Genetics

One reason I’ve hammered the 500 fair coin illustration and the law of large numbers is that it illustrates how to use the binomial distribution to reject chance as a mechanism. In certain contexts, the law of large numbers is much easier to use than the more generalized design detection methods discussed here. When looking for non-random patterns, excessive appearances of certain symbols may indicate non-randomness, and thus too much of something can be a good thing for ID. If something is randomly distributed like the DNA bases Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, Guanine (A,T,C,G), we should see creatures and DNA regions have nearly equal parts of each. But this is clearly NOT the case on several levels. It sort of crushes Read More ›

Occasionally evolutionary biology tries to inform chemical theories, but given the shaky foundation of certain evolutionary claims, maybe this isn’t a good idea. Years ago, in a debate, an evolutionist said something to the effect, “Sal you’re clueless, transition mutations happen 10 times more frequently than transversion mutations.” I’m sorry now I took that evolutionist’s word about basic chemical processes. It turns out he was wrong, and I was duped into believing an evolutionary claim. Here are the 4 bases that are the alphabet of the DNA and how they can mutate from one letter to the other. From wiki: In genetics, a transition is a point mutation that changes a purine nucleotide to another purine (A ↔ G) or Read More ›

Most molecular evolution is neutral. Done. PZ Myers From wiki: Codon usage bias Codon usage bias refers to differences in the frequency of occurrence of synonymous codons in coding DNA. A codon is a series of three nucleotides (triplets) that encodes a specific amino acid residue in a polypeptide chain or for the termination of translation (stop codons). There are 64 different codons (61 codons encoding for amino acids plus 3 stop codons) but only 20 different translated amino acids. The overabundance in the number of codons allows many amino acids to be encoded by more than one codon. Because of such redundancy it is said that the genetic code is degenerate. Different organisms often show particular preferences for one Read More ›

Most of biological ID literature is focused on Irreducible Complexity and Specified Complexity (Specified Improbability) and information theory, no free lunch, critique of OOL, the Cambrian explosion, etc, But there is another line of argument that is devastating to the claims of mindless evolution that has been underappreciated partly because it is highly technical, and in many cases most biologists will not even learn it in detail, namely that most molecular evolution is non-Darwinian. Here is the simplest way to understand why evolution is mostly non-Darwinian. The ability to select for or against a trait involves the cost of sacrificing individual lives. When we spend money we have a limited budget to buy things. From our budget we can select Read More ›

If there was any time the human population was very small, fixation was likely inevitable as discussed in Neutral Evolution for Newbies, Part 2. The time for required for fixation in a population according to standard population genetics is approximately 4 Ne, where Ne is the effective population size.

For example, for an Ne of six individuals, the approximate time to fixation using this approximation is:

4 x 6 = 24 generations

In 24 generations, assuming they don’t die from inbreeding depression, everyone will be pretty much genetically identical according to standard theory. Even if their differences were huge (maybe millions of nucleotides), they should fix in 24 generations using this approximation.

In contrast consider the current human population of 7 Billion, and suppose the effective reproductively viable population is 1.5 billion. Using the approximation, the time to fixation with Ne = 1.5 billion is

4 x 1,500,000,000 = 6 billion generations
Read More ›