In YOUR opinion which doesn't actually count for much.
Well... me and your numbers. I guess you don't trust your numbers much.
But that's the thing. On the one hand your sort love to say how theories are being overturned all the time. Then in the next breath you act like no one would dare overturn Evolution. Which is it? I say no matter what any "vested interest" if there were solid evidence against evolution, it would be dead already. Someone would have become famous out of upsetting the apple cart. As anyone else that has ever overturned a major scientific idea has done, Einstein, Copernicus, Watson and Crick, etc.
The fact remains. You can't put much confidence in a process where the people who have a vested interest in a certain pattern are the same ones that weigh the factors that determine the pattern.
Except it isn't. If the numbers are what you are implying they are, everything would die an instant a mutation happened. We know that doesn't happen. We know that we can have major changes in form.
They're your numbers.
Things don't die because the system is robust, not because we can count on magic mutations to keep us alive.
Yorzhik said:
And this is just one sequence. Even if you are lucky enough to get a sequence that works, it has to be in an organism that has a selective advantage before that new sequence will spread to the population.
Alate_One said:
No it doesn't and you know better.
Oh, sure, there is luck, but do you really want to rely on that for the majority of your changes to get fixed in a population?
You can cover the genome of any organism with a population of a few thousand and a few generations given known mutation rates. This means every mutation WILL happen every few generations.
Sure. But your population goes down to ONE when you get the mutation you need. Then, somehow, that mutation has to get fixed in the population. I'll agree that the lucky individual and its immediate offspring and offspring's offspring could receive the lucky mutations one generation after the next. Heck, give them all two... or three lucky mutations every one! Your population that has the mutations to fix into a population is reduced to a few no matter what.
It's a physical limitation you cannot get around.
Your math argument is simply wrong and yes I have run these numbers for you before. Stop pretending you don't know this. Barbarian answered a lot of your objections already.
Barbarian thought I was saying the whole sequence appears, correctly, at once. That's such a great misunderstanding it isn't worth answering.
But the math argument is sound. Your possibilities are so many, your possible working sequences are so few. Unless you have DNA fairies, you can't get around it.
That's the thing if it doesn't work, there isn't necessarily a generation. Think about this. If you have say fish. A fish like a salmon can produce 35,000 eggs in a spawning run. That's a heck of a lot of dice rolls at once. And for much of the history of life on earth (and for most of the living organisms on earth) we are dealing with those kinds of numbers. Your thinking on this matter is incredibly limited.
Well, 35K eggs would certainly help, but the numbers don't lie; Once a lucky hatchling has the mutation that is the first in a line of mutations needed for the new functional cyt c, your population with the new mutation is now reduced to ONE.
But even if 35K eggs helps enough to make a plausible argument, you
still have to explain vast differences in groups whose reproduction is 3 magnitudes less. But I don't know why I'm so generous, having 35K eggs doesn't even hardly help get out from the mountain of probability you're under.
lain:
