Poll: Does the Theory of Evolution have practical applications?

[BobRyan]

[Staff Edit]

And don't you know that drug-resistant infections, herbicide-resistant weeds, pesticide-resistant insects, and failed cancer treatments occur? That's because the ToE explains nothing about evolution, if the theory had any practical application, it would explain why this happens. The ToE is just a story about reptiles evolving into birds and fish evolving into mammals without explaining anything about how random mutation and natural selection works. The ToE is mythology for naive school children and it only causes them harm.

Nice!

 

[BobRyan]

What a curiously odd statement.

Chemistry as applied physics and biology as applied chemistry?

 

[BobRyan]

[Staff Edit]

And don't you know that drug-resistant infections, herbicide-resistant weeds, pesticide-resistant insects, and failed cancer treatments occur? That's because the ToE explains nothing about evolution, if the theory had any practical application, it would explain why this happens. The ToE is just a story about reptiles evolving into birds and fish evolving into mammals without explaining anything about how random mutation and natural selection works. The ToE is mythology for naive school children and it only causes them harm.

"ToE is just a story"... as one of their own world-class proponents put it "stories easy enough to tell but they are not science because there is no way to put them to the test".

"harm to systematics" as they sometimes say

I think Patterson quoted one of them saying "I know one thing - it ought not be taught in grade school" -- I will have to look that up again.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

Evolutionary processes are governed by the laws of physics. If you want to do a scientific analysis of evolution, try using the laws of physics (if you can).

What a curiously odd statement.

Why is that odd? What scientific laws govern evolution? What scientific law governs evolutionary competition? And what scientific law governs evolutionary adaptation?

 

[Alan Kleinman]

Nice!

Thank you!

 

[Alan Kleinman]

Chemistry as applied physics and biology as applied chemistry?

You can get more specific than that. Evolutionary competition (survival of the fittest) is a 1st law of thermodynamics process. The variant that is the most effective user (for reproduction) of the resources in the given environment wins the competition. Evolutionary adaptation on the other hand is a 2nd law of thermodynamics process. Random mutations are a disordering process for genomes. Over time, genomes would become increasingly disordered until when equilibrium is reached and the frequency of the different bases becomes constant. The Jukes-Cantor model demonstrates this nicely using Markov chains. Here's a short description of Markov entropy:
Entropy rates for Markov chains

 

[Alan Kleinman]

"ToE is just a story"... as one of their own world-class proponents put it "stories easy enough to tell but they are not science because there is no way to put them to the test".

"harm to systematics" as they sometimes say

I think Patterson quoted one of them saying "I know one thing - it ought not be taught in grade school" -- I will have to look that up again.

The ToE should only be taught as fiction, not only to naive school children but also to biologists. What needs to be taught is the correct physics and mathematics of evolution so that students and researchers are properly prepared to deal with evolutionary problems such as drug-resistant infections, herbicide-resistant weeds, pesticide-resistant insects, and failed cancer treatments.

 

[BobRyan]

You can get more specific than that. Evolutionary competition (survival of the fittest) is a 1st law of thermodynamics process. The variant that is the most effective user (for reproduction) of the resources in the given environment wins the competition. Evolutionary adaptation on the other hand is a 2nd law of thermodynamics process. Random mutations are a disordering process for genomes. Over time, genomes would become increasingly disordered until when equilibrium is reached and the frequency of the different bases becomes constant. The Jukes-Cantor model demonstrates this nicely using Markov chains. Here's a short description of Markov entropy:
Entropy rates for Markov chains

That equilibrium argument is a great one. I need to reference it more. Thanks.

Conservation of energy in the form of the first law - applied in biology as "(survival of the fittest)" is a new one for me - I will look at that more and thanks for the link.

 

[BobRyan]

Why is that odd? What scientific laws govern evolution? What scientific law governs evolutionary competition? And what scientific law governs evolutionary adaptation?

There is the unwritten law of making stuff up to help stitch a story together that goes from the "lifeless rock" state as mentioned in the Stanley Miller interview - and makes it all the way over to the desired end point of "rabbit" or "horse".

 

[Alan Kleinman]

That equilibrium argument is a great one. I need to reference it more. Thanks.

Conservation of energy in the form of the first law - applied in biology as "(survival of the fittest)" is a new one for me - I will look at that more and thanks for the link.

What you need to understand about DNA evolution is that it is a highly non-equilibrium process. The ToEites model DNA evolution as an equilibrium process using Markov chains. If you are familiar with the Jukes-Cantor model and its derivatives, are used to compute "genetic distance". They assume that when these models reach equilibrium, that gives the genetic distance. Real evolutionary processes do not rapidly approach equilibrium. In my last paper, I modify the Jukes-Cantor model so that it will correctly model DNA evolution. You can find that paper here:
The Kishony Mega-Plate Experiment, a Markov Process
That paper is presently in peer review.

There are not a lot of papers out there that show that competition is a conservative process, but here is a good one:
An Analysis of the Cost-of-Selection Concept

Where this principle becomes most obvious is in the Lenski experiment where he glucose limits (the source of energy for reproduction) his populations. The most effective users of the limited amount of glucose become fixed in the population. Once you understand this, it becomes clear why competition slows evolutionary adaptation.

 

[Alan Kleinman]

There is the unwritten law of making stuff up to help stitch a story together that goes from the "lifeless rock" state as mentioned in the Stanley Urey interview - and makes it all the way over to the desired end point of "rabbit" or "horse".

It's worse than that, the time-tested, dependable laws of physics have to be denied in order to embrace these beliefs.

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

Do you think starvation is a man-made selection pressure? Because that's the selection pressure Lenki uses in his experiment. And evolutionary adaptation works the same way for that selection pressure as it does for medicines, herbicides, and pesticides. Evolutionary processes are governed by the laws of physics. If you want to do a scientific analysis of evolution, try using the laws of physics (if you can).

Starvation is not a man-made selection pressure since it does happen in nature in times of drought, causing scarcity of resources for both prey and predator animals.
What laws of physics do you refer to when you tell people to "try use the laws of physics"? What exactly are you referring to?

Perhaps you want to explain to us how the Kishony and Lenski experiment works and why it takes a billion replications for each adaptive step in the Kishony experiment and 100x or more replications for each evolutionary adaptive step in the Lenski experiment? Feel free to post any links to ToEite research that give that explanation.

Maybe you can explain to us why it can't, because you keep bringing up this point but really haven't explained why it's a stumbling block for evolution.

 

[Astrid]

Starvation is not a man-made selection pressure since it does happen in nature in times of drought, causing scarcity of resources for both prey and predator animals.
What laws of physics do you refer to when you tell people to "try use the laws of physics"? What exactly are you referring to?



Maybe you can explain to us why it can't, because you keep bringing up this point but really haven't explained why it's a stumbling block for evolution.

There is no thing there to explain.

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

There is no thing there to explain.

No, there is. If he makes claims, then he needs to explain them. Simple as.

 

[Astrid]

No, there is. If he makes claims, then he needs to explain them. Simple as.

Just saying the claims are hollow, nothing in
them to explain.

 

[Speedwell]

The ToE should only be taught as fiction, not only to naive school children but also to biologists. What needs to be taught is the correct physics and mathematics of evolution so that students and researchers are properly prepared to deal with evolutionary problems such as drug-resistant infections, herbicide-resistant weeds, pesticide-resistant insects, and failed cancer treatments.

What are you going to teach them instead?

 

[Astrid]

What are you going to

 

[Astrid]

X

 

[Ken-1122]

What is the ToEite explanation for why competition slows evolutionary adaptation?

I don't know. Why do you ask?

 

[Alan Kleinman]

Do you think starvation is a man-made selection pressure? Because that's the selection pressure Lenki uses in his experiment. And evolutionary adaptation works the same way for that selection pressure as it does for medicines, herbicides, and pesticides. Evolutionary processes are governed by the laws of physics. If you want to do a scientific analysis of evolution, try using the laws of physics (if you can).

Starvation is not a man-made selection pressure since it does happen in nature in times of drought, causing scarcity of resources for both prey and predator animals.
What laws of physics do you refer to when you tell people to "try use the laws of physics"? What exactly are you referring to?

Competition (sometimes called survival of the fittest and what Darwin called "the struggle for existence") and evolutionary adaptation are two distinctive physical processes. Competition is a 1st law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy process). First, you have to understand that it takes energy to replicate. When you talk about the carrying capacity of an environment, what you are talking about is a limited amount of usable energy to reproduce. A good experimental example of this is the Lenski experiment where glucose is the energy source for his bacteria. His is an open system and the amount of glucose available on a daily basis will allow for about 5E8 bacterial replications. If he didn't add more glucose to his experiment, those bacteria would die off due to starvation. But what Lenski does is take 1% of that population each day and put those members into fresh glucose solution for the next day's replications. What his experiment does is select for the most effective users of the limited amount of glucose. The most effective users of glucose get fixed in the populations and those members are the candidates for the next beneficial mutation giving an even more effective user of the glucose. That is the adaptative component of the evolutionary process. Evolutionary adaptation is a 2nd law of thermodynamics process. The easiest way to know this is that random mutations are a disorganizing process where if there were no selection would lead to an equilibrium state where the frequency of the different bases in a genome would not change (genomes would end up being random sequences of bases). What selection does in this circumstance increases the frequency of those variants that have the best fitness to reproduce.

Perhaps you want to explain to us how the Kishony and Lenski experiment works and why it takes a billion replications for each adaptive step in the Kishony experiment and 100x or more replications for each evolutionary adaptive step in the Lenski experiment? Feel free to post any links to ToEite research that give that explanation.

Maybe you can explain to us why it can't, because you keep bringing up this point but really haven't explained why it's a stumbling block for evolution.

Consider the Kishony experiment which is a good example of evolutionary adaptation. Watch this short video and pay particular attention at about 1:40 where they draw in the phylogenetic trees for this evolutionary process:
The Evolution of Bacteria on a “Mega-Plate” Petri Dish (Kishony Lab)
Each node on these phylogenetic trees is a colony with about a billion members where some lucky member gets a beneficial mutation enabling that member to start a new colony in the next higher drug concentration region. In other words, each transitional evolutionary step takes a billion replications in that lineage's particular evolutionary trajectory.

Now consider the claim made in the ToE that reptiles evolve into birds. That means a replicator that doesn't produce feathers must accumulate the mutations that would enable it to produce feathers. But it doesn't stop there, birds and reptiles have different respiratory systems, different circulatory systems, different excretory systems, different metabolisms, different musculoskeletal systems (pneumatic bones and flight muscles), and for each evolutionary transitional step from one form of replicator to the other will take a billion replications for each evolutionary transitional step and that is under the best of conditions when only a single selection is acting on the population at a time. If multiple selection conditions are acting simultaneously, the number of replications for each adaptive step goes up exponentially. The ToE simply doesn't have the population sizes necessary for such evolutionary transformation to have a reasonable probability of occurring.