Natural selection or Virus infection

Jet Black · Apr 28, 2005

Hawkins said:
Might be not too soon before it becomes "more truthful", perhaps.

que?

random_guy · Apr 28, 2005

Two people were discussing where Ford builds their cars. One person thought they were still being built in Detriot. However, the other person argued that they are now being built in Mexico. Hawkins overheards the conversation and states, "Ah hah! This is proof that there are no cars!"

I thought this was relevant.

Jet Black · Apr 28, 2005

Hawkins said:
It sounds like natural selection is not yet confirmed to be how it occurred.

natural selection isn't the blunt all encompassing tool you seem to make it out to be. There are a number of highly complex facets to evolution, especially when analysing how certain traits can and do become embedded in populations. for example one needs closer analysis to understand how things such as Eusociality in ants or Altruism in Vampire Bats can evolve and remain within the population, even though the selective advantage for the altruistic individual is not immediately apparent. Other issues such as sexual selection also add further subtleties to the evolution of organisms, resulting in traits that may appear detrimental to the organism as a whole, but are evolutionarily beneficial because they increase the reproductive success of the individual with those traits.

Hawkins · Apr 28, 2005

random_guy said:
Two people were discussing where Ford builds their cars. One person thought they were still being built in Detriot. However, the other person argued that they are now being built in Mexico. Hawkins overheards the conversation and states, "Ah hah! This is proof that there are no cars!"

I thought this was relevant.

While Hawkins was argueing the cars were being built in Detriot, someone knew nothing about the discussion but jumped in and yelled that "Hawkins say that there are no cars!".

I thought this was much more relevant.

Jet Black · Apr 28, 2005

Hawkins said:
You mean by chance a fish was turned to a frog and the frog survived? What's point of nature selection? It's already a frog. Gradual change is not a necessity then.

you appear to have a number of misconceptions as to the evolution of the theropods, and even as to how evolution itself works. Hopefully you know that the offspring of an organism vary from the parent as a result of sexual mixing of alleles and also mutations. So given the population in which there is variation, their breeding success will be a function of their phenotype. Those which breed more for whatever reason see their genes represented more in the next generation, and so their genes are more likely to survive and be passed on again and again. So between the fish and the frog were a sequence of organisms that as a function of their phenotype survived and bred more than their comrades, slowly building up on the accumulated beneficial mutations. your example above seems far more like saltation, where a fish laid an egg and a frog popped out, this is a strawman of evolution.

Jet Black · Apr 28, 2005

Hawkins said:
All the fossils show that most (if not all) the species are leaping instead of gradual change.

not really. the fossil record in essence shows snapshots. It would be like looking at a series of photographs of a race taken several seconds apart. There are a number of series of fossils linking various higher orders.

Jet Black · Apr 28, 2005

Hawkins said:
Finally, the retrovirus theory almost makes your natural selection theory obsolete.

retroviral insertions do no such thing.

Jet Black · Apr 28, 2005

Hawkins said:
From scientists:

August 2nd, 2002
University Of Georgia

............

nice article. All it shows is that reroviral insertions may have been important in the development of humans as a result of the additional genetic material and so on that they introduced into the nuclear DNA. It certainly does not discount natural selection, which would still determine whether the placement of a retrovirus was important or not, and nor does it discount "standard" mutations as being important. It simply adds another facet to the evolution of humans from earlier primate ancestors.

Hawkins · Apr 28, 2005

I dont know what happened to this board, but it's often to see people poping up not focusing on the discussion but to make an assumption on one's knowledge or education or even spelling errors or whatever irrelevent.

Aparently you miss out the point, it's about full functional offsprings.

Jet Black · Apr 28, 2005

Hawkins said:
I dont know what happened to this board, but it's often to see people poping up not focusing on the discussion but to make an assumption on one's knowledge or education or even spelling errors or whatever irrelevent.

I am afraid your understanding of evolution is highly relevant. Spelling I don't care about, there is no point worrying about such trivial issues. you might not be English, or you might be dyslexic or be a sloppy typist (like I am) there is no need to victimise you just because all your words are not correct or found in the OED.

Aparently you miss out the point, it's about full functional offsprings.

I am not missing the point at all. you are implicitly making the claim that there are no fully functional intermediate forms between fish and land living tetrapods - i.e. the only way to get from a fish to a frog and have all forms functional would be to take a saltationary leap, and this is quite blatantly false. Your distraction regarding ERVs was a misunderstanding on your part about what the effect of ERVs are.

random_guy · Apr 28, 2005

Hawkins said:
While Hawkins was argueing the cars were being built in Detriot, someone knew nothing about the discussion but jumped in and yelled that "Hawkins say that there are no cars!".

I thought this was much more relevant.

Ah, I see you failed to understand the joke. Let me break it down for you. You state that there's controversy about evolution because scientists have differing views on how life evolved. However, you then jump to the conclusion that means that evolution doesn't exists.

Now you understand why that joke was relevant?

Hawkins · Apr 28, 2005

random_guy said:
Ah, I see you failed to understand the joke. Let me break it down for you. You state that there's controversy about evolution because scientists have differing views on how life evolved. However, you then jump to the conclusion that means that evolution doesn't exists.

Now you understand why that joke was relevant?

That's rather your conclusion than mine. I doubt about the role of natural selection, I have said nothing about other parts of the evolution such as common ancestry, species trees and branches and so forth. So what you see how my version of the joke means?

Hawkins · Apr 28, 2005

Jet Black said:
I am afraid your understanding of evolution is highly relevant. Spelling I don't care about, there is no point worrying about such trivial issues. you might not be English, or you might be dyslexic or be a sloppy typist (like I am) there is no need to victimise you just because all your words are not correct or found in the OED.

I am not missing the point at all. you are implicitly making the claim that there are no fully functional intermediate forms between fish and land living tetrapods - i.e. the only way to get from a fish to a frog and have all forms functional would be to take a saltationary leap, and this is quite blatantly false. Your distraction regarding ERVs was a misunderstanding on your part about what the effect of ERVs are.

You weigh too much on the context, that's your problem. Along the whole thread I am talking about the possibility of leaping forward and gradual change. The 2 statements respectively are a leap forward process and a gradual change process, if you would like to take out the fish/frog thing.

random_guy · Apr 28, 2005

Hawkins said:
That's rather your conclusion than mine. I doubt about the role of natural selection, I have said nothing about other parts of the evolution such as common ancestry, species trees and branches and so forth. So now you see how my version of the joke means?

My bad. Let me get this correct. I hate putting words into other people's mouths, and I apologize. I'll try to clear up some misconceptions.

Haha...they are debating about how it occurred. It sounds like natural selection is not yet confirmed to be how it occurred.

When I said they debate on how it occurred, I meant that they were debating on things such as which is which's ancestor, what may have caused a shift in the gene frequency, etc. There is no debate over evolution. Evolution occurred. Similarly, there is no debate over natural selection. Natural selection happens.

Now, what I don't understand is this comment:

Of course, only those embracing natural selection are creditable scientists, then what the hell they are debating about. Yep, i shouldn't have brought it up when 95% of those legitimate creditable scientists are apparently debating a confirmed but debatable result.

Could you clarify by what you meant here? To me, it sounds like you're saying, since there's no concensus between these creditable scientists, then the scientists are not creditable or the theory is not creditable. That's why I made that joke.

Jet Black · Apr 28, 2005

Hawkins said:
You weigh too much on the context, that's your problem.

dodge as much as you like, I am addressing your misrepresentations and factual inaccuracies.

Along the whole thread I am talking about the possibility of leaping forward and gradual change.

perhaps, but you are making endless errors along the way.

The 2 statements respectively are a leap forward process and a gradual change process, if you would like to take out the fish/frog thing.

well I think the fish/frog thing is a rather good example of where you are going wrong in your musings. for example you recently said that

I doubt about the role of natural selection, I have said nothing about other parts of the evolution such as common ancestry, species trees and branches and so forth.

well that is all well and good, but on what basis? your example about retroviral insertions which you have posed as something that makes natural selection redundant was deeply flawed, since you did not correctly understand the purpose of the article on ERVs, or the fact that the preservation of those ERVs in the population would still be a function of the ERV on the reproductive success of the organism carrying it. At the verry most, the ERVs provide another source for the genetic variation of the organism, but their impact on the role of natural selection is absolutely zero.

then you said it is all about "fully functional offspring" and that is fine, all the intermediates we have found between fish and early tetrapods are indeed fully functional. so where is your problem?

Hawkins · Apr 28, 2005

That's exactly my doubt about natural selection. Yet I perceived someone else is so defensive and sound like everything inside the general term "evolution" is the truth and the whole truth, while they keep saying about having not enough evidence and there are still debates on "something". And any alternative thought could lead to discredits, and not a creditable scientist in the case that the alternative thought is from a scientist.

Hawkins · Apr 28, 2005

Jet Black said:
At the verry most, the ERVs provide another source for the genetic variation of the organism, but their impact on the role of natural selection is absolutely zero.

Dogde as much as you like. So how dramatic the variation will that be, that's my question.

"But there is increasing evidence that they may have been - and may still be - a driving force between evolution at the cellular and organismal levels."

" it is increasingly clear that organisms need the viral elements and that their apparent continual backdoor assaults on normal genes may, in truth, be more like a vast, sophisticated chess game on an enormously complex board"

So how sophisticated is that chess game in the complex board. You sound like you fully understand the sophisticated complex such that the "impact on the role of natural selection is absolutely zero".

jwu · Apr 28, 2005

Could you perhaps give a short summary of what you think "natural selection" means?

Jet Black · Apr 28, 2005

Hawkins said:
So how sophisticated is that chess game in the complex board. You sound like you fully understand the sophisticated complex such that the "impact on the role of natural selection is absolutely zero".

no, you see you are not understanding. These things do not affect natural selection. natural selection acts on these things. Natural Selection is simply the process in which genotypes are either made more or less prevalent in the population as a function of their effect on the phenotype. even if ERVs were responsible for a slatationary change in an organism, it would still be natural selection that determined whether the genes of that organism passed to the next generation or not.

your assertation that ERVs somehow do away with natural selection is nonsense. at the worst, as I have already pointed out, all they could do away with is standard non-viral genetic mutations.

why aren't you addressing any of the errors in your posts that I am outlining?

Hawkins · Apr 28, 2005

"The idea of a relatively sudden genetic change that alters evolution isn't new. Scientists, such as the late Stephen Jay Gould, proposed a mechanism called "punctuated equilibrium" more than two decades ago. This idea, not yet completely accepted by scientists, proposes that evolution has depended more often on sudden and unexpected changes in genomes rather than a simple Darwinian paradigm of gradual evolutionary change due to extremely long-term natural selection."

"The research of Jordan and McDonald is intriguing because it suggests that rather than simply playing a role in human evolution, retroviral elements may actually be implicated in the leap from chimpanzees to humans."

Which part I have misread? Now the "leap" suddenly becomes "acceptable"? Maybe I should rephrase what I meant by "natural selection" as semantically meaningful as "a simple Darwinian paradigm of gradual evolutionary change due to extremely long-term natural selection".

It seems to me that you not only weigh too much on contexts, you almost make it like a semantic game. Errors? I consider that you misread and miscomprend more often than I do, purposely or not.

Natural selection or Virus infection

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