Quantum Windbag
Gold Member
- May 9, 2010
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It appears you have trouble reading. Allow me to help. You are correct in saying natural selection does not eliminate randomness of mutations. Lucky for me, nothing I said contradicts that. No, what I said was that environmental pressures themselves are non-random selection on random mutation. They don't affect the frequency of the mutations from happening, they just pick and choose which mutations are more likely to be passed on. An "intelligent" intervention is not required to produce non-random outcomes from a random population. The only thing that is needed is a filter of some sort. In this case, natural selection is that filter.
This concept can be demonstrated with a simple thought experiment. Imagine a game where different sized objects are randomly selected from a bag. Now let's impose a filter: let's say a small round hole. The first object you draw is a large square, and it doesn't fit in the round hole. After drawing all objects, you're only left with small circular ones. A non-random filter produced a non-random outcome when imposed on a random sample. The filter need not be intelligent, it just needs to be a filter. Now you can claim natural selection itself is a randomly selected filter, and we can get into the meta-philosophy of what really is "random", but that's just a silly argument and doesn't practically pertain to this discussion.
Trust me, I have no trouble reading. You are the one with the comprehension problem here. Environmental pressures are just as random as mutations. The only way something natural can not be random is if it is unnatural. Earthquakes, meteor strikes, and even weather, are all random, and they all affect the environment a species lives in. An increase in radiation from a landslide that exposes pitchblende would be random, and affect the mutation rate of a species.
Let me repeat this for you so you understand.
The only way to filter a random even to get a non random result is through the deliberate intervention of intelligence to remove that randomness. This is a foundation of statistics and math, it cannot be circumvented in any other way.
Your thought experiment falls short in so many ways it is laughable. The fact that you had to specifically design your filter to exclude all but the results you want proves that intelligent intervention is necessary.
Let us make your experiment fit reality more closely.
We take the same bag and fill it with coins of different denominations. Then we randomly pull the coins from the bag and drop them through a hole that is only big enough to pass coins of the size of a nickle or smaller, and we look at whether those coins are heads or tails. Do you really think the results will be less random simply because they go through that hole first?
Natural selection does not select for a specific result, it only selects what fits through that hole. Some of what fits through that hole is good, and some is bad, but it all fits. That makes evolution as perfectly random as the underlying mutations, and explains why there are things about us that make no sense from a survival oriented result.
Once again it appears you have trouble reading. Can you point out where I stated some species are "less evolved" than others? I recommend however that you google "phylogenetics" for more information on tracking evolution over time.
What I DID state was that mutation frequency is not constant across species. Eukaryotes and prokaryotes have completely different DNA polymerase altogether. Heck even wikipedia has an article on mutation rate. If that and its sources are not sufficient, there are 700 articles with "mutation rate" in their titles on pubmed. Let me know if you want any more documentation.
In the meantime, I recommend you phrase your questions in a tone that connotes desire to learn instead of distrustful challenge, as you're not yet tall enough to ride the high horse.
Funny, when I read that article at Wiki it clearly did not support your assertion that mutations occur at different rates among species. I am no where near an expert in this field, but it seems to be saying that more complex organisms mutate slower because the genome is more complicated, and even there individual mutations are more likely to occur in males than females. It also states that mutation rates are affected by environment, and not steady, even if the assumption that they are makes it easier to track species divergence.
That would help explain why those Tibetan natives evolved more quickly than there relatives who stayed at lower altitudes, wouldn't it?
If you don't like the way a phrase something, feel free to ignore me. I am more than capable of learning anything I want to through other avenues than internet forums, so see no need to moderate any questions I ask here with the intent to learn. Even If I did want to learn here, I would choose to learn from someone who has a better grasp of fundamental math than you have demonstrated.