Yeah, I've never had a debate like this end well. Mostly the people that try to hold up evolution as a viable process use any number of excuses to bow out as they are unable to refute the facts I bring to the table. Its OK though, hopefully you gained some insight into how things really work and are better off for it...

I don't remove parts of quotes which is what I was objecting to...

And here you try to call people out on fallacies.

Here's what I saw of your "facts" -- zero sources cited in your opening post on the issue. This was followed by a blog post, with no sources cited.

Your second barrage of seven posts in a row linked out to an inflammatory documentary funded out of the pockets of noted rich biologist lawyer Ben Stein.

Things almost got better, when you linked to a IECB paper on multiple-protein coding; but you've used the results of that paper to draw a conclusion that it isn't clear the authors' support. Perhaps your additional conclusion is correct, but it would need to be tested.

And then you linked to another blog post on religiopolitic. It would have been better if you'd just linked to a source paper representing that information. Try this direct link to the only supported research in your second example of an inflammatory post next time, instead of religiopolitic. Although it does not contain the complete text of the paper, it contains a very reasonable swath of it, inluding the conclusions.

However, I should note that Sargent's review of previous experiments did not refute the Majerus work linked to by Glasir (nor did it actually refute previous experiments, including Sargent's own). Majerus's final work, having been conducted after Sargent's initial review, was published last year. I have not yet seen a critical analysis of Majerus's more recent work, but it is not debunkable in any way by Sargent's 1999 review.

Also: HERE is the working link to the paper that gave you a 403 Forbidden error code. However, there were two papers linked, neither of which you responded to with citable references. Just as you never responded to the RSBL paper with citations, nor the Nature paper with citations.

For what it's worth, neither did Glasir respond to the IECB paper with further citations, however, again -- you did not merely present the information summarized from the IECB paper, but drew an additional conclusion based on your original statistics.

I'm not an evolutionary biologist, so I don't intend to argue with either you or Glasir in this. I also know that even if I did argue with either of you, I wouldn't be able to convince either of you -- you've each made that very clear in your presentations. Again, this brings me back to the theory that debate is for the audience. Additionally, I actually believe intelligence design has worked in concert with evolution, so you might almost even see me as being on your side. However, your aggressive manner of debate, extreme hyperbole, hypocrisy in use of fallacies, and lack of citable references make your presentation very much worse than Glasir's own.


But I am a physicist, and your comments on entropy are entirely incorrect. Here, in fact, is the lower bound entropy generation value during DNA replication (linked article):


In any case, there is no shortage of egos in the world of science.

Most of this post boils down to "you didn't link expensive scientific peer reviews and instead linked articles talking about those peer reviews." which is a non-argument. If you can't refute them then just admit it. You don't need to attack the source of the information with ad hominem fallacies.

Your chart is not relevant to the conversation. Its about the production of the each allel and not about how they are put together which is where the outside influence needs to be. In other words if new genetic data is not inserted from outside then there is not 'energy' being added to the process of DNA replication, only to the factory production of its parts. I'm not sure how to make the distinction any clearer...

What are you talking about? That's not how entropy works. If you can't refute his science then just admit it.

We link to scientific papers, rather than blog posts and videos, because they present the information and its conclusions as refracted through one less lens of bias. There was not ad hominem in my comments; Ben Stein and religiopolitic.com are indeed not ethical sources of information, because they do not meet an appeal to authority. Since they are conducting no original research, it's best to source the original works, rather than the works as viewed through extraneous agendas.


You may have a biological point that you are trying to make here, but it isn't a description of the thermodynamic measurement of entropy, and it appears to be at odds with your earlier quote "Nope sorry, no energy is added to the process of DNA replication. Its a complete closed entropy system." Especially if we are talking about production of the alleles, which is where the genetic information is stored, it matters less how the chain is built. Allele replication, a subset of the process of DNA chain replication, is not a "closed entropy system."

The paper I linked to is pointing out that the DNA itself represents information, which is entropic and added to the process of DNA replication. Replication of information anywhere in the universe is a physically entropic process. As such, it manifests change. There is a lower bound on the entropy produced during a frictionless replication of the information contained in DNA. No observed subsystems in this universe are truly entropically closed in separation from the larger universe, to theoretically include Black Holes (Hawking Radiation). Even simple tunneling by free electrons and cosmic radiation can accidentally interfere with, and add energy to, any chemical reaction anywhere, allowing different results to manifest.

In any case, the input of the DNA information itself is the energy in, even if we could consider it a closed system. Thermodynamic processes require an increase of entropy; but that does not make the system entropically closed, free from other sources of energy in.

Oh, and it isn't my chart, it's the work of another reputable scientist. I am not here to take credit for their efforts.

why is this thread even still open

its the miracle of nature

people are having a healthy intellectual debate

So in this post we have Loki stating that these "fact" things are irrelevant, and unsourced opinion is just as, if not more valid, pointing out baseless opinion is not fact is "ad hominem," and that data on a subject is not relevant to said subject.

Why is anyone bothering with this anymore?"Intellectual" is not the word I'd be using, unless you want to put a "ly challenged" on the end of it.

Before going into the quotes...

I think part of the issue, Lokiare, is that you're expecting new genes to be created for old situations. For example, the yellow and blue snakes in the desert. Very quickly we'll see the trait of yellow become dominant. Like you said in this case, it's already there, so it's genetically very easy for it to become dominant. What's much more rare is for the snake to turn light brown if that trait never existed. Nevertheless, this process can happen. Before 1500 there were no records of white tigers... so where did they come from? Turns out a new gene was produced that inhibited the production of the striking orange coats!

http://www.livescience.com/34632-white-tiger-color-mystery-solved.html

Neato!

So what I'm saying is that it's much easier to find situations where an old gene/protein simply takes up the function of the new requirement rather than a whole new protein being created, and as such it's much more difficult to study. Carrying on...



That's what I mean. The sentence you provided can be warped around a bunch of times to say the same things in different ways. However, when you further break it down into the basic language, you'll find that you can say lots of different things to:

Today, the heavens are azure.
(adverb), the (noun) (verb "to be") (adjective).
Oddly, the cow is flumoxed.

The result? New information!



That's not really how the Homunculus fallacy works. There is no infinite regress here, which is the basis of the homunculus fallacy. It would be a homunculus fallacy if we said that proteins require a change in the DNA which requires a change in the proteins, because then it would infinitely regress. However, even if we assume that there is a regress here (basing theories on a bad theory means that the new theory is also bad and will require a new theory), then the argument is still invalid, as it makes an assumption that the new theory will be bad. I think these discussions are evidence that non-evolutionary models are always considered and tested in addition to standard tests. However, these other models are not able to stand up to the same amount of scrutiny as the current model. Both models collapse at the end (only because we still have more to learn), but as the evolutionary model can withstand greater scrutiny to further along the line, it makes logical sense that it is closer to the "true" final answer.

By example, if an earthquake happens, and I say it happened because of tectonic plates and you say it happened because of a flying saucer, both hypothesis can be tested, and both will eventually fail. The difference is that yours will fail much sooner (no laser beams detected, etc.), while mine will fail only once we start trying to locate the exact rock that broke that triggered the cascade of tectonic pressure release. Similarily, non-evolutionary models collapse sooner under scientific scrutiny than evolutionary models - but the evolutionary model does still collapse if you look far enough, such as what you are doing. That does not mean that the theory is wrong, only that there continue to be portions of the theory that need to be filled in.

Newton's model is entirely false, sorry to say. There is no gravitational constant. In fact, in Relativistic models, there is no gravity - just a curvature of space. Objects of mass do not "pull" on each other. If I fire a rocket directly perpendicular to Earth and start falling towards it, it won't be because Earth is pulling me, or because I fired rockets in the wrong direction... my space-time momentum literally makes a straight line into a visually curved one.

Newton's theory is entirely false, not just imprecise. However, even though it is false, it is still very useful for most day to day situations, and Force is much easier to calculate than Tensors (space-time points and movements). As such, we still use it.

Evolutionary models may not be perfect, but they describe what we see so well that until a better model comes along, we might as well use it.



Unfortunately, science disagrees with you:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534703000338 - Evolution by gene duplication: an update
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/7/2 - Inventing an arsenal: adaptive evolution and neofunctionalization of snake venom phospholipase A2 genes
http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v9/n12/full/nrg2482.html - How duplicated genes find new functions
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.genet.38.072902.092831?journalCode=genet& - DUPLICATION AND DIVERGENCE: The Evolution of New Genes and Old Ideas
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v428/n6983/full/nature02424.html - Proof and evolutionary analysis of ancient genome duplication in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1460548/ - How keeping around junk DNA through gene duplication helps increase odds of beneficial new traits

(there's lots more if you do a Google search, though admittedly they tend to be locked up in paid-for peer-review journals)

That said, I was especially tempted to look at the last one on that list.

Gene duplication is viable, even if it results in a greater risk of deleterious mutations, due to the greater chance and probabilities (far higher than the numbers you've quoted) of hitting beneficial new traits.

To me, this is like saying math classes are biased against anything that isn't correct math. Evolutionary theory is the best explanation we have for how we got here. To teach students opposing views that are either unfalsifiable, or even verifiably wrong, is bad. Researchers are welcome to experiment and study and come to whatever conclusions they can support, but the reason anything that isn't evolutionary theory isn't being taught in schools is that every alternative is based on faith and/or unsound or invalid reasoning. I've literally never heard anyone say "I don't think evolutionary theory is right, but neither are any of those other crackpot ideas. We still need more data. The conclusions we have drawn from the data we have is premature." But no one who disagrees with evolutionary theory ever argues with the theory. They try to argue with the actual, verifiable data. Your statement of "we have never been able to witness new traits occurring" is provably false, and has been disproven in this thread multiple times.

You're pulling the assumption that the gene already exists out of nowhere. You are asserting that the gene already existed based on the assumption that new traits can't evolve, and using the that assertion (that the genes already existed recessively rather than evolving) as evidence that new traits can't evolve.



This "article" by PapaGiorgio is not peer reviewed, and unscientific. I read the entire thing, and it is nothing but a bunch of questions asked by someone who is clearly biased, asks questions that serve only as evidence of his lack of understanding and relevant education, and in addition to not being peer reviewed or even published by a legitimate publication at all, he doesn't actually even make any assertions as far as I can tell, never mind any that actually debunk the study. This article contains no facts that I can see, beyond those quoted in the original study. It has about as much weight and scientific merit as a comment on someone's youtube video.



Again, I read this article. Please cite examples from the text. I couldn't find any.



First of all, please cite proof of this specific number, and second realize that inbreeding mutations are new traits evolving that did not exist before. Something like 70% of inbreeding mutations are harmful, and most of the rest are either weakly expressed or completely neutral, but that does not change the fact that these are changes in the gene structure and not preexisting but recessive traits being expressed, and that some are even beneficial. You just cited evidence that debunks your entire stance.



"I highly doubt" is not evidence, and isn't worth mentioning if you are trying to convince anyone of anything.



Cite evidence please.



You bet?



What section of variables is ignored? Science is about using the best explanation for what we see. A bunch of stuff isn't getting made up to support these explanations, we've seen these mutations. At a macro level, and at a bacterial level, which we DO have DNA sequencing for:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... ktv9VOcF8E



Just because you aren't aware of it or don't understand it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Random gene recombination happens all of the time. We see this happen at a genetic level in labs. here is no "caused by X" happening. We are talking about extrapolating ideas from things that are verifiable, that there is evidence for, and every time someone shows you evidence, you say that it has been debunked, and cite something that doesn't debunk it at all, or you ignore it.



I've already answered this above, and others have any other times as well, but you're still citing the mechanism that makes evolution work, and saying it proves that it doesn't. Just because most of some types of mutations such as inbreeding produce negative results doesn't mean that the mechanism doesn't exist. In the same works you've cited, it is outlined that positive change does happen, and has been documented in lab settings, as well as in nature. At a macro and micro scale.



Okay first, how does it represent a loss of genetic data? There is no "loss of data," there is only change. All of our dna is four nucleobases combined in different ways. But secondly, there were no chimps 500 million years ago. So by your logic, everything that is a chimp already existed as a recessive gene in the first amoebas.




What. That you can acknowledge one and not the other blows my mind. Especially since it appears to be a distinction based on pure whim, as far as I can tell.

it is hard to get good information on controversial topics i imagine

Just a heads-up: I've removed some posts from this thread.

Pro tip: Hanging a lampshade on the fact that your post is off-topic doesn't magically make it on-topic.

what is controversial is oppositions to evolutionary biology i imagine mostly because of the ties to creationism and other religious beliefs

it is controversial in the sense that there is stigma attached to opposing it academically. (that is just a guess though i do not actually know anything about academic communities)

Yes, and there's stigma over opposing 1+1=2, or that carbon has six protons, or that the Earth is several billion years old. Your point?