What are the Weaknesses of Evolution?

[Nathan Poe]

This is what happens when the Bible's mediocre poetry is transformed into ludicrous pseudosciece.

 

[Inan3]

And where are you getting this from?

From the scriptures

 

[sfs]

Well the Kimura study is theoretical, yet the curve shape is accurate,so I am not so sure I agree with you. The reason is:
[...]
I think the mutations being shown here include the whole genome, including the aforementioned ~95% which you had stated as "completely neutral". I think thats why the larger frequency of total mutations are counted, the closer they pile up towards 0. I am curious as to why you don't think the entire genome would not be included in the graph.

I don't even know what you mean by "included in the graph". No empirical data of any kind (other some measurements of total genetic diversity as reflected in protein polymorphism -- and they weren't used to decide on the shape) were included in the graph. That's why it is a theoretical, rather than an empirical, curve. In any case, the only data Kimura had available were protein electrophoresis measurements, which would correspond to a subset of nonsynonymous mutations, plus some splice variants, so he certainly wasn't trying to include other mutations.

Furthermore, the curve doesn't look anything like the data we now have about deleterious mutations. Most mutations (in humans) appear to be completely neutral; the curve has no mutations at all in that category. Of the remainder, the ones we know about are roughly evenly split between the mildly deleterious region (the box) and the tail, while the curve has almost all of its area within the box.

If you really want to learn what's known about the range of deleterious mutations, there's a review article on just that subject in the August issue of Nature Reviews Genetics. No, the empirical data do not match the curve.

Ok. Well the question becomes: How much mutation is too much? This is where evolution begins to become a tautology, especially when there seems to be a mindset which places no limit to the rescuing power of natural selection.

Human mutation rates are much too high. For decades geneticists have been worried about the impact of mutations on the human population.(Muller 1950, Crow 1997)
Muller, American Journal Human Genetics 2:111-176
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/94/16/8380

When these concerns first arose, they were based on a rate of deleterious mutation of .12 to .30 per person per generation(Muller 1956)
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/42/11/855

Also there was a concern that if the rate got as high as 1 per person per generation, then their would be a real problem with long-term deterioration.

That would be a real problem because there would be no way to get rid of the deleterious mutations, we would need to keep the number below .33 per person per generation in order to select out the bad mutation and have two people left to reproduce and continue a healthy population.

A great deal has been learned about deleterious mutations and genetic load since Muller, and it has been clear for a long time that concerns about deleterious mutation rates of 0.1 or 0.3 or 1.0 per person were misplaced. There is a lot of history here (none of it my specialty), including a decades-long debate between Bruce Wallace and Jim Crow (see Wallace's Fifty Years of Genetic Load) and contributions from many people (e.g. Joe Felsenstein and Warren Ewens, to pick two I know something about).

One key insight (due to Ewens, I believe) is something that I mentioned in a previous post: organisms do not compete against the ideal member of their species, but against real ones. So if all members of the species have similar numbers of deleterious mutations, than it is their relative fitnesses that matter, not some kind of absolute fitness (which no one seems to be able to define). What this means is that deleterious alleles can accumulate in a species until the number lost every generation (due to selection against those who randomly inherit an above average number) balances the number gained through new mutation, i.e. until mutation-selection balance is attained.

Not all deleterious mutations will fit this model, of course. Some will be lethal to any cell (including sperm and eggs) carrying them, or to fertilized eggs; these will be included in the deleterious mutation rate, but contribute almost nothing to the genetic load, since they don't cost the parent significantly. Others will not be lethal, but will have a negative effect on the viability of the organism anyway. Accumulating a lot of these could spell trouble for the species, since extinction faces a species if the organisms all tend to die before reproducing.

Lots of mutations do fit the model however. These are ones that have a negative effect relative to the unmutated version, but little overall effect. For example, if two animals are competing for a mate, it matters if one is more attractive (by whatever standards that species uses) than the other, but it doesn't matter what the absolute level of attractiveness is, since the mate will choose one or the other. (I.e., it doesn't matter if you're ugly: it only matters if you're uglier than the other guy.)

Our understanding of how many deleterious alleles fit into each category, and how many a species like ours can tolerate, is still quite primitive. What is quite clear is that the concerns from the era of Muller were exaggerated by a least one order of magnitude.

So back to our original numbers and questions: even if we accept estimates of Kondrashov, Nachman and Crowell about the amount of mutation to be ~200, which we had tentatively agreed on, and we consider 95% of the genome to be as you said: "completely neutral" (or junk), what is the new bottom line? 95% of 200 = 190 leaving 10 deleterious mutations per person.

No, that doesn't leave 10 deleterious mutations per person. In coding regions (which are included in the 5% functional fraction of the genome), one third of mutations are synymous and have little or no selective effect; many of the nonsynoymous mutations are conservative, replacing one amino acid with a chemically similar one, and many are in inessential parts of genes, both again with the minimal deleterious effect. Less in known about mutations in regulatory regions for genes, which is where most of the rest of the 5% lies. Some are under greater selective constraint than coding regions, but most appear to more forgiving, so there again will be many mutations even in functional regions that are not significantly deleterious. A reasonable guess for the number of deleterious mutations in humans is 1 - 3 per person, but it's just a guess.

So I would be eager to find out what kind of selection structure is going to halt this kind of deterioration.

See my comments on genetic load above. If each human carries a few tens to a few hundreds of deleterious mutations, then a deleterious mutation rate in the low single digits will not lead to deterioration. It is easy to show that in a simple model, 3 new deleterious mutations per person, each with a selective disadvantage of one percent, will lead to a stable genetic load of ~150 deleterious mutations per person (even fewer if the deleterious effects get multiplied when combined).

I don't think there's anything implausible about that number of deleterious alleles in the average person. When I look at nonsynonymous variants in data from the International HapMap, a straightforward analysis suggests between 75 and 100 deleterious alleles are being carried by each person in the sample, all of whom are normal, healthy individuals. Add in deleterious alleles in the functional, noncoding parts of the genome, and the numbers should be quite substantial.

*Also bearing in mind that this number 200 is a low, conservative estimate.

A low, conservative estimate would be ~120. 200 is about the middle of the range I would consider reasonable, and 300 is toward the high end.

**Also the portion of the genome that is recognized as truly functional is quickly rising from 95%.

I don't know what you're looking at, but I haven't seen any substantial changes in the estimate since the mouse genome was sequenced, which is when the first genome-wide estimate was available.

***These are just the point mutations, not counted are the other types:deletions,insertions,duplications,translocations,inversions, and mitochondrial mutations.

Deletions and insertions (including duplications) combined add an extra ~15% to whatever the mutations rate is (see the chimpanzee genome sequence paper). Translocation and inversion rates are not well understood, but they are likely a good deal smaller yet, based on available information. Mitochondrial mutations are a tiny fraction of the nuclear rate, simply because the mitochondrial genome is so small (it's 1/200,000th the size of the nuclear genome). So none of these is likely to change the situation much.

You have shown this high frequency of E.Coli mutation, tested against a background which they were not adapted to,...why do we not see some major evolutionary progress with these types of experiments?

We do. The rate of adaptive change in laboratory experiments is orders of magnitude faster than the fastest evolutionary changes we see in nature, and many orders of magnitude faster than the typical rate of change in the fossil record.

If we have figured out ways to engineer high mutation rates in bacteria, and their reproduction levels are so high combined with short lifespans we are able to see thousands of such generations...correct?

Why wont they evolve into eukaryotes? And if they wont, then why did we?(allegedly) I assume the answer is that the procaryote->eukaryote jump was just such a big one.

Since the evolution of eukaryotes occurred once in the nearly four billion year history of life, and since it took something like half a billion or a billion years for it to occur, and since there was an entire planet full of bacteria evolving during that time, I think it's a little silly to wonder why we haven't seen a similar change in a handful of labs over a few decades.

 

[sfs]

You see, this isnt my point at all, while I certainly don't want to oversimplify it, I feel that you are forcing me to, even though I am not ready to sum it up. But for a concise summary I would say by way of illustration that my idea basically states that the very few beneficial mutations would never be able to cause evolution because humanity is basically suffering the kind of genomic deterioration which causes species to become extinct. Basically any good mutations can be visualized to be like small drops swimming against a tidal wave of deleterious mutation. Here is the previous information about it, which I still havent heard any feedback about which addresses what it is I am really proposing here.OK. So the following is a quote originally written by me:
[...]
OK. So I think that most honest geneticists would admit that the human population is genetically deteriorating, due to rapid mutation accumulation and relaxed natural selection pressure. (Basically the 'relaxed NS pressure would refer to the relatively low pressure which humans have put themselves in due to civilization, nutrition,technology, etc). Basically I think they realize that genetic information is being lost in our collective genome, and that the result is reduced fitness. This reduction in fitness for our species is believed to be occuring at 1-2% per generation(Crow 97)
http://www.pnas.org/content/vol94/issue16/
There are some charts and figures here to refer to.

So the question becomes: How much selection pressure would be needed to completely stop genetic degeneration?

Or a better question would be, can it be stopped?

You have a point here, although it is somewhat obscured by your wording and by the context. Strictly within the last few hundred years, humans have experienced a dramatic reduction in selection pressure, so that more "bad" mutations, that is mutations that would have been deleterious earlier, are now accumulating. This is true, and would be clearer if you simply dropped the word "information" from the argument. That word already has several meanings (and lots of baggage), and none of those meaning apply here.

You should note two things about your true statement, however. First, it says nothing about the validity of evolution as a whole, or about the evolution of humans from non-human ancestors (despite the title of this thread). The article by Crow that you cite explains why the deleterious mutation rate has not been an issue for most of our history. Second, the process you're talking about does not pose a threat of extinction for humanity. The bad mutations you're talking about can only harm our species survival if they start to harm our individual survival, but your whole point is that they are not affecting our survival; that's why they can persist. When they accumulate to the point that people with too many of them start keeling over or failing to reproduce, then natural selection will again begin to restrain their continued accumulation.

As an aside, I doubt that Crow's estimate of a 1-2% reduction in fitness actually means anything, since there is no reduction in fitness in the current environment and no definition of the global fitness of the population. What might be true is that our fitness is declining by 1% per generation in the sense that, if we were placed in competition with our ancestors from a few thousand years ago in their environment we would be at a disadvantage that is increasing at that rate (assuming the estimate is correct). That may be true, but it is not obvious to me that it is interesting.

 

[Nathan Poe]

From the scriptures

This is what happens when the Bible's mediocre poetry is transformed into ludicrous pseudosciece.

I must be a prophet -- I gave my response before I heard what I'd be responding to!

 

[FishFace]

I must be a prophet -- I gave my response before I heard what I'd be responding to!

Congratulations! Everything you say is infallible!

 

[NailsII]

Sorry guys, been away for the weekend. Time to unleash a monster:

I personally dont have time to watch 117 minutes of his bragging, there was very little science (in the first 46 minutes I watched), there was no opposing viewpoint, just him bragging over his own overblown sense of success.

That's the whole point, there is no opposing viewpoint.
Not one that is correct and based upon fact, that is.
There are plenty based on conjecture, but what good is that?
I can imagine plenty of things, but I need hard evidence to back it up.

These fossil evidences or genetics are so limited that they really can't prove any of that. They show something no doubt but as to the the existence they barely scratch the surface. You could study it all for several lifetimes and yet not come to the whole truth of it.
.....

God is Light, Life, Spirit and Love. All that is, finds its origin and existence in and from Him.

I think you'll find that the evidence from genetics is quite compelling, especially when you look at what we have retrieved from the fossil record.
As for being limited, compared to the assumptions of an ancient document written by man with no better knowledge....
Had the bible given us some understanding beyond what man knew at that time (predicting the discovery of DNA, cellular mechanism, hereditary or shedding some light on something of this nature) - but it doesn't. It is written like a story by someone who knew only what they could see and needed to tie everything together. I bet that the best minds of any generation without any modern scientific knowledge could write genesis from scratch in much the same way. It doesn't sound at all like the words of an all-powerful creator at all.
And as for god is love, have you not read my earlier quotes?
I am still waiting for your admission that these were horrible acts by the way. If you can justify this then you can justify anything, so I cannot believe you even tried.
If that is your idea of love, then I pity you.

Exactly, Skaloop, that is why we take it ALL as the Word of God. If what we understand doesn't line up with the bible we don't have to throw it out, but on the other hand we do not throw out the Word either, NONE of it. That's when we trust God to to give us more understanding. To give us more "light" on the subject. This is how we expand. This is how discoveries are found. How victories are won. We can't take God out of His creation. Do you think He is against science? He created it all He is the greatest of Scientists. He wants to share His mysteries. He wants man to know and discover and believe me it will never end. Do you think it is in man to find out the issues of life by accident? We are made in the image and likeness of God, the Mastermind, and His desire is to pass it along to sons and daughters.

So what happens when you find one piece of the bible to be incorrect?
If he wanted us to know science, he would have instructed us to follow it, not make faith a virtue.
He would not have waited until 1945 for us to be able to make antibiotics, before which even a prick from a rose bush could have been fatal.
And again, if you think evolution is all about accident, then you need to learn some biology. Evolution is anything but accident, it is the non-random survival of randomly varying organisms in a particular environment.
How simple do things need to be!!!

Who said that I don't believe in God? I just happen to not believe in your version of God. He seems so petty and irrational.

As petty as the one who turns people to salt for turning round when told not too?

Gen 1:3 And God said....
Gen 1:6 And God said....
Gen 1:9 And God said....
Gen 1:11 And God said....
Gen 1:14 And God said....
Gen 1:20 And God said....
Gen 1:24 And God said....
Gen 1:26 And God said....

To whom did he say this then?
It is written as if the observer is there, side by side!!
Does that not strike you as a little odd?

What I don't get is where do they get these arbitrary #s? 13 Billion? 4.3 Billion? We are talking billions here. Theres no way that I would be convinced these figures were attestable, even if I didn't believe in the Bible. I mean why not 3.7 Billion? or 5.2 Billion? or 999.6 million? No way they could be off by a ..... let's see .... a billion or two? Come on! If anyone is swallowing a BIG hook it is those who fall for that!

The numbers are not made to be nice or easy to understand, it is where the evidence directs us.
And if you think we don't know enough about radioactivity to date anything, be really scared the next time you have an x-ray.

 

[NailsII]

And as for scripture and a god of love:

""Deaths in the Bible. God - 2,270,365 not including the victims of Noah's flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, or the many plagues, famines, fiery serpents, etc because no specific numbers were given. Satan - 10.""

Amen.

 

[Blayz]

And as for scripture and a god of love:

""Deaths in the Bible. God - 2,270,365 not including the victims of Noah's flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, or the many plagues, famines, fiery serpents, etc because no specific numbers were given. Satan - 10.""

Amen.

More a whimper than a bang for post 100, but I was wondering if there was a link to these numbers, that laid them all out.

I have some other fundamentalists I'd like to share this info with

 

[Wiccan_Child]

More a whimper than a bang for post 100, but I was wondering if there was a link to these numbers, that laid them all out.

I have some other fundamentalists I'd like to share this info with

I've seen the statistics before on a graph, though no source was given.

And congratulations on your 100th post!

 

[MoonLancer]

And as for scripture and a god of love:

""Deaths in the Bible. God - 2,270,365 not including the victims of Noah's flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, or the many plagues, famines, fiery serpents, etc because no specific numbers were given. Satan - 10.""

Amen.

yay. god wins!!!!

...um?

 

[Blayz]

And as for scripture and a god of love:

""Deaths in the Bible. God - 2,270,365 not including the victims of Noah's flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, or the many plagues, famines, fiery serpents, etc because no specific numbers were given. Satan - 10.""

Amen.

For Google is all seeing and all knowing

http://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/2006/08/how-many-has-god-killed.html
http://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/2006/08/who-has-killed-more-satan-or-god.html

 

[Inan3]

I've seen the statistics before on a graph, though no source was given.

And congratulations on your 100th post!

How convenient but if a creationist ever gave this for evidence out would come the claws and the fangs of the orangatangs! Hypocrites!

 

[Inan3]

And as for scripture and a god of love:

""Deaths in the Bible. God - 2,270,365 not including the victims of Noah's flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, or the many plagues, famines, fiery serpents, etc because no specific numbers were given. Satan - 10.""

Amen.

Did you stay up all night counting? How ridiculous an argument! I think you have slipped on a banana peel and "bonked" your head or was it a quartz crystal, WC?

 

[Dannager]

How convenient but if a creationist ever gave this for evidence out would come the claws and the fangs of the orangatangs! Hypocrites!

I would be pretty surprised if a creationist decided to point out the ridiculous number of deaths attributed to God. That would be pretty uncharacteristic of them.

 

[Blayz]

How convenient but if a creationist ever gave this for evidence out would come the claws and the fangs of the orangatangs! Hypocrites!

I posted the links 7 hours ago.

And orangutans don't have claws. They have nails, like their human cousins.

 

[lemmings]

Highly off topic but who would be dumb enough to include a list of all their murders in their own autobiography?

 

[Inan3]

Sorry guys, been away for the weekend. Time to unleash a monster:

OOOOO It's the big bad neanderthal man monster or was it piltdown monster! Of course, we all know they are imaginary just like a lot of evolutionary stuff. You know how you take a couple of fossil bones and put them next to each other and then you draw a huge sketch of this incredible animal or link, or whatever you want to call it, and then you tell all the world that this is what it is. You even write books with the pictures in it and teach that in the schools so you can fools (or is it monkeys) out of generations. Boy, that's a another good one. Always makes me laugh. You had me going for a while. Phew! I was scared. You guys have such a great imagination. Funny though, really funny. Got me laughing.

Seriously you guys are just to full of yourselves. You must really be sick. Time to upchuck and you'll feel better. Or was that what you did in your post. No wonder it smelled so foul.

 

[Blayz]

Highly off topic but who would be dumb enough to include a list of all their murders in their own autobiography?

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully" - R Dawkins

--He would

 

[The Bellman]

OOOOO It's the big bad neanderthal man monster or was it piltdown monster! Of course, we all know they are imaginary just like a lot of evolutionary stuff. You know how you take a couple of fossil bones and put them next to each other and then you draw a huge sketch of this incredible animal or link, or whatever you want to call it, and then you tell all the world that this is what it is. You even write books with the pictures in it and teach that in the schools so you can fools (or is it monkeys) out of generations. Boy, that's a another good one. Always makes me laugh. You had me going for a while. Phew! I was scared. You guys have such a great imagination. Funny though, really funny. Got me laughing.

Seriously you guys are just to full of yourselves. You must really be sick. Time to upchuck and you'll feel better. Or was that what you did in your post. No wonder it smelled so foul.

This is what passes for creationist debate?