Remember all those unique human hearing genes that evolutionists said must have undergone “accelerated” evolution because of human language, but then similar genes showed up in the gorilla too? Evolutionists had to conclude that not only was there accelerated evolution, but amazingly it must have occurred in parallel, in both the human and gorilla lineages. So if human language was the reason for the accelerated evolution in the human lineage, the cause in the gorilla lineage was “entirely different, but as-yet-unknown.”
Well now evolutionist PZ Myers is saying that spread out speciation processes and incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) solves the problem. The idea is that when a population gives rise to two species (cladogenesis) those two populations may not both include all the copies (alleles) of a gene, so particular genes may contradict the true evolutionary history. So if a gene fits the hoped for pattern, then they say the history of the gene aligned with the speciation event. But if a gene doesn’t fit the pattern, then they say it was because of ILS.
For added protection Myers throws in some meaningless barbs at his opponents (“Do you really think all the differences popped into existence simultaneously, at one instant when two populations of our last common ancestor discretely and completely separated? Of course not: you’d have to be a creationist to believe in something that stupid.”)
Myers needs the ad hominems because his ILS explanation doesn’t work. It’s a stretch to explain all the parallel evolution using ILS. But incredibly, Myers claims not only that ILS explains the results, but in fact it is all expected. So what was surprising and puzzling for evolutionists rapidly has become yet another confirmation.
Of course, as usual, the evolutionist’s certainty never came from the contradictory evidence that was force fit into just-so stories. It was from religion. As Myers concludes, “the observation of ILS contradicts creationism.” Well if that’s true, then yes, Myers is absolutely correct. Evolution is the right answer.
Religion drives science, and it matters.
[Reworded second paragraph]
That's not what ILS is at all.
ReplyDeleteYes, too simple of an explanation. But you can't just put all those parallel changes into the ILS box.
DeleteWhoever said ILS explains *all* "parallel" changes? You made that up. And, because you're dumb, you have no sense, and give your readers no sense, of the *proportions* of the data that support or weaken any particular hypothesis. You also give them no sense of scale about phylogenies. The difference between putting humans as the sister group of chimps vs. gorillas is a *tiny* difference in phylogenetic trees, when you are looking at a tree of mammals or vertebrates, for instance. You never see humans grouping with lizards and chimps with birds. Cornelius regularly makes the common, and idiotic, creationist mistake of confusing minor differences in phylogenetic trees for being absolute, catastrophically different phylogenetic trees. It's just as dumb as when YECs argue that because different measurements of the age of the Earth vary by tens of millions of years, the whole idea of an old Earth is crap. They ignore that this is less than 1% uncertainty. And this, not dogma or religion or whatever, is why scientists detest creationists like Cornelius, and they always will, until creationists stop making dumb mistakes and start apologizing for them (like actual good Christians would) and also apologizing for the baseless insults they, in their ignorance, toss at scientists every day.
ReplyDeleteAs for ILS -- What ILS explains is what proportion of well-resolved trees of small portions of the genome will support a particular relationship in overall species-level tree (e.g., humans-chimps as sister groups). It only applies to situations in which the time between one speciation event and the next is small relative to the coalescence time for genes (which depends on the population size). But within that domain, ILS is unavoidable. The only way to NOT get ILS is if each species' ancestral population size = 1. Which is the creationist hypothesis, not the evolutionist one.
NickM
DeleteWhoever said ILS explains *all* "parallel" changes? You made that up.
I see, so when Myers said “So sometimes a mutation unique to one extant lineage appeared long before the split, and was just sorted at the time of separation into one lineage or the other,” “simply not a problem for evolutionary theory,” and “you just have to appreciate the population nature of evolution,” he did not mean that his explanations covered *all* the gorilla-human comparisons, just some of them. He just forgot to mention that he doesn’t have good explanations for those others, aside from “it was parallel evolution you dummy!”
And, because you're dumb, you have no sense
I wish that were the case. But while I’m not a smart guy like you, I’m afraid the problem lies elsewhere.
The difference between putting humans as the sister group of chimps vs. gorillas is a *tiny* difference in phylogenetic trees, when you are looking at a tree of mammals or vertebrates, for instance. You never see humans grouping with lizards and chimps with birds. Cornelius regularly makes the common, and idiotic, creationist mistake of confusing minor differences in phylogenetic trees for being absolute, catastrophically different phylogenetic trees.
You of all people should know better. The problem here is not that there is a minor discrepancy in some phylogeny which can be ascribed to the usual evolutionary “noise.” The problem is that what the results portend. What is needed here is massive parallel, accelerated molecular evolution. Evolutionists had given a reason for this in the one lineage (humans) and it doesn’t work for gorillas. These things are not just meaningless problems that can be swept under the rug at no cost to a theory.
Your failure to do the Christian thing and admit an obvious error, even though you implicitly acknowledge the error by failing to even try to defend your assertions about ILS, is noted.
DeleteNickM, I noticed that you never responded to the falsification of neo-Darwinian evolution by quantum entanglement/information on UD:
DeleteFalsification Of Neo-Darwinism by Quantum Entanglement/Information
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p8AQgqFqiRQwyaF8t1_CKTPQ9duN8FHU9-pV4oBDOVs/edit?hl=en_US
But now another pressing concern has cropped up Nick. Now it has come to my attention that consciousness must precede quantum wave collapse to a particle state.
“I’m going to talk about the Bell inequality, and more importantly a new inequality that you might not have heard of called the Leggett inequality, that was recently measured. It was actually formulated almost 30 years ago by Professor Leggett, who is a Nobel Prize winner, but it wasn’t tested until about a year and a half ago (in 2007), when an article appeared in Nature, that the measurement was made by this prominent quantum group in Vienna led by Anton Zeilinger, which they measured the Leggett inequality, which actually goes a step deeper than the Bell inequality and rules out any possible interpretation other than consciousness creates reality when the measurement is made.” – Bernard Haisch, Ph.D., Calphysics Institute, is an astrophysicist and author of over 130 scientific publications.
Preceding quote taken from this following video;
Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness - A New Measurement - Bernard Haisch, Ph.D (Shortened version of entire video with notes in description of video)
http://vimeo.com/37517080
Moreover, the argument for God from consciousness can be framed like this:
1. Consciousness either preceded all of material reality or is a 'epi-phenomena' of material reality.
2. If consciousness is a 'epi-phenomena' of material reality then consciousness will be found to have no special position within material reality. Whereas conversely, if consciousness precedes material reality then consciousness will be found to have a special position within material reality.
3. Consciousness is found to have a special, even central, position within material reality.
4. Therefore, consciousness is found to precede material reality.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kpDwWetu66fBRlPM7zjA5BpHzcu5wBY7AdB7gOz51OQ/edit
Thus Nick how does neo-Darwinian evolution retain its claim for 'purely material processes' evolving all life on earth when it is now shown that consciousness precedes the quantum wave collapse of every particle in the universe?
further notes:
Quantum Entanglement and Teleportation - video - (Theistic implications for creation and sustaining of universe discussed in description)
http://vimeo.com/38463906
Alain Aspect speaks on John Wheeler's Delayed Choice Experiment - video
http://vimeo.com/38508798
DeleteNickM, I noticed that you never responded to the falsification of neo-Darwinian evolution by quantum entanglement/information
I too, am interested in NickM's response to the falsification of neo-Darwinian evolution by quantum entanglement/information...
For what it's worth.
ReplyDeleteAlso, we can calculate the probability of a particular organismal relationship given gene trees, even when some of them are unsorted. So it's not a case of invoking some mechanism ot explain something that doesn't fit a preconceived pattern.
Great writeup David. Regarding your probabilities though, I suspect what you are referring to are methods which, one way or another, assume evolution to begin with. IOW, I suspect you are not computing a theory-neutral, objective, probability that two species share a particular common ancestor.
DeleteAs of yet, you still haven't explain how it's possible to extrapolate observations without first putting them into an explanatory framework, which would be necessary for one to have a "a theory-neutral, objective, probability".
DeleteCH:It’s a stretch to explain all the parallel evolution using ILS.
ReplyDeleteCan you point me to where PZ Myers attempts to explain any, let alone all, of the parallel evolution between humans and gorillas (e.g. hearing-related gene accelerations) using ILS?
Myers follows Scally et al. in using ILS to explain the fraction of the genomes where human-gorilla homologues are more similar than human-chimpanzee homologues.
Where is the evidence that the "parallel evolution" here even involved identical changes? My sense of it is there is just evidence for increased rates of substitution and for selective events in both lineages. This in no way necessarily means identical changes. You can't just read some simplified summary in a news story, make the dumbest possible interpretation, and assume that's correct.
DeleteYes, indeed. Amongst the accelerated genes there will be faster divergence not parallel nucleotide substitutions, or sequence convergence.
DeleteIt seems to me that Cornelius is conflating these accelerations with the 15% of the genome where ((H,G)C) instead of ((H,C)G).
If this is the case, it is a misunderstanding of ILS and parallel evolutioh.
Perhaps you can clarify your position, Cornelius?
Where is the evidence that the "parallel evolution" here even involved identical changes?
DeleteIn Cornelius' bad faith.
Dr. Hunter, should not neo-Darwinists, being as exceptionally smart in their own minds as they take themselves to be, demonstrate that their mechanism is even plausible, before they extrapolate it to explain the origination of all life on earth?
ReplyDeleteExperimental Evolution in Fruit Flies (35 years of trying to force fruit flies to evolve in the laboratory fails, spectacularly) - October 2010
Excerpt: "Despite decades of sustained selection in relatively small, sexually reproducing laboratory populations, selection did not lead to the fixation of newly arising unconditionally advantageous alleles.,,, "This research really upends the dominant paradigm about how species evolve," said ecology and evolutionary biology professor Anthony Long, the primary investigator.
http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/literature/2010/10/07/experimental_evolution_in_fruit_flies
Waiting Longer for Two Mutations - Michael J. Behe
Excerpt: Citing malaria literature sources (White 2004) I had noted that the de novo appearance of chloroquine resistance in Plasmodium falciparum was an event of probability of 1 in 10^20. I then wrote that 'for humans to achieve a mutation like this by chance, we would have to wait 100 million times 10 million years' (1 quadrillion years)(Behe 2007) (because that is the extrapolated time that it would take to produce 10^20 humans). Durrett and Schmidt (2008, p. 1507) retort that my number ‘is 5 million times larger than the calculation we have just given’ using their model (which nonetheless "using their model" gives a prohibitively long waiting time of 216 million years). Their criticism compares apples to oranges. My figure of 10^20 is an empirical statistic from the literature; it is not, as their calculation is, a theoretical estimate from a population genetics model.
http://www.discovery.org/a/9461
Stephen Meyer - Functional Proteins And Information For Body Plans - video
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4050681
The Origin at 150: is a new evolutionary synthesis in sight? - Koonin - Nov. 2009
Excerpt: The edifice of the modern synthesis has crumbled, apparently, beyond repair.
http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/literature/2009/11/18/not_to_mince_words_the_modern_synthesis
Hey, these are some pretty good points. What do the Darwinists here have to say about these findings?
DeleteI'm particularly interested in Thorton explaining away the fruit fly experiments.
When evolutionists draw targets before all the data is known, their predictions are usually wrong.
ReplyDeleteWhen this happens they invent another acronym to accommodate whatever is found. They draw a new target around the newly contrived acronym and then beat their chests to celebrate that evolution is once again confirmed. This is what happens when a weak hypothesis is turned into dogma that is not allowed to be challenged.
Sad but true...
DeleteWhen this happens they invent another acronym to accommodate whatever is found
ReplyDeleteWhat, do you mean ILS? That's the only acronym getting used here.
ILS is a problem that has been getting addressed for 30 years, i.e. Kingman's (1982) coalescent theory.
And rather than the 30-year-old coalescent theory having been made up to accommodate ILS in the gorilla genome, it quantitatively predicts it.
Funny how Tedford projects over his own ignorance. Acronym obfuscation is exactly the mark of ID "scholarship".
Delete