Creationists: Explain your understanding of microevolution and macroevolution

[Frank Robert]

Everybody knows that biology majors take simplified math and physics courses compared to the course requirements for physics, engineering, and chemistry majors, the hard mathematical sciences. And your lack of understanding of the thermodynamics and mathematics of biological evolution shows as a consequence of this.


I'm not going to repeat the mathematical definition of macroevolution a third time for you. If you haven't gotten it by now, you never will. Were you this inattentive in your dumbbell math courses and your survey of physics course? What were you waiting for in your training in biology, a course in fossil tea-leaf reading?

They take what they need to fulfill the requirements. If they need further studies for their research they obtain it.

Now I recall a comment you made at Peachful Science that you didn't want to take the time to learn a new sequencing procedures and 2 or 3 graduate students jumped in and offered to help you with the math.

If you believe PhD biologists do not know the math they need for their research, whether they learned it in grad school or not, then you are really displaying how dumb you are.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

Perhaps I am wrong but I look at things differently than you. For example, if I were a theist I would believe in theistic evolution for the very simple reason that we live in a natural world that follows natural laws so why wouldn't the Christian God create natural laws for the universe and let those laws do the grunt work of letting things like flagellum evolve naturally. It appears that the people who disagree with a natural world are the ones who believe in a literal reading of genesis.

If you believe in ID for whatever reason, I have no objection.

Frank, your problem is that you have a very poor understanding of natural laws. Biological evolution is subject to those very laws of physics, in particular, the laws of thermodynamics. It takes a lot of study and practice to understand how to apply mathematical principles to these natural laws. There is no shortcut, but in the training of biologists, they try to take shortcuts. The Genesis story makes a lot of sense once you understand the thermodynamics and mathematics of biological evolution. However, I don't advocate teaching Genesis as a scientific explanation for creation. I also don't advocate teaching that reptiles evolve into birds and fish evolve into mammals as science. I advocate teaching naive school children the correct physics and mathematics of biological evolution, not some mathematically irrational belief system.

 

[Frank Robert]

Maybe you think that drug-resistant infections and failed cancer treatments are hilarious? Because that's what you get from people that take classes in dumbbell math and a survey course in physics and then think they can understand the thermodynamics and mathematics of biological evolution and the evolution of drug resistance.

How many times do I need to tell you it is not what I think that you need to worry yourself with what I know or not. You need to figure out how to convince other scientists that your claims have value.

 

[Frank Robert]

Frank, your problem is that you have a very poor understanding of natural laws. Biological evolution is subject to those very laws of physics, in particular, the laws of thermodynamics. It takes a lot of study and practice to understand how to apply mathematical principles to these natural laws. There is no shortcut, but in the training of biologists, they try to take shortcuts. The Genesis story makes a lot of sense once you understand the thermodynamics and mathematics of biological evolution. However, I don't advocate teaching Genesis as a scientific explanation for creation. I also don't advocate teaching that reptiles evolve into birds and fish evolve into mammals as science. I advocate teaching naive school children the correct physics and mathematics of biological evolution, not some mathematically irrational belief system.

I have no intention or need to dispute anyone else's beliefs. What I was pointing out that is if I were a Christian I would be a theistic evolutionist which is also a Catholic viewpoint.

I am glad you don't advocate teaching religion. The Dover trial laid a foundation for determining what is religion and what is science so is no need to retry it.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

They take what they need to fulfill the requirements. If they need further studies for their research they obtain it.

Well, they haven't met the requirement to give the correct mathematical explanation of the Kishony and Lenski adaptive evolutionary experiments. If you think you understand biological evolution, you must be able to give the correct mathematical explanation of these experiments.

Now I recall a comment you made at Peachful Science that you didn't want to take the time to learn a new sequencing procedures and 2 or 3 graduate students jumped in and offered to help you with the math.

You need to check your recollection because that has never happened. In your vivid imagination, do you think that a lecture on fossil tea-leaf reading is going to explain biological evolution? What makes you think that you can explain what happens on the molecular level (DNA evolution) using gross anatomy. That's like trying to explain quantum mechanics using classical physics.

If you believe PhD biologists do not know the math they need for their research, whether they learned it in grad school or not, then you are really displaying how dumb you are.

So where are the mathematical explanations of the Kishony and Lenski biological adaptive evolutionary experiments written by your PhD biologists? Give us a link to a paper that explains the mathematical behavior of either of these experiments. You won't because they don't understand how DNA adaptive microevolution works. The best you can do is say that my explanations are wrong when the math that I've presented predicts and simulates the behavior of both of these experiments accurately including the prediction that each adaptive evolutionary step in the Kishony experiment would take about a billion replications.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

How many times do I need to tell you it is not what I think that you need to worry yourself with what I know or not. You need to figure out how to convince other scientists that your claims have value.

The peer reviewers of my papers understand the value of this work and I'm starting to get citations. You have to understand that my explanations go against decades of misinformation and poor instruction in the principles of biological evolution by biology instructors. Until the biology departments require adequate training in mathematics and the laws of physics (in particular thermodynamics) necessary to understand biological evolution, this is going to be a long difficult slog.

 

[Ophiolite]

Are you one of those macroevolutionists that thinks that biological processes are not subject to the laws of physics? Perhaps taking a couple of courses in dumbbell math and a survey course in physics is why you are so ill-prepared to understand the thermodynamics and mathematics of biological evolution. You have about the same amount of training as an auto mechanic has on this subject.

But go ahead and enlighten us on the relevant biological disciplines that explain the physics and mathematics of biological evolution. Perhaps it is fossil tea-leaf reading? You biologists are so poorly trained in the hard mathematical sciences that you can't even explain the thermodynamics and mathematics of the simplest evolutionary experiments. Of course, I'm talking about the Kishony and Lenski DNA adaptive evolutionary experiments.

Tell me, how did you get on with your father?

 

[Alan Kleinman]

I have no intention or need to dispute anyone else's beliefs. What I was pointing out that is if I were a Christian I would be a theistic evolutionist which is also a Catholic viewpoint.

I am glad you don't advocate teaching religion. The Dover trial laid a foundation for determining what is religion and what is science so is no need to retry it.

This discussion has nothing to do with religion. It has everything to do with the correct scientific explanation of DNA microevolution because that exists, macroevolution doesn't exist. That's why 3 drug therapy works for the treatment of HIV.

 

[Frank Robert]

Well, they haven't met the requirement to give the correct mathematical explanation of the Kishony and Lenski adaptive evolutionary experiments. If you think you understand biological evolution, you must be able to give the correct mathematical explanation of these experiments.

You give yourself a lot of credit.

You need to check your recollection because that has never happened.

It has been a while so I will check.

In your vivid imagination, do think that a lecture on fossil tea-leaf reading is going to explain biological evolution? What makes you think that you can explain what happens on the molecular level (DNA evolution) using gross anatomy. That's like trying to explain quantum mechanics using classical physics.

It is not what I can or can not explain that you need to worry about. Misdirection will not get you where you want to go.

So where are the mathematical explanations of the Kishony and Lenski biological adaptive evolutionary experiments written by your PhD biologists? Give us a link to a paper that explains the mathematical behavior of either of these experiments.

You have made similar claims in numerous forums and you still have. Did you ever wonder why no one pays attention to you?

You won't because they don't understand how DNA adaptive microevolution works.

I think the only claim that I have made is that I can not find any experts that agree with your work or if they do they don't find any added value in it. So again, it is not what I understand or don't know that you need to worry about.

The best you can do is say that my explanations are wrong when the math that I've presented predicts and simulates the behavior of both of these experiments accurately including the prediction that each adaptive evolutionary step in the Kishony experiment would take about a billion replications.

I have never questioned the accuracy of your math.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

Tell me, how did you get on with your father?

I loved my father but he died at a young age from cancer when I was in elementary school. It was at that time that my 5th-grade science teacher taught us about what Edward Tatum said in his Nobel Laureate lecture and combination therapy and the treatment of cancer and I hoped this might be something that would help my father. My science teacher, in fact, started doing the mathematics on the chalkboard that I would later complete and publish some 50 years later. You see, back then kids played lots of cards and dice games and they taught us probability theory in elementary school. I even remember questioning my teacher about the validity of the ToE because I understood the consequences of the multiplication rule even at that young age.

 

[Frank Robert]

Tell me, how did you get on with your father?

Excellent question.

 

[Frank Robert]

The peer reviewers of my papers understand the value of this work and I'm starting to get citations. You have to understand that my explanations go against decades of misinformation and poor instruction in the principles of biological evolution by biology instructors. Until the biology departments require adequate training in mathematics and the laws of physics (in particular thermodynamics) necessary to understand biological evolution, this is going to be a long difficult slog.

That you met the requirements to get past peer review is not an indication that other scientists agree or find additional merit or value in your work. If they did, don't you think that they would be citing it?

 

[Ophiolite]

I loved my father but he died at a young age from cancer when I was in elementary school. It was at that time that my 5th-grade science teacher taught us about what Edward Tatum said in his Nobel Laureate lecture and combination therapy and the treatment of cancer and I hoped this might be something that would help my father. My science teacher, in fact, started doing the mathematics on the chalkboard that I would later complete and publish some 50 years later. You see, back then kids played lots of cards and dice games and they taught us probability theory in elementary school. I even remember questioning my teacher about the validity of the ToE because I understood the consequences of the multiplication rule even at that young age.

My condolences on the early loss of your father. That must have been difficult.

However, you've rather missed the sub-text of the question. The sub-text was the only important part of it. I would not have been so insensitive as to actually ask such a personal question and I offer you an apology for giving you the opportunity to think I was doing so.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

Perhaps I have been asking the wrong question. Perhaps this is more to the point. Why does no one find any added value to K & L form your mathematical explanations?

I can only speculate about why someone would object to these mathematical explanations. Perhaps they realize the consequences of adaptive evolution taking a billion replications for each adaptive mutation throws a big wrench into the gears of the ToE. And it is not "no one", there are people who agree with this math, but biologists have made this such a toxic environment to discuss this subject, why get into an argument?

It has been a while so I will check.

You do that.

It is not what I can or can not explain that you need to worry about. Misdirection will not get you where you want to go.

I'm not giving you misdirection. I'm giving a mathematically precise direction in which to go.

You have made similar claims in numerous forums and you still have. Did you ever wonder why no one pays attention to you?

You are making an incorrect assumption here. The reason why I link my references with ResearchGate is that they track the number of reads of my papers. That number is now in the thousands. That may not be viral but these reads are being made by individuals who have an interest in this subject, many of the readers are faculty and researchers from major universities. This doesn't include reads by individuals that access the papers directly from the journals. Researchgate also tracks citations to these papers and besides my own, there are others occurring. One thing you really don't get is that I am well trained in doing the mathematics of thermodynamics. That's what I was paid to do when I worked on the Space Shuttle and that's what I was paid to teach at the university level (both undergraduate and graduate). It is not hard to see when you have the math correct when you are doing these kinds of scientific problems when you have a little experience. And I know this math is correct.

I think the only claim that I have made is that I can not find any experts that agree with your work or if they do they don't find any added value in it. So again, it is not what I understand or don't know that you need to worry about.

Start with the peer-reviewers. I know that people that believe in macroevolution are going to have a hard time swallowing these mathematical facts of life. You have to understand that many biologists have argued that the multiplication rule does not apply to biological evolution. These is both a physical and mathematical blunder.

I have never questioned the accuracy of your math.

You shouldn't, it was peer-reviewed by experts in the field. The question then becomes does the math fit the data. It sure predicted accurately the results of the Kishony experiment before the experiment was performed.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

My condolences on the early loss of your father. That must have been difficult.

However, you've rather missed the sub-text of the question. The sub-text was the only important part of it. I would not have been so insensitive as to actually ask such a personal question and I offer you an apology for giving you the opportunity to think I was doing so.

No need to apologize. His death was an important part of my quest to understand biological evolution. It was part of my motivation to study medicine so that I could help others. And it was the first and only time that I was given an introduction to the correct mathematics of biological adaptive evolution. I never saw anything like this in any of the many biology and genetic courses I have taken over the years. A 5th-grade elementary school science course and you get the correct introduction to the mathematics of adaptive biological evolution and nowhere else. I even remember the name of the teacher more than a half-century later. I doubt they teach this now in elementary school.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

Perhaps I am wrong but I look at things differently than you. For example, if I were a theist I would believe in theistic evolution for the very simple reason that we live in a natural world that follows natural laws so why wouldn't the Christian God create natural laws for the universe and let those laws do the grunt work of letting things like flagellum evolve naturally. It appears that the people who disagree with a natural world are the ones who believe in a literal reading of genesis.

If you believe in ID for whatever reason, I have no objection.

I think we probably agree on a lot here then (but what fun is that )

I suppose it would come down to what constitutes 'natural laws'

The laws of quantum mechanics may still be 'natural laws' but they are far more specific to pre-determining the precise development of physical reality than was described by classical physics- which held that a handful of simple 'immutable' and directly observable laws + lots of time and space for random interaction- was all that was required to account for all the wonders of physical reality.

From my point of view Darwinism is a leftover from that reductionist Victorian age model. It was born directly and logically out of it, and remains essentially unchanged

I'm not a creationist but credit where it is due; the Bible describes a very specific creation event- rejected as 'religious pseudoscience' by naturalist cosmologists until fairly recently- it goes on to describe an initial dark fluid state- followed by a sudden appearance of light- life beginning in the ocean & culminating with man- even one great ocean and one landmass - all lucky guesses perhaps... but accurate none the less.

 

[Frank Robert]

Frank Robert said: ↑
It has been a while so I will check.

You do that.

I did. It was a database program for running simulation. You objected to learning a computer language and Swamidass suggested asking grad students davecarlson & evograd to assist you.

The following comments were copied verbatim from Peaceful Science
Swamidass
You don’t have to write a simulation. There are many programs out there. Take a look at SLIM 3, if you like, or ask @davecarlson and @evograd for help.

Your challenge is to identify a well specified question, answerable with a simulation, where you and the experts here disagree on the results. Several outcomes are possible from this experiment.

You will not be able to find such a case, which would demonstrate you cannot substabtiate any of your disagreements are salient.

Your prediction on the experimental results could be correct, and ours would be wrong. We would learn something.

Your prediction is wrong, and ours is right. You would learn something.

You will ignore this test of your work, missing your best opportunity in a long time to be heard.

So, let’s see how this plays our. Please produce the parameters of a well specified experiment, and a prediction we can verify with simulation. Check to be sure we are making a different prediction than you. The. Let’s put it to the test.

Kleinman
I’m not interested in learning another computer language at this time. I already have all the empirical evidence substantiating my algebraic model. If you have someone experienced with SLIM 3 (when I googled the term, one of the first things that came up was a weight loss supplement), let them design and write the algorithm and find empirical examples which substantiate it and that contradict my model. All you have demonstrated is that you can’t find an empirical example which contradicts my model so now you want me to write a computer simulation, based on what principle?

Swamidass
If you can come up with a test case that satisfies the criteria I laid out, maybe we will run it for you.

Unwillingness to even try will provide us all with abundant evidence that you don’t have a point. Much bluster. Not much else.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

Swamidass
You don’t have to write a simulation. There are many programs out there. Take a look at SLIM 3, if you like, or ask @davecarlson and @evograd for help.

Your challenge is to identify a well specified question, answerable with a simulation, where you and the experts here disagree on the results. Several outcomes are possible from this experiment.

Slim 3 is nothing other than a programming environment.
Slim 3 Documentation
I had already written out the algebraic probability equations that describe biological adaptive evolution. Use whatever computer program you want to use to evaluate these equations. All it took was plugging numbers into a spreadsheet. And those results are in accurate agreement with the Kishony and Lenski experiments. Swamidass has no idea how to formulate the mathematical model of biological adaptive evolution. If I wanted some kind of online interactive model of my model, SLIM 3 might have some application. But look at what SLIM 3's intended use is in the link provided.

I then go on to say to Swamidass:

Kleinman
I’m not interested in learning another computer language at this time. I already have all the empirical evidence substantiating my algebraic model. If you have someone experienced with SLIM 3 (when I googled the term, one of the first things that came up was a weight loss supplement), let them design and write the algorithm and find empirical examples which substantiate it and that contradict my model. All you have demonstrated is that you can’t find an empirical example which contradicts my model so now you want me to write a computer simulation, based on what principle?

I didn't need another computer program to evaluate the math that I'd presented and I said so. If he had people experienced with that computer language, let them do the math for the Kishony and Lenski experiment. There are two ways that I know of to do the mathematics of DNA evolution. You can model the process as nested binomial probability problems or you do the mathematics as a Markov process. I've done the math both ways and you get analogous results.

Swamidass
If you can come up with a test case that satisfies the criteria I laid out, maybe we will run it for you.

Unwillingness to even try will provide us all with abundant evidence that you don’t have a point. Much bluster. Not much else.

What more do you want in a test case with two real, well-measured, and repeatable evolutionary experiments? I don't have a microbiology lab where I design and perform these kinds of experiments. Either Swamidass is unable to understand how the Kishony and Lenski experiments are performed or he is unwilling to consider these experiments. You don't need SLIM 3 to construct the correct model of biological evolution. Here's what SLIM 3 does:

What’s the point?
Slim is an ideal tool to create APIs that consume, repurpose, or publish data. Slim is also a great tool for rapid prototyping. Heck, you can even build full-featured web applications with user interfaces. More importantly, Slim is super fast and has very little code.

If Swamidass wants to figure out how to formulate the mathematical behavior of these experiments so that he could plug that into SLIM 3, perhaps I should have tried to explain that to him but my papers explicitly explain how this is done.

I actually had another scientist contact me privately and he evaluated the model using MATLAB, a simulation program he has experience with. We got the same results within a small fraction of a percent as with my spreadsheet computation.

It's all straightforward, you start with a founder bacterium, how many replications does it take to give a reasonable probability of an adaptive mutation occurring on one of the descendants of that founder.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

From my point of view Darwinism is a leftover from that reductionist Victorian age model. It was born directly and logically out of it, and remains essentially unchanged

Do you actually understand what Darwin wrote on this subject? “On the Origin of Species”. From this text, we get a particular quote that describes these processes:

For it should be remembered that the competition will generally be most severe between those forms which are most nearly related to each other in habits, constitution and structure. Hence all the intermediate forms between the earlier and later states, that is between the less and more improved state of a species, as well as the original parent-species itself, will generally tend to become extinct. So it probably will be with many whole collateral lines of descent, which will be conquered by later and improved lines of descent. If, however, the modified offspring of a species get into some distinct country, or become quickly adapted to some quite new station, in which child and parent do not come into competition, both may continue to exist.

Darwin recognized that two processes can occur during evolution, competition (what Darwin also calls the struggle for existence) and adaptation. These principles were applicable then and they are applicable now.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

Do you actually understand what Darwin wrote on this subject? “On the Origin of Species”. From this text, we get a particular quote that describes these processes:

Darwin recognized that two processes can occur during evolution, competition (what Darwin also calls the struggle for existence) and adaptation. These principles were applicable then and they are applicable now.

I have a copy on my desk- 'The Origin of Species- by Means of Natural selection'

Then as now, you can select exactly nothing into existence - it is a destructive/ filtering process that leaves you with a smaller set of options than you began with. i.e. opposite of his tree of life.

After the discovery of quantum mechanics- apples still fall from trees
and genetic apples will always fall not far from theirs

The tempting mistake in both cases, is extrapolating a superficial observation into a comprehensive explanation.