lucaspa

Well, one probably has to remember that evolution is a gradual event and, what is even worse, the definition of evolution is not as sharp throughout biology than one might want to (slightly similar to the species concept).

I would say the definition is pretty "sharp". Futuyma's definition (echoed by other evolutionary biologists) is sharp. Not short, but sharp. What gets us in trouble is 1) the reductionist definition of change in allele frequencies and 2) the colloquial use of "evolution" or "evolve" to mean a permament change in the population.

The definition of "species" is imprecise precisely because evolution is true. With a gradual and continuous transformation of a population from one species to another, there is no way to make a precise definition of species. Some population, somewhere, is always going to fit in the gray area while evolving from one species to another.

That's not the question, though john. Obviously, a being of limitless power could have used natural selection, or anything else. The problem is that, we can't prove God's existance, let alone if he uses natural selection as an evolutionary process.

 

That has to come down to a matter of personal belief.

This isn't the point, either. We are not discussing the existence of God. We are talking about how to get design. And I am submitting that Darwinian selection is the ONLY way to get design. Even if God designs, He is going to sort thru the possible designs in His mind against the environment He has mentally set up. He will select those designs that fit the environment. Only after that design process has completed will He manufacture the object.

Humans do the same thing. It's still Darwinian selection, only it is taking place in a mind rather than only in the physical universe. "Natural" selection refers to Darwinian selection operating solely in nature.

We use grafting and we are inserting jellyfish genes into other animals. I am sure we will figure a smarter way to design than trial and error. If we will be able to figure it out, I am sure a God like intelligence would have done so as well.

It's still Darwinian selection. In this case the selection is going on in human minds before they are doing the grafting or gene transfer. IOW, there are several possible graftings that can be done -- variations -- and we select among those variations the one we are actually going to perform in the real universe. It's still trial and error.

I am somewhat familiar with how green fluorescent protein is transfected into other animals. And it too is Darwinian selection. First there were several possible candidates of fluorescent proteins to use. An initial Darwinian selection was performed in human minds against the environment of available fluorescent filters. Then further selection was performed as to which fluorescent proteins were the brightest when transfected.

In addition, there is also Darwinian selection going on in terms of the promoter. In the area of vascular research, there were at least 10 different promoters -- all proteins thought to be expressed when endothelial cells differentiated. These were picked -- by Darwinian selection -- in the minds of the researchers among all the possible promoters. Only those promoters possibly fit the environment of being expressed by only endothelial cells. In the event, 3 of the promoters didn't work. Either they really weren't expressed by endothelial cells or it turned out they were expressed by other cells as well. And they were eliminated as candidates to transfect GFP into mammalian cells.

theres broadly speeking two types of muscle: red and not-red (possibly white, or possibly white is just one type of non-red muscle, i can't remember). ok, actually that's a gross oversimplification, as there's striated and smooth (and cardiac striated) muscle, but, of the muscle that we're talking about (striated), it can be divvied up, for convienience, into red and what im going to call white.

 

red muscle is for 'raargh, me man' type strength. weight lifters have lots of it.

 

white muscle is for more explosive, rapid moovements, but is less strong and 'burns out' quickly.

You're actually looking for Type I, "slow twitch",Type IIA, "fast twitch", and Type IIB muscle. Type I is also called "red" and Type IIA is called "white". Most muscles are composed of a combination of fibers. Sprinters tend to have Type II while long-distance runners are Type I.

However, strength depends not on muscle fiber types but on 1) cross sectional area of the muscle and 2) moment arm of the muscle and bone. As I recall, the different anatomy of apes gives them greater moment arms. Also, short term strength (such as punching or ripping) also depends on the efficiency of anerobic metabolism. Cross sectional area can be increased by training. Moment arm is genetic, and the efficiency of anerobic metabolism would also be, to some extent, genetic.

Well, that was kind of my point. I was trying to say that the simplistic and polar view of "apes have strength, humans have dexterity" is a dangerous basis for making any arguments in this thread.

We are not talking about a simplistic or polar view. But looking at the hypothesis that, in evolution, humans traded strength for dexterity.

I am demonstrating firstly that such limb-tearing strength does not lie exclusively in the domain of the great apes, but also in that of humans, and secondly that in the case of humans such capabilities can be attained voluntarily.

But can humans voluntarily reach the maximum strength of great apes? Remember, we have 2 bell-shaped curves. The question is whether those curves come from different populations or are sampling errors from the same population.

I remember one incident in grad school where a monkey escaped from a cage. My fellow graduate students engaged in a Keystone cops chase thru the graduate school. Now, this primate had been caged for months -- unable to do strength exercises. The grad students, OTOH, all ran and went to the weight room. Yet, when cornered, the monkey wiped the floor with them. It took six of them to finally subdue the monkey.

Which, I was trying to point out, is not a useful generalisation in this discussion, since it neglects the fact that manual precision and strength are not mutually exclusive, and it also fails to take into account the voluntary plasticity of human individuals as far as both strength and dexterity go.

I find your objections to generality somewhat disingenuous, since you too are using generalities. I would note that I am the only one, so far, who has contributed scientific literature to this discussion. And that search turned up a paper showing differences in dexterity between humans and apes. Why didn't you do a PubMed search?

What you are doing is arguing the premise of the hypothesis: apes, including chimps, are stronger than humans. But instead of looking for data, you are tying to use rhetoric. Doing a quick search on ask.com, I have come up with these sites that all affirm that, in general, apes are stronger than human. The bell-shaped curves are indeed different.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1541283-1,00.html

http://schoolweb.missouri.edu/ashland.k12.mo.us/jn/03page/webpage.htm

"Chimpanzees are both smaller and stronger than humans."

http://www.hsus.org/wildlife/issues_facing_wildlife/should_wild_animals_be_kept_as_pets/fact_and_fiction_monkeys_and_apes_as_pets.html

"When they begin to express their normal and instinctual behavior as they mature, monkeys and apes become extremely difficult to handle and can be up to seven times stronger than humans. "

Now, if you want to argue this, you would need to look at dexterity and see if apes are also as dexterous as humans. They do have opposable thumbs, after all.

I'm not saying we should go around killing everyone who I deem unfit. Also I did not say that I would be choosing who is unift. I'm saying that maybe we would be better off if we let nature take it's course.

Maybe

1. We are letting "nature" take its course. After all, we and our decisions are part of nature! So, our technology is now part of the "environment" under which natural selection works. In this environment some selection pressures are eased.

2. In order to be "better off", someone MUST make the decision about who is unfit. Otherwise the environment (our technology) preserves those individuals. So despite your protests, your position does amount to someone going around and killing people deemed "unfit" -- killing them by witholding the technology to keep them alive.

3. I'm arguing there is no "maybe" about it. Natural selection is much, much smarter than we are. I would rather let it decide who survives in a particular environment -- including an environment where technology preserves what in a different environment would be "unfit".

Demon Haunted World perhaps? Your link gives me a "page not found" error.

Damn! The link was valid several years ago. They changed the web address.

Try this one: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=1297 But now it's not free like it used to be. Damn again.

Of particular interest is the sarcasm Lewontin shows in these passages:

"What seems absurd depends on one’s prejudice. Carl Sagan accepts, as I do, the duality of light, which is at the same time wave and particle, but he thinks that the consubstantiality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost puts the mystery of the Holy Trinity “in deep trouble.” Two’s company, but three’s a crowd.

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen. "

Notice the sarcasm that starts the description of science as absolutely materialistic. Lewontin is poking fun at Sagan's position. The complete paragraph is one of the more famous misquotes used by creationists. It is a misquote because it doesn't recognize the tongue-in-cheek critique of Sagan started by the final sentences in the preceding paragraph, or the criticisms of the book as a whole in the rest of the review.

Lewontin is saying that the absolute materialistic view is not part of science, despite Sagan's rhetoric (which is quite good).

And I know plenty of men who could rip an adult chimp's arm off.

Perhaps. But this isn't the point. It simply means that arm ripping is within the capability of both species. It doesn't say anything about relative strength. THe poster also gave several other examples where chimps and other great apes have strength capability exceeding the maximum of humans.

In general, chimps are much stronger than humans.

Is the reason that humans are so much weaker than chimpanzees due, in part, to our enhanced precision of movement?

 

Are our muscles specialized not for strength, but to work in tandem with our highly complex brains to execute precision movements?

 

I've just read that no chimpanzee has ever been trained to thread a needle. Is this simply a deficiency of the chimp brain, or do its muscles also prevent it from executing such precise movements?

The articles here might help you answer your question:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itool=pubmed_DocSum&db=pubmed&cmd=Display&dopt=pubmed_pubmed&from_uid=9503091

When you have a question like this, PubMed is always the place to start.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=citation&list_uids=9503091&query_hl=4&itool=pubmed_docsum

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itool=pubmed_DocSum&db=pubmed&cmd=Display&dopt=pubmed_pubmed&from_uid=10999274

This article:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itool=pubmed_DocSum&db=pubmed&cmd=Display&dopt=pubmed_pubmed&from_uid=10999274

Would indicate that you are correct: trading strength for precision

Primates. 2005 Oct;46(4):275-80. Epub 2005 Sep 6. Related Articles, Links

Muscle dimensions in the chimpanzee hand.

Ogihara N, Kunai T, Nakatsukasa M.

Laboratory of Physical Anthropology, Department of Zoology, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, Sakyo, Kyoto, Japan. ogihara@anthro.zool.kyoto-u.ac.jp

We dissected the forearms and hands of a female chimpanzee and systematically recorded mass, fiber length, and physiological cross-sectional area (PCSA) of all muscles including those of intrinsic muscles that have not been reported previously. The consistency of our measurements was confirmed by comparison with the published data on chimpanzees. Comparisons of the hand musculature of the measured chimpanzee with corresponding published human data indicated that the chimpanzee has relatively larger forearm flexors but smaller thenar eminence muscles, as observed in previous studies. The interosseous muscles were also confirmed to be relatively larger in the chimpanzee. However, a new finding was that relative PCSA, which reflects a muscle's capacity to generate force, might have increased slightly in humans as a result of relatively shorter muscle fiber length. This suggests that the human intrinsic muscle architecture is relatively more adapted to dexterous manipulative functions. Shortening of the metacarpals and the intervening interosseous muscles might accordingly be a prerequisite for the evolution of human precision-grip capabilities.

Yes natural bananas are small and inedible. It was only through a mutation (which it is known when it occured) and selective breeding that the bananas that we eat are like they are. Yes the eating banana was design... by humans

But look at HOW humans designed it: by Darwinian selection!

I submit that Darwinian selection is the ONLY way to design. The issue is whether the method is used by intelligent entities or happens without them.

I suppose I phrased that poorly. I didn't really mean belief in God generally, inasmuch as "God" is a word which can mean almost anything. Rather, it is belief in the God which is held up as a counter-argument to evolutionary theory, the god that literally sculpted Adam and Eve from clay and exiled them from a garden a few thousand years ago, which can and should be refuted. That is the kind of faith that Coulter is talking about.

Look at "god literally sculpted Adam and Eve from clay ... a few thousand years ago." That is a specific method of creation by a specific deity Yahweh (usually referred to as "God").

It is also a scientific theory that can be tested: humans are manufactured artifacts that appeared in their present form a few thousand years ago. This can be tested, has been tested, and has been shown to be wrong.

You and Coulter are saying that this refutes belief in Yahweh. What you are saying is: if Yahweh didn't create this particular way, then Yahweh didn't create and Yahweh doesn't exist.

You can easily see the non sequitor here. Yahweh simply creates by another method. And, in fact, Christianity accepts that Yahweh created by the processes discovered by science -- including evolution. Fundamentalism does not. I would submit that Fundamentalism is a new religion and is not Christianity.

What you have found, in general, is how God gets into science despite the limitations of Methodological Materialism -- by the back door. God is proposed to use a particular material method. Science then tests the material method. But, that isn't testing God or belief in God. Just the method. However, you can see why atheists want the non sequitor: it's the only way they can use "science" to disprove the existence of Yahweh in particular or deity in general. But it's a misuse of science.

Ironically, the literal text of Genesis 1 contradicts the method you stated also. In Genesis 1:25-27, people are created together -- both men and women (plural in the Hebrew). And they are spoken into existence -- "let there be" -- instead of forming one man out of clay and one woman out of a rib of the man. So Coulter's insistence on a literal Bible is contradicted not only by science but also by the text of the Bible!

I agree that religion certainly can be completely independent of anything scientific, but it's certainly not necessarily so, or even usually so.

Please expand on this. I would say that it is possible for religion to be consistent with science. That is, not contradicted by science. In fact, that has been the way it has been for centuries. Science has been viewed for most of the history of modern science simply as discovering the way that deity works.

It is only within the last 40 or so years that we have had the supposed conflict of science and religion. Partly that is due to the rise of Fundamentalism and partly to the rise of militant atheism.

I thought the whole point of the article was that it's people like Coulter who make it about theism vs. atheism.

People like Coulter do this. But militant atheists also try to make the issue about theism vs atheism. PZ Meyers, Dawkins, EO Wilson, Peter Atkins, Daniel Dennett, and a host of militant atheists on the internet make the same mistake as Coulter.

The threat of militant atheists to science is more subtle than the threat of creationists, but even more devastating. Creationists object to particular theories and would close down research in some areas. Militant atheists would change the very nature of science and would make science just as dogmatic as they say religion is. IOW, they would turn science into a dogmatic religion.

I thought the whole point of the article was that it's people like Coulter who make it about theism vs. atheism. She holds up belief in God in opposition to the science of evolution. Since that belief, as a scientific theory, holds no water whatsoever, it's perfectly appropriate to refute it on those terms.

Coulter does do this. But she is mistaken. Creationism vs evolution is not about theism vs atheism. One of the most effective counters is to note that at least half of evolutionary biologists have been Christian. What you did was undermine the counter and supported Coulter!

The belief in God is fine as a scientific theory. It's simply one that science can't test. Therefore, it is NOT appropriate to refute belief in God on scientific terms. Science will NOT refute belief in God. In terms of science, there are still 2 questions where direct intervention of God is still a viable (unfalsified) hypothesis:

1. Why does the universe exist?

2. Why does the universe have this order rather than some other order.

Science deals with material causes. Science cannnot answer whether the material processes observed by science are sufficient as causes. Do the material processes require supernatural input in order to work? This limitation of science is called Methodological Materialism (or Naturalism). One way to express this is to propose the following hypothesis:

"The only distinct meaning of the word 'natural' is stated, fixed, or settled; since what is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent agent to render it so, i.e., to effect it continually or at stated times, as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once." Butler: Analogy of Revealed Religion. (but that isn't where I found the quote)

Now, the first statement is accurate. "natural" is only what is stated. The hypothesis is that natural requires an intelligent agent in order to happen. There's nothing in science to refute that hypothesis.

Therefore you can't say that "belief in God ... as a scientific theory, holds no water whatsoever" That's a wrong statement -- by science.

Creationism and evolution -- for the theist -- are both specific mechanisms of HOW God created. See quote below. In terms of science, both creationism and evolution are scientific theories. Evolution is a currently valid theory (supported by the data) and creationism is a falsified/refuted theory. So all science has done, for the theist, is tell the theist how God created.

Coulter confuses belief in a literal, inerrant Bible with belief in God. Coulter doesn't really have belief in God. Her god is a literal, inerrant Bible. This is called Bibliolatry. In theological terms, it's worship of a false idol.

The "mentally similar" humans has a flawed consideration: IMM is comparing human infants to adult animals or comparing mentally intact animals to mentally damaged humans. Apples and oranges. If we compare the capabilities at comparable ages or comparable health, then the argument falls apart.

Also, IMM maintains that there is a continuum of "feeling" and "self-awareness" within living organisms. How do you quantify this? How would you tell that a rat is more "self-aware" than a squid? Or a plant?

ALL living organisms react to stimuli. It is one of the necessary conditions to be alive. Even unicellular organisms -- such as bacteria -- communicate and act as a group. The amoeba Dictylostelium sometimes self-organizes to reproduce sexually and make a multicelled animal with specialized organisms. It does that in response to certain environments. Is this response "self-awareness"? If not, why not?

Dr Dalek,

 

Yes, but they are doing the right thing.

Are they? That is what we are trying to decide. It's not a consensus that what they are doing is "right". Also, considering that some of the animals they have released are incapable of living outside the lab, they are also, in the end, torturing and killing the very animals they say they are trying to "save". Oh, the irony!

Bachelors in Finance and Business, associates in Economics, and a specialized degree in technical and fundamental analysis (<--- techniques to predict stock patterns) which I earned as an intern for TD Waterhouse and California College of Business. I earn a living as a professional technical analyst (read that as "stock investor")...

 

... so if you ever needed a broker, I'm the girl you can count on... but no, they have nothing to do with biomedical research.

All this may partially explain why you and I so often have opposite positions. Apparently you haven't had much training in hypothetico-deductive reasoning. Instead, you must learn to deal with the irrationality of investors, who buy and sell for reasons that have nothing to do with the fiscal reality of the company involved.

Secondly I'd like to say that upon consideration even my "Evolution Based Moral Theory" sugests that animal testing, and many drugs and medical treatment ingeneral are not nesicary.

After all a lot of people who medical science wants to save are people who have inherint genetic flaws whose presence will ultimatly weaken our species as a whole,

If this is your "evolution based moral theory", then it is flawed because it misrepresents evolution and natural selection. First, you are making the mistake of saying that some traits are absolutely bad. In evolution, you can't do that. Traits are beneficial or harmful only in relation to particular environments.

Also, you are saying you are smarter than natural selection and that you have such a complete knowledge of the environment and the future that you can pronounce what is going to be "beneficial" for all time. You don't.

Look at Stephen Hawking. He has one of those people who have "inherent genetic flaws" that you don't want to treat. BUT, he also has a superior intelligence. By refusing to treatment to Hawking, the gene pool loses the alleles for intelligence.

aslo I know more than a few anecdotes (and perhaps later on some statistics) that show that in many cases medical treatment isn't necisary. One example would be my mother who took medical treatment for an autoimmune disorder that (according to one doctor) easily could have gotten better on its own. She ended up worse off because of some of the drugs she was taking.

You do need the statistics. "could ... have gotten better" is not the same as "would have gotten better". Yes, there are medical mistakes, but you need to document that they are approaching 50%.

I feel that humans, dispite their higher thinking are still inherintly animal.

We are animals. After all, are we classed in a separate Kingdom?

They arent inferior in the least. They are the mental and feeling equivalents to certain groups of humans and share many of the most important morally relevant characteristics with them, so they are out moral equals.

Then why isn't their behavior "immoral"? They painfully kill other species.

BBC News - Animal Drug Testing:

Several published studies assessing the prediction of drug side effects by animals have found them to be very poor predictors; correct only 5-25% of the time.[3]

92% of drugs fail in clinical trials, having successfully passed through animal studies.[4]

On the contrary, probably fewer drugs would be developed, or they would be more rigorously tested on human subjects.

Well, it systematically undermines all of the common justifications for animal experimentation, such as:

"if we didnt test on animals, we'd have to test on people"

"animal testing is necessary to cure human diseases"

"animal experimentation is save so many human lives"

Those kinds of justications wouldnt have any meaning outside of an ethic that says "humans are the center of the universe", because they dont weight the benefit of humans against the harm caused to animals.

tis true, but also redundant.

 

your saying that a local change in allele frequency to less than 1 does not equate to a species-wide evolution

 

i agree, and never said otherwize

These aren't the original claims:

Lucas: Now, for evolution -- changes in populations -- to happen, alleles must become FIXED -- become the sole allele in the population.

Dak: if an advantageous allele has increased so that it is predominant (but not exclusive), than that species has evolved.

or: a change in frequency from 0.2 to 0.9 is a change in frequency, and thus evolution; it is not neccesary for the frequency to become 1 before it is evolution.

You seem to have 3 simultaneous claims:

1. Evolution is a shift in gene frequencies without fixation. IOW, fixation is not necessary for the process to be included in evolution.

2. A shift in gene frequencies is tied to a change in designs, and that is tied to whether a "species has evolved".

Do you see the difference? In 1 you are saying that a shift in gene frequencies is part of evolution. In 2 you say a shift in gene frequencies = a species has "evolved". Those 2 statements are not necessarily saying the same thing.

3. You say that a local change in gene frequency is not "species wide evolution" but you do say that a change in gene frequency means the population has "evolved" and use the term specifically for Africans and the sickle-cell allele.

Let's start from the top. #1 is correct and my original claim was poorly worded. It does look like I'm saying that shifting allele frequencies within a population is not part of evolution.

"Biological evolution may be slight ...; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportions of different forms of a gene within a population, such as the alleles that determine the different human blood types" Futuyma op cit, pg 4

Instead, what I meant to say was that loss of alleles and fixation of alleles is an inevitable result of evolution -- common ancestry:

"The geneology of the genes in the present population is said to coalesce to a single common ancestor [individual]. Because that ancestor represents one of the several original alleles, the population, descended entirely from that ancestor, must eventually become monomorphic: one or the other of the original alleles becomes fixed (reaches a frequency of 1.00)" D. Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, pg 299

Of course, that means that the other is lost.

So, let me rephrase: When evolution -- changes in populations -- happens, some alleles must become fixed and other alleles must become lost.

#2. When we say "evolved", we most often mean complete changes in a population such that it is different from the original "Biology To develop (a characteristic) by evolutionary processes. " http://www.ask.com/reference/dictionary/ahdict/34692/evolve

Changes in allele frequency most often don't fit this usage. For instance, the allele frequency in the peppered moths changed twice, but you could always find both light and dark moths in the population. When we commonly think of "evolved", it means that all the moths are now a new color.

IOW, the bell-shaped curve of properties/traits has to shift so that there is no overlap with the preceding curve Just shifting gene frequencies won't do that. The curves will still overlap and represent simply variations of one population. You need to drop some alleles entirely and fix others so that the whole population is different.

Also remember that changing traits in a population is not (most often) a case of one allele, but an accumulation of many alleles.

You maintain that populations rarely have one allele at a locus. That is correct because mutations add alleles to the population. However, remember accumulation. Let's say there is Locus 1 that has alleles A and B. B has a higher selection coefficient than A. Eventually B will become fixed. But in the meantime 2 new alleles appear: C and D. C is worse than B and D but D is better than B (and C). So D becomes fixed. In that process alleles E and F also appear. E is worse than D and F, while F is better than D. So F is fixed.

So, where you had a population that was A and B, you now have a population that is either all F or still has some D in it. Completely different set of alleles.

No, this is not the definition of fixation.

Simple denial without any supporting evidence. If fixation is not when the allele becomes present in every member of the population, then what is it? And please post your source.

If I don't know what s, N and P are, how can I comment on what follows?

Well, you can drop the pretense of being an evolutionary geneticist. Why did you adopt the pretense to begin with? To try to give your posts some "authority"? Anyone who has done even casual reading in population genetics and evolutionary genetics must know what the terms mean. And, yes, I did identify them. Go back and read carefully. Or Charon was nice enough to give them to you.

As above, this is not what fixation means! Ah. Then I'm done with you my friend. Have a nice day.

Simple denial without providing any information on what fixation is. Then using this as an excuse to bail on the discussion. Sorry, but I've seen the tactic before. It's not the most graceful way of admitting you were in error, but it is one way.

FYI: "In the following, we study the simplest possible question: what is the probability that a single mutant generates a lineage that takes over the entire population? This fixation probability determines the rate of evolution. "

http://www.univie.ac.at/virtuallabs/Moran/

that's not true. the design of a species isn't an absolute thing: it contains many 'usually this' or 'most often, but not allways, that'.

 

if an advantageous allele has increased so that it is predominant (but not exclusive), than that species has evolved.or: a change in frequency from 0.2 to 0.9 is a change in frequency, and thus evolution; it is not neccesary for the frequency to become 1 before it is evolution.

No. Think of the sickle cell gene in African populations. The frequency of that gene is different from other human populations, but we don't say that H. sapiens has "evolved" because of it. Nor do you say that those African populations have evolved while the rest of the species has not.

For every trait or allele, you can make a bell-shaped distribution curve where you plot trait or allele on the x-axis and number of individuals on the y-axis.

During evolution, the bell-shaped curve shifts either left or right. In order to do that, some alleles must be lost (at the tail at the back end of the shift) and other alleles must be fixed (at the middle or front of the curve shift). As the curve continues to shift over generations, eventually the new curve will not overlap the old one. THEN we know evolution has occurred. You can see the bell shaped curves depicted and the divergence of them as new species are formed in Futuyma or

1. ME Heliberg, DP Balch, K Roy, Climate-driven range expansion and morphological evolution in a marine gastropod. Science 292: 1707-1710, June1, 2001

2. Kellogg DE and Hays JD Microevolutionary patterns in Late Cenozoic Radiolara. Paleobiology 1: 150-160, 1975.

Changing frequencies of an allele within a population is not really evolution, which is another reason why the "change in allele frequencies" is not a definition of evolution. Your example -- which would be equivalent to the peppered moth -- is an example of natural selection at work. But natural selection, by itself, is not evolution either.

In order to have common ancestry, and descent with modification, you must have fixation of some alleles and loss of others.

In the 20th century, most of the contributors to evolutionary biology were atheists. Dobzhansky, Fisher and perhaps Ayala (if you consider him a notable contributor) were notable exceptions...

I said evolutionary biologists. You first try to make this "contributors" and then "notable contributor". Yes, Francisco Ayala is America's foremost living evolutionary biologist. You forgot Teilhard de Chardin, Kenneth Miller, Walcott, and others. So you have what we call "selective data". If you go through the authors of publications -- contributors -- you end up with still more than 50% of evolutionary biologists in the 20th century being Christians.

What you are doing is trying to rank contributors to make atheists more prominent. Please stop trying to turn this into an atheist vs theist situation with evolution = atheism. All you will do by this is hurt science. Science does not back atheism. Science is agnostic, or neutral, on the question of God. You need to ask yourself: what is more important to me? Promoting science or promoting atheism?

In your list, Haldane, Gould, Lewontin, Mayr, and Maynard Smith were/are agnostic. Even if not, they explicitly rejected any attempt to link evolution with atheism. For instance, Gould is famous for his NOMA. Lewontin, in a famous review of

Sagan's Demon Haunted Woodland, savagely lampooned Sagan's attempt to associate science with atheism.

http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?19970109028R@p1

I doubt this is true. I gave examples earlier of neutral alleles at isozyme and DNA polymorphism loci. Their appearance in a population over time is in no way related to selection (natural selection, that is) In what sense? Chance has ...poor odds? I don't follow

Apples and oranges. What you are talking about now is mutations when you say "their appearance". Yes, alleles "appear" by mutation -- this is the "variation" in natural selection. But, after they appear, we are talking about changes in their frequency -- the proportion of individuals that have the genes.

Now, for evoution -- changes in populations -- to happen, alleles must become FIXED -- become the sole allele in the population. The relative strength of genetic drift to natural selection is very low. Especially if the effective population size is greater than about 10.

You need the equations on page 393 of Futuyma. If s = 0 the probability of fixation is P = 1/(2N). Whereas if s >0, then the probability is P=2s(1-e^-4Ns) if s is small and P = 2s if s is larger.

So, let's take an effective population of 1000. If s = 0 (neutral), then P = 1/2000 or 0.0005. However, if s = 0.01 (a "large" selection coefficient) then P = 0.02. This is 40 times more probable than if s = 0. Now, if s<0, then P = 0.00004 by using the equation that combines probability of fixation by selection and genetic drift.

Anyway, as above, we know from evidence that loads and loads of neutral mutations are fixed in effectively H-W populations. How to account for it?

Because the data you have is not fixation! What the data shows is that there are many alleles present in populations. But fixation means that only one of those alleles would be present. You aren't really an evolutionary geneticist, are you? The average time to fixation of a newly arisen neutral allele that actually does become fixed is 4N generations for a diploid population.

So, if N = 1000, that is 4,000 generations! So what we are seeing with the data you posted is simply a snapshot in time. If we are dealing with humans and a generation time of 24 years, that is 100,000 years to fixation. Of course, most wild populations are much larger than 1,000. That increases the time a lot.

Basically, gene frequencies are essentially unchanged from generation to generation under genetic drift in populations greater than N = 200.

Having claimed the right to use my own (defined) terminology, I should be slow to criticize here. But you are getting yourself into a sematic quicksand.

 

Say I am an architect: my job is to "design" buildings. The first building I put up falls down the next day. Was it fit for purpose? No. Was it designed?

Actually, the answer is "yes" for both questions. The building was fit for a purpose -- (housing people) -- just badly fit. IOW, it was a bad design. What you have here is 2 criteria -- fit for the purpose of housing human beings and longevity. You are trying to conclude that longevity has to be maintained in order to for the building to be "designed". Does not follow.

Yes, but poorly, but it was still designed! Conversely, if I am not an architect, I might well be able, by pure chance i.e. without design, to erect a buildilng that lasts for centuaries.

See? You realize it was designed, just poorly.

No, your building would still be design. Not chance. After all, you too are being an architect. What you are saying is that you have no formal training in it. But you are designing a building (and manufacturing it). However, what you are saying is that you came up with a more long-lasting design than the professional architect -- but did so without the formal training on what you should be doing.

Now, Gould has stated that one of the ways we can recognize that evolution happened instead of ID is that so many of the designs in nature are indeed poor ones. They are buildings that last for a day but not longer. Of course, they don't have to be better, but an intelligence (especially a supernatural one) could be reasonably expected to come up with only good designs.

Gould is restating, in fact, an argument used by 19th century theologians to reject Special Creation (ID).

I fully endorse this. Once again, I merely note that selection is only one of many mechanisms by which allele frequencies change over time. This, all along, has been my only, very minor, point.

I'm glad you "endorse" the obvious. I'm sure that Futuyma is so relieved to have your endorsement.

What people are saying is:

1) Selection is the only one of these processes that produces adaptations (designs).

2) That chance, gene flow, and mutations are relatively minor ones of altering frequencies. Mutations, by their very nature, are initially confined to a very small proportion of the population.

3) Sexual selection (nonrandom mating), it turns out, is usually an extension of natural selection.

I am happy to do that. I am not bogged down with particular terminogies, I am quite flexible here. It's no big deal.

Excellent. It will greatly facilitate communication and discussion to use the standard terms whenever possible. Thank you.

Good - H-W can be "reversed" in the sense that if their equilibrium doesn't apply, then something else must be going on. But what? Yay, not only drift! H-W is a theorem in population genetics, all sorts of effects can lead to deviation form H-W equilbrium. I invite you to show me the "mathematical tests" that distinguish the various population effects that lead to lack of equilibrium in this sense. I cannot bring any to mind, maybe I'm being slow here.

I suggest chapter 13 in Douglas Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology. Pay particular attention pages 371-373. Futuyma also cites this book as giving a comprehensive treatment:

Endler, JA Natual selection in the Wild Princeton University Press, 1986

8. Gilad Y, Rosenberg S, Przeworski M, Lancet D, Skorecki K. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2002 Jan 22;99(2):862-7. Evidence for positive selection and population structure at the human MAO-A gene. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/99/2/862

"Data Analysis. We calculated three summaries of diversity levels: Watterson’s W (9), based on the number of segregating sites in the sample; (10), the average number of pairwise differences in the sample; and H, a summary that gives more weight to high frequency-derived variants (11). Under the standard neutral model of a random-mating population of constant size, all three summaries estimate the population mutation parameter 3N(for X-linked loci), where N is the diploid long-term inbreeding effective population size, and is the mutation rate per generation. To test whether the frequency spectrum of mutations

conformed to the expectations of this standard neutral model, we calculated the value of three test statistics: Tajima’s D (12), which considers the difference between and W, Fay and Wu’s H test (11), which considers the difference between and H, and the HKA (Hudson–Kreitman–Aguade) test (13), which tests whether levels of polymorphism are consistent with levels of divergence, as expected under the neutral model, by comparison

with one or more reference loci."

That's 3 different tests. The equations didn't come thru well on copy and paste, but the article is free and you can get your own PDF copy to read.

Look, the statement "sqrt(x) is an integer" is true when x = 4. This statement is false for almost all other integer values of x. So the statement cannot be generalized, and I say that sqrt(x) = integer is false in general.

You still didn't provide a source of a colleague using the statement. You have seemed to have changed the terminology. We were talking about "true in general" but now you have "false in general". Apples and oranges. This does make more sense and I have seen this phrase used in my math classes and textbooks. It means that the equation is false for most values of x but that there are some values for which it is valid.

BUT, this isn't the original we were discussing.

It appears that what you are trying to do is extend what you do in mathematics outside of it. Let's do this in science:

What you have here is the statement "sqrt(x) is an integer". That's really a hypothesis. It implies that the statement is true for ALL values of "x". As you have shown by testing, most values of "x" do not yield an integer. Therefore, as stated, the hypothesis is false. What happens in science, as opposed to what you are doing here, is to modify the hypothesis. We can probably come up with an equation (other than using integer^2) to describe the sequence 4, 9, 16, 25, 36 etc. Maybe not. I'm too restricted by time to try. But if all else failed, we could say "sqrt(x) is an integer only when x = integer^2". That's a supported hypothesis (altho somewhat circular and uninteresting). But it's more how science works rather than say "generally true".

No, this is not right, whoever states it.

Then you must show why Mayr's argument is not right. Simple denial doesn't cut it. Mayr gave the reasons that "change in allele frequencies" is an inadeqate definition: "This reductionist definition omits the crucial aspects of evolution: changes in diversity and adaptation. "

A change in allele frequency does not tell you why populations split and we have cladogenosis. Change in allele frequency only gives us anagenesis.

Also, changes in allele frequency does not tell us why we see adaptations (designs) in organisms. A change in allele frequency could simply leave the organism either: unchanged in adapation or less well adapted.

Sorry, but I seriously doubt your source here.

You did see the source, didn't you? Douglas Futuyma. IF you are really into evolutionary biology (which I'm beginning to seriously question), you must know who Futuyma is. Here is the PubMed search page for him:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=search&DB=pubmed

Here's the Amazon.com search of his books: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b/002-9368283-7697633?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Douglas+Futuyma&Go.x=8&Go.y=8

Here's his faculty page: http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/ee/futuyma.html

You might want to note this from that page:

"the President of the Society for the Study of Evolution and the American Society of Naturalists, and the editor of Evolution. He is the author of the successful textbook Evolutionary Biology."

I drew the definition from that "successful textbook". "Successful" here means that evolutionary biologists use that book as textbook in their classes.

So, if you are going to argue against the President of the Society for the Study of Evolution and the editor of the journal Evolution about the defintion of evolution, be prepared to back your claims with lots of data.

Of course, you could also try to argue against the National Academy of Science:

"Evolution in its broadest sense explains that what we see today is different from what existed in the past. Galaxies, stars, the solar system, and Earth have changed through time, and so has life on Earth.

"Biological evolution concerns changes in living things during the history of life on Earth. It explains that living things share common ancestors. Over time, biological processes such as natural selection give rise to new species. Darwin called this process "descent with modification," which remains a good definition of biological evolution today." Appendix and Frequently Asked Questions Science and Creationism, A View from the NAS, the section "What is Evolution?" pg 27

Notice that they avoided "changes in allele frequencies" in their defintion.

Or you can try another other successful college-level introductory evolutionary biology textbook:

"Most of the processes described in this book concern change between generation within a population of a species, and it is this kind of change we shall call evolution. When the members of a population breed and produce the next generation, we can imagine a lineage of populations, made up of a series of populations through time. Each population is ancestral to the descendant population in the next generation: a lineage is an "ancestor-descendant" series of populations. Evolution, then, consists of change between between generations within a population lineage. Darwin defined evolution as "descent with modification," where the word "descent" refers to the way evolutionary modification takes place in a series of populations that are descended from one another." Mark Ridley, Evolution, 2nd Edition (1996) pg 4.

"1. Evolution means descent with modification, or the change in the form, physiology, and behavior of organisms over many generations of time. The evolutionary changes of living things occur in a diverging, tree-like pattern of lineages." pg 19.

Directional?????? I have no idea what that means. Pray tell.

How can you be an evolutionary geneticist and not know? The equations for frequency change under positive selection show gene frequency changing in only one direction -- toward fixation. That's "directional"

I have no idea what Mayr thinks he means by "changes in diversity". Do you? Maybe change in allele frequency? Hm. Adaptation is, I remind you once again, is an a posteriori judgement.

It's Futuyma. You should read more carefully. And, if you would have read the entire definition before you started nit-picking, you would have found this:

"Populations may become subdivided so that several populations are derived from a COMMON ANCESTRAL POPULATION. If different changes in the proportions of variant individuals transpire in the several populations,the populations DIVERGE, OR DIVERSIFY. "

So, it is clear the "changes in diversity" means that the descendent populations are different from each other.

And I cited a couple of papers to you to show that adaptation is not always posterior. Sometimes it has been predicted ahead of time what would be adaptive. You seemed to either have not recognized what the data showed or just chose to ignore it. The second is not good science.

Good heavens! And what the **** does hereditary similarity mean? It is meaningless.

Oh, please. "hereditary similarity" simply means that offspring are similar to their parents. It is the same thing as Darwin saying: "from the strong principle of inheritance they will will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. "

How can you possibly be a geneticist and not know that offspring are similar to their parents?

Now, why the "Good heavens" in reference to variation. Darwin and many others have already demonstrated variation among individuals. As a geneticist, you should be very aware that recombination and mutation mean that, altho offspring are similar to their parents, they are not identical. Nor are siblings (other than identical twins) identical to each other.

Hey! We call it the change in allele frequence over time!

Yes. No one ever said this didn't happen. We have just said that it is not a complete or sufficient definition of evolution. Back to Mayr. If you confine the definition of evolution to "changes in allele frequency" then you omit critical and necessary parts of evolution. You do know what "omits" means, don't you?

Ha! Every time I see that "I" word I want to throw up.

Go ahead and throw up. Means nothing. Within the limited scope that Futuyma is using it, "improves" is accurate. Here Futuyma is not using it as a long-term goal or that some traits are absolutely "good" or "better", but in the context that adaptations show an improvement in the ability to use nylon as a food source, or the improvement in the ability to avoid predators by puffing up to a large size, or the ability to survive in an acidic environment, or an improvement in the ability to circumvent prey being immune to venom, or improve the ability to live on mine tailings with high levels of toxic heavy metals:

1. Birth of a unique enzyme from an alternative reading frame of the pre-existed, internally repetitious coding sequence", Ohno, S, Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 81:2421-2425, 1984.

39. C. Zimmer, How the pufferfish got its puff, Discover, Sept. 1997, pp 30-31 3. D. Grady, Quick-change pathogens gain an evolutionary advantage.Science, vol.274: 1081, 1996 (November 15). The primary research articleis JE LeClerc, B Li, WL Payne, TA Cebula, High mutation frequencies among Eschericia coli and Salmonella pathogens. Science, 274: 1208-1211, 1996 (Nov.15).

7. S Grenard, Is rattlesnake venom evolving? Natural History 109:44-49, July/Aug 2000.

4. Macnair, M. R. 1981. Tolerance of higher plants to toxic materials.In: J. A. Bishop and L. M. Cook (eds.). Genetic consequences of man made change. Pp.177-297. Academic Press, New York.

5. Toxic Tailings and Tolerant Grass by RE Cook in Natural History, vol90(3): 28-38, 1981

OK, "drives" is not the best word. I merely meant that selection is not the only known mechanism by which evolution (aka change in allele frequency over time) can occur.

Natural selection is by far the overwhelmingly predominant mechanism for changing allele frequency. Of course, you did note the objections to equating change in allele frequency to evolution, didn't you? Changing allele frequency is part of evolution, but evolution is a lot more than just changing allele frequency.

The other "major" way to change the frequency of alleles in population is chance. But, as you know from the equations, unless the population size is very small, chance alone has very poor odds of fixing an allele in a population and it works very slowly, taking millions of generations to either fix or eliminate an allele from a population. This is what allows population geneticists to determine whether changes in a population are due to genetic drift (chance) or natural selection.

Yikes! What on earth can you mean by designs? Assuming you're not an adherent of ID, let me try and guess.

I mean just what everyone else means by designs: "to devise for a specific function or end". Notice that you have "designed ... by natural selection". The presumption with ID is that "design" always has the attached prepositional phrase "by an intelligent entity". Thus, their argument is that if you see something that has a specific function or end, then it was manufactured (designed) by an intelligent entity.

Darwin's genius was in discovering an unintelligent process that also "devised for a specific function or end". Darwin agreed with Paley that living organisms exhibit traits that have a specific function or end. He just found another means -- a "secondary cause" -- to make them. Natural selection is an algorithm for producing designs: follow the steps and design is guaranteed. You can find this whole argument done in much greater detail in Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

Evolutionists have been tiptoeing around the issue of "design" for a long time. Dawkins used the term "designoid". I simply agree with Dennett that we ought to face the problem head-on. Let's challenge that hidden prepositional phrase used by creationists "by an intelligent entity" and realize that designs can arise by sources other than an intelligent entity.

But allele frequecies change regardless of this "pressure"

Please provide the equations and examples to show this. Hardy-Weinberg states (and shows mathematically) that, in populations meeting certain characteristics, allele frequencies are constant.

Futuyma discusses this on pages 236-263 of Evolutionary Biology.

He starts off by stating:

"The Hardy-Weinberg principle is the foundation on which almost all of the theory of population genetics of sexually reproducing organisms -- which is to say, most of the genetic theory of evolution, rests. Its importance cannot be overemphasized. We will encounter it repeatedly in the theory of natural selection and other causes of evolution."

"An important consequence of the Hardy-Weinberg principle is that no matter what the past history of a population may have been, a single generation of random mating yields the Hardy-Weinberg genotype frequencies."

After one generation of random mating, gene frequencies will be p^2:2pq:q^2.

Now, Hardy-Weinberg has several assumptions.

1. Mating is random. So sexual selection will skew that. (However, several studies have shown that sexual selection is a subset of natural selection, since selection is based on fitness characteristics of the mates.)

2. The population is very large. So, if there is a finite population, pure random chance could alter the gene freqencies in the next generation. This is random genetic drift.

3. Genes are not added from outside the population. Immigrants may carry different gene frequencies, and this is gene flow or migration.

4. Genes do not change from one allelic state to another. Such alteration is termed mutation.

5. All individuals have equal probability of survival and of reproduction. Natural selection upsets this.

So, Futuyma concludes (with italics):

"Inasmuch as nonrandom mating, chance, gene flow, mutation, and selection can alter the frequencies of alleles and genotypes,these are the major factors of evolutionary change within populations." pg 237

Now, Evolutionary Biology is the major textbook for college level evolutionary biology courses. If you want to argue with a textbook, you are going to have to provide considerable amounts of data to do so -- since the textbook already contains considerable amounts of data to back it.

True, but as I said in an earlier post, if I a) admit I am slightly abusing terminology and b) am willing to explain what I mean, I cannot see the problem. Terminology is, after all, entirely abtitrary.

Terminology is NOT "entirely" arbitrary. It is related to observations. I submit that your definition of "slightly" is different from the standard usage. I can't see a reason to alter the terminology. The problem is that your alterations lead to confusion and are unnecessary.

Of course that is the historical definition. But surely you can see that that any barrier that prevents sub-populations from interbreeding leads to precisely the same outcome, so there is no need for multiple definitions.

Yes, there is, because the generic term we are talking about is reproductive isolation. What are the processes that result in reproductive isolation? Allopatry -- geographical isolation -- is one of them. As you note, there are others. So calling ALL of them "allopatry" simply confuses the issue. If you want to talk about the generic topic, then say "reproductive isolation"

Oh by the way, I note that Mayr's classification uniformly uses (or pre-supposes) some form of isolation. Personally I do not see a functional distinction between them.

Mayr's classification is the different ways that reproductive isolation can occur. DUH. So he is describing the processes that result in reproductive isolation. You are trying to substitute "allopatry" for "reproductive isolation". Again, since we already have a perfectly good term -- reproductive isolation -- your substitution only leads to confusion.

If you mean "reproductive isolation" -- and you do -- just say so.