Over at the “IDM collapse” thread I rather churlishly rejected CharlieM’s invitation to read an extensive piece by Stephen L. Talbott. Discovering he is a fan of Velikovsky did little to encourage me (that is, I fully realise, an argument from authority, but life is short and authors many. One needs a filter). What did catch my eye, however, is the fact that he is a contributor to Third Way of Evolution. This, on their front page, is what one might term their ‘manifesto’.
The vast majority of people believe that there are only two alternative ways to explain the origins of biological diversity. One way is Creationism that depends upon intervention by a divine Creator. That is clearly unscientific because it brings an arbitrary supernatural force into the evolution process. The commonly accepted alternative is Neo-Darwinism, which is clearly naturalistic science but ignores much contemporary molecular evidence and invokes a set of unsupported assumptions about the accidental nature of hereditary variation. Neo-Darwinism ignores important rapid evolutionary processes such as symbiogenesis, horizontal DNA transfer, action of mobile DNA and epigenetic modifications. Moreover, some Neo-Darwinists have elevated Natural Selection into a unique creative force that solves all the difficult evolutionary problems without a real empirical basis. Many scientists today see the need for a deeper and more complete exploration of all aspects of the evolutionary process.
That puzzles me. We need a root-and-branch rethink because of the widely-accepted phenomena of endosymbiosis, HGT, transposons and epigenetics? I honestly don’t get it. These are refinements easily, and already, accommodated. Neo-Darwinists do not ‘ignore’ these phenomena, nor consider them unimportant. They may fall outside a strict framework of genetic gradualism by ‘micromutation’, but are hardly keeping anyone awake nights.
Perhaps, on reflection, I should punt them my musings on the Evolution of Sex. It is non-Darwinian in the sense they appear to mean, so it should be right up their street!
I’ll spell it out then: You cannot determine that an object is made for a purpose without recognizing that purpose.
LOL. You want me to prove that a snowflake has no intentional purpose?!? Or do I need to prove that crystals are ordered?
Is there a Designed variant that is unequivocally favoured in all contexts? How does a ‘contextual’ criticism of evolutionary change avoid rebounding on the alternative?
So far, it is avoided by denying adaptation is a thing.
So designs serve no purpose? 🤔
I have accepted that Nonlin doesn’t get it, but you should be able to grasp that the Lenski lab has repeatedly performed competition experiments against the ancestral strain and that in the experimental setting the evolved strain has consistently higher growth rates than the ancestral strain.
It’s like watching a weekly soccer match in which FC Barcelona repeatedly humiliates “the Brisbane Boys” and then have phoodoo declare that skill at playing soccer does not exist, since it is of no use in a swimming pool.
My thoughts exactly. I have a hunch this was not thought out that well 😄.
That’s not how it works. The literature is abundant with experiments looking for evidence one way or another. If the experiment shows that the mutation is the reason for survival, then it’s beneficial. For example, the citrate thing in E coli, they isolated the DNA, sequenced, checked the most suspicious mutation, found that it allowed use of citrate as carbon source under those conditions, then they concluded that that mutation was beneficial. This has to be done to distinguish background mutations (neutral or semi-neutral), from the beneficial ones.
Same goes for deleterious. If there’s suspicion that some mutation is never seen because it would be deleterious, then constructing the mutant and checking if that works is a way to tell apart what hasn’t happened because it’s deleterious, from what hasn’t happened because, well, it hasn’t.
So where’s the circular logic? We observe survival under conditions where the wild-type doesn’t survive, we strongly suspect there might be a beneficial mutation, we check the mutations and isolate the one we suspect the most, we check if it works under a clean background (one without the other mutations). If it works, we’ve caught it.
Seems like you’re demonstrating what happens when you don’t think things through. Maybe you should follow your own advice.
Sure. that’s by definition!
That’s also by definition.
You seem to be mistaking identifying something that fits a definition for circular logic.
So, what exactly is wrong with identifying something that fits a definition?
Every mutation exists in it’s very own unique context, such as the context of the individual itself. So appealing to “context” is just so much hand-waving.
Their purpose is to confuse the enemy, 🙂
And those individuals share a larger context, the physical world. In ID theory is design carried out one individual at the time or is a complete population designed?
Of course every mutation exists in its own unique context, such as the context of the individual itself. What’s the problem with pointing something that obvious to those who imagine that evolutionary biology should ignore it? How the fuck is that handwaving? Do you think evolutionary biology should ignore this fact? Evolutionary biology is about making sense of facts, data, evidence, etc. It therefore doesn’t ignore them. It builds on them as foundations.
Some “IDiot” here thinks that evolution is about magical mutations, existing context-free, spreading to wide-world populations magically, rather than being about natural phenomena where mutations have effects dependent on their overall context, from the individuals themselves to their environmental circumstances, and where mutations spread through natural mechanisms, like the more successful reproduction of some individuals against the reproduction of other members of its population. I’m pointing out that we’re not talking about magic, but trying to make sense about real circumstances where there’s real contexts and real reproduction. That evolutionary theory takes reality and evidence into account. That poor person keeps ignoring the mechanisms, the nature we’re trying to explain, in exchange for imaginary “dogmas” that nobody holds.
So, you’re missing a lot of, ahem, context. Maybe you should read a bit more carefully before commenting?
Except you destroy your own argument with one sentence. If there is context to when a beneficial mutation helps survival, and the context is when it helps survival, then beneficial mutations only help survival when they help survival.
In which case the beneficial mutations are deleterious mutations. Likewise deleterious mutations are beneficial.
And you know how you can tell when deleterious mutations are beneficial mutations? When they exist. Deleterious mutations are actually platonic in nature. They exist as a form outside of our reality. But as soon as they exist in our reality, they become beneficial, until they one day return to not existing, where they become their ideal form, deleterious.
Is this supposed to make sense? Yes, I can understand that benefits are beneficial, and harmful things do harm. Trying to make these the same in some semantic sense would do Trump proud.
I did an interesting study in graduate school. I wanted to know if the best batters in baseball had the best batting average. So I did a study of the best batters in baseball over the past fifty years. I took all of the players with the best batting average for each season. If a players batting average went down in any given year, they were consider to be less good batters and if there batting average went up, they were considered better batters. What I found was very interesting.
I discovered that in fact, in major league baseball, the top batters every year all had the best batting average. The worst batters each year all had the poorest batting averages. It was practically a one-to-one correlation. The only players who didn’t correlate exactly to these measurements were the players we didn’t measure. Even more telling, we studied the minor leagues as well. We found almost the same results. We were going to publish the results in Skeptic Science Quarterly, but then we decided instead to sell the results to same major league clubs who wanted to identify the best batters.
It turned out not so good for us in the end though, as many of the teams complained to us that a lot of the batters whose batting average went down no longer had the best batting performance. They said, “How can the best batters have such a low batting average?” We replied that they can’t, that there must be something wrong with their stats. We looked at their numbers and determined they they miss calculated who the best batters were. After we adjusted the numbers for them, it turned out we were still right, but every year more and more complaints.
Ask the evolutionists. Apparently so.
The was an interesting epilogue to our baseball study. A lot of baseball teams came to us and said they would like us to do another study. They said they want to calculate things like batter arm strength, swing speed, hand-eye coordination, size, even hair color and size of their ring fingers. We replied that these things are all contextual, and thus can’t really be used to determine the best performance. They said, “but we believe batters with the best swing speed could have the best performance.” So we did that study for them.
WE compared swing speed to batting performance compared to batting average to batting performance. As we predicted, batting average was a much better measurement of batting performance than swing speed. We did however find that hair color had a strong correlation to batting performance except in the cases where hair color did not have a strong correlation. In all of those cases there was little to no correlation. But in the cases where there was a correlation, we noticed that hair color played a strong role in batting performance. Brown hair had both a negative correlation and a positive correlation, depending on the context.
Soooo, safe to say that if phoodoo ever watched Moneyball, he didn’t understand it.
ROFL
FYI, phoodoo, ALL definitions are tautological. Doesn’t make arguments which include those defined terms circular…
This could actually be an interesting study, provided you don’t use batting average as the only skill metric. This is why baseball has developed such a variety of metrics which attempt to include average, power, ability to draw walks, and baserunning speed. There are quite a few lists, done by various baseball people, of whom they consider the all-time best hitters. If you look at their top ten on each list, you will find relatively few with league-leading averages.
Now, if you wanted to know if the tallest players were the ones with the greatest height, your stupid-sounding approach might work. But even there, I recall one manager saying Randy Johnson was the tallest pitcher he’d managed, but NOT the highest! He named Bill “Spaceman” Lee as the highest!
So … some medicines are beneficial, in some circumstances. In others, there are contraindications – antagonistic effects with other medications, or negative effects given certain comorbidities. In those circumstances, the medicine is not beneficial, and may indeed be detrimental. Kaboom! Phoodoo destroys medicine! Medicine is circular!
Then you’re a tad incoherent. I did a different study. We wanted to find the best batters, so we got them batting to figure it out. We wanted to find the ones that fitted the definition: those with the best batting averages.
The baseball teams that hired them never complained about “circularity.” Actually, they wanted us to do exactly what we did: find the ones fitting the definition for best batters. Of course, the teams wanted them for playing a specific position in baseball, a context that’s very important for baseball teams, but they did not have a need to tell us that the context was important. They didn’t complain either that “best batters” is an advantageous ability for baseball, and that it didn’t matter for diving.
Must of never managed Doc Ellis who pitched a no hitter tripping on acid.
It sounds very interesting. Were you given a grant to do it?
Yes.
But not all tautologies are definitions.
DNA_Jock, don’t you think phoodoo is relying on a particular definition of tautological and circular, definitions which no doubt depend on context?
If the definitions depend on context then they aren’t definitions.
Thanks for the clarification. One small step for man ,one giant leap for ID.
Don’t forget Mung is a word lawyer. I hear he has a dog on a lead that is made out of lead which he leads on the same paths he was led as a buoy.
I don’t understand the entire premise of the true story, the book and the movie is that batting average is NOT the best metric to use for finding the best hitters for a baseball team? I didn’t understand that when I joked about your use of batting average as a great measurement of batting average?
You never saw the movie did you? You also completely missed my point as well didn’t you? Congratulations, you are batting 2 for 2!
Nitwit.
Do tell, how is linking to the movie Moneyball relevant to making some point you are not even sure you are making? What were you trying to say there?
No question batting average is the best measurement of batting average, but not at all the best measurement of hitting, which involves multiple factors.
Another metric is wins above replacement (i.e. compared with the average player at that position). This metric takes into consideration the skills of other players, the skills of available players, the position the player most often plays in, fielding percentage, fielding range, and others (as well as all the offensive statistics). The idea is to determine how much a player contributes to the team’s success.
Where Moneyball comes in, is when you start combining all of these hitting and fielding statistics with the cost of employing a player. What Billy Beane did was figure out that there were plenty of excellent players who could be signed for cheap, until their abilities were widely noticed. In other words, Beane identified those young players who were the best hitters for the money. This metric was crucial in building and maintaining a competitive team in a small market.
But all of that aside, I realize that your purpose here has nothing to do with baseball, and everything to do with trying to play word games in order to belittle those who don’t share your views. At which you fail.
THIS is where you showed how little you are paying attention.
How many skill metrics do you think the concept of fitness uses when measuring the concept of fitness?
Let me help you in case the question is too hard-ONE.
No question survival is the best measurement of that which survived…
Actually, they more typically measure mean offspring accruing to carriers vs that accruing to non carriers. As you have been told more times than I have had hot dinners.
But try applying your objections to medicine. The ‘mean offspring’ approach is readily analogised with a double blind trial: measure outcomes with and without the drug of interest.
If the notion of benefit fails in evolution because it can be stated tautologously, how does the efficacy of a drug evade this criticism? The best drug is the one that has the best mean outcome. But it might not be, especially in a small trial: stochastic effects can give a false positive. Oh no, medicine is wrong!
What context?
The definition of tautology is the definition of tautology.
The definition of circular definition is any definition that is circular.
Easy!
Off the top of my head:
Developmental viability, age-specific survival, age-specific reproduction, fecundity, mating success, age at maturity, fertility, competitive ability, clutch size, number of clutches, size at birth, sex ratio of offspring, reproductive investment.
May have missed a few.
Oh is that right? So which is more fit, an organism which has very large size at birth compared to its peers, but very low mating success, or one with very high mating success but very low size at birth?
Or one that survives long but doesn’t breed, compared to one that dies young but breeds a lot-which gets higher marks?
“Batting average”? LOL
Oh dear. Like I said, you didn’t understand the movie. Or Sabremetrics. One key innovation that Beane had was to move away from batting average and towards On Base Percentage as the metric of value. I tried to gently guide you in this direction five years ago when I originally brought up the analogy — I used OBP. To no avail.
Phoodoo, as Allan notes, your “it’s tautological!” complaint applies equally to medicine. How do we know that Lipitor is better than Lescol, or Avastin is better than Zaltrap?
ALL definitions are tautologous.
Have you heard of mayflies?
No fucking kidding? Is that right? Oh, he moved AWAY from batting average as the metric of the best hitters to deal for? Wow, is that so? What a revelation! AWAY from batting averages you say?
I’ll be damned! NOT batting averages you say?
Are you in Mensa Jock? Because they gotta be looking for you!
Well yea, there is a documentary all about them with Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. I am sure Jock is very familiar with it.
You are making a category error. “Fitness” is an abstract label attached to the net operation of many real-life factors. Fitness is not measured directly. You can compare it to “skill”, which is the sum total of many different factors. In other words, you aren’t looking at measurements, you are looking at the result of many measurements, and calling it a measurement. It’s not.
These are among many different (and effective) survival strategies. At one extreme, we have careful protection of few offspring, and at the other we have no protection of zillions of offspring. Some organisms breed extremely early in their life cycle. If yeast could breed freely, it would outmass the Earth in days. There does not seem to be any “best” survival strategy.
There isn’t.
By definition. So what’s the problem?
Are you saying that scientists should stop studying those that survived in order to learn if they had any advantage over those that did not survive?
I should point out that on base percentage is another composite, composed of hits, walks, and hit-by-pitch. The Sabremetric in common use today is OPS, which is essentially how many bases a player reaches in an average at-bat. It’s another composite statistic, not measured directly.
Its not a question of studying anything to determine if it had an advantage or disadvantage. Its quite the opposite. There isn’t a means for deciding that something had a disadvantage and survived, or had an advantage and didn’t survived. It is implied in the definition that if it survived it had an advantage, and if it didn’t it had a disadvantage.
All this time and you still don’t get this. Amazing.
You should go watch the documentary on mayflies. Its at 92% on Rotten Tomatoes.
You aren’t applying much thought to your ideology here. What scientists do is identify differences among individuals. These are the base facts. If certain differences, over time, are found in increasingly higher percentages of the population, then this lends support to the proposal that these differences are beneficial. But “benefit” and “fitness” and “advantage” are all proposed conclusions. They are NOT measurements.
You are consistently confusing definitions with observations.
I explained to you that this is not so. That there’s ways to determine if the surviving individuals had advantages (and viceversa).
I explained that noticing survival under conditions where individuals of the original population didn’t survive is but the first step. That then there’s work to be done to determine which, if any, mutations were beneficial (if it’s about mutations). Did you “answer” that comment without reading it?
It’s implied in the definition that having an advantage helps survival, but not that it survived. It’s implied in the definition that if the disadvantage if deadly, then, obviously, it did not survive, but not that every disadvantage is deadly.
There’s documented cases where somewhat disadvantageous, obviously not deadly, features do survive. Sometimes “carried” by an advantageous one. We would not know this if the whole work consisted on just saying that survivors had advantages and non-survivors didn’t. We know this because there’s further investigation.
Evolutionary science is not the black-and-white endeavour that you imagine it to be. It’s a scientific discipline.
Since you “answered” the comment where I explained to you that’s not how it’s done, I assumed that wasn’t your problem. What else should I have assumed? That you cannot read for comprehension? That when answered you rather ignore the answers? What?
This is not the story that was peddled. And it’s illogical anyway.
Therefore no “evolution”. Simple.
Therefore no “evolution”. The crazy story is not consistent by your own admission.
Yes he did. And this is the best he can do.
The nonsense has been going on for centuries. That’s because “evolution” is so darn “gradual”.
What is the story that was paddled and by whom?
As opposed to? What is your explanation for extant biology?
Of course you can. This has been discussed, Stonehenge etc.
Absolutely. That is precisely your claim, isn’t it? Not only that it has no purpose but also that it was not created with a purpose. Now, that should be entertaining.
Allan Miller,
Huh?
False. Adaptation is “a thing”. Just not “evolution”.
So Lenski’s a farmer just like the other farmers that grow big breasted chickens. Big deal. So how’s that “evolution”?
That’s silly. We just don’t call medicine “unqualified beneficial”. That’s why medicine is science and “evolution” is not.
So you’re alive? Do you now get the difference between black cat and black chameleon? Your mistakes will not be forgotten, math challenged. Haha.
Only, YOU don’t understand the movie. Since you’re missing the time factor. As in history vs forecast. Quite embarrassing. Well, if not math challenged, that is.
Translation: there is no “fitness”.
Another one bites the dust. We salute you trailblazing truck driver.
Yeah. Meaningless differences.
Then no “evolution” mechanism, right?