PoliticalChic
Diamond Member
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- #61
As usual, you supply no source for your specious comments as your source is fundamentalist xtian websites. You really should learn the facts about biology rather than default to ICR nonsense.Our next loon, Michael Behe, is a prime example of what can happen when loonery disguises itself as real science. Behe is one of the most ardent and influential creationist out there; covered in more detail here.
Behe himself claims to accept (for instance) common descent and an old (13+ Billion years) universe. However evidence shows that he is a straightforward creationist. He consistently argues that his purported evidence that evolutionary theory does not work is automatically evidence for ID. The shifting of goalposts is obvious when he tries to argue that his opponents are inconsistent in arguing that ID is unfalisifiable (e.g. Coyne) and empirically refuted (e.g. Doolittle). In refusing to admit that Doolittle’s experiments - which falsified his specific predictions concerning blood clotting - were a falsification of the testable claims he forwarded with respect to irreducible complexity, Behe spectacularly demonstrates that Coyne is right to deem ID unfalsifiable (insofar as its supporters continuously change the goalposts).
Behe is also a religious apologist in general, serving as an “expert witness” for several religion related court cases.
Diagnosis: Strongly under the spell of confirmation bias, dishonest and a crackpot. As perhaps the leading creationist today, Behe is very influential and dangerous.
We already saw your fake looney blogsite, so no need to repeat.
You have no evidence using mathematics or else show us something.
Why not look up Ronald Fisher in your looney website?
Ronald Fisher, a mathematician and one of the founding fathers of the Modern Theory of Evolution, proposed a Natural Law of Evolution that stated that given random chance induced changes (mutations), the fitness of an organism will always INCREASE over time due to natural selection. He derived that this evolutionary law assumes an equal number of beneficial mutations = number of harmful mutations and symmetrical distribution of beneficial vs harmful mutations.
However, extensive research has shown that the distribution of beneficial-vs-harmful mutations is NOT equal and symmetrical. Instead the distribution is very heavily biased towards HARMFUL mutations. (No surprise there as this is what creation scientists have been saying from the beginning.) Anyway, experimental measurements shows that 1) There are NO observed beneficial mutations at all, or 2) Beneficial mutations IF present are below detection limits of the experiments, or 3) Beneficial mutations IF present are less than one in a million mutations. The rest are majority HARMFUL along with some fraction that are neutral.
When we add in this experimentally determined distribution, the MATH shows that in biologically realistic situations (with asymmetric mutational distributions), the fitness of the species DECLINES over time in general. It means that mutations and natural selection do NOT work in reality.
You might as well add your name to your fake looney website haha.
Claim CB101:
Most mutations are harmful, so the overall effect of mutations is harmful.
Source:
Morris, Henry M. 1985. Scientific Creationism. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, pp. 55-57.
Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. 1985. Life--How Did It Get Here? Brooklyn, NY, pg. 100.
Response:
Most mutations are neutral. Nachman and Crowell estimate around 3 deleterious mutations out of 175 per generation in humans (2000). Of those that have significant effect, most are harmful, but the fraction which are beneficial is higher than usually though. An experiment with E. coli found that about 1 in 150 newly arising mutations and 1 in 10 functional mutations are beneficial (Perfeito et al. 2007).
The harmful mutations do not survive long, and the beneficial mutations survive much longer, so when you consider only surviving mutations, most are beneficial.
Beneficial mutations are commonly observed. They are common enough to be problems in the cases of antibiotic resistance in disease-causing organisms and pesticide resistance in agricultural pests (e.g., Newcomb et al. 1997; these are not merely selection of pre-existing variation.) They can be repeatedly observed in laboratory populations (Wichman et al. 1999). Other examples include the following:
Mutations have given bacteria the ability to degrade nylon (Prijambada et al. 1995).
Plant breeders have used mutation breeding to induce mutations and select the beneficial ones (FAO/IAEA 1977).
Certain mutations in humans confer resistance to AIDS (Dean et al. 1996; Sullivan et al. 2001) or to heart disease (Long 1994; Weisgraber et al. 1983).
A mutation in humans makes bones strong (Boyden et al. 2002).
Transposons are common, especially in plants, and help to provide beneficial diversity (Moffat 2000).
In vitro mutation and selection can be used to evolve substantially improved function of RNA molecules, such as a ribozyme (Wright and Joyce 1997).
Whether a mutation is beneficial or not depends on environment. A mutation that helps the organism in one circumstance could harm it in another. When the environment changes, variations that once were counteradaptive suddenly become favored. Since environments are constantly changing, variation helps populations survive, even if some of those variations do not do as well as others. When beneficial mutations occur in a changed environment, they generally sweep through the population rapidly (Elena et al. 1996).
High mutation rates are advantageous in some environments. Hypermutable strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa are found more commonly in the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients, where antibiotics and other stresses increase selection pressure and variability, than in patients without cystic fibrosis (Oliver et al. 2000).
Note that the existence of any beneficial mutations is a falsification of the young-earth creationism model (Morris 1985, 13).
What else can I help you with?
Haha. Still stuck in the 1980s. Fisher's theorem was disproved in 2018.
"January 2018: Fisher’s Famous Theorem Has Been “Flipped”
The 2014 edition of Genetic Entropy stated that a publication was in preparation that would disprove the historically pivotal “Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection”, developed by Ronald Fisher. This key new paper has finally been published.
Ronald Fisher was one the great scientists of the last century, and his theorem, published in 1930, and was the foundational work that gave rise to neo-Darwinian theory and the field of population genetics. This new paper shows that Fisher’s mathematical formulation and his conclusion were wrong. Furthermore, the new paper corrects Fisher’s work — thus reversing Fisher’s thesis and establishing a new theorem. Fisher had claimed that his theorem was a mathematical proof of evolution — making the continuous increase in fitness a universal and mathematically certain natural law. The corrected theorem shows that just the opposite is true — fitness must very consistently degenerate — making macroevolution impossible. The new paper by Basener and Sanford, is in the Journal of Mathematical Biology (available here).
Fisher described his theorem as “fundamental”, because he believed he had discovered a mathematical proof for Darwinian evolution. He described his theorem as equivalent to a universal natural law — on the same level as the second law of thermodynamics. Fisher’s self-proclaimed new law of nature was that populations will always increase in fitness — without limit, as long as there is any genetic variation in the population. Therefore evolution is like gravity — a simple mathematical certainly. Over the years, a vast number of students of biology have been taught this mantra — that Fisher’s Theorem proves that evolution is a mathematical certainty.
The authors of the new paper describe the fundamental problems with Fisher’s theorem. They then use Fisher’s first principles, and reformulate and correct the theorem. They have named the corrected theorem The Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection with Mutations. The correction of the theorem is not a trivial change — it literally flips the theorem on its head. The resulting conclusions are clearly in direct opposition to what Fisher had originally intended to prove.
In the early 1900s, Darwinian theory was in trouble scientifically. Darwin’s writings were primarily conceptual in nature, containing a great deal of philosophy and a great deal of speculation. Beyond simple observations of nature, Darwin’s books generally lacked genuine science (experimentation, data analysis, the formulation of testable hypotheses). Darwin had no understanding of genetics, and so he had no conception of how traits might be passed from one generation to the next. He only had a very vague notion of what natural selection might actually be acting upon. He simply pictured life as being inherently plastic and malleable, so evolution was inherently fluid and continuous (think Claymation). When Mendel’s genetic discoveries were eventually brought out of the closet, it could be seen that inheritance was largely based upon discrete and stable packets of information. That indicated that life and inheritance were not like Claymation, and that biological change over time was not based upon unlimited plasticity or fluidity. Mendel’s discrete units of information (later called genes), were clearly specific and finite, and so they only enabled specific and limited changes. At that time it was being said: “Mendelism has killed Darwinism”.
Fisher was the first to reconcile the apparent conflict between the ideas of Darwin and the experimental observations of Mendel. Fisher accomplished this by showing mathematically how natural selection could improve fitness by selecting for desirable genetic units (beneficial alleles), and simultaneously selecting against undesirable genetic units (deleterious alleles). He showed that given zero mutations, the more there are good/bad alleles in the population, the more natural selection can improve the fitness of the population. This is the essence of Fisher’s Theorem. This was foundational for neo-Darwinian theory — which now reigns supreme in modern academia.
Remarkably, Fisher’s theorem by itself illustrates a self-limiting process — once all the bad alleles are eliminated, and once all the individuals carry only good alleles, then there is nothing left to select, and so selective progress must stop. The end result is that the population improves slightly and then becomes locked in stasis (no further change). It is astounding that Fisher’s Theorem does not explicitly address this profound problem! Newly arising mutations are not even part of Fisher’s mathematical formulation. Instead, Fisher simply added an informal corollary (which was never proven), which involved extrapolation from his simple proof. He assumed that a continuous flow of new mutations would continuously replenish the population’s genetic variability, thereby allowing continuous and unlimited fitness increase."
NEW DEVELOPMENTS | -genetic-entropy
www.geneticentropy.org
Interesting and informative.