Startling Result–90% of Animals Less than 200 kya
| May 28, 2018 | Posted by PaV under Darwinism, Evolutionary biology, extinction, Intelligent Design, Tree of life |
From PhysOrg this morning, in a study using “DNA bar-codes” (mitochondrial DNA, using a specific gene COI) and conducted around the world, here’s the verdict:
The study’s most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
“This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could,” Thaler told AFP.
The scientists can’t figure out what might have caused this. They ask:
Was there some catastrophic event 200,000 years ago that nearly wiped the slate clean?
Maybe a “flood”?
About “bar-codes” there’s this:
On the one hand, the COI gene sequence is similar across all animals, making it easy to pick out and compare.
On the other hand, these mitochondrial snippets are different enough to be able to distinguish between each species.
“It coincides almost perfectly with species designations made by specialist experts in each animal domain,” Thaler said.
IOW, this method works, unlike, say, ‘phylogenetic trees’!
Here’s the actual article. I haven’t had time to read it.
Enjoy!
65 Responses to Startling Result–90% of Animals Less than 200 kya
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Hmm. We have a wide variety of artifacts (tools, paintings, etc) that are reliably dated back to 1.5 million years BC, using a variety of dating methods.
But the current mitochondrial patterns have been stable for only 200k.
Conclusion: The mitochondrial patterns aren’t a driving variable. They’re a secondary result, or a signal, of changes that don’t really affect speciesness.
polistra:
Then how do you explain the fact that the ‘DNA bar-codes’ match the species definitions of paleontologists. That is, matching mitochondrial DNA to species looks to be a ‘best-fit,’ unlike phylogenetic trees. The mt-DNA almost seems to be the ‘best’ definition of species. Any thoughts?
I have been arguing just that for a long while. A new “tree of life” will be shown through genetics.
Also shows stasis and clear separation of species.
Maybe I am missing something, but are they not talking about a phylogenetic tree?
AK:
Different methods.
DNA barcoding is explicitly phylogenetic — you have to make a tree before you can do the barcoding. It’s absolutely not the case that “‘DNA bar-codes’ match the species definitions of paleontologists”, in part because paleontologists study things that are very difficult to get DNA from…
The authors quoted in the OP seem to be quite ignorant of population genetics and the biology of mtDNA. Of course all living members of a species will share a recent common ancestor, that doesn’t meant that ancestor is the first of the species.
Looking past the primary conclusion of the paper that found “the extant population, no matter what its current size or similarity to fossils of any age, has expanded from mitochondrial uniformity within the past 200,000 years.”,,, The paper also adds another major piece of evidence falsifying Darwin’s imaginary “tree of life”. Specifically, “1) the variance within clusters is low, and 2) the sequence gap among clusters is empty, i.e., intermediates are not found.,,,”
The preceding study, in over the top fashion, also confirms what Michael Denton had found over 30 years ago in his book “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis”. Specifically, “However, the most striking feature of the matrix is that every identifiable subclass is isolated and distinct. Every sequence can be unambiguously assigned to a particular subclass. No sequence or group of sequences can be designated as intermediate with respect to other groups. All the sequences of each subclass are equally isolated from the members of another group. Transitional or intermediate classes are completely absent from the matrix. 4”
Here are a few more references falsifying Darwin’s imaginary ‘tree of life’:
Of supplemental note:
I’m more impressed with the animals (10%) that have been around for 200k+ years. Cockroaches? Water bears? Wayne Newton?
Amblyrhynchus:
You wrote:
From the paper:
Most of the phylogenetic tree work I’m familiar with, generally, end up to be quite a mess, with one tree contradicting another. These authors seem to be reporting something quite different here, where clear correlations exist.
All of this, of course, hugely distracts from the authors main point: according to them, “nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.”
Would you like to comment about their conclusion?
I’m not sure you know what a palaeontologist is?
Well, you were wrong about this not being a phylogenetic method. So not sure you assessment of other phylogeny studies adds up to much…
It’s not one that is informed by knowledge of population genetics or phylogeny…. They seem to confuse the time to the most common recent ancestor of mtDNA with the time at which a species arose. These are different things.
I managed to find the actual paper: http://www.pontecorboli.com/di.....Thaler.pdf
It’s remarkabl for how bad it is, and how little evidence there is for the grandiose claims in the press release. Pretty shoddy all around.
Dinosaurs lasted millions & millions of years. Maybe recent animals don’t last long because of climate change. Ok, just kidding.
Amblyrhynchus @ 12 – congratulations! It was hard work, wasn’t it?
I agree, it’s a horrible paper: very arm-wavy and the evidence for the claim isn’t really well supported. This is where the argument appears:
The first problem is that if we have an APD of 0.1% and the average for animals is 0.2% then the average species should have speciated 200kya-400kya (if we assume, for the sake of argument, that the rest of the model is correct). Then, even within the 90% there is a lot of variation: a species with a divergence of 0.5% would have an estimated speciation 500kya – 1,000 kya. In addition, if the authors had actually looked at their figures (in particular Fig. 1) they would have seen that the APDs are not tightly clustered around 0.5, indeed most are much lower, suggesting much more recent speciation.
And these criticisms can be made before we even consider how awful their argument is that APDs can be used (along with a single estimate of sequence divergence). APDs themselves are a stupid measure for speciation date: it should be obvious that for many pairs of individuals, their divergence is larger than the average, so they would have diverged before speciation(*). This contradicts that authors’ contention that between-species divergence is much larger. The maximum divergence would be a better measure, but there are going to be all sorts of problems using that.
(*) before someone else points this out: yes, in reality we can very easily find this, for perfectly good biological reasons. But in those case, you wouldn’t expect to see much stronger divergence between species.
This paper. as well as the other papers listed in posts 7 an 8, show that the Darwinian expectation that the “comparison of anatomical and DNA sequences (should lead) to the same family tree of organisms” is falsified.
As well, the poo pooing of this paper by Darwinists in posts 11, 12, and 14, is yet another example of the unfalsifiable, even pseudoscientific, nature of Darwinian claims:
Moreover, even if Darwinists were somehow able to shoehorn the DNA sequences into some type of preconceived tree-like pattern, (which they, despite extreme cheery picking of data, have not been able to do),,
,,, even if Darwinists were somehow able to shoehorn the DNA sequences into some type of preconceived tree-like pattern,,, that still would not tell us how the basic “form” of any particular type of organism was arrived at.
Biological form simply is not reducible to DNA sequences. As Stephen Meyer states at the 5:55 minute mark of the following video, ‘you can mutate DNA indefinitely. 80 million years, 100 million years, til the cows come home. It doesn’t matter, because in the best case you are just going to find a new protein some place out there in that vast combinatorial sequence space. You are not, by mutating DNA alone, going to generate higher order structures that are necessary to building a body plan.’
Moreover, the failure of the reductive materialism of Darwinian evolution to be able to explain the basic form of any particular organism occurs at a very low level. Much lower than DNA itself.
In the following article entitled ‘Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable’, which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists’ point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.”
Thus, even if Darwinists could somehow disingenuously shoehorn the DNA sequences into some-type of preconceived tree-like pattern, that still, since the reductive materialistic foundation of Darwinian evolution is now falsified, would tell us absolutely nothing about how an organism achieves it basis form.
In further falsification of the reductive materialistic foundation of Darwinian evolution, advances in Quantum Biology have now also further falsified the reductive materialistic foundation of Darwinian evolution,
As Jim Al-Khalili notes in the following video, Darwinists, with their with their balls and sticks models of molecules, i.e. with their reductive materialistic framework, are not even on the correct theoretical foundation to begin with in order to properly understand molecular biology
Thus in conclusion, even though many lines of scientific evidence are devastating to the reductive materialistic presuppositions of Darwinian evolution, Darwinists constantly refuse to accept any empirical falsification of their theory. That refusal to deal forthrightly with empirical evidence against their theory is what makes their theory a pseudoscience instead of a real science.
As others critics of Darwinism have often pointed out, Darwinism is a religion not a science.
OT:
https://natureecoevocommunity.nature.com/users/30647-rui-diogo/posts/29886-where-is-the-evo-in-evo-devo-in-2017
OT:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322896948_Where_is_in_2017_the_evo_in_evo-devo_evolutionary_developmental_biology
Perhaps one problem that Rui Diogo doesn’t seem to realize is that the only evo that can be associated with evo-devo is microevolutionary.
No matter how much he wants to push the issue in the direction of his preference.
I recall seeing an interesting formulation for evo-devo that was posted by somebody somewhere here, but can’t locate it now.
Has anybody else seen it?
Amblyrhynchus:
I had a link in the OP that could have taken you to the paper.
Can you point to a phylogenetic tree that everyone is happy with? That was my point.
Here, OTOH, there seems to be very good agreement between accepted groupings and genetic evidence.
#######+++++++++++++++++++++++++#######
I’m not in a position to evaluate the paper; however, what are the implications of
“ . . . the time to the most common recent ancestor of mtDNA . . . ” being ‘one or several hundreds of thousands of year’ when it applies to 90% of extant species?
Was there a ‘flood’ 200 kya?
Wouldn’t that be an acceptable hypothesis?
BTW, being Catholic, I have no vested interest in such a scenario since St. Augustine centuries before warned against taking the creation accounts as science.
But, again, what are the implications of their findings? Or, are you disputing their findings as well?
If I’m not mistaken, the authors of the paper used Tajima’s D, if they considered that the conditions were the right ones for that method, I don’t see why not, a good scientist should consider all the options, now what the critics here should do is finding out if the method was correctly applied .
getting warmer ?
More precise: all animal species are under 6K YA based on the strongest science (ie the highest probability explanation of the natural observations) as explained in/by RCCF framework for understanding science.
200k RCCF calibrates to just over 4K YA. Not long after the 1656 anno mundi Mabul impacts mass extinction events year that was the cause and effect for The ice ages to set in to begin with.
Stepping back from this study one step, mitochondrial DNA is not the same as nuclear DNA. The mutation clock for the two DNA is very different, some 20X faster in mitochondria. Likewise, every cell has 1000-2000 mitochondria, and their life cycle includes fission, fusion and biogenesis. Older animals/cells have a different mtDNA than younger cells.
Since all this is happening inside the cell, there are two effects superposed on one another—the “diffusion” of the species, and the “diffusion” of the mtDNA within an organism. Since the “DNA barcode” is taking swabs from many cells of single individuals, there is really no way to separate these two diffusion terms.
Making things worse, mitochondria are essential for life. There isn’t a lot of room for neutral mutations. That means most of the variations seen, actually are selected for. Once again, the aged cells tend to be populated with a mono-culture of mtDNA, having sacrificed their diversity for function. Some argue that this is a Darwinian effect of stress on that particular cell, so it optimizes the mtDNA. Others argue that it is a result of reactive oxygen species created by the necessary mitochondrial function itself, which eliminates the more agressive mtDNA.
Whatever the reason, if few of the mutations are neutral, then there is no way to determine the “genetic clock” or age of the mtDNA distribution.
The net result of these competing processes of diversity and selection, is almost predictable–homeostasis. Nothing looks too different. Everything looks like it was made 200,000 years ago.
So the problem with this paper is not with its conclusion, but with its assumption: novelty is randomly accumulating. And that is probably a lot more damaging to evolutionary theory then saying something dramatic happened 200,000 years ago.
PAV,
The vast majority of phylogenetic questions are well-resolved and are agreed on by molecular and morpholgical types. Open an issue of Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution or another solid mid-level journal and you’ll see plenty. If you use press releases or creationists literature to filter the results then of course you’ll only hear of the controversial studies. For most part, the remainin controversies relate to the evolutionary histories that are most difficult to recover: ancient rapid speciation giving rise to short internal branches, the ordering of which is difficult to
reonstrcut.
There is no evidence for this claim about 90% of species having a mtDNA ancestor at 200ka. I think they are saying ~90% of animals are arthropods, the few arthropods they looked at have mtDNA diversity similar to that of humans, humans had mtDNA ancestor at 200ka so 90% of animals ahve a mtDNA ancestor at 200ka. Shoddy.
There really is evidence that within species diversity of mtDNA is shallow (i.e. has pretty recent common ancestors), but that tells you that the effective population size of mtDNA is small and selection affects the whole molecule. There is not a requirement for a bottleneck to generate that pattern.
Jorronet
You are mistaken. It’s pretty odd they didn’t, since they are claiming these results are due to bottlenecks, and Tajima D is a test of this claim…
Rob Sheldon
Do you have a citation for this, or are you just making it up as you go along?
Amblyrhynchus;
That is still no refutation, you might disagree with the results but you haven’t pointed where they are wrong except that you don’t like the results.
jorronet,
The results don’t exist. The things they have claim in the press release/article are not supported by any results in the paper. The finding they do report, that within-species diversity of mtDNA is often (but not always) shallow is well known and easily explained. Worryingly, the authors seem unaware of the basic background to this work.
If you can point to a particular result that you think is unexpected or in need or explaining go for it.
Amblyrhynchus;
The species problem, more than 1000 species of yeast in this study and they found no evolution at all, just SNPs ( neutral mutations) , they didn’t evolve .
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0030-5
Is this some sort of world record attempt: The greatest concentration of error in one sentence? There is one species in this study, they found plenty of evolution, SNVs are not necessarily neutral and they found more than SNVs, the “species problem” has a couple of meanings but it’s not clear that any of them relate to this paper or your misunderstanding of it.
Now, if you want to slow down the Gish Gallop and get back to the point at hand please do.
Amblyrhynchus;
I’m just using what the paper you posted says , but you might not have read it :
“Nonhuman animals, as well as bacteria and yeast, are often considered “model sys- tems” whose results can be extrapolated to humans.”
Also the paper I posted says this ;
“The comparison of genome content variation and levels of SNPs in domesticated and wild clades (Supplementary Fig. 28) shows higher SNP density (median 0.55% versus 0.41%) and lower genome content variation (median 115 ORFs that are not shared, versus 161 shared ORFs) in wild versus domesticated clades, respectively (Supplementary Fig. 28 and Supplementary Tables 9, 10). These findings suggest a shift in evolutionary mechanisms during the domestication process. The wild clades share similar genome content, and their evolution is mainly driven by the accumulation of SNPs. “
It does say that. Though this doesn’t relate to anything in the paper in the OP or any claim you made earlier. So… what’s all this about, exactly?
Yes it relates , but you are cherry picking, both show the same exact pattern and the press release clearly says it, however your religious beliefs won’t let you accept the facts , even the paper about yeast that I posted shows that SNPs were prevalent and you dismissed it,so we have an example in non human animals also.
The press release say 90% of animal species arose 200ka.
The paper does not support this claim at all.
This new paper says a particular species of yeast have SNPs.
I’m finding it very hard to imagine how you think these things are related to each other. Perhaps you are simply an idiot who mistakenly started talking about a subject he knows nothing about but is now somehow unable to stop himself?
Not at all, the paper supports the author’s claim and yeast is just another example, you have not presented anything that proves the paper wrong except your disbelief.
What is the author’s claim?
How is it supported by data in the paper?
How is it supported by this yeast paper?
1.- For the planet’s 7.6 billion people, 500 million house sparrows, or 100,000 sandpipers, genetic diversity “ is about the same,” he told AFP.
2.- The data is in the paper.
3.- The same as in point 1.
I said in 25, the general statement that within-species diversity of mtDNA is generally low is well known and not a new result.
But, if you actually read the paper, within species diversity varies beteen 0 and 0.8%, with humans at 0.1%. There is still considerable variation in this number.
Precisely nothing you have quote about the yeast paper is about mtDNA, the numbers you have cited are not within-species diversity and the comment you made about the paper in 29 is completely unrelated to this point.
Just stop.
Amb, kindly read this: http://vixra.org/pdf/1105.0025v1.pdf , noting from abstract: “The predominant viewpoint appears incompatible with the finding that the sequenced genome of each species contains hundreds, or even thousands, of unique genes – the genes that are not shared with any other species. These unique genes and proteins, singletons, define the very character of every species.” Reflect on the implication of isolated islands of function starting at molecular level and moving up through the diversity of body plans, then down to the requisites of a first living, metabolising, von Neumann self replicator using cell. Especially, on implications of codes and regulated, pretty exact stepwise functional processes. KF
Kaisorfocus,
Gene birth and turnover is actually one of my areas of reasarch. The existence of “singleton” genes in newly sequenced genomes is explained by two processes:
(a) When we sequence a genome we focus on species that have not close relative already sequenced. The first sea squirt genome had thousands of singletons, but as we have sequanced more of this species relatives we have whittled that number of lineage-specific genes down. So “singleton” genes are partly an artefact of the way we prioritize genome projects, rather than a biologicl result.
(b) None the less, there are a suprising (to me) number of totally new genes in some lineages. As we have studies these groups closely, the dynamics of gene birth and death have become clear. There is a lot of essentially random transcription going on in Eukaryotes. As long parrticular sequence motifs are present and chromatin is accessible then transcipts get made. As the sequences underlying these chromatin states and the motifs driving expression drift, the parts of the genome that are randomly transcribed differs among species. So, you have a huge flux in lineage specific transcripts, most of which are doing nothing. Very occasionally, one takes on a biological function and then natural selectio acts to conserve that transcript. When that happen a lineage gains a new gene that will survive into all of its descendants. But the flux is much greatr than the accumulation of new genes.
It’s a really interesting field at the moment.
Amb, the issue is the informational import joined to the blind search for needles in a haystack. What is before us is evidence of deeply isolated islands of function — scattered needles with a lot of haystack between. Where, a Hamming distance of just 500 bits is effectively insuperable for blind search mechanisms and the only empirically warranted cause for such is intelligently directed configuration. Where, 500 bits corresponds to a configuration space of 3.27 * 10^150 possibilities. And while I spoke to species above, the far more key cases are OoL and Oo Body Plans. The former requires 100k – 1,000 k bits, more or less and the latter 10 – 100+ M bits. 100 k bits is a space of 9.99*10^30102. Those are vastly beyond the search resources of our solar system or indeed the observed cosmos; which set a threshold at 500 – 1,000 bits. It does not take a lot of singletons to pass that threshold, and in any case the deep isolation of a lot of folds in AA sequence space is also highly relevant. So, while yes some of the phenomenon is explicable on artifacts, that does not credibly explain it away. Likewise, essentially random transcription etc does not escape the search challenge I outlined. KF
What?
Wishful thinking. First, we often see information jumps larger than 500 bits, while even the probabilistic resources of bacteria in 4 billion years of natural history, under a hugely optimistic estimate, are well under 140 bits — see here.
Second, what are the odds that a new gene sequence can be incorporated by the organism? There are countless biological functions, but any specific organism has no use for the vast majority of them. Moreover, the new sequence needs to be regulated, what is the chance that a functional regulation system just happened to be in place at the advent of the new gene?
Those linked posts are… really something.
Often the regulation comes before function, acutally. Random transcription makes lots of RNA, a few of them have a function. In general, young genes don’t have especially complex function, many of them make proteins that don’t fold in the way we are used to, for example.
Amblyrhynchus @
Your “judgement” of two large OP’s by GPuccio formed within a time frame of 11 minutes. Do not be offended when I say that your judgement has no value whatsoever.
when you’ve seen a cargo cult before it doesn’t take long to spot another one.
This place is kind of amazing though.
PaV @ 21 –
The flood would have to have lasted 100,000 years, so not really.
It must feel uncanny being outside the echo chamber.
Meanwhile I note that you have failed to address the arguments presented to you. That is, I take it that you understand that your reference to IDP’s is irrelevant to the issue of probabilistic resources. Also IDP’s are not in any conceivable way an explanation for huge information jumps as we see in the evolutionary history of e.g. Ubiquitin system.
No argument has been presented to me.
PaV took a press release on face value, boranagin pasted a lot of quotes, Rob Sheldon pontificated on… something, jorronet lost the plot, Kaiser strung together a lot of words but produced no meaning and you have linked to giant posts that combine wikipedia-style summaries of particular proteins with some reification of BLAST bit scores to prove… well I’m stilll not sure what they are meant to prove.
As I say, it’s an amazing place.
of related note to the handle “Amblyrhynchus”
: It seems that Amblyrhynchus cristatus, which refers to “Galápagos marine iguana”, remains “mutually fertile” with land iguanas which it supposedly separated from some 8–10 million years ago.
In other words,the iguana is, like Darwin’s finches, a fairly lame example of adaptation that is falsely claimed as proof for ‘Darwinian evolution”.
And here is a picture of our new troll “Amblyrhynchus”:
https://depositphotos.com/106907528/stock-photo-the-marine-iguana-amblyrhynchus-cristatus.html
Handsome little devil isn’t he? 🙂
Amb, no argument has been presented? I suspect, you mean no argument you are willing to take seriously. That reaction on your part is, as they say, interesting. KF
Amblyrhynchus @
In #44 I point out the glaringly obvious, namely that your archetypal fantasy about gene origination is a non-starter due to lack of probabilistic resources and your unwarrented assumption of integrability of new genes.
Well, good for you.
Don’t worry, you will be escorted back to where you belong very soon.
In 45 Amblyrhynchus claims:
Because of course, as every Darwinists knows, regulating non-function is essential if you ever want to someday regulate function? 🙂
Amblyrhynchus then states:
Actually, RNA transcriptions are “highly non-random”,,,
Moreover many classes of RNA transcripts are now shown to have function of some sort.
Moreover, Darwinists certainly did not predict that the vast majority of the genome would be transcribed into functionally important RNA transcripts,.
In fact, Darwinists presupposed non-functionality for the vast majority of the genome because it was forced on them by the mathematics of population genetics. That is precisely the reason why Dan Graur said that “if the human genome is indeed devoid of junk DNA as implied by the ENCODE project, then a long, undirected evolutionary process cannot explain the human genome.”
Amblyrhynchus then states:
Actually, many ‘young’ genes are shown to have essential functions.
Amblyrhynchus then states:
Amblyrhynchus then links to Intrinsically Disordered Proteins (IDPs). IDPs are not as friendly to Darwinian concerns as Amblyrhynchus seems to believe.
Amblyrhynchus said ID was similar to a “Cargo Cult” which is interesting claim for him to make since he is the one that is found to be pretending that he has real evidence of some sort that will fly instead of him actually having any real evidence that will actually fly.
https://cdn3.omidoo.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/full/images/bydate/201507/cargo-cult.jpg
The shoe is squarely on the other foot, “Cargo Cult”, is an extremely apt phrase for the unfalsifiable pseudoscience of Darwinian evolution
You’ll note this is still not an argument. In 44 you linked to a post about BLAST bitscores and some calculation about the number of mutations occurring in a single population over time. Somehow I’m meant to conclude from this that evolution couldn’t happen (?), but even then, none of this has anything to do with the de novo origin of genes. So… yeah. I find it all a little confusing (and, I’ll admit, amusing too).
Amblyrhynchus @55
In #44 I quoted your idea of how genes can be explained. The arguments I presented show that your proposal is a non-starter as a full explanation of genes.
Moreover, in certain cases, under discussion in GPuccio’s OP’s, the information jump in gene sequence, during the vertebrate transition, is so large and homology with pre-vertebrates so low, that the distinction between “old” and “new” gene becomes arbitrary.
Amblyrhynchus (Blunt-Nose)[Viper?]:
This is from Stoeckle and Thaler’s July 2014 paper:P
This makes clear that they were struggling with the fact that mt-DNA clusters were showing that ‘neutral theory’ did not apply. This is a starting point for them.
You’ll also note they reach the same conclusion in 2014 that I did in reading their paper: a “Noah’s Ark hypothesis.” They were obviously uncomfortable with this.
From the Conclusion of the 2014 paper:
The obvious solution to neutral theory’s failure in regard to mt-DNA was to look for “extreme purifying selection.”
And so they take up this view in their current, 2018, paper:
So, the ‘neutral theory’ won’t explain the clustering of mt-DNA, nor will “purifying selection,” at least not for codons ending in G. So, now what?
It appears that the authors look to “bottlenecks” as the answer to “speciation.”
They quote Mayr—“(originally 1942, here quoted from a reprise based on interviews in 2004 [136])”:
Then, invoking Gould and Eldridge:
So, Stoeckle and Thaler are saying it’s just a ‘winnowing down’ of what exists prior to a ‘bottleneck’ that counts.
Immediately, they say:
In conclusion, their hypothesis seems to be that ‘speciation’ isn’t the result of either ‘neutral theory’ or of ‘natural selection (purifying)’, but of a kind of mitochondrial “cloning” wherein the mitochondria act as a kind of a “honorary prokaryote.”
Hence, the whole notion that “90 percent of animal life, genetically speaking, is roughly the same age” is for Stoeckle and Thaler, an indication that some severe “bottleneck” event occurred within the past 200,000 years. And the lack of ‘neutrally’ induced variation ‘within species’ might represent a very new way of looking at how “speciation” takes place.
Hence, their final paragraph:
Obviously the “grandeur in this view” phrase harkens to Darwin’s original conclusion in the Origin of Species and that Stoeckle and Thaler feel as though they’ve discovered a new, perhaps “the”, mechanism for evolution.
Origenes,
You keep talking about this argument you have presented,but you haven’t articulated it at all. Please try to do so in plain English. But bear in mind, we are talking about gene birth, then posts you’ve linked to are about evolution over 600 million years. Very hard to imagine they are relevant.
PaV,
This 90% of animals statistics simply isn’t supported by anything in the paper. The idea that a recent common ancestor for mtDNA requires a clonal period is simply wrong. These authors are very confused (presumably why this ended up in such an odd little journal), and you’re reading of them is only more confused.
Ambly:
I think I’ve followed their argument fairly well. I think it’s simply a matter that you don’t agree with them.
Their 90% figure comes, I’m rather sure, from what they see as an almost uniform lack of mt-DNA variation.
They might be onto something. But, I do agree, they haven’t presented it as clearly and forcefully as they might have. But, then again, maybe they’re afraid to speak their mind, or their article might be published anywhere.
Ambly:
Is it “blunt-nosed,” as in ‘scissors’; or is it “snub-nosed” as in a ‘revolver’?
If you are going to pay attention to the figure shouldn’t it come from data by way of some sort of calculation?
Amb,
You must be new here. :).
as to: “If you are going to pay attention to the figure shouldn’t it come from data by way of some sort of calculation?”
So the results of Mathematics now matter to Darwinists?
Mathematics is not a friend to Darwinian presuppositions in the least. Where Darwinian evolution is based on a materialistic view of reality which denies that anything beyond the physical exists, on the other hand, Mathematics, which provides the backbone for all of science, engineering and technology,,, mathematics exists in a transcendent, beyond space and time, (Platonic) realm which is not reducible any possible material explanation.
Simply put, Mathematics itself, contrary to the materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists, does not need the physical world in order to exist. And yet Darwinists, although they deny that anything beyond the physical exists, need this transcendent world of mathematics in order for their theory to be considered scientific in the first place. The predicament that Darwinists find themselves in regards to denying the reality of this transcendent, immaterial, world of mathematics, and yet needing validation from this transcendent, immaterial, world of mathematics in order to be considered scientific, should be the very definition of self-refuting.
Amby:
If you are going to pay attention to the figure shouldn’t it come from data by way of some sort of calculation?
If my memory serves me well, they make mention that ‘neutral theory’ would require that a much higher level of variation of mt-DNA be found that the very low levels GenBank returns. I imagine it’s a straightforward calculation, almost trivial.
One way to refresh your memory and move beyond your imagining of what was in the paper would be to read it. The figure you making the most of, 90% of animal species having a mrca for mtDNA btween 100ka and 200ka is simply not supported by any analysis at all. Why you feel the need to defend this paper’s authors I do not know.
To know if the level of diversity was consistent with the strict neutrality of mtDNA variants you would need some independent estimate of the effective population size of each species. They don’t have that. FWIW, the fact mtDNA does not usually recombine means it is unlikely to evolve as if it were neutral, as selection effects the whole molecule and drags neutral variants along with it.