Creationists: Explain your understanding of microevolution and macroevolution

[Alan Kleinman]

Wasn't it the mechanical engineers who said the Titantic was unsinkable .. something about a mathematical impossibility?

Nope, it was the mechanical engineer that explained to the captain that it was hopeless for the ship after the ship hit the iceberg. Once the watertight compartments started flooding over from the top and started filling the adjacent compartments, the die had been cast.
https://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/captain-smith-believed-titanic-be-unsinkable.html

"Anyhow," declared Captain Smith, "the Olympic is unsinkable, and the Titanic will be the same when she is put in commission."Why," he continued, "either of these vessels could be cut in halves and each half would remain afloat indefinitely. The non-sinkable vessel has been reached in these two wonderful craft."

"I venture to add," concluded Captain Smith, "that even if the engines and boilers of these vessels were to fall through their bottoms the vessels would remain afloat."

You are not very good at your claims and research. It's your captains of the field of biology that is sinking your ship and you are dragging a lot of innocent people down.

 

[SelfSim]

Nope, it was the mechanical engineer that explained to the captain that it was hopeless for the ship after the ship hit the iceberg. Once the watertight compartments started flooding over from the top and started filling the adjacent compartments, the die had been cast.
https://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/captain-smith-believed-titanic-be-unsinkable.html

Ha! Not much of a sense of humour, there!

You are not very good at your claims and research.

I'm not really trying. I think your goose has been well and truly over-cooked in this thread.

 

[Yttrium]

Oh no, Ponderous, I get Yttriums point completely. Reptiles evolve into birds and fish evolve into mammals simply by an accumulation of neutral mutations, the divergence of genomes by sets of random mutations without any change in fitness.

Well, that's very much not what I wrote. I said that a change in fitness is not required in nature. Changes in fitness can and do occur, but there's no expectation that they will occur.

Let's go over it again. Mutations happen. You get a variety of alleles in a population. A selection event comes along. The frequency of alleles changes. Evolution happens. That's not a random walk of mutations.

You keep looking at macroevolution as a sequence of advantageous mutations for one continuous selection. That's not the way it works. A mutation is only advantageous for a specific selection event. When we're talking about macroevolution, we're talking about a wide array of selection events happening to a population over a great many generations. The mutations aren't dependent on each other, for the most part. Because they're not dependent on each other, because there is no desired outcome, probability calculations don't apply.

I don't need a mathematical model for macroevolution, because macroevolution is just a lotta evolution. There is no separate process of macroevolution. The process is evolution. Changes are additive, and eventually the population can become much different than its distant ancestors. Macroevolution, for all intents and purposes, is the amount of evolution that we can't study in laboratory conditions, because there just isn't enough time.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

Ha! Not much of a sense of humour, there!

Sorry, I forgot that making false accusations is part of the humor repertoire of a macroevolutionist. So when are you going to trot out your bumblebee can't fly joke?

I'm not really trying.

It shows.

I think your goose has been well and truly over-cooked in this thread.

Nothing compared to the goose eggs you have been laying when it comes to giving an experimental example of macroevolution or a mathematical model of that process.

I wonder if you are going to have as much success in your new career as a comedian as you have had as a biologist?

 

[Frank Robert]

You better not make that claim, you already have more than enough dumb claims to deal with.

You are the one making claims that you are unable to backup. My training is in making observations like your denial of marcoevolution w/o evidence.

I do read what you write, I keep waiting for you to explain macroevolution in your own words instead of posting some link. And waiting for an experimental example of that explanation is hopeless.

Then you should be able to acknowledge that I produced papers for macroevolution simulation by real scientists which is what you asked for.

I have never claimed extensive knowledge of evolution. My only claim is that I affirm the established science and evidence for macroevolution.

I am waiting for you to substantiate your absurd claim that macroevolution doesn't exist. The only way you can to that is to refute the
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution

Wake me when you do.

 

[Frank Robert]

You are the one making claims you can not substantiat. My training is in making observations like your denial of marcoevolution w/o evidence

I don't claim extensive knowledge of evolution like some people we know. I merely affirm the established science and evidence for macroevolution.

I am waiting for you to substantiate your claim that macroevolution doesn't exist. The only way you can to that is to refute the
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution

Wake me when you do.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

Well, that's very much not what I wrote. I said that a change in fitness is not required in nature. Changes in fitness can and do occur, but there's no expectation that they will occur.

Oh, so improvement in fitness to require specific mutations? What's the probability that these specific mutations occur? Oh wait, you said something about mutations not being random so that the multiplication rule doesn't apply, you just add up these mutations?

Let's go over it again. Mutations happen. You get a variety of alleles in a population. A selection event comes along. The frequency of alleles changes. Evolution happens. That's not a random walk of mutations.

Clearly, you haven't studied this area of mathematics. Why don't you start here:
Models of DNA evolution - Wikipedia
and
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~avrim/598/chap5only.pdf

The terms “random walk” and “Markov chain” are used interchangeably.

You keep looking at macroevolution as a sequence of advantageous mutations for one continuous selection. That's not the way it works. A mutation is only advantageous for a specific selection event. When we're talking about macroevolution, we're talking about a wide array of selection events happening to a population over a great many generations. The mutations aren't dependent on each other, for the most part. Because they're not dependent on each other, because there is no desired outcome, probability calculations don't apply.

I see, hit a population with thermal stress, then starvation stress, then dehydration stress, then predation, then disease, the population will evolve more quickly. Oh, wait, perhaps you are talking about the usage of antibiotics, first, you use the penicillin class, and then when that fails, you use the erythromycin class, and then when that fails, you use the quinolone class,... What a bright mathematician you are.

I don't need a mathematical model for macroevolution, because macroevolution is just a lotta evolution. There is no separate process of macroevolution. The process is evolution. Changes are additive, and eventually the population can become much different than its distant ancestors. Macroevolution, for all intents and purposes, is the amount of evolution that we can't study in laboratory conditions, because there just isn't enough time.

It's a whole lotta something you got there. Just a little question for you Yttrium, are you the dumbbell math instructor for biologists?

 

[Alan Kleinman]

I don't claim extensive knowledge of evolution like some people we know. I merely affirm the established science and evidence for macroevolution.

I am waiting for you to substantiate your claim that macroevolution doesn't exist. The only way you can to that is to refute the
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution

Wake me when you do.

Next Frank is going to make me prove that unicorns don't exist. Yttrium says there's a whole lotta evolution going on out there. No Frank, I'm not going to wake you, just go get some shuteye.

 

[Frank Robert]

Next Frank is going to make me prove that unicorns don't exist. Yttrium says there's a whole lotta evolution going on out there. No Frank, I'm not going to wake you, just go get some shuteye.

I didn't ask you to prove macroevolution, I asked you to substantiate your claims by refuting the scientific evidence for macroevolution. The evidence does not magically go away because Alan denies macroevolution.
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution

 

[pitabread]

The evidence does not magically go away because Alan denies macroevolution.

I have the feeling that in AK's world, the entire field of biology doesn't exist past the Lenski and Kishony experiments.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

I didn't ask you to prove macroevolution, I asked you to substantiate your claims by refuting the scientific evidence for macroevolution. The evidence does not magically go away because Alan denies macroevolution.
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution

You post a link and I ask you to tell us what you think is the best observational evidence of macroevolution and you post another link. Take what you think is the best one of your 29+ evidences and write it in your next post.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

I have the feeling that in AK's world, the entire field of biology doesn't exist past the Lenski and Kishony experiments.

You are wrong about that Pita, there are drug-resistant infections to deal with. Biologists certainly haven't explained that little bit of biology.

 

[pitabread]

You are wrong about that Pita, there are drug-resistant infections to deal with. Biologists certainly haven't explained that little bit of biology.

As I said, you make it sound like the field of biology doesn't exist past Lenski and Kishony.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

As I said, you make it sound like the field of biology doesn't exist past Lenski and Kishony.

When it comes to explaining the biological evolution of these experiments, the field of biology hasn't even gotten there. Instead, the field of biology has transformed itself into a storytelling club about macroevolution, multimillion-year-old soft tissue in fossils, junk DNA, abiogenesis,... It's like biologists would rather be science fiction writers rather than scientists. And the derision that you use in the way you treat people that don't agree with you is pretty disgusting. And the whining you do when someone gives you a dose of your own medicine is pathetic.

 

[Hans Blaster]

Dinosaur Shocker | Science | Smithsonian Magazine

Why are you arguing from your own incredulity? Nowhere in the article do they say they are not rbcs.

The problem is, it is not rare to find soft tissue on dinosaur fossils.

Yes, macroevolutionists don't understand decay, and they don't understand microevolution. There's some unknown physical phenomenon that preserves proteins and cells for millions of years and there is some unknown mechanism of macroevolution. And let's not forget, there is some unknown chemical reaction that caused a replicator to form in the primordial soup. That's the kind of science you need to teach naive school children to deal with the problems of drug-resistant infections and failed cancer treatments. Don't you have a march through Georgia to go to?

You have two choices:

* protein decays sometimes occur at a slower rate than you expected, or
* the rocks aren't nearly 65 M years old.

Which is it?

(Are you afraid your "scientific reputation" will be trashed if you admit that you think the Earth is 10,000 years old? Don't worry about it.)

 

[Yttrium]

Clearly, you haven't studied this area of mathematics. Why don't you start here:
Models of DNA evolution - Wikipedia
and
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~avrim/598/chap5only.pdf

And once again you pick out a case of a sequence of mutations in a desired result, which is inapplicable to macroevolution. I spot a broken record. I don't think I can make my argument any clearer than my previous post.

Well, I have no interest in trying to convince you of anything. My goal here was to understand where you were coming from with your math argument, and I'm disappointed to see that it's just a case of misapplying models. You've got more than enough simultaneous arguments going on. Hope you stick around, your arguments are certainly more interesting than some of the Biblical preaching we get here.

 

[Ponderous Curmudgeon]

Ponderous, a specific set of mutations is required if you want an increase in fitness. Now Yttrium is claiming that the evolution of reptiles to birds and fish to mammals simply occurs by a divergence in genome sequence by neutral mutations. That divergence process is a Markov random walk. It's the same divergence process that occurs when natural selection is acting on that population. How large of a colony do you think it would take for the drug-resistant variants to appear in the Kishony experiment if he didn't use an antibiotic on his plate? The math I've presented will give you that calculation and his plate is not anywhere near large enough to get those variants. Even to get a variant with the first 3 mutations would take a population size of about 1e27. Genomes diverge very slowly, most of the genome will be identical to the founding parent of the lineage, even when the population size is 1e27.

Don't you even remember the macroevolutionist argument about the similarity of human and chimp genomes? 98% similar. And that's after how many generations of divergence of genomes? You macroevolutionists need to think through your arguments.

Yes, we have been over this numerous times, you have an equation that approximates a very specific situation and you then claim that this invalidates all the observed evidence for the outcome of the more general situation. Sorry, but if you wish to make anyone consider your equation, then you need to provide the evidence that is relevant to the world.
Finally, I will reiterate, that even if your approach were correct, it is only relevant to the a priori calculation of where we are now, which is again irrelevant to evolution in that evolution has no target, and so the a priori odds of arriving at any given target are irrelevant.

Sorry.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

You have two choices:

* protein decays sometimes occur at a slower rate than you expected, or
* the rocks aren't nearly 65 M years old.

Which is it?

(Are you afraid your "scientific reputation" will be trashed if you admit that you think the Earth is 10,000 years old? Don't worry about it.)

What paleontologists need to do is turn their fossils over and read the expiration date. If it says fresh if packaged after 75,000,000BC, then they know it's ok to find soft tissue on their fossils.

I've never done any scientific studies on the age of the earth.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

And once again you pick out a case of a sequence of mutations in a desired result, which is inapplicable to macroevolution. I spot a broken record. I don't think I can make my argument any clearer than my previous post.

Well, I have no interest in trying to convince you of anything. My goal here was to understand where you were coming from with your math argument, and I'm disappointed to see that it's just a case of misapplying models. You've got more than enough simultaneous arguments going on. Hope you stick around, your arguments are certainly more interesting than some of the Biblical preaching we get here.

You should submit your lotta evolution going on out there model for publication.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

Yes, we have been over this numerous times, you have an equation that approximates a very specific situation and you then claim that this invalidates all the observed evidence for the outcome of the more general situation. Sorry, but if you wish to make anyone consider your equation, then you need to provide the evidence that is relevant to the world.
Finally, I will reiterate, that even if your approach were correct, it is only relevant to the a priori calculation of where we are now, which is again irrelevant to evolution in that evolution has no target, and so the a priori odds of arriving at any given target are irrelevant.

Sorry.

So you think that DNA evolution works differently in humans than bacteria. Why don't you explain those differences? I'll even help you get started, diploid and recombination. So what changes?

And this math predicted the behavior of the Kishony experiment before it was performed.