Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Plotting “Random” Mutations on a Fitness Curve

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Recently and many times in the past I’ve remarked that life doesn’t have the illusion of design. Design is real. It has the illusion of chance and neccessity. Over at ATBC I noticed a couple members of the anti-ID peanut gallery clucking to themselves that mutations plotted on a fitness curve have a random distribution. IOW there is no predictability in where any one mutation will fall on a fitness curve (harmful/neutral/beneficial). It will be a scattershot plot without any pattern. Thus even if the universe is deterministic and no mutation is truly random they appear random when plotted on a fitness curve.

This is just utter dreck. You can predict with almost 100% confidence that any given mutation will be either harmful or neutral on a fitness curve. That means that a large fraction of the plot, that portion of it in the beneficial third, will have few if any points plotted in it. In fact if you press the orthodox evolutionists to give you an example of an observed beneficial random mutation you’ll get a short list of a few micromutations that gave some lucky organism disease or toxin resistance. You can find an endless number of observed mutations that either reduced fitness or had no observed effect. Ask for a plot of mutations in humans known to cause genetic disorders, early spontaneous abortion, no effect, and/or are beneficial. The plot will be dominated by neutral and harmful mutations and if they give you any beneficial mutation at all it’s arguable about whether it’s really beneficial.

This is emphatically NOT a random distribution. Whoever made up that particular bit of idiocy about mutations being random with regard to fitness deserves many lashes with a wet noodly appendage and anyone who accepts the supposition uncritically should hang their head in shame too.

Comments
platolives I've corresponded on many topics with the author of that program and the first thing I asked when I saw the program is how are beneficial mutations discriminated. He told me he just chose a number from thin air - 1 of every 32,000 mutations is a good mutation. Obviously there's no programmatic way of determining in real life whether any given mutation is good, bad, or neutral without observation of its effect on the host.DaveScot
January 8, 2007
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I'd agree that if they were aruging for a scatter plot, then it is unfounded - as far as I understand. Are you sure they didn't mean the points are random..but fill in a distributuion pattern much like Kimura's.JGuy
January 8, 2007
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Go to http://progettocosmo.altervista.org/rm.php , "DNA Random Mutation Simulator v.1.1 Do your own Darwinian Evolution experiments with the DNA Random Mutation Simulator Have fun: try to get the bonus of a beneficial mutation!"platolives
January 8, 2007
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