Does anyone believe in Evolution anymore?

[Yorzhik]

There is no "devolve."

Could you show us where he says populations "devolve?"

You are incorrect. The laws of physics dictate what geneticists knew intuitively.

The abstract and introduction don't question mutational load, but discuss ways it is mitigated. Unfortunately, they admit to not knowing if the problem can be mitigated.

We also discuss why accurate estimation of mutation load depends on assumptions regarding the distribution of dominance and selection coefficients, quantities that are poorly characterized for current genomic datasets.

About ten years ago, I think... (Barbarian checks)

Mathematical and Computer Modelling
Volume 49, Issues 11–12, June 2009, Pages 2109-2115
S.GenieysaN.BessonovbV.Volperta
Mathematical model of evolutionary branching
Abstract

This work is devoted to the study of an evolutionary system where similar individuals are competing for the same resources. Mathematically it is a Fisher equation with an integral term describing this non-local competition. Due to this competition, an initially monomorphic population may split into two distinct sub-populations, hence exhibiting a branching capacity. This framework can be applied to various contexts where recognizers are competing for some signals. The pattern formation capacity of this model is investigated analytically and numerically.


As Shannon showed, evolution would not work without the noise.

As the program shows, evolution has yet to be modeled. Shannon has been a serious impediment to speculating how a program could be made to work.

 

[Yorzhik]

Sorry, botanist intrusion here . . . In fact it's even better than that. Most cultivated plants not only have an extra chromosome or two but entire genomes. Cultivated strawberries are octoploid (have eight copies of their entire genome!).

This is actually a valuable trait as far as humans are concerned. Cells with more DNA in them have larger nuclei, making the cells larger, making the resulting fruits, grains and whole plants larger.

In fact most cultivated plants are polyploids, having many copies of their genomes. Humans sometimes even create polyploids intentionally. Sometimes these are even from different species. The bread most of us eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner is made from a plant (bread wheat) that has a combination of three different species' genomes inside of it, making it hexaploid. So genome duplication is a very good thing as far as we humans are concerned, and it's quite common in nature as well.

So you could safely admit that bread wheat genomes have less than 33% functional DNA?

 

[The Barbarian]

Barbarian suggests:
There is no "devolve."

Could you show us where he says populations "devolve?"

You are incorrect. The laws of physics dictate what geneticists knew intuitively.

I notice you couldn't find anything in the literature where geneticists say there's such a thing as "devolution." Isn't that a pretty good clue for you?

As the program shows, evolution has yet to be modeled.

I just showed you several models that accurately model observed evolution, including speciation. No point in denying the fact.

Shannon has been a serious impediment to speculating how a program could be made to work.

Shannon wrote a thesis on how to model biological evolution. I thought you knew.

IEEE Eng Med Biol Mag. 2006 Jan-Feb;25(1):30-3.
Claude Shannon: biologist. The founder of information theory used biology to formulate the channel capacity.
Schneider TD1.

 

[Alate_One]

1. That was an informed, intentional change. Random changes never improve data.

Wrong and wrong. Wheat evolved into bread wheat long before humans had any idea of how to cross species. They simply selected beneficial mutations as they came along.

2. There was a benefit, but that almost certainly came at a cost to the plant population that far outweighed the slight benefit it gave people. To figure this out: Take only the changed genome and try to remake what you got it from.

There are more wheat plants now than there ever were before these mutations. How is this not beneficial to both the plant and humans?

 

[Stripe]

Wrong and wrong. Wheat evolved into bread wheat long before humans had any idea of how to cross species. They simply selected beneficial mutations as they came along.

Because you say so?

Wheat turned up at the same time people did. They grew it with all the understanding that was available to them at the time, which is to say, they could have and did cross breed it.

And random changes can never improve information.

There are more wheat plants now than there ever were before these mutations. How is this not beneficial to both the plant and humans?

Darwinists must forever conflate the ideas that are being expressed. We do not deny that useful features may arise from informed, intentional changes to a genome. They might even arise from random changes.

What is impossible is that a genome be improved by random changes. It can't even be improved by intentional changes, as we have no idea what the totality of effects are for a single alteration.

You've been guided through this numerous times. Is what we believe going to affect how you approach the discussion, or will you continue to assert your ideas as fact?

 

[The Barbarian]

Wrong and wrong. Wheat evolved into bread wheat long before humans had any idea of how to cross species. They simply selected beneficial mutations as they came along.

There are more wheat plants now than there ever were before these mutations. How is this not beneficial to both the plant and humans?

It's often a good evolutionary move to form symbiotic relationships. This is what wheat has done. It gives up its surplus seed in return for protection, continued propagation, and expansion of territory. Obviously a successful move.

 

[Stripe]

It's often a good evolutionary move to form symbiotic relationships. This is what wheat has done. It gives up its surplus seed in return for protection, continued propagation, and expansion of territory. Obviously a successful move.

:rotfl:

Darwinists will believe anything.

 

[Yorzhik]

Since we cannot review the volume of texts a computer could generate, let's use the world to review them for us. This proposal would rely on google ads. We'll take text ads and add random mutation, and then see what ads improve conversion from the original. We could even purposefully create poor ads to give them obvious room for improvement. We could even create ads with 1 or two typos already in them to see how quickly they go back to the original no-typo version.

Does that sound like a reasonable experiment? Can you think of any better ways to do it?

Sort of like the first guy to say, "hey, maybe if we put some of these pepper things that make your mouth hurt, into the stew, it would taste better."

Genetic algorithms do exactly what you're proposing. So did guys constructing steam engines back when they were first introduced. They were just fiddling around, trying to find the best way. Sometimes, they blew up. Sometimes they functioned poorly. If one worked better than before, everyone incorporated the change into their models. People just tried various things to make them work. It was over a hundred years later that Sadi Carnot figured out the theory to explain how to maximize efficiency of a heat engine.

Ironically, one of the first uses of genetic algorithms was to optimize diesel engines. And random changes with natural selection turned out to work better than design.

Because turbulence is a lot harder to understand than heat.

:darwinsm: So here's Barbarian being all Joe Pesci in Goodfellas "I’m funny? Funny, like, I’m a clown? I amuse you?" and everyone at the table laughs at him "Yeah, that's it!"

 

[Yorzhik]

Barbarian suggests:
There is no "devolve."

Could you show us where he says populations "devolve?"

I notice you couldn't find anything in the literature where geneticists say there's such a thing as "devolution." Isn't that a pretty good clue for you?

Seriously? Geneticists use the word "mutational load" and that it needs to be mitigated. That's at least a *hint* of devolution.

I just showed you several models that accurately model observed evolution, including speciation. No point in denying the fact.

You just showed several models that didn't work. I though "Eve" was the best program out there, but it seems to be named "Ev", which makes sense. Anyhow, it's been shown to have its goal embedded in the program, just like all the supposed successful models have.

The sources of knowledge in ev include a Hamming oracle and a perceptron structure that predisposes the search towards its target.

Shannon wrote a thesis on how to model biological evolution. I thought you knew.

IEEE Eng Med Biol Mag. 2006 Jan-Feb;25(1):30-3.
Claude Shannon: biologist. The founder of information theory used biology to formulate the channel capacity.
Schneider TD1.

And Shannon also says the purpose of his work is to get rid of noise. He stated, "The fundamental problem of communications is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point."

 

[The Barbarian]

(Barbarian notes various instances of random changes improving things)

:darwinsm: So here's Barbarian being all Joe Pesci in Goodfellas "I’m funny? Funny, like, I’m a clown? I amuse you?" and everyone at the table laughs at him "Yeah, that's it!"

And we have meltdown. Yorzhik abandons any attempt at supporting his claims...

 

[Right Divider]

(Barbarian notes various instances of random changes improving things)

RD notes that these so-called "random change improvements" are nowhere near enough to produce all life on earth from random processes.

These changes corrupt the original design of the created kinds and are NOT directly cumulative in any sense.

But the incredible imagination of the CD (Common Descentists) knows no bounds.

 

[The Barbarian]

Barbarian suggests:
There is no "devolve."

Could you show us where he says populations "devolve?"

I notice you couldn't find anything in the literature where geneticists say there's such a thing as "devolution." Isn't that a pretty good clue for you?[/quote]

Seriously?

Yep. When you can't find any evidence to support your claim, that's pretty much it.

Geneticists use the word "mutational load" and that it needs to be mitigated. That's at least a *hint* of devolution.

Show us that geneticists say "devolution" (whatever that's supposed to mean) is "mutational load."

You just showed several models that didn't work.

The data showed they work. No point in denying the fact. Would you like me to show you again?

And Shannon also says the purpose of his work is to get rid of noise.

Actually, no. What he showed was that no matter how noisy the channel, you could transmit an accurate message by including enough redundancy. Our space probes send messages across billions of kilometers of space, not by "getting rid of noise" but by putting enough redundancy into the message to make it clear.

And of course, his thesis in biology was focused on genetics and variation.

Claude Shannon, population geneticist
November 5, 2013 in talks | Tags: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, eugenics, information theory, population genetics, Shannon

Abstract:
Claude Shannon founded information theory in the 1940s. The theory has long been known to be closely related to thermodynamics and physics through the similarity of Shannon's uncertainty measure to the entropy function. Recent work using information theory to understand molecular biology has unearthed a curious fact: Shannon’s channel capacity theorem only applies to living organisms and their products, such as communications channels and molecular machines that make choices from several possibilities. Since he used a property of biology to formulate his mathematics, the author concludes that Claude Shannon was doing biology and was therefore, effectively, a biologist - although he was probably unaware of it. What are the implications of the idea that Shannon was doing biology? First, the author claims it means that communications systems and molecular biology are headed on a collision course. As electrical circuits approach molecular sizes, the results of molecular biologists can be used to guide designs. We might envision a day when communications and biology are treated as a single field. Second, codes discovered for communications potentially teach us new biology if we find the same codes in a biological system. Finally, the reverse is also to be anticipated: discoveries in molecular biology about systems that have been refined by evolution for billions of years should tell us how to build new and more efficient communications systems.
https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/claude-shannon-population-geneticist/

He stated, "The fundamental problem of communications is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point."[/QUOTE]

See above. The purpose of information in biological systems is somewhat different.

 

[The Barbarian]

RD notes that these so-called "random change improvements" are nowhere near enough to produce all life on earth from random processes.

Seems unlikely, given the mutation rate and the number of useful mutations. Let's see your numbers. It appears you just made it up, and have no idea how many of anything is involved. But I could be wrong. Let's see your math.

These changes corrupt the original design of the created kinds and are NOT directly cumulative in any sense.

Sorry, that's been directly observed to happen. Would you like me to show you, again?

The incredible imagination of the YE creationist knows no bounds.

 

[Stripe]

(Barbarian notes various instances of random changes improving things)

Nope. You forgot that the challenge issued is not the one you insist on addressing. When you learn some intellectual honesty, you might be capable of joining a rational discussion.

All you do is have meltdowns. You long ago abandoned supporting your claims with sense.

Barbarian suggests:There is no "devolve."

Except you just got introduced to the concept of mutational load. We're sorry that you only deal in semantics and not ideas, but that's hardly our fault, is it now?

Could you show us?

There are none so blind as who will not see.

We notice you completely avoid what was shown you in the literature where geneticists say there's such a thing as devolution. Isn't that a pretty good clue for you?

When you ignore evidence presented to you, that's pretty much it.

Show us that geneticists say "devolution" (whatever that's supposed to mean) is "mutational load."

Changing your tune all of a sudden, huh? How about you deal with the challenge sensibly. :up:

The data showed they work.

Nope. No point in denying it. Would you like us to show you again?

Seems unlikely, given the mutation rate and the number of useful mutations.

Did you forget? There is no such thing as a useful mutation. Random changes are always bad for information. Let's see your numbers of you disagree. It appears you just made it up, and have no idea what is involved. But I could be wrong. Let's see your maths.

That's been directly observed to happen.

Nope. It's just a theory. Would you like us to show you again?

The incredible hypocrisy of the Darwinists knows no bounds.

 

[Alate_One]

Because you say so?

Wheat turned up at the same time people did. They grew it with all the understanding that was available to them at the time, which is to say, they could have and did cross breed it.

Uh huh. Explain to me how you cross breed a wheat flower if you think you know then. It's not at all obvious.

And random changes can never improve information.

You don't get to assert this without evidence.

What is impossible is that a genome be improved by random changes. It can't even be improved by intentional changes, as we have no idea what the totality of effects are for a single alteration.

And now you play with the semantics of "improved". You define improved as some magical state of ultimate good as far as biology. That is impossible.

A fox with white fur in the winter does well in the far north, it does poorly in the forest or prairie. There is no single standard of what is "improved" or not. what is good for an organism ALWAYS depends on the context it lives in.

This idea is simply you trying to assert that there is some created state that is perfect and anything different than that original created state is bad.

I say there isn't such a state and the beauty of creation is that it can adapt to any possible situation, not by magical processes that don't exist, but by simple mutation and selection.

You've been guided through this numerous times. Is what we believe going to affect how you approach the discussion, or will you continue to assert your ideas as fact?

Wow. Pot meet kettle yet again.

Let me summarize this for anyone following along. This is how these discussions always go.

1. Stripe asserts random changes are never good
2. Stripe is presented with evidence that a random mutation was beneficial in some context
3. Stripe asserts the mutation isn't random, and is a "designed change" because it's beneficial (or that some undefined universal context makes all such changes "bad")
4. Repeat steps 1-3 ad infinitum.

To Stripe any beneficial genetic change CANNOT by definition be random, because he sees that as impossible a priori, therefore he's impervious to evidence because he simply moves the goalposts and declares himself right.

 

[Alate_One]

:rotfl:

Darwinists will believe anything.

Read the Botany of Desire. You might learn something, for once.

 

[Stripe]

Uh huh. Explain to me how you cross breed a wheat flower if you think you know then. It's not at all obvious.

:AMR:

How about you explain why they couldn't instead of playing childish games. :up:

You don't get to assert things without evidence.

And now you play with the semantics of "improved". You define improved as some magical state of ultimate good as far as biology. That is impossible.

Not bad. Improvement is impossible — a magical notion.

A fox with white fur in the winter does well in the far north, it does poorly in the forest or prairie. There is no single standard of what is "improved" or not. what is good for an organism ALWAYS depends on the context it lives in.

Darwinists must always conflate these two very distinct ideas. We do not deny that an incidental benefit might arise amid the inexorable degradation of the genome.

This idea is simply you trying to assert that there is some created state that is perfect and anything different than that original created state is bad.

And you assert your idea. It's called science. The next step is to look at the evidence to falsify both.

I say there isn't such a state and the beauty of creation is that it can adapt to any possible situation, not by magical processes that don't exist, but by simple mutation and selection.

We know your idea, even though Barbarian insists on calling it a fact. Can you accurately represent ours?

Let me summarize this for anyone following along. This is how these discussions always go.

1. Stripe asserts random changes are never good
2. Stripe is presented with evidence that a random mutation was beneficial in some context
3. Stripe asserts the mutation isn't random, and is a "designed change" because it's beneficial (or that some undefined universal context makes all such changes "bad")
4. Repeat steps 1-3 ad infinitum.

Not exactly. And you forgot the endgame: Evidence.

To Stripe any beneficial genetic change CANNOT by definition be random, because he sees that as impossible a priori, therefore he's impervious to evidence because he simply moves the goalposts and declares himself right.

Nope. The problem is one of information, ie, we don't have enough of it to show definitively that the genome is getting worse with random and even intentional changes. That entropy dictates degradation is not accepted to the Darwinists, so we have to set aside physical necessity — the laws of nature — and discuss evidence with them.

Of course, they don't want to do that either.

 

[Yorzhik]

:darwinsm: So here's Barbarian being all Joe Pesci in Goodfellas "I’m funny? Funny, like, I’m a clown? I amuse you?" and everyone at the table laughs at him "Yeah, that's it!"

And we have meltdown.

Meltdown? Your disparaging comment only gets funnier because it went over your head. I'll explain it for you: That scene in Goodfellas was so cool and intense with Ray Liotta's character just trying to keep it light and Joe Pesci's character turning it around and coming back with a serious accusation saying "I’m funny? Funny, like, I’m a clown? I amuse you?". I realize Ray's character couldn't say it, but it would have been downright hilarious to see an outtake with Ray Liotta laughing back at Joe Pesci "Yeah, that's it!"

You missed it completely.

Anyhow, back to the show:

Show us that geneticists say "devolution" (whatever that's supposed to mean) is "mutational load."

Geneticists use the word "mutational load" and that it needs to be mitigated. It's the same as devolving.

The data showed they work.

The data showed they don't work.

The sources of knowledge in ev include a Hamming oracle and a perceptron structure that predisposes the search towards its target.

Actually, no. What he showed was that no matter how noisy the channel, you could transmit an accurate message by including enough redundancy. Our space probes send messages across billions of kilometers of space, not by "getting rid of noise" but by putting enough redundancy into the message to make it clear.

And of course, his thesis in biology was focused on genetics and variation.

Claude Shannon, population geneticist
November 5, 2013 in talks | Tags: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, eugenics, information theory, population genetics, Shannon

Abstract:
Claude Shannon founded information theory in the 1940s. The theory has long been known to be closely related to thermodynamics and physics through the similarity of Shannon's uncertainty measure to the entropy function. Recent work using information theory to understand molecular biology has unearthed a curious fact: Shannon’s channel capacity theorem only applies to living organisms and their products, such as communications channels and molecular machines that make choices from several possibilities. Since he used a property of biology to formulate his mathematics, the author concludes that Claude Shannon was doing biology and was therefore, effectively, a biologist - although he was probably unaware of it. What are the implications of the idea that Shannon was doing biology? First, the author claims it means that communications systems and molecular biology are headed on a collision course. As electrical circuits approach molecular sizes, the results of molecular biologists can be used to guide designs. We might envision a day when communications and biology are treated as a single field. Second, codes discovered for communications potentially teach us new biology if we find the same codes in a biological system. Finally, the reverse is also to be anticipated: discoveries in molecular biology about systems that have been refined by evolution for billions of years should tell us how to build new and more efficient communications systems.
https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/claude-shannon-population-geneticist/

Shannon showed that communication relies on accurate transfer of information. His work relied on getting rid of noise. That's why he stated, "The fundamental problem of communications is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point."

If that weren't true, we would use noise to improve communication. Biological messages aren't magic.

 

[ok doser]

Meltdown? Your disparaging comment only gets funnier because it went over your head. I'll explain it for you: That scene in Goodfellas was so cool and intense with Ray Liotta's character just trying to keep it light and Joe Pesci's character turning it around and coming back with a serious accusation saying "I’m funny? Funny, like, I’m a clown? I amuse you?". I realize Ray's character couldn't say it, but it would have been downright hilarious to see an outtake with Ray Liotta laughing back at Joe Pesci "Yeah, that's it!"

You missed it completely.

Anyhow, back to the show:

Geneticists use the word "mutational load" and that it needs to be mitigated. It's the same as devolving.


The data showed they don't work.

The sources of knowledge in ev include a Hamming oracle and a perceptron structure that predisposes the search towards its target.

Shannon showed that communication relies on accurate transfer of information. His work relied on getting rid of noise. That's why he stated, "The fundamental problem of communications is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point."

If that weren't true, we would use noise to improve communication. Biological messages aren't magic.

If barbie really believes the load he's shovelling, surely he must have exposed his gonads to radiation before reproducing, um?

 

[The Barbarian]

Meltdown?

Yep. That's what it's called when someone abandons reasoning and goes for ridicule in an argument. Your disparaging reference is an attempt to avoid the direction our discussion was taking.

I'll explain it for you:

Better yet, just show us a geneticist who says there's such a thing as "devolution."

Geneticists use the word "mutational load" and that it needs to be mitigated. It's the same as devolving.

Show us someone who actually understands genetics who says so. You see, perhaps, that you really don't mitigate the fix you're in by a diversion.

The data showed they don't work.

I showed you two models that did. No point in denial. You've have to come to terms with the facts.

Shannon showed that communication relies on accurate transfer of information.

IEEE Eng Med Biol Mag. 2006; 25(1): 30–33.
Claude Shannon: Biologist
The Founder of Information Theory Used Biology to Formulate the Channel Capacity
Recent work using information theory to understand molecular biology has unearthed a curious fact: Shannon's channel capacity theorem only applies to living organisms and their products, such as communications channels and molecular machines that make choices from several possibilities. Information theory is therefore a theory about biology, and Shannon was a biologist.

Turns out, his theory is actually used by population biologists to understand evolution. His theorem has applications far beyond communications.

His work relied on getting rid of noise.

No. It was about the way one can accurately communicate over noisy channels. All channels have noise. His theorem showed that you could communicate over noisy channels by increasing redundancy and using an appropriate coding. It's how NASA communicates over huge distances with low-powered transmitters. It's how the internet works.

That's why he stated, "The fundamental problem of communications is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point."

That doesn't say anything about "reducing noise", either.

In the earlier days of long-distance communication this was indeed what people thought: when you're dealing with a noisy channel, you have no choice but trade your error rate for redundancy. In 1948, however, the mathematician Claude Shannon proved them wrong. In his ground-breaking Mathematical theory of communication Shannon showed that given any error rate, no matter how small, it's possible to find a code that produces this tiny error rate and enables you to transmit messages at a transmission rate that is only limited by the channel's capacity. This result is known as Shannon's noisy channel coding theorem. It shows that near-error-free transmission doesn't lead to near-zero efficiency.
...
What Shannon showed is that once the entropy is below some critical value, a code with an arbitrarily small rate of decoding error can always be found.