable predictions testable in the here and now .
For instance? What are some of those testable predictions, that would falsify evolution ?
Given the number of fossils that are flat, I’d say that flatness is a sure sign of being unfit.
The irony here is that phoodoo’s caricature of perfect adaptation derives from the creationist assumption that god’s creation has to be flawless.
(At least it was before the First Couple’s impertinent act of disobedience.)
What did evolutionary theory predict about the evolution of sex?
https://sites.google.com/site/darwinspredictions/
“Thus I can understand how a flower and a bee might slowly become, either simultaneously or one after the other, modified and adapted in the most perfect manner to each other, by the continued preservation of individuals presenting mutual and slightly favourable deviations of structure.”
– Charles Darwin
retard alert
It’s not so ironic for your average creationist, who really just thinks that evolution is a rival religion invoking unlimited magical powers to “explain” what they think about the world, like that everything was made perfect by God. And such a religious view just requires poking holes in the rival religion, not providing meaningful explanations.
The actual match of cause to effect found in science, such as in evolutionary explanations, is simply foreign to them. Some amazing power beyond our ken is all that they believe and all that they want, and they think that evolution is supposed to be that, but that it fails to actually measure up to their religious expectations.
Glen Davidson
Evolution does seem to be a popular religion here at TSZ, which makes it difficult to separate the ideology from the science.
And I’m not sure it’s possible to explain why evolutionists believe what they do. The alternative is unpalatable?
Cornelius G. Hunter,
YEC retard confirmed
It’s like on the right you have a list of “causes” and on the left you have a list of “effects” and in the middle you have a scientist trying to draw lines between the two. How quaint. I guess maybe it works for second grade science classes though.
Let’s imagine an optimization algorithm.
Trolling troll is trolling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqdqyvcJtig
How would you know? I doubt you made it that far.
Why do you bother?
Perhaps one of the testable predictions of evolution is that evolutionists will avoid explaining what any of the testable predictions for evolution are.
Hypothesis confirmed!
I know what a fifty foot tall redwood looks like. I also know what a 25 foot tall redwood looks like, and even a three foot one.
What does a semi-useful, shitty limb look like? I can’t seem to find many in the wild. I have looked next to all the three foot redwood saplings and I can’t find them.
Silly phoodoo. Those changes take place at the molecular level, where you can’t see them, and over very long periods of time, where you also can’t see them.
Only for persons who are more focused on ideology than science.
I love it. “Science is a religion.”
Vintage Cornelius Hunter.
And “Obama Care is a disaster.”
And when asked to give an example of what prompts them to say such things they bail.
The twin nested hiearchy. If three or more taxa share common descent, we should be able to construct highly congruent trees from objective but independent data sets.
Look at the crawling fish, those are some “shitty limbs” for moving around on land. They get the job done, but they could be much better.
Look at the limbs of many semi-aquatic mammals, which often constitute a compromise solution to their land-water life style. How well do seals run? Not that well, they drag themselves around on land.
Look at this Siren intermedia aquatic salamander. It can move around on land with it’s forelimbs, but it’s pretty crap at it.
We have what we have with Redwood trees. Countless organisms in various intermediate stages between the extremes of fully aquatic and fully terrestrial adaptation.
I was told I don’t exist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0mgFGDEFRM
Me too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvRtOYGMWV8
I’m a hoax!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1UKHimLZao
Has been debunked.
Why should we expect that this would be the case, and even if the trees were not congruent why should that falsify evolution? I can’t see why it would, or even should.
So you’ve finally rejected common descent, huh?
Ever collect wood for a campfire?
Really? Please elaborate.
The Myths of the Twin Nested Heirarchy
It’s quite a long thread, is there something in particular I should search for?
Because if they share descent with the gradual accumulation of changes, more closely related taxa which share more recent descent, should also be closer together in the phylogenetic tree because fewer changes in character states should separate them. Because there have been fewer replication events for mutations to creep in since they split into independent lineages.
Think about it for a moment. Lets take a really simple hypothetical example and see what we can predict if we assume evolution over time.
An organism divides into two (A1 and B1), and those two become independent lineages. The two are initially very similar in the chosen character state (to make it simple we just use DNA sequence) at the first generation. Say the organism has four genes, G1, G2, G3 and G4 and these mutate randomly along the way every generation. Maybe each gene gets a single random mutation every generation to keep it simple.
The next generation, the newest offspring (A2 and B2) are slightly less similar (more mutations separate them). The ancestors (A1 and B1) die (maybe of old age, or disease, doesn’t matter). The generation after again, the latest offspring (A3 and B3) have diverged even further (even more mutations have crept in). And so on.
At some point, maybe a new lineage emerges (B10 splits into B11 and C1) so now there are three independent lineages. The C lineage will always be more similar to the B lineage, than it is to the A lineage, right? Because more generations, and thus more mutations, separate the A lineage from the B and C lineage, than separate the B and C lineage. Because A and B diverged and went through multiple generations (in this case, 10 generations), before C and B diverged.
So what tree would we expect from gene G1, say three generations after the B-C split?
Well, we will have a tree with three branches because we have three taxa of course. How will it look? Well in our hypothetical example here we have rooting information, we know this started with a split between A and B. So we start with a node that splits into two branches A and B. How long should the branches that separate A and B be? Well we’ve been going for 13 generations, and one mutation creeps into G1 every generation, so both lineages must have accumulated 13 mutations independently. So each branch must be 13 units in length, separating A13 and B13 by 26 total distance units.
Then there’s the C-branch, where to place that one? Well we know that the split happened at generation 10, so that’s of course where we put the C branch on the B branch.
So we can see now that our simple model of evolution predicts that gene G1 from B13, should be more similar to G1 from C3, than G1 from A13.
Okay, but how will the tree we predict look for gene G2? And G3? And G4?
Well, since G2 went through the same exact same genealogical process as G1, it should of course produce the same tree. Because G2 also went on for 10 independent generations after the A-B split, and then the B-C split happened and G2 should diverge between B and C from then on for another three generations.
And same with G3 and G4.
I trust that you can see why this should be so. Admittedly this is very idealized and simplified, but this is basically the principle by which evolution predicts that independent data set should produce the same trees. That’s why, if the organisms we see really did go through a common genealogical relationship of gradual accumulation of changes from common ancestors, the trees we construct from independent genetic data should be congruent.
It would mean we could not say that A, B, and C share a common genealogical relationship of branching descent with modification, because the evidence we would expect to have if this actually happened, isn’t as it should be.
Having now looked over most of that, it’s actually not relevant. What is being discussed there is whether other entities can display a nesting pattern. In other words, is the mere existence of a nesting pattern a unique prediction of evolution? No, it isn’t.
For example, the folder system in your computer is a nesting hiearchy. There are folders within folders. But suppose I didn’t tell you the order of folders, and asked you to construct an independent tree from each of their properties (name, number of files contained, length of file name, total size of content, size of individual files, file-change-dates, proportion of file-name-length that are letters versus numbers, and so on), would you expect that the tree you construct using the differences in file-sizes would be congruent with the tree you construct using number of files? Or the change-dates? You wouldn’t expect that at all, there is almost never a systematic relationship between the actual order of folders and the properties of those folders and their contents (there’s nothing that says a new file can’t go in an older folder, for example).
Which is why I’m not saying “a nested hierarchy” is a prediction of evolution. I specifically used the term “twin nested hierarchy”, and by that I really mean multiple highly congruent nesting hiearchies constructed from independent data. In particular, I meant my elaboration. That using independent data sets to build your hierarchy from, you’re going to come up with the roughly the same branching pattern over and over and over again.
For reasons already elaborated on in my previous post, evolution really does predict that independent data sets (sequences from different genes, for example, or trees constructed from morphology compared to trees constructed from gene sequences) yield similar branching patterns.
I can highlight a few creotard gems:
“Examples of nested hierarchies in designed objects:”
XML data elements
Weaving a better Web. Scott Mace, Udo Flohr, Rick Dobson,
Tony Graham. Byte March 1998 v23 n3 p58
Windows 95 file management
Housekeeping: file management. Matthew Lake, Yael Li-Ron.
PC/Computing Sept 1995 v8 n9 p194
…note how some random “references” are used to make it all look legit
That’s just plain hilarious.
I’ve downloaded your paper. Where do you explain the evolution of sex?
(with the implicit “hurr, hurr”)
How did you manage to establish the independence of the data sets? I’d really like to know. Given that “genes” are supposed to “code for” phenotypic traits doesn’t your claim that the phenotype is independent of the genotype turn modern biology on its head?
Maybe your just bullshitting us, like John Harshman.
You’ve described a nested hierarchy, not a twin nested hierarchy. I trust that you can see why this should be so.
Because we know something about the physiology of the organism. For example, we know that the cause of the gene sequence of your cytochrome C gene, is not the cause of the gene sequence of your GAPDH gene. Nor are either of these genes the cause of your particular anatomical arrangements (nor the other way around).
To pick an example, the amino acid sequence of cytochrome C is not causing you to have a spine (aka, be a vertebrate), or to have four limbs (be a tetrapod), or to have mammary glands (be a mammal). How do we know this? Muhc of life on Earth has the cytochrome C gene, but not all of that life on Earth has a spine, or four limbs, or mammary glands. Also, the cytochrome C gene has been experimentally taken from humans (or cows, or pigs, or birds, or fish IIRC), and replaced the cytochrome C gene in yeast, or wheat, or E coli, and they didn’t grow a spine, four limbs or mammary glands. They worked just as they did before. It’s a core metabolic enzyme, it catalyzes the same basic chemical reaction in the electron transport chain.
As such, a tree constructed using cytochrome C amino acid sequence should not correlate with one constructed from comparative anatomical traits (or with another metabolic enzyme) except if they share a common genealogical realtionship of branching descent with modification. This is why, if the trees contructed from both agree with each other, this is evidence for evolution because only evolution would make us expect them to agree.
Systematists have constructed trees from dusins and dusins of independent genes and found they agree to an astonishing level of accuracy.
If I understand your question correctly, I think it is based on a misunderstanding. There is no single gene that codes for a morphological phenotypic trait in that sense you are alluding to here. Genes have a contextual effect. It is only in the broader genomic context that, for example some HOX gene, “codes for” the development of forelimbs in some location.
Put that HOX gene in a bacterium, it won’t grow arms. Because that HOX gene is lacking many other genes to interact with for the final result we see in complex multicellular organisms.
That said, given that there IS such a genomic context for many organisms, you are right that some genes will be expected to correlate with certain anatomical features, and has such can’t really be said to be independent from that particular anatomical feature. As such, the challenge then is to identify what those genes are and what physiological traits they are involved in, and then avoid using those two data sets for a test of evolutionary relationship.
That’s why I said independent data sets. We have to know by some other means that the data sets really are independent. And we know that for a whole host of genes.
Maybe I’m not? We will have to find out.
Actually I’ve described a QUADRUPLE nested hierarchy. I said four genes, G1, G2, G3, and G4. The whole point of my example was to show why independent data sets, given evolution, are expected to produce congruent trees. For that, I obviously had to make an example that actually had multiple independent data sets.
The term “twin nested hierarchy” is, as Theobald writes in 29 evidences for macroevolution, today something of a misnomer, as such tests as the one described are almost never done using only two data sets.
In Theobalds 2010 paper A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry, he used 23 independent protein sequences universally present in all known life.
Everytime. Except when it doesn’t.
A lot also depends on your use of the word similar. Perhaps its similar to the way John Harshman uses the word “study”.
Phoodoo if you bothered to actually read Theobalds 29 Evidences for macroevolution, you would discover there is a real quantitative measure of similarity. It’s an actual field in statistics called statistical hypothesis testing, not just some bullshit somebody came up with to “prove evolution” as I suspect you imagine.
From 29 Evidences for macroevolution:
Reflect on that. It’s why I said the twin nested hierarchy is a debunked myth.
Twins = Two. Triplets = Three. Do you get that?
Q: How many data sets do you need, exactly, to get a twin nested hierarchy?
A: As many as are needed.
Q: Which scientific model for the evolution is sex is best supported?
A: Who cares. It exists, therefore it must have evolved. All else is irrelevant detail.
ROFL, not it isn’t. That much is obvious given the link you provided. You don’t have to try to save face now with that silly excuse.
Now all Mung has to actually do is quote someone saying that and he’s proven his point.