As an ID proponent and creationist, the irony is that at the time in my life where I have the greatest level of faith in ID and creation, it is also the time in my life at some level I wish it were not true. I have concluded if the Christian God is the Intelligent Designer then he also makes the world a miserable place by design, that He has cursed this world because of Adam’s sin. See Malicious Intelligent Design.
Jesus prophesied of the intelligently designed outcome of humanity: “wars and rumors of wars..famines…pestilence…earthquakes.” If there is nuclear and biological weapons proliferation, overpopulation, destruction of natural resources in the next 500 years or less, things could get ugly. If such awful things are Intelligently Designed for the trajectory of planet Earth, on some level, I think it would almost be merciful if the atheists are right….
The reason I feel so much kinship with the atheists and agnostics at TSZ and elsewhere is that I share and value the skeptical mindset. Gullibility is not a virtue, skepticism is. A personal friend of Richard Dawkins was my professor and mentor who lifted me out of despair when I was about to flunk out of school. Another professor, James Trefil, who has spent some time fighting ID has been a mentor and friend. All to say, atheists and people of little religious affiliation (like Trefil) have been kind and highly positive influences on my life, and I thank God for them! Thus, though I disagree with atheists and agnostics, I find the wholesale demonization of their character highly repugnant — it’s like trash talking of my mentors, friends and family.
I have often found more wonder and solace in my science classes than I have on many Sunday mornings being screamed at by not-so-nice preachers. So despite my many disagreements with the regulars here, because I’ve enjoyed the academic climate in the sciences, I feel somewhat at home at TSZ….
Now, on to the main point of this essay! Like IDist Mike Gene, I find the atheist/agnostic viewpoint reasonable for the simple reason that most people don’t see miracles or God appearing in their every day lives if not their entire lives. It is as simple as that.
Naturalism would seem to me, given most everyone’s personal sample of events in the universe, to be a most reasonable position. The line of reasoning would be, “I don’t see miracles, I don’t see God, by way of extrapolation, I don’t think miracles and God exists. People who claim God exists must be mistaken or deluded or something else.”
The logic of such a viewpoint seems almost unassailable, and I nearly left the Christian faith 15 years ago when such simple logic was not really dealt with by my pastors and fellow parishioners. I had to re-examine such issues on my own, and the one way I found to frame the ID/Creation/Evolution issue is by arguing for the reasonableness of Black Swan events.
I will use the notion of Black Swans very loosely. The notion is stated here, and is identified with a financeer and academic by the name of Nasim Taleb. I have Taleb’s books on investing entitled Dynamic Hedging which is considered a classic monograph in mathematical finance. His math is almost impenetrable! He is something of a Super Quant. Any way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.
The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:
1.The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.
2.The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).
3.The psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to a rare event’s massive role in historical affairs.Unlike the earlier and broader “black swan problem” in philosophy (i.e. the problem of induction), Taleb’s “black swan theory” refers only to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. Such events, considered extreme outliers, collectively play vastly larger roles than regular occurrences.[1] More technically, in the scientific monograph Silent Risk , Taleb mathematically defines the black swan problem as “stemming from the use of degenerate metaprobability”.[2]
….
The phrase “black swan” derives from a Latin expression; its oldest known occurrence is the poet Juvenal’s characterization of something being “rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno” (“a rare bird in the lands and very much like a black swan”; 6.165).[3] When the phrase was coined, the black swan was presumed not to exist. The importance of the metaphor lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought. A set of conclusions is potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved. In this case, the observation of a single black swan would be the undoing of the logic of any system of thought, as well as any reasoning that followed from that underlying logic.Juvenal’s phrase was a common expression in 16th century London as a statement of impossibility. The London expression derives from the Old World presumption that all swans must be white because all historical records of swans reported that they had white feathers.[4] In that context, a black swan was impossible or at least nonexistent. After Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered black swans in Western Australia in 1697,[5] the term metamorphosed to connote that a perceived impossibility might later be disproven. Taleb notes that in the 19th century John Stuart Mill used the black swan logical fallacy as a new term to identify falsification.[6]
The very first question I looked at when I was having bouts of agnosticism was the question of origin of life. Now looking back, the real question being asked is “was OOL a long sequence of typical events or a black swan sequence of events.” Beyond OOL, one could go on to the question of biological evolution. If we assume Common Descent or Universal Common Ancestry (UCA), would evolution, as a matter of principle, proceed by typical or black swan events or a mix of such events (the stock market follows patterns of typical events punctuated by black swan events).
If natural selection is the mechanism of much of evolution, does the evolution of the major forms (like prokaryote vs. eukaryote, unicellular vs. multicellular, etc.) proceed by typical or black swan events?
[As a side note, when there is a Black Swan stock market crash, it isn’t a POOF, but a sequence of small steps adding up to an atypical set of events. Black Swan doesn’t necessarily imply POOF, but it can still be viewed as a highly exceptional phenomenon.]
Without getting into the naturalism vs. supernaturalism debate, one could at least make statements whether OOL, eukaryotic evolution (eukaryogenesis), multicellular evolution, evolution of Taxonomically Restricted Features (TRFs), Taxonomically Restricted Genes (TRGs), proceeded via many many typical events happening in sequence or a few (if not one) Black Swan event.
I personally believe, outside of the naturalism supernaturalism debate, that as a matter of principle, OOL, eukaryogenesis, emergence of multicellularity (especially animal multicellularity), must have transpired via Black Swan events. Why? The proverbial Chicken and Egg paradox which has been reframed in various incarnations and supplemented with notions such as Irreducible Complexity or Integrated Complexity or whatever. Behe is not alone in his notions of this sort of complexity, Andreas Wagner and Joe Thornton use similar language even though they thing such complexity is bridgeable by typical rather than Black Swan events.
When I do a sequence lookup at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center of Biotechnology Information (NCBI), it is very easy to see the hierarchical patterns that would, at first glance, confirm UCA! For example look at this diagram of Bone Morphogenetic Proteins (BMP) to see the hierarchical patterns:
From such studies, one could even construct Molecular Clock Hypotheses and state hypothesized rates of molecular evolution.
The problem however is that even if some organisms share so many genes, and even if these genes can be hierarchically laid out, there are genes that are restricted only to certain groups. We might refer to them as Taxonomically Restricted Genes (TRG). I much prefer the term TRG over “orphan gene” especially since some orphan genes seem to emerge without the necessity of Black Swan events and orphan genes are not well defined and orphan genes are only a subset of TRGs. I also coin the notion of Taxonomically Restricted Feature (TRF) since I believe many heritable features of biology are not solely genetic but have heritable cytoplasmic bases (like Post Translation modifications of proteins).
TRGs and TRFs sort of just poof onto the biological scene. How would we calibrate the molecular clock for such features? It goes “from zero to sixty” in a poof.
Finally, on the question of directly observed evolution, it seems to me, that evolution in the present is mostly of the reductive and exterminating variety. Rather than Dawkins Blind Watchmaker, I see a Blind Watch Destroyer. Rather than natural selection acting in cumulative modes, I natural selection acting in reductive and exterminating modes in the present day, in the lab and field.
For those reasons, even outside the naturalism vs. supernaturalism debate, I would think a reasonable inference is that many of the most important features of biology did not emerge via large collections of small typical events but rather via some Black Swan process in the past, not by any mechanisms we see in the present. It is not an argument from incredulity so much as a proof by contradiction.
If one accepts the reasonableness of Black Swan events as the cause of the major features of biology, it becomes possible to accept that these were miracles, and if Miracles there must be a Miracle Maker (aka God). But questions of God are outside science. However, I think the inference to Black Swan events for biology may well be science.
In sum, I think atheism is a reasonable position. I also think the viewpoint that biological emergence via Black Swan events is also a highly reasonable hypothesis even though we don’t see such Black Swans in every day life. The absence of such Black Swans is not necessarily evidence against Black Swans, especially if the Black Swan will bring coherence to the trajectory of biological evolution in the present day. That is to say, it seems to me things are evolving toward simplicity and death in the present day, ergo some other mechanism than what we see with our very own eyes was the cause of OOL and bridging of major gaps in the taxonomic groupings.
Of course such a Black Swan interpretation of biology may have theological implications, but formally speaking, I think inferring Black Swan hypotheses for biology is fair game in the realm of science to the extent it brings coherence to real-time observations in the present day.
Sal inspired the neologism excilience.
He is quote mining on steroids. He goes way beyond quoting out of context.
He thinks out of context. Everything about evolution is evidence against evolution. Everything is evidence for YEC. Everything that Koonin writes, everything Gould writes, everything written about evolution proves it can’t happen and didn’t happen.
Evidence of adaptive radiation after mass extinctions? Evidence that genomes deteriorate, and evolution can’t invent new function.
Malthus? Evidence of genetic entropy and imminent extinction?
The exact number of mutational load L is debated, but it is not much more than 1.
I cited Muller gave a number of 0.5, Graur cites Muller as giving a number of 1.0. It’s a little moot as you’ll see since, the modern estimates are much lower than 1 and the number of point mutations is 45-82 by Graur’s references.
Yes, this is clearly bonkers to expect purifying selection to work on such a large scale! The one alternative that Graur said elsewhere:
What he fails to point out is even if Encode is only 5% right, evolution is wrong. Graur isn’t wagering with the odds.
Graur reminds me of the spontaenous generation advocates in Pasteur’s time.
Paraphrasing their sentiments: “The theory of spontaneous generation had to be right otherwise naturalistic emergence of life would be falsified.”
Graur’s is facing an analogous situation, paraphrasing his words: “the genome has to be mostly rubbish, otherwise evolutionary theory is wrong.” But he said it more succinctly:
If ENCODE is only 5% right, evolution is wrong.
How about 2 percent, Sal?
Did ENCODE find more than two percent of the human genome coding protein?
Do you ever read or think about responses to your arguments?
stcordova,
Note that much of what Graur calls “indifferent” DNA is going to be perfectly tolerant of mutations (at least some of the time), but these nucleotides would still be counted as part of the 80% under ENCODE’s definition.
The issue isn’t just coding. It’s regulation, its construction, it’s putting stuff in the right place, it’s keeping track of what’s going on in the cell, it’s the 5 functional phases of introns, etc. etc.
There may be as many unique RNA transcriptomes as there are cells in the human body. How is the development of 100 trillion cells coordinated? It’s not just by providing sequence blueprints for proteins.
The sister projects at the NIH are ENCODE, Roadmap, and E4 (Enabling Exploration of the Eukaryotic Epitranscriptome).
The NIH research lines are roughly:
HGP: human genome
ENCODE: human RNA transcriptome
Roadmap: human epigenome
E4: human epitranscriptome
TBD: glycomes, proteomes, epiproteomes
The non-coding DNA seems to have relation to all these “-omes”. So Dan Graur has way more to worry about than just ENCODE, he’s not even dealing with Roadmap, and E4 isn’t even underway yet, not to mention some of the other NIH initiatives that ought to happen in the future.
When you say Many, what percentage of the genome are you referring to?
Cite some references?
By the way, pl;ease answer my questions about how genetic entropy is working out with invasive species? Do populations founded by a single pregnant female go extinct quickly in real life?
Sal, a species introduced to an island, or to a new environment is not new to evolution, but it is always a tiny population having no way to avoid inbreeding.
How’s genetic entropy working out with invasive species?
They can’t be a problem, because you have determined with geometric logic that they
stole the strawberrieswill go extinct due to genetic deterioration.Right?
I was talking about the transcriptome, not the genome when I said “many”.
The transcriptome is different than the genome.
I was using the term, as a lot of ENCODERs do, to refer to all RNA transcripts not just mRNA.
But since you’re demanding citations, here are some:
and I pointed out here:
80 billion neurons in the human brain, that’s potentially 80 billion unique transcriptomes and thus also 80 billion unique epitranscriptomes. But we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. What if those L1s do the same magic in other cells?
No because something else can whack them off the planet before their own genetic deterioration finishes them off.
Even with the yeast experiment pointed out, extinction by meltdown took 2,900 generations and that in only 2 of the 12 lines.
But if genetic deterioration isn’t the major cause of extinction, why did I bring up the point? It’s was a criticism of cumulative selection and the WEASEL model that only models tiny sets of features (genomes, strings, whatever). When we have huge numbers of features, say on the order of hundreds of millions or billions, cumulative selection become prohibitive because of the cost of purifying selection. The budget of available excess offspring is consumed paying for maintenance, it doesn’t have anything left to pay for construction.
That point wasn’t lost on Dan Graur. He said it well, “If ENCODE is right, evolution is wrong.” He understated the problem, if ENCODE is even half right, even 5% right, evolution is wrong. And it’s not just ENCODE, it’s now Roadmap, E4 and TBD.
Sal,
It was as charitable as I could be without being dishonest. If
a) Number_right_whales is the current population,
b) Number_right_whales_born is the number of right whales born this year, and
c) Number_right_whales_died is the number of right whales who died this year,
…then your statement…
…is incorrect, as I explained.
I’m quite serious about the importance of running simulations to catch errors like this.
Besides exposing errors in your models, simulations can lead to insights that you wouldn’t glean by merely thinking about the model. For example, the entire field of chaos theory arose from simulations behaving in unexpected ways.
Don’t get me started on Japanese knotweed.
Not right. What we see in the present day is accidents destroying species – and by “accidents” I include the arrival of the overwhelming humans into previously stable ecosystems. It’s wrong to say we’re “selecting’ in general.. We’re not selecting for faster antelopes the way big-cat predation selects for faster antelopes. Nobody thinks that selection should be able to drive condors to adapt to swallowing lead ammunition fragments from hunters’ discards in a few generations before they are acutely poisoned to death . That’s not selection. That’s the human equivalent of the dinosaur-ending meteorite impact.
Meanwhile, selection in the background is actually still working to create new variations and species and testing their survivability in the new human-created ecosystems. It’s not pretty, it’s not charismatic, it’s not fast enough to counter the accidental destruction in this blip of history, but it’s happening. It’s happening all around you but you don’t see it, and can’t see it, because you’re always blinded by your bias towards “decline” as a narrative.
Of course we expect a new burst after many/most of the creatures currently on our planet are forced into extinction by the accident of our arrival on the scene. Why wouldn’t we expect it? It’s happened five times before, after extinctions of as much of 95% of species, representing as much as 50% of all families then existent. Why wouldn’t we expect that it will happen again? What’s the magic barrier to it happening again?
This Dan Graur?
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/04/dan_graur_the_v084181.html
What about founder populations and invasive species?
No recourse to inbreeding. How’s that fit in with your cost model?
stcordova,
F = ma
“there are an infinite number of possible values for F, m and a that will make that equation true, and those combinations that will make the equation hold true are solutions to that equation.”
Infinite possibilities yet with the same number the outcome is repeatable. There is no drift in this equation. If on the other hand the outcome is probabilistic then there is uncertainty and drift. Since the genome is a sequence any random change has a probabilistic outcome. Is this what you call genetic entropy?
I remember reading an article about how human anti-weed measures are selecting for smaller faster blooming weeds. I only recollect dandelions as an example. A quick look at wikipedia says knotweed has potential to reach 4m high, but we see shorter plants “where they sprout through cracks in the pavement or are repeatedly cut down.” I hypothesize there’s a genetic switch to younger (shorter-stem) flowering time being selected there.
As if weeds weren’t already enough of a problem …
If we are in the sixth extinction, does any one really expect a new burst of complexity after most of the creatures on the planet are wiped out? I don’t
I think this about says it all. Just because it happened every time in the past doesn’t mean nuthin, because I don’t believe it. Just because all the observations we have show both THAT it will happen and HOW it will happen don’t mean nuthin because I don’t believe that either. And if anyone else believes differently, I tune them all out so I can’t imagine why anyone would disagree with me!
Yet I remain amazed. How can anyone with even the slightest knowledge ask “does anyone expect the inevitable”?
I thought you had abandoned Second Law arguments.
Perhaps you can cite some biologist who has quantified the “cost” of construction.
Perhaps you can quantify the cost. Is construction something like creating CSI? FSCI? dFSCI? FIASCO?
Perhaps you can explain exactly what the energy cost is of construction.
You see? Genetic entropy at work. Loss of function. Extinction imminent.
Just be patient. It worked with cockroaches and rats.
Agreed.
Almost there but not quite. 🙂
Random changes to software or a computer circuit (like zapping individual transistors), are usually damaging. So even if the change is random, we can say, the probability is high that it will cause breakage.
Genetic entropy (deterioration is a better word, entropy is a misnomer), says most random changes cause breakage in the genome just like random software changes and that natural selection cannot purify out the sheer number of defects. Darwin believe selection could remove all the bad. Darwin would be correct if we are dealing with genomes that are miniscule, not ones that are gigantic.
That’s why there is a discussion using the calculations above. Graur points out the essential problem with his “bonkers” comment.
How’s that model working out with founder populations and invasive species, Sal?
Well Keiths, I thank you for reading and responding even though I disagree with your characterization.
But you have reinforced my view that the ANNIHILATOR model should not become ANNIHILATOR software except for theatrical purposes. That is to say, let it remain as vaporware so that it be free of errors and criticisms. 🙂
The only exception would be to make the vaporware a purely theatrical type experience, in such case I would like the software, when it models an extinction to give an audible “You are terminated” in a Austrian/German accent:
But as I said, the best model of reality is reality itself. The ANNIHILATOR model claims:
Do disagree with number 1 for the present day and recorded history?
🙂 🙂 🙂
We’ve been through this. Recorded history includes the fossil record, and you model is simply wrong.
How’s your model working out for founder populations and invasive species, Sal?
What does “present day and recorded history” have to do with actual evolutionary timescales or legitimate evolutionary models?
When we take our planet’s history of life at the scale of three months, complex (photosynthesizing) organisms appear in October, dinosaurs at Christmas, proto humans at 11PM on New Year’s Eve, and all of recorded history** in the last 20 seconds before midnight.
If you only want to study those last 20 seconds, feel free, but don’t expect anyone to believe you about evolutionary history or evolutionary models based on your blindness to real time.
When you deliberately choose to restrict your model to the evolutionary equivalent of the great meteorite impact, you’re lying by omission. You’re not including the truth, the whole truth, the whole timescale including the “bursts” of radiation and adaptation (which you yourself admit exist, upthread) and the long eras of relative steady-state and slow evolution in between.
.
.
.
** and by “recorded history” I include the first known permanent settlements, which didn’t actually leave written records. Actual written history is only about 10 seconds on this scale.
The more I look at that the more it looks like kariosfocus’ isolated islands of function. Just a rewording. And construction cost looks like a rewording of CSI.
You do write better than KF, though.
Not to mention actual evolution experiments that show slow, increments in viability in a fixed environment, and no genetic deterioration.
When you close your eyes and ears to data you can rationalize anything.
Sal, I’m still asking how genetic deterioration model is working out with founder populations and invasive species?
Perhaps instead of black swans, we should have a thread about bumblebees.
Now there’s an opportunity for metaphor.
Cost is paid for by excess reproduction. You can’t build without sacrificing offspring and preventing them from reproducing as even Dawkins WEASEL demonstrated.
Graur gave the excess reproduction needed to purify the genome if ENCODE is right. I used the word “cost” to relate it to every day intuitions, but if you don’t like the idea, then use “requisite excess reproduction”.
There is fixing due to genetic drift and fixing due to substitution via natural selection in a population of approximately fixed size. Cost applies to the latter.
How about this one. 🙂
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2459384?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Oh MY GOD!
THE ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION!
How can I argue with that reference?
So I assume Haldane and Graur gave up on evolution and became young earth creationists.
Surely you aren’t quote mining them.
By the way, Sal, speaking of small populations, how’s your model working out with founder populations and invasive species?
No, he’s motivatedly misunderstanding Joe Felsenstein. .
Well, we’ve got the author of the paper here who was paid by Atomic Energy Commission. He’s a world expert on the topic.
I got through the pay wall because I have university access. But you’ve got the author right here at TSZ if you want to learn about the concept and if he’s willing to spend time talking about it.
I’m willing to learn Sal.
Tell me how your model of small population extinction is working out with founder populations and invasive species.
I’m going to try a different angle.
Let’s say there was no record of any Abrahamic God at all. Theists, would you be pursuing your current arguments about design as proof for Zeus / Buddha / next most viable candidate. If not,why not?
Don’t forget Zoroastrianism.
OK:
A relevant citation is here:
But there is a statistical bias in your statement of the issue. A founder population is founder population only after the founders have survived. It’s not including all the would-be founders that failed!
Throw a pair of tropical fish into the Arctic where a polar bear can eat them, and that “founder” or “invasive species” will go extinct in short order.
Here is proof of splintered off individuals that were would-be founders in a new environment going extinct:
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2011/03/23/animals-dying-kiev-zoo.html
Buddha? No, since there is no positive EV in it (according to Pascal’s wager).
Zeus? No, since no positive EV as far as I can tell.
If there is no payoff to the question, aside from curiosity, I probably wouldn’t pursue the question.
The current question of genetic deterioration and the work of ENCODE is relevant independent of the Design debate. I framed the OP in terms of genetic deterioration and extinction. That is formally separate from the question of design.
I tried to limit mention of design since there are relevant issues related to human health and environmental conservation.
Independent of ID and YEC, I’ve tried to state why I think the human race is getting sicker and why I believe more species are dying in the present day than being created. Those are questions that have relevance outside of philosophy and religion.
Everything alive is alive because it survived, Sal. I live a block away from an Osprey nest. Every year a pair of ospreys raise two chicks. the same pair has been doing this for ten years or so, while I’ve been watching. In a stable population, only two will survive, net. That’s two out of twenty, so far, if the population isn’t increasing.
Now what is your argument again about the cost of selection?
And no one doubts that inbreeding populations can go extinct. It’s true I’m asking about the ones that don’t. Rabbits in Australia, for example.
I’d think if your model said anything not tautological, it would have something to say about the populations that don’t go extinct.
I find it fascinating that a former UD contributor is suggesting something like the need for eugenics. If not active eugenics, something like social Darwinism.
I’m still interested in how you calculate the cost of selection.
Stupid biologists seem to think that reproductive excess followed by selection pays the cost, assuming a population isn’t weakened by environmental change.
How is your model not just the Second law argument in disguise?
There are at least two costs associated with selection because there are at least two modes:
1. selecting against new deleterious mutants in a purifying way
2. selecting for new beneficial mutants in a substitutional cumulative way as in WEASEL
Purifying selection was well described by Graur. He is hardly alone in his view. Look at page 155 of Joe’s book “Why Aren’t we All Dead” and it is a comparable argument:
http://evolution.gs.washington.edu/pgbook/pgbook.pdf
I agree with Graur and Joe that most of the regions of the genome must be free of purifying selection as a matter of principle.
Neutrality is still compatible with ENCODE if we allow functional features to be added and disabled without affecting fitness and hence they are neutral. But if they are neutral now, they likely became functional without any help from natural selection.
Some black swan process is indicated for the emergence of those functions without the aid of Darwinian selection. If I weren’t a creationist I’d opt for some sort of quantum based teleological evolution, Koonin’s multiverse, or a simple “we don’t know.”
Regarding cost of construction, this relates to how quickly we can evolve new features in a genome. There are subtleties to this too. For example there is interference selection. One guy is fast, the other is smart, and when a lion comes along, the benefit of being smart is extinguished because the dumb fast guy escaped. So it is desirable not to apply too much selection strength on one trait lest it destroy other desirable traits.
Now back to cost of construction. A species that has low reproductive excess and long generation times will not be able to add as many new features to the entire population as a species with high reproductive excess and short generation times.
The reason for this is that to add a new feature, one has to kill off so many individuals lacking that feature, and then be able to do this without wiping out the population.
But why ask me? There are experts who know this a buzzillion times better than me.
All that I really know is that Kimura took Haldane’s notions of the cost of natural selection and concluded evolution would be too slow to proceed via selection since only 1 new feature could be added only once every 300 generations on average. Hence Kimura argued the majority of molecular evolution must be free of selection. Kimura and Ohta quoted the Haldane figure in their book (which I own):
I’m pretty sure it’s in that book. I have since filed the book away in a box that I can’t get to right now….
This is from an earlier comment from Sal, quoting Thomas et al. 2012 (http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-cellbio-101011-155822):
Without further comment (though emphasis added), here is the entire paragraph from which this quote was taken:
Ok…gotta chime in here as this is my area of expertise…
First, the above is NOT inline with the ecological definition of invasive species.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/invasive_species.htm
So your example doesn’t remotely address the issue you keep avoiding: why do invasive species become so prolific if they are “suffering” from “genetic deterioration”?
Now, one may quibble that the term is not well-defined scientifically, but if one is going to make that argument, you can’t then turn around and use the term improperly.
The fact is however that your argument does not address non-native species population explosions in any manner and has no way of actually explaining the phenomenon. English Ivy in the U.S. is a great example. It’s genetic makeup is relatively stagnant here because there is virtually no selective pressure on its colonies, yet those colonies not only thrive, they expand now exponentially. How do you explain that given your premises above.
Wrong Sal. This again is a horrible example because it does not meet the definition of Founder Species. Try again. How about this instead:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galapagos_land_iguana
stcordova,
Pascal’s wager is simply a rhetorical tool, EV is not applicable due to some use of infinity and also probably some zeros. Also, its not fair. Supposing there is an undisclosed ‘God of rationality’ who gives all those heavenly goodies to those that “use their minds not follow dogma”. Would that offset YOUR pascal’s wager? It’s a bet made with very little and very bad information.
YEC and eugenecists have made strange bed fellows on the issue of genetic deterioration. John Sanford in his book said he was a eugenicist before becoming a creationist. He had to practice large scale eugenics when breeding plants….
Since then, he’s argued the only solution to the human condition is Jesus and the new world which Jesus promised. Jesus said this world is passing away, the scientific evidence affirms this on many levels starting with the 2nd law of thermodynamics which indicates all the usable energy in the universe will one day be gone.
On a more immediate level, I think John is advocating the reduction of exposure to mutagens. It won’t cure the problem, but will alleviate it.
One possibility being floated around by eugenecists is that birth defects are reduced when mating happens at certain ages. I think the optimal age for boys is 15 and women is 22. I can’t recall who suggested it, but the idea was to take a 15 year old boy with good genes and get him to mate with as many 22-year-old healthy females as possible.
You are getting more and more like kariosfocus (minus all the political paranoia).
You’ve managed to write a big pile of words without answering my question or saying anything that supports your position.
Here’s a clue:
Cherry picking paragraphs from actual scientists is dishonest and misleading unless you present their complete argument.
You quote Graur as if he supports your position. He doesn’t. He is considered the enemy at ENV.
You cite ENCODE without noting that they backed off on functionality. You talk about really rare transcriptions as if they approached some significant percentage of the genome.
In short, you are mathematically literate and have no excuse for misusing mathematics.
Digression into analogy:
There are, in the American and British systems, two kinds of lawyers working criminal cases: prosecutors and defenders.
Defenders are under no obligation to present evidence they know about that indicates guilt. Prosecutors, are on the other hand, obligated to present exculpatory evidence. Prosecutors are ethically and legally obligated to seek the truth.
You, Sal, and nearly all IDists and creationists, behave like defenders. Scientists are ethically and professionally obligated to behave like prosecutors. When you talk science, you cannot make your case as if you are trying to win a lawsuit. If you don’t want to look like a complete asshole, you need to cite the complete argument of the opposition.
I should not have to cross examine you. You should not be withholding the complete positions of your reference authors. You should be — as Darwin and Gould and Mayr did — be starting with the best case that can be made for evolution, and then offering your objections.
petrushka,
Sal, echoing Petrushka, I get the impression you have a preconception you want to fit reality into. If that’s what you need to do, so be it. But then why the apparent need to justify your belief with these cherry-picking forays into science? Isn’t faith enough? It makes no sense to me that you want to try and wrap your understanding of science around your belief!
Faith isn’t enough. Gullibility is not a virtue, skepticism is.
I came here to see if you guys can overturn my understanding of the scientific literature. I provided what I believe evidence support 3 main points for the present day and the era of recorded human history (about 5000 years). The three point that are subject to science are:
1. net species decreasing
2. reductive evolution
3. net genetic erosion
Petrushka disagreed with all 3. No one else has come right out and said what they think #1 is but they’ve alluded to it with references to the 6th extinction.
All that I’m hearing now is accusations that I’m this or that.
It might be helpful to focus instead on the issue of those 3 points and to what extent the readers agree or disagree or just plain don’t know.
Petrushka disagreed with #1. He’s the one who has actually failed to provide ANY evidence the net number of species is increasing in the present day.
I’ve provided several citations as to why many believe the number of species in the present day is declining.
What do you think? If you say, “yes” to #1 in the present day, then why should you accuse me of cherry picking since it’s the view you yourself hold.
Why should we have to pretend we disagree when we might actually agree?