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Recent papers confirm that genetic entropy decreases fitness

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entropy illustrated

Over at Creation-Evolution Headlines, Dave Coppedge reports that two recent journal article’s have confirmed Cornell’s John Sanford’s “genetic entropy”: An accumulation of mutations always decreases fitness (contrary to neo-Darwinists’ hopes):

For mutations under epistasis to produce innovation, there must be a way for them to work together (synergistic epistasis). This is often assumed but has not been observed. Most experiments have shown beneficial mutations working against each other (antagonistic epistasis; see 12/14/2006), or causing even less fitness than if they acted alone (decompensatory epistasis; see 10/19/2004). In a new paper in Science,3 Khan et al, working with Richard Lenski [Michigan State], leader of the longest-running experiment on evolution of E. coli, found a law of diminishing returns with beneficial mutations due to negative epistasis.

Diminishing returns?

Like this, for example?: An increased number of spelling errors in a letter retyped in series by a number of different people does not add up to a new, better letter over time?

Coppedge also notes the way the science media handled the news, for example:

“The more mutations the researchers added, the more they interfered with each other,” was one of the “surprising” results.

Surprising to whom? Not to Dembski and other members of the No Free Lunch club.

Follow UD News for breaking news on the design controversy.

Comments
paragwinn correct on the math my man,,, perhaps a million would be more reasonable???!!! Now let's see if you are willing to look at some more math, to see if you can spot the problems here??? God by the Numbers - Charles Edward White Excerpt: "Even if we limit the number of necessary mutations to 1,000 and argue that half of these mutations are beneficial, the odds against getting 1,000 beneficial mutations in the proper order is 2^1000. Expressed in decimal form, this number is about 10^301. 10^301 mutations is a number far beyond the capacity of the universe to generate. Even if every particle in the universe mutated at the fastest possible rate and had done so since the Big Bang, there still would not be enough mutations." http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/march/26.44.html?start=2 Indeed, math is not kind to Darwinism in the least when considering the probability of humans 'randomly' evolving: In Barrow and Tippler's book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, they list ten steps necessary in the course of human evolution, each of which, is so improbable that if left to happen by chance alone, the sun would have ceased to be a main sequence star and would have incinerated the earth. They estimate that the odds of the evolution (by chance) of the human genome is somewhere between 4 to the negative 180th power, to the 110,000th power, and 4 to the negative 360th power, to the 110,000th power. Therefore, if evolution did occur, it literally would have been a miracle and evidence for the existence of God. William Lane Craig William Lane Craig - If Human Evolution Did Occur It Was A Miracle - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUxm8dXLRpA Along that same line: Darwin and the Mathematicians - David Berlinski “The formation within geological time of a human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components.” Kurt Gödel, was a preeminent mathematician who is considered one of the greatest to have ever lived. Of Note: Godel was a Theist! http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/11/darwin_and_the_mathematicians.html “Darwin’s theory is easily the dumbest idea ever taken seriously by science." Granville Sewell - Professor Of Mathematics - University Of Texas - El Paso Waiting Longer for Two Mutations - Michael J. Behe Excerpt: Citing malaria literature sources (White 2004) I had noted that the de novo appearance of chloroquine resistance in Plasmodium falciparum was an event of probability of 1 in 10^20. I then wrote that 'for humans to achieve a mutation like this by chance, we would have to wait 100 million times 10 million years' (1 quadrillion years)(Behe 2007) (because that is the extrapolated time that it would take to produce 10^20 humans). Durrett and Schmidt (2008, p. 1507) retort that my number ‘is 5 million times larger than the calculation we have just given’ using their model (which nonetheless "using their model" gives a prohibitively long waiting time of 216 million years). Their criticism compares apples to oranges. My figure of 10^20 is an empirical statistic from the literature; it is not, as their calculation is, a theoretical estimate from a population genetics model. http://www.discovery.org/a/9461 Can Darwin’s enemy, math, rescue him? - May 2011 https://uncommondescent.com/darwinism/can-darwin%E2%80%99s-enemy-math-rescue-him/ This following calculation by geneticist John Sanford for 'fixing' a beneficial mutation, or for creating a new gene, in humans, gives equally absurd numbers: Dr. Sanford calculates it would take 12 million years to “fix” a single base pair mutation into a population. He further calculates that to create a gene with 1000 base pairs, it would take 12 million x 1000 or 12 billion years. This is obviously too slow to support the creation of the human genome containing 3 billion base pairs. http://www.detectingtruth.com/?p=66 Oxford University Admits Darwinism's Shaky Math Foundation - May 2011 Excerpt: However, mathematical population geneticists mainly deny that natural selection leads to optimization of any useful kind. This fifty-year old schism is intellectually damaging in itself, and has prevented improvements in our concept of what fitness is. - On a 2011 Job Description for a Mathematician, at Oxford, to 'fix' the persistent mathematical problems with neo-Darwinism within two years. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/05/oxford_university_admits_darwi046351.htmlbornagain77
June 19, 2011
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note: Poly-Functional Complexity equals Poly-Constrained Complexity http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AYmaSrBPNEmGZGM4ejY3d3pfMjdoZmd2emZncQ DNA - Evolution Vs. Polyfuctionality - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4614519 K´necting The Dots: Modeling Functional Integration In Biological Systems Excerpt: “If an engineer modifies the length of the piston rods in an internal combustion engine, but does not modify the crankshaft accordingly, the engine won’t start. Similarly, processes of development are so tightly integrated temporally and spatially that one change early in development will require a host of other coordinated changes in separate but functionally interrelated developmental processes downstream” https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/k%C2%B4necting-the-dots-modeling-functional-integration-in-biological-systems/ Insight into cells could lead to new approach to medicines Excerpt: Scientists expected to find simple links between individual proteins but were surprised to find that proteins were inter-connected in a complex web. Dr Victor Neduva, of the University of Edinburgh, who took part in the study, said: "Our studies have revealed an intricate network of proteins within cells that is much more complex than we previously thought. http://www.physorg.com/news196402353.htmlbornagain77
June 19, 2011
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Actually, the result is expected from a genetic entropy perspective and is very antagonistic to what is expected from a neo-Darwinian framework.bornagain77
June 19, 2011
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I take it we are all clear now that the papers do not support the headline claim in the OP?Elizabeth Liddle
June 19, 2011
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ba77:",,,and yet after 50,000 generations (equivalent to 2,000,000 years of hypothesized human evolution)" have people always waited until they were 40 years old to reproduce?paragwinn
June 16, 2011
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Thanks Coop.Mung
June 16, 2011
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And yet the 'fitness' (functional complexity) never increased over the parent species in the parent species native environment!!! Thus genetic entropy holds which has been my point all along!!! Thus, to break it down, we have fast adaptation to 'niche' environments, all coming, according to Behe, at a loss of Functional Elements, Michael Behe's Quarterly Review of Biology Paper Critiques Richard Lenski's E. Coli Evolution Experiments - December 2010 Excerpt: After reviewing the results of Lenski's research, Behe concludes that the observed adaptive mutations all entail either loss or modification--but not gain--of Functional Coding ElemenTs (FCTs) http://www.evolutionnews.org/2010/12/michael_behes_quarterly_review041221.html and then these fast adaptations are shown to peter out dramatically, but not come to a complete stop,,, ,,,and yet after 50,000 generations (equivalent to 2,000,000 years of hypothesized human evolution), they scrutinize through billions of detrimental mutations and find just 5 'beneficial' mutations, (mutations that 'burnt bridges' to allow adaptations), moreover when they put these 5 beneficial together they produce 'negative epistasis' instead of the incremental step by step improvement that is presupposed neo-Darwinian evolution... And all this helps a neo-Darwinists sleep better at night how???bornagain77
June 16, 2011
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*crickets* In the future, could everyone at least read the abstracts?DrREC
June 16, 2011
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Thanks for confirming that, Tim Cooper! Lovely papers, btw.Elizabeth Liddle
June 16, 2011
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Tim Cooper emailed me back. He said he will make one post here to clarify what he meant. Hopefully it will get through moderation quickly.Driver
June 15, 2011
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I want to respond to the specific point raised in the initial post that our work supports a view that the fitness of the population that we studied will decline over time. It doesn't. Our work describes evidence that the rate of fitness *increase* will decline over time. That is, the rate of fitness improvement slows, but does not become negative. For anyone interested, a link to the actual article is now live on my lab website: web.mac.com/tim_f_cooper/Cooper_lab/Publications.htmlCooper
June 14, 2011
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Mung:
Elizabeth Liddle: No decrease of fitness was observed, just a reduced increase. So how was it determined that these bacteria were originally becoming increasingly fit over time?
It's a long term experiment, so I'd have to dig back among several papers, but IIRC, the original population was cloned and divided, and a sample was frozen. Relative fitness of any two lineages from the original population was assayed by direct comparison, and fitness relative to the original population by comparison with a defrosted sample, I think! Details of the fitness assays and computations are given in this paper: http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic625334.files/Papers/Lenski-et-al-1991.pdf
Because that would have to be the case, would it not, for there to then follow a decreased increase?
Yes. They isolated five mutations (in separate lineages) that conferred increased fitness relative to the ancestral population, and then artificially combined those mutations, in all possible combinations, in a clone from the ancestral population. They found that the effects were not additive, but obeyed a "law of diminishing returns" (except in the case of one mutation where the epistasis was positive).
The study seems to be about the effects of beneficial mutations. This is relevant to the “genetic entropy” debate because “synergistic epistasis” is supposed to be a way out of the genetic entropy dilemma.
Well, it's one of the hypothesed reasons we have not "died 100 times over": http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519385701671 There are others. The Kondrashov paper is interesting though, if you can get hold of it.Elizabeth Liddle
June 14, 2011
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Elizabeth Liddle:
No decrease of fitness was observed, just a reduced increase.
So how was it determined that these bacteria were originally becoming increasingly fit over time? Because that would have to be the case, would it not, for there to then follow a decreased increase? The study seems to be about the effects of
beneficial
mutations. This is relevant to the "genetic entropy" debate because "synergistic epistasis" is supposed to be a way out of the genetic entropy dilemma.Mung
June 14, 2011
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Elizabeth you stated: 'The papers have nothing to do with “genetic entropy” which is to do with the gradual buildup of mostly Very Slightly Deleterious Mutations (VSDMs) in a population over time.' That is simply false. Not only does Genetic Entropy hold that genomes will deteriorate over very long periods of time (as is witnessed by Dollo's law) Genetic Entropy also holds speciation is a 'top down' affair. i.e. Genetic Entropy holds parent species to be 'optimal' and that evolutionary processes will NEVER increase the optimal functional information that was originally designed in the parent species genome!,,,bornagain77
June 14, 2011
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ba77: you are reading far too much into my posts! All I'm saying is that I've read the papers, and they don't say what the headline says - they aren't even on that topic.Elizabeth Liddle
June 14, 2011
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no comment about the pax-6 gene…no surprise…oh and Lenski took 20,000 generations for this one small change…ever hear of Haldane’s dilemma???
Did Lenski's populations have a deteriorating environment? That's a hidden assumption in Haldane's calculations, which makes it faulty.Heinrich
June 14, 2011
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Elizabeth:
Heritable traits that tend to promote successful reproduction in one generation will be preferentially represented in the next.
Is this true? In Hoyle's "Mathematics of Evolution", the very first thing he demonstrates is that if you compensate the power law that is supposed to define evolution, things slow down very quickly. If you have populations in which pairs of adults produce four offspring, then the likelihood of any of the offspring surviving to reproductive age is roughly 1/2. Why? Because most populations of species are stable populations, with stable population size. And if a "beneficial" mutation occurs, there's at least (putting stochastic effects to the one side) a 50% chance it will be eliminated in the first generation. So, I guess it's true that there is 'tendency' to promote successful reproduction, but it is an extremely slight tendencyPaV
June 14, 2011
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Elizabeth, it is very interesting to note, in your trying to distance this paper from the principle of Genetic Entropy, is not what in you do mention, as in regards to the buildup of slightly detrimental mutations (the paper is not focused on that), but is in what you fail to mention. You fail to mention that Genetic Entropy was not violated over and above 'the fitness' that which was already present in parent lineage in the parent lineage's native environment. This is a glaring lack of 'evolution' of functional complexity/information over and above the parent lineage!!! Especially given the fact that the 50,000 generations of Lenski's e-coli are equivalent to 2,000,000 years of supposed human evolution!!! In fact here's exactly what they did: Mutations : when benefits level off - June 2011 Excerpt: After having identified the first five beneficial mutations combined successively and spontaneously in the bacterial population, the scientists generated, from the ancestral bacterial strain, 32 mutant strains exhibiting all of the possible combinations of each of these five mutations. They then noted that the benefit linked to the simultaneous presence of five mutations was less than the sum of the individual benefits conferred by each mutation individually. http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/1867.htm?theme1=7 So Elizabeth whether you admit it or not this is crushing to evolution!!! For it nails you from two different directions. 1. you can't evolve up above the parent species!!! 2. You can't evolve past the wall that negative epistasis presents!!! So Elizabeth what do you do instead OF HONESTLY FACING THE TRUTH??? You 'interpret' the findings to mean what you want!!! This is sheer personal bias on your part, and I'm calling you on your intellectually dishonesty to it!!! ,,, Also of interest is that this 'severe limit' to 'evolvability', is exactly what has been noticed in previous ID research, that was ignored by neo-Darwinists; Response from Ralph Seelke to David Hillis Regarding Testimony on Bacterial Evolution Before Texas State Board of Education, January 21, 2009 Excerpt: He has done excellent work showing the capabilities of evolution when it can take one step at a time. I have used a different approach to show the difficulties that evolution encounters when it must take two steps at a time. So while similar, our work has important differences, and Dr. Bull’s research has not contradicted or refuted my own. http://www.discovery.org/a/9951 Reductive Evolution Can Prevent Populations from Taking Simple Adaptive Paths to High Fitness - Ann K. Gauger, Stephanie Ebnet, Pamela F. Fahey, and Ralph Seelke – 2010 Excerpt: When all of these possibilities are left open by the experimental design, the populations consistently take paths that reduce expression of trpAE49V,D60N, making the path to new (restored) function virtually inaccessible. This demonstrates that the cost of expressing genes that provide weak new functions is a significant constraint on the emergence of new functions. In particular, populations with multiple adaptive paths open to them may be much less likely to take an adaptive path to high fitness if that path requires over-expression. http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2010.2/BIO-C.2010.2bornagain77
June 14, 2011
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The logic of the case is that absent the root, there is no basis for the tree of life.
You are surely too intelligent to think abiogenesis is necessary for the theory of evolution, since you are learned enough to be aware that the theory of evolution would still be valid whether life arose by natural processes or divine fiat. There is nothing in the theory of evolution that says that the first life, the common ancestors (the root), couldn't have been created by an intelligent designer.Driver
June 14, 2011
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I am very aware of how Darwin artfully cut off his public discussion at the point of the root of the tree of life. He knew he had no evidence
Do you accept microevolution or don't you? Surely you don't accept it on no evidence?Driver
June 14, 2011
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A better approach is to restore a more historically and philosophically well warranted understanding of what science should seek to be and do A scientific paper on ID that makes positive predictions should do the trick. Then those predictions can be tested and voila! - ID usurps evolution. I must say I find it difficult to reconcile the almost universal acceptance of (micro)evolution (including in ID circles) with the idea that evolution is an unwarranted usurper.
Driver
June 14, 2011
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Most of cosmology. Much of particle physics.
and all of evolution...
In 1942, Nobel Laureate Ernst Chain wrote that his discovery of penicillin (with Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming) and the development of bacterial resistance to that antibiotic owed nothing to Darwin’s and Alfred Russel Wallace’s evolutionary theories. The same can be said about a variety of other 20th-century findings: the discovery of the structure of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome; the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; new surgeries; and other developments. Additionally, I have queried biologists working in areas where one might have thought the Darwinian paradigm could guide research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I learned that evolutionary theory provides no guidance when it comes to choosing the experimental designs. Rather, after the breakthrough discoveries, it is brought in as a narrative gloss. The essence of the theory of evolution is the hypothesis that historical diversity is the consequence of natural selection acting on variations. Regardless of the verity it holds for explaining biohistory, it offers no help to the experimenter–who is concerned, for example, with the goal of finding or synthesizing a new antibiotic, or how it can disable a disease-producing organism, what dosages are required and which individuals will not tolerate it. Studying biohistory is, at best, an entertaining distraction from the goals of a working biologist. It is noteworthy that Darwin’s and Wallace’s theories of evolution have been enormously aggrandized since the 1850s. Through the writings of neo-Darwinian biologists, they have subsumed many of the biological experimental discoveries of the 20th century. This is so despite the fact that those discoveries were neither predicted nor heuristically guided by evolutionary theory. The overselling of the theory of evolution, because of the incorporation of these later discoveries, may have done a grave disservice both to those two 19th-century scientists and to modern biology.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/23/evolution-creation-debate-biology-opinions-contributors_darwin.htmltsmith
June 14, 2011
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Nope, since the dominance of the institutions and the public sphere was usurped by back-door a priori imposition of evolutionary materialism, the first thing is to expose that.
Well, if by "usurped" you mean that evolutionary theory became a mainstream scientific paradigm and replaced the philosophical musings of Paley and the theological assumptions of the time, then I accept that evolutionary theory was a usurper. To show that evolution usurped science (a serious charge), all that needs to be shown is that the emperor is naked. A well written paper or two should take care of this, if the emperor is indeed naked.Driver
June 14, 2011
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can you tell me another branch of science that has no practical benefits and IS science?
Most of cosmology. Much of particle physics.Driver
June 14, 2011
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Driver: Nope, since the dominance of the institutions and the public sphere was usurped by back-door a priori imposition of evolutionary materialism, the first thing is to expose that. The evolutionary materialism will then fall of its own weight, but if one tries to "prove" something to an institution locked into an ideology, then one cannot disprove what is built in as a controlling assumption and censor on thought. The real task is to expose Lewontinian-Saganian a priori materialism and how this warps origins science and origins science eduction. Let's give three key clips: ______________ Lewontin: >> To Sagan, as to all but a few other scientists, it is self-evident [a total misunderstanding of self-evidence BTW . . . what is happening is that they are caught up in an ideological circle of question-begging . . . ] the practices of science provide the surest method of putting us in contact with physical reality, and that, in contrast, the demon-haunted world rests on a set of beliefs and behaviors that fail every reasonable test . . . . It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. [[From: “Billions and Billions of Demons,” NYRB, January 9, 1997.] >> US NAS: >> In science, explanations must be based on naturally occurring phenomena. Natural causes are, in principle, reproducible and therefore can be checked independently by others. If explanations are based on purported forces that are outside of nature [notice the loaded language, marking a strawman distortion: the real issue is the empirical markers of natural [chance plus necessity] vs ART-ificial causes, as was laid on the table since Plato in The Laws Bk X, 360 BC], scientists have no way of either confirming or disproving those explanations. Any scientific explanation has to be testable — there must be possible observational consequences that could support the idea but also ones that could refute it. Unless a proposed explanation is framed in a way that some observational evidence could potentially count against it, that explanation cannot be subjected to scientific testing. [The artificial is eminently suitable for empirical testing on characteristic signs] [[Science, Evolution and Creationism, 2008, p. 10 ] >> US NSTA: >> The principal product of science is knowledge in the form of naturalistic [note the question-begging] concepts and the laws and theories related to those concepts . . . . Although no single universal step-by-step scientific method captures the complexity of doing science, a number of shared values and perspectives characterize a scientific approach to understanding nature. Among these are a demand for naturalistic explanations supported by empirical evidence that are, at least in principle [note the question-begging, naturalism is a worldview, one aka evolutionary materialism, aka scientific atheism etc], testable against the natural world. Other shared elements include observations, rational argument, inference, skepticism, peer review and replicability of work . . . . Science, by definition, is limited to naturalistic methods and explanations and, as such, is precluded from using supernatural elements in the production of scientific knowledge. [NSTA, Board of Directors, July 2000.] >> _______________ The effect of such ideologisation of science, especially on origins, is to warp results by censoring out the possibility for science to follow the evidence freely where it leads. A better approach is to restore a more historically and philosophically well warranted understanding of what science should seek to be and do, e.g.:
science, at its best, is the unfettered — but ethically and intellectually responsible — progressive, observational evidence-led pursuit of the truth about our world (i.e. an accurate and reliable description and explanation of it), based on: a: collecting, recording, indexing, collating and reporting accurate, reliable (and where feasible, repeatable) empirical -- real-world, on the ground -- observations and measurements, b: inference to best current -- thus, always provisional -- abductive explanation of the observed facts, c: thus producing hypotheses, laws, theories and models, using logical-mathematical analysis, intuition and creative, rational imagination [[including Einstein's favourite gedankenexperiment, i.e thought experiments], d: continual empirical testing through further experiments, observations and measurement; and, e: uncensored but mutually respectful discussion on the merits of fact, alternative assumptions and logic among the informed. (And, especially in wide-ranging areas that cut across traditional dividing lines between fields of study, or on controversial subjects, "the informed" is not to be confused with the eminent members of the guild of scholars and their publicists or popularisers who dominate a particular field at any given time.) As a result, science enables us to ever more effectively (albeit provisionally) describe, explain, understand, predict and influence or control objects, phenomena and processes in our world.
GEM of TKI PS: I am very aware of how Darwin artfully cut off his public discussion at the point of the root of the tree of life. He knew he had no evidence and he knew that the trend of thought would be followed to the logical conclusion by others. He did make sure to put something into a letter [that warm little pond quote], knowing that it would be the subject of writing of biographies and onward investigations. Darwin was first and foremost a clever and patient rhetor of what he termed Free Thought, a synonym of skeptical agnositcism or atheism. The logic of the case is that absent the root, there is no basis for the tree of life. And, if there is good reason to infer to the origin of a metabolising self replicating automaton on the only known cause of the required FSCI, design, then there is a fortiori good reason to infer to the same cause as the main cause of the much larger increments of FSCI to account for novel body plans. For first life we are looking at 100 - 100+ k bits of functionally specific complex digital info, and for body plans credibly 10 - 100+ million bits. Just 1,000 bits of FSCI specifies 10^150 times the number of Planck time quantum states that the atoms of our observed cosmos will go through across the effective -- heat death -- lifespan of our cosmos. In short, something that, per specificity, is isolated in that scope of a space of possibilities will be maximally unreachable apart from by intelligent design.kairosfocus
June 14, 2011
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oh yeah driver, did Dr. Cooper ever get back to you? I'm sure he droppedd everything when you wrote him....tsmith
June 14, 2011
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No, that bit you quoted is a description of the actual development the eye in vertebrates. That is, how the eye develops in embryos.
yes and it assumes evolution...but no list of the mutations that led to all of these wonderful things happening...oh and how did some of these mutations...which by themselves provide no benefit, hang around until the rest of the pieces evolved? its kind of like the 'evolution' of male and female...it sho is clever of evolution to evolve em at the same time isn't it? shazam!
It’s a bit more complicated than that, but how is that scientific evidence of design?
its rather obvious isn't it?tsmith
June 14, 2011
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Back to the OP: I have read both papers now, and the headline of the OP is incorrect. Neither paper shows that genetic entropy decreases fitness. It may do, but the papers aren't about that. Both papers concern the Lenski E-coli lineage, in which the ancestral lineage was stored so that it can be compared with populations bred separately from that common ancestral lineage. Both papers show that beneficial mutations (which occured in different lineages) did not have an additive effect, but rather a "law of diminishing returns", when artificially inserted into already-fit genomes. No decrease of fitness was observed, just a reduced increase. The papers have nothing to do with "genetic entropy" which is to do with the gradual buildup of mostly Very Slightly Deleterious Mutations (VSDMs) in a population over time. This was nothing to do with buildup over time (the "buildup" was an experiment manipulation); the mutations were beneficial alone, not deleterious; there was no decrease in fitness (just a decrease in rate of fitness increase). Interesting papers, but not what it says on the OP tin :) If you want a take-home anti-Darwinian message from the papers, it isn't that genetic entropy decreases fitness, but that beneficial mutations tend not to be additive. Although at least one was actually multiplicative.Elizabeth Liddle
June 14, 2011
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the same gene produces widely divergent types of eyes in widely divergent animals.
It's a bit more complicated than that, but how is that scientific evidence of design?Driver
June 14, 2011
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LOL…more ‘just so’ stories…
No, that bit you quoted is a description of the actual development the eye in vertebrates. That is, how the eye develops in embryos.Driver
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