Creationists: Explain your understanding of microevolution and macroevolution

[Alan Kleinman]

You are clueless, just like I thought.
You desperately want to present yourself as this expert, and you cannot even address simple questions on things you have not spent years dreaming up retorts to.

Pathetic.

Is that reference your proof for macroevolution? So reptiles evolve into birds and fish evolve into mammals by transposons? Write it up and submit it for publication. One of your so-call "on topic" journals are sure to publish that.

 

[tas8831]

Oh really? Swamidass is a physician and a PhD, why don't you ask him to explain how drug resistance evolves? Instead, he makes very sloppy claims about neutral evolution.

You're funny.

I grow tired of creationist hacks that only respond to the tidbits that others write to which they think they can score points or dodge or whatever.

Your "reply" to the p450 issue tells me all I need to know about why your amazing 'random mutation and natural selection' essay only got 2 citations.

That and I read the sad thing in 5 minutes and saw numerous flaws - now, I am so sure your amazing math is impeccable, but that is irrelevant when you disregard/don't understand the biology.

This one seems immune to actually addressing what others write, or perhaps comprehending what others write. Here is a nice example from the peacefulscience thing:

@kleinman:
How many beneficial mutations does it take to get a more than four-order of magnitude increase in reproductive fitness

CrisprCas9:
At least one. Possibly several.

@kleinman:
So, how many replications does it take for a beneficial mutation to occur?​

Not getting the response he expected, or had hoped, he shifts gears and goal posts. He did this to me re: p450.
He is disingenuous and out of his depth, and so tries to steer every attempt at dialogue into an area he thinks he can control.
Sad.


Not wasting any more time on this malcontent until he grows up. Which will be hard for an old creationist dude - too much invested.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

Let me! Let me! An egomaniac trying to find a way to prop up his ancient middle eastern beliefs?

You certainly don't do it the way macroevolutionists prop up their beliefs. When are you going to publish your paper that explains how reptiles evolve into birds and fish evolve into mammals by transposons. The world needs this wisdom.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

Not wasting any more time on this malcontent until he grows up. Which will be hard for an old creationist dude - too much invested.

Yes, your time would be better invested in taking a course in introductory probability theory. That's the mathematical subject you need to understand if you want to explain stochastic processes such as DNA adaptive microevolution

 

[Phred]

Kishony and Lenski

I swear he gets a nickel every time he mentions them.

 

[tas8831]

One last one - I assume that most who are interested have found Kleinman's antics elsewhere, but I like his antics on the peacefulscience site. His performance there really shows his limited understanding of things, and his dogged, almost desperate attempts to steer the dialogue into a region that the think she can 'win' in. For simplicity, our boy Kleinman's attempts as self-aggrandizement will be in italics, all others in plain text. This came from the same page/thread linked above, so I am not providing more.

Timothy_HortonUnspecified Interlocutor
Feb 27

kleinman:
So, how many replications of a variant does it take to have a reasonable probability of a beneficial mutation occurring?

That depends on the local environment and how close the population is to a local fitness maximum. The closer the population is to the fitness maximum the less chance it will have a mutation to increase fitness - if you’re near the top of the mountain already there are few ways to climb higher. However in the real world environments are constantly changing and reproductive fitness maxima are always moving. The process of evolution allows the population to constantly track and move toward the local fitness maximum. Asking for a specific number of beneficial mutations is rather silly as there are way too many variables in the equations to calculate.




Feb 27

kleinman:
So, how many replications of a variant does it take to have a reasonable probability of a beneficial mutation occurring?

That would depend on the probability of a beneficial mutation occurring. Which is a difficult thing to estimate, as most experimental tests of the question only address ‘beneficial in a specific artificial environment’, rather than any possible beneficial mutation. And ignores the fact that mutations without any adaptive effect in one environment may be beneficial in another.

Still, I doubt the rate of beneficial mutations is any lower than 1 every 10k generations or so, since the experimental values are higher in nearly every experiment I’m familiar with. So if ‘reasonable probability’ means 5%, then 500-600 generations. If it means 95%, then ~30k generations. ~280k generations since the most recent common ancestor with chimpanzees, so I’d say the probability of at least one beneficial mutation is really good.

If you disagree, and…

kleinman:
If you have difficulty doing that math

…let me know.

--------

Feb 27
How many beneficial mutations does it take to get a more than four-order of magnitude increase in reproductive fitness (300,000 vs >7billion)? If you can, tell us how beneficial mutations accumulate on a lineage. If you have trouble with that math, you can find it here:
​

Of note here, K-man is referring to the current population of chimps (300,000) v. humans. Because you know, hunting and habitat destruction over the past 50-100 years is totally relevant to genetic processes that took millions of years... He actually seems to think that this is an argument against evolution...

 

[Phred]

Yes, your time would be better invested in taking a course in introductory probability theory. That's the mathematical subject you need to understand if you want to explain stochastic processes such as DNA adaptive microevolution

No... it's just the hill you're choosing to die on.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste...

 

[Subduction Zone]

Wow - almost like a trend or something. I should have stuck to my original plan and not wasted time of this creationist.

@kleinman, I’d like to take a brief pause from the debate here and ask what you are hoping to accomplish with your participation here. It’s clear that you aren’t hoping to learn anything since you already have all the answers. It is also quite unlikely that you have secret knowledge to impart that is unavailable to the PhD researchers and graduate students that regularly contribute here. Perhaps you just like to argue. Or perhaps there is some other reason I haven’t yet considered.
​

Let me! Let me! An egomaniac trying to find a way to prop up his ancient middle eastern beliefs?

Thanks for the link. You can see how little Allen understands by this quote:

" My math has been examined by experts in probability theory. "

His "math" may be correct, but he went to the wrong experts. If the mathematical formula is based upon improper assumptions, and the experts have repeated told him that, it does not matter how the "correct" the math is. And that is the problem when one goes to an off topic journal. The so called experts chosen are apt to not understand the underlying errors that make his work useless.

I would like to check the general reputation of the journal that he used more than once. It appears to be just another example of the vanity press. In other words it is merely a pay to publish site.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

I swear he gets a nickel every time he mentions them.

I don't but these are two of the best-measured examples of DNA adaptive microevolution. You should study and understand these experiments and learn something about biological evolution.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

One last one - I assume that most who are interested have found Kleinman's antics elsewhere, but I like his antics on the peacefulscience site. His performance there really shows his limited understanding of things, and his dogged, almost desperate attempts to steer the dialogue into a region that the think she can 'win' in. For simplicity, our boy Kleinman's attempts as self-aggrandizement will be in italics, all others in plain text. This came from the same page/thread linked above, so I am not providing more.

Timothy_HortonUnspecified Interlocutor
Feb 27

kleinman:
So, how many replications of a variant does it take to have a reasonable probability of a beneficial mutation occurring?

That depends on the local environment and how close the population is to a local fitness maximum. The closer the population is to the fitness maximum the less chance it will have a mutation to increase fitness - if you’re near the top of the mountain already there are few ways to climb higher. However in the real world environments are constantly changing and reproductive fitness maxima are always moving. The process of evolution allows the population to constantly track and move toward the local fitness maximum. Asking for a specific number of beneficial mutations is rather silly as there are way too many variables in the equations to calculate.​

Horton is already confused. I'm not asking for a specific number of beneficial mutations. I'm asking the number of replications required for a particular mutation to occur.

Feb 27

kleinman:
So, how many replications of a variant does it take to have a reasonable probability of a beneficial mutation occurring?

That would depend on the probability of a beneficial mutation occurring. Which is a difficult thing to estimate, as most experimental tests of the question only address ‘beneficial in a specific artificial environment’, rather than any possible beneficial mutation. And ignores the fact that mutations without any adaptive effect in one environment may be beneficial in another.

The probability of a mutation occurring at a site with a single replication is simply the mutation rate. The probability of a beneficial mutation occurring at a site with a single replication will be slightly lower. The probability that at least one member of the population gets a beneficial mutation depends on the (beneficial) mutation rate and the number of replications of the particular variant that would benefit from that particular mutation.

Still, I doubt the rate of beneficial mutations is any lower than 1 every 10k generations or so, since the experimental values are higher in nearly every experiment I’m familiar with. So if ‘reasonable probability’ means 5%, then 500-600 generations. If it means 95%, then ~30k generations. ~280k generations since the most recent common ancestor with chimpanzees, so I’d say the probability of at least one beneficial mutation is really good.

Kishony's bacteria gets an adaptive mutation when the founder colony reaches a population of about 1 billion. That occurs with about 30 doublings (generations), not 10k generations. You really shouldn't choose confused debaters to support your mathematically irrational beliefs.

Feb 27
How many beneficial mutations does it take to get a more than four-order of magnitude increase in reproductive fitness (300,000 vs >7billion)? If you can, tell us how beneficial mutations accumulate on a lineage. If you have trouble with that math, you can find it here:

Of note here, K-man is referring to the current population of chimps (300,000) v. humans. Because you know, hunting and habitat destruction over the past 50-100 years is totally relevant to genetic processes that took millions of years... He actually seems to think that this is an argument against evolution...

Once again, you are confused. In this case, I'm arguing the blunder that Swamidass is making using neutral evolution to claim that humans and chimpanzees came from a common ancestor. What makes mutations neutral is that they don't change reproductive fitness. If that were the case, neutral evolution would say that humans and chimps have the same reproductive fitness. 7 billion humans vs 300,000 chimps contradict this claim. Asking you to read for comprehension is like asking you to do math.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Horton is already confused. I'm not asking for a specific number of beneficial mutations. I'm asking the number of replications required for a particular mutation to occur.​

No, you asked a poorly formed question and he tried to explain to you why it failed.

When you start an explanation with a poor premise everything that arises from it is usually wrong.​

 

[Alan Kleinman]

His "math" may be correct, but he went to the wrong experts. If the mathematical formula is based upon improper assumptions, and the experts have repeated told him that, it does not matter how the "correct" the math is. And that is the problem when one goes to an off topic journal. The so called experts chosen are apt to not understand the underlying errors that make his work useless.

So, where is your experts' explanation of the Kishony and Lenski evolutionary experiments?

I would like to check the general reputation of the journal that he used more than once. It appears to be just another example of the vanity press. In other words it is merely a pay to publish site.

All journals charge for publication. They may not charge the authors but then they put the papers behind a paywall. If the paper is "Open Access" they charge the authors or the institutions that the authors work for. And none of your so-call "on topic" journals have ever published papers that explain the mathematics of the Kishony and Lenski experiments. Macroevolutionists never explain the mathematics of microevolution.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

No, you asked a poorly formed question and he tried to explain to you why it failed.

When you start an explanation with a poor premise everything that arises from it is usually wrong.

Don't expect a macroevolutionist to explain how to compute the probability of at least one instance of a particular mutation occurring as a function of the number of replications of a particular variant.

 

[Phred]

I don't but these are two of the best-measured examples of DNA adaptive microevolution. You should study and understand these experiments and learn something about biological evolution.

I seem to know more about it than you do.

 

[Ponderous Curmudgeon]

I don't but these are two of the best-measured examples of DNA adaptive microevolution. You should study and understand these experiments and learn something about biological evolution.

So you think that DNA microevolutionary adaptation works differently in bacteria than any other replicator? Show us the math, you won't.


I cited Haldane's paper because he was not modeling DNA microevolution, he is modeling competition. If you understand the physics of biological evolution, you know when Haldane's model is applicable. When I first started studying Haldane's work, I wondered if there was an exact solution and how it compared to Haldane's approximate solution. I wrote an exact solution and it turns out that Haldane's approximate solution is fairly accurate. But you wouldn't know because you have no idea what Haldane is doing. Actually, his model is quite simple and useful. I used a variation of his model when writing the mathematics for the Lenski experiment.


So, where is the macroevolutionists' mathematical explanation of the Kishony and Lenski evolutionary experiments? If you want to see that mathematical explanation, you need to expand your reading list beyond your so-called "on topic" journals.

And don't worry about citations to my papers, there are ones you have missed and there will be more by authors that actually want to understand the evolution of drug resistance.

from the paper you plagiarized for your math: Darwinian Evolution Can Follow Only Very Few Mutational Paths to Fitter Proteins Daniel M. Weinreich,* Nigel F. Delaney,† Mark A. DePristo, Daniel L. Hartl

They write this as their general method for estimation.
" To estimate the relative probabilities with which evolution by natural selection for heightened cefotaxime resistance will realize each of the 120 possible mutational trajectories from TEMwt to TEM*, we assumed that the time to fixation or loss of individual mutations is far less than the time between mutations the strong selection/weak mutation[ model of (15)^. Thus, the relative probability of realizing any particular mutational trajectory is the product of the relative probabilities of its constituent mutations, because under our assumption the choice of each subsequent fixation is statistically independent of all previous fixations (12). Next, for each allele we partitioned all possible mutations into those that are beneficial, deleterious, or neutral with respect to cefotaxime resistance. The probability of fixation for a beneficial mutation far exceeds that for deleterious or neutral mutations (12, 15) and, because all alleles have one or more beneficial mutations (Table 1), we approximated the probability of fixation for all other mutations by zero." my bold

This is their simplified model for certain highly selective environment, all you have done is repeat this with more verbiage and symbols as your own paper. It is not some new understanding it is only your specious conclusion that this somehow precludes evolution.

 

[Subduction Zone]

So, where is your experts' explanation of the Kishony and Lenski evolutionary experiments?

All journals charge for publication. They may not charge the authors but then they put the papers behind a paywall. If the paper is "Open Access" they charge the authors or the institutions that the authors work for. And none of your so-call "on topic" journals have ever published papers that explain the mathematics of the Kishony and Lenski experiments. Macroevolutionists never explain the mathematics of microevolution.

Please, let's deal with your errors first. You will never learn as long as you duck and dodge and try to shift the burden of proof.

And yes, though all journals tend to charge something, some try to get their money more from subscriptions than from the person publishing. The most reliable journals rely on subscriptions. Open access journals can publish valid articles, but there are quite a few of them out there that will publish almost anything. If a nobody that does not know what he is talking about wants to get published he will go to an open access source. If a person that knows nothing is afraid of being exposed even from the vanity press he or she will go to an off topic journal. No one is taking your articles seriously since they have been refuted and you do not even appear to understand the refutations.

 

[pitabread]

Macroevolutionists

"Macroevolutionists"? Don't you mean biologists?

 

[Phred]

All journals charge for publication. They may not charge the authors but then they put the papers behind a paywall. If the paper is "Open Access" they charge the authors or the institutions that the authors work for. And none of your so-call "on topic" journals have ever published papers that explain the mathematics of the Kishony and Lenski experiments. Macroevolutionists never explain the mathematics of microevolution.

What happened when you submitted your paper to Science, for example? Surely with a discovery of such an astounding scale you were accepted immediately. Why didn't you publish there?

 

[Alan Kleinman]

I seem to know more about it than you do.

Then why ask Hans, "So how does his equation fit the data?"

And thank you very much, this math very nicely fits the data, it fits it so well that it predicted the behavior of the Kishony experiment before it was performed.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

from the paper you plagiarized for your math: Darwinian Evolution Can Follow Only Very Few Mutational Paths to Fitter Proteins Daniel M. Weinreich,* Nigel F. Delaney,† Mark A. DePristo, Daniel L. Hartl

They write this as their general method for estimation.
" To estimate the relative probabilities with which evolution by natural selection for heightened cefotaxime resistance will realize each of the 120 possible mutational trajectories from TEMwt to TEM*, we assumed that the time to fixation or loss of individual mutations is far less than the time between mutations the strong selection/weak mutation[ model of (15)^. Thus, the relative probability of realizing any particular mutational trajectory is the product of the relative probabilities of its constituent mutations, because under our assumption the choice of each subsequent fixation is statistically independent of all previous fixations (12). Next, for each allele we partitioned all possible mutations into those that are beneficial, deleterious, or neutral with respect to cefotaxime resistance. The probability of fixation for a beneficial mutation far exceeds that for deleterious or neutral mutations (12, 15) and, because all alleles have one or more beneficial mutations (Table 1), we approximated the probability of fixation for all other mutations by zero." my bold

This is their simplified model for certain highly selective environment, all you have done is repeat this with more verbiage and symbols as your own paper. It is not some new understanding it is only your specious conclusion that this somehow precludes evolution.

If you actually understood microevolutionary adaptation you would recognize a blunder in the mathematics of the Weinreich paper. Fixation is not required for microevolutionary adaptation, the Kishony experiment demonstrates that. Are all you macroevolutionists this ignorant of microevolutionary adaptation?