Absurdity of evolution

[EarthScienceguy]

How is evolution even possible in light of the following?

1. Haldane's Dilemma

The cost of substitution Cs is 30 and it is paid off in installments (Ps)of 0.1 each generation. At that rate, it takes (Cs/Ps) 300 generations to pay the cost of substituting one gene. Haldane's conclusion was over the long term the average rate of gene substitution is no better than one gene every 300 generations. (Crow and Kimura, 1970 p 244-252; Crow 1968 p 168-173; Ewens 1979 p 252-256; Merrell 1981 p 187-193)

In a human-like population with a nominal generation time of 20 years 10 000 000/(20x300) = 1667nucleotides could have been changed. That is 0.000047% of the human genome. For 1% of the human genome to be changed in this fashion would take 210,000,000,000 years.

Haldane's dilemma ended the idea of selection causing evolution.

How is there time for evolution?
How can there be evolution without selection?

2. Kimura's Neutral theory of evolution

Kimura is credited with coming up with the solution to Haldane's dilemma. He suggests that neutral mutations is the way that most of the genome was changed.

Error catastrophe is when harmful mutations accumulate too fast and genetic deterioration becomes unavoidable. The standard genetic model the one model taught in every evolutionary textbook -predicts that error catastrophe occurs when the mutation rate gets much above one harmful mutation per progeny. (that is 0.5 harmful mutations per gamete per generation) At that rate, each progeny typically has one more harmful mutation than its parents. Above this threshold, the species would rapidly accumulate harmful mutations from generation to generation.

Kimura estimates that amino-acid altering mutations are roughly ten times more likely to be definitely harmful than neutral. (kimura 1983, p 199; King and Jukes 1969 p 795) That would indicate that the expressed neutral mutations cannot be more common than 0.05 per gamete per generation.

The neutral theory predicts that the neutral substitution rate is equal to the neutral mutation rate per gamete. (Kimura 1983 p 46-48) Therefore, expressed neutral mutations are substituted no faster than 0.05 per generation. In ten million years, a human-like population could substitute no more than 25000 expressed neutral mutations. That amounts to 0.00007% of the genome. So that means if 1% of the human genome were to change it would 14,000,000,000 it is closer to the age of the universe.

How would evolution have time to occur?

3. Punctuated Equilibria

Punctuated Equilibria was developed in response to seeing cladogenesis in the fossil record and not anagenesis. Punctuated equilibria has three central postulates.

Postulate 1: Most evolution occurs in short, rapid bursts (called punctuation events) followed by stasis. This produces a large morphological gap.

Postulate 2: Most evolution occurs at speciation (in other words, punctuation events are closely tied to speciation)

Postulate 3: Speciation has no inherent directionality. A daughter species tends to originate in a random, non-adaptive direction from the parent species.

Punctuated equilibria destroy the idea of discernable phylogeny in the fossil record. Punctuationists declare that evolution is a labyrinthine bush, not an identifiable tree.

How can evolution be true if phylogeny is not discernable in the fossil record?

Remine, Walter The biotic message

[Purple Knight]

What is the explanation for the rapid change of animals as we selectively breed them? These do not look like regular cats.

1. You are selectively breeding them. Selective breeding is not evolution. Because the driving force of evolution is the duplication of genes and genomes. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2364042 ... 0organisms.
https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/23/5/887/1058364

Yes, I want a long, thin cat with large ears, so I put the thinnest and longest with the largest ears together. I put the selective pressure there. I am doing this with a purpose in mind because these cats are attractive.

It is not beyond reason to think that Nature also puts a selective pressure there, only more cruelly and without a will. While I spay those with the least desirable traits, Nature simply kills them off.

A long, thin cat with large ears survives better in extreme heat.

Long, thin cat with large ears created by Nature (a serval):



Long, thin cat with large ears created by artificial selection:



I admit this is technically abductive reasoning, but it is particularly good abductive reasoning to assume that Nature is simply doing the same thing I'm doing. I know this process works. If it doesn't carry on out in the wild I would be shocked.

If there isn't enough time for changes to occur, how do these big changes occur within 100 years? These modern versions of breeds are not old. In fact, below, the Oriental Shorthair, did not exist in the extreme form until after 1950.

There are still cats.

I don't ask you to have faith that a new species will be produced. I ask people to trust what they can see. So I do ask you to look at a horse and a donkey, who can almost breed successfully with each other. They can make a sterile mule, but not a fertile offspring thanks to their different numbers of chromosomes. Since you admit that the driving force behind evolution is the duplication of genes and genomes, is it really that strange to think that perhaps one diverged from the other, and they became different over a very long time? If you saw both for the first time, you might think the horse was just an oversized, blocky donkey.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to Purple Knight in post #31]

Yes, I want a long, thin cat with large ears, so I put the thinnest and longest with the largest ears together. I put the selective pressure there. I am doing this with a purpose in mind because these cats are attractive.

It is not beyond reason to think that Nature also puts a selective pressure there, only more cruelly and without a will. While I spay those with the least desirable traits, Nature simply kills them off.

A long, thin cat with large ears survives better in extreme heat.

Long, thin cat with large ears created by Nature (a serval):

Long, thin cat with large ears created by artificial selection:

What you are describing is not what separates creationism and evolutionism. That is why I said they were still cats. What separates evolution from creation is the evolutionary belief that duplication and then the mutation is a mechanism for the diversity of life. Duplication of both genes and genomes is essential to evolutionary theory.

I don't ask you to have faith that a new species will be produced. I ask people to trust what they can see. So I do ask you to look at a horse and a donkey, who can almost breed successfully with each other. They can make a sterile mule, but not a fertile offspring thanks to their different numbers of chromosomes. Since you admit that the driving force behind evolution is the duplication of genes and genomes, is it really that strange to think that perhaps one diverged from the other, and they became different over a very long time? If you saw both for the first time, you might think the horse was just an oversized, blocky donkey.

I am sorry that you do like science. Haldane's Dilemma is not a creationist argument. Haldane' believed in evolution he was just honest enough to show how it was not possible for selection to cause the diversity of life because of the cost involved in selection. So your selection model that you are proposing with your kitty cats is simply not possible to cause the diversity of life by selection the cost is too great so it takes too much time to change even small portions of the genome.

[Purple Knight]

What you are describing is not what separates creationism and evolutionism. That is why I said they were still cats. What separates evolution from creation is the evolutionary belief that duplication and then the mutation is a mechanism for the diversity of life. Duplication of both genes and genomes is essential to evolutionary theory.

Right, but this is an example of diversity actually being achieved in 50 years. Dogs that have been bred for hundreds of years no longer resemble wolves. No one would say a pug was the same as a wolf if they didn't already know so. It's not a huge leap to suggest that what can happen in the lab can happen in the field. Assuming it can't would be the assumption you'd have to justify.

Haldane's Dilemma is not a creationist argument. Haldane' believed in evolution he was just honest enough to show how it was not possible for selection to cause the diversity of life because of the cost involved in selection.

I will go through a couple flaws with Haldane's Dilemma, but you don't have to read them. I'm not obligated to trust Haldane any more than you are obligated to trust any other expert. I especially don't trust that math always describes reality when it comes to biology, and I extra-especially don't trust somebody who crunches a few numbers and tells me something can't happen. The numbers turn out to be flawed or there were factors that weren't considered. If I'm not mistaken people had these arguments about flying machines until someone turned an electric air-popper for popcorn into a an airplane and flew it through space.

First, the limitation on how fast evolution can occur doesn't include multiple advances being made every generation and then recombining due to sexual reproduction. Next, it doesn't include detrimental (or neutral, most mutations are neutral) mutations that are possibly retained in speciation. I can think of two examples in human evolution: We're naked, and we have about 1/3 to 1/5 the strength of our chimpanzee cousins. The nakedness is an example of Nature giving us lemons, out of which we made lemonade. Losing fur is a detrimental mutation (don't make me post a picture of a naked cat) but we made it work, and that made us human. Haldane's dilemma is too linear. Theories like it, such as those that posit we could never get from gene A to gene B, never account for evolution working by two steps back and one forward. You can get a detrimental or neutral mutation that doesn't happen to be killed off right away and given a few more mutations, it can blossom into something helpful.

So your selection model that you are proposing with your kitty cats is simply not possible to cause the diversity of life by selection the cost is too great so it takes too much time to change even small portions of the genome.

It can produce diversity in a limited amount of time, the 50 years to produce an Oriental Shorthair proves that, the question is just whether it actually does happen in the wild.

[The Barbarian]

I am sorry that you do like science. Haldane's Dilemma is not a creationist argument. Haldane' believed in evolution he was just honest enough to show how it was not possible for selection to cause the diversity of life because of the cost involved in selection. So your selection model that you are proposing with your kitty cats is simply not possible to cause the diversity of life by selection the cost is too great so it takes too much time to change even small portions of the genome.

Kind of surprising that any creationist would still try to use Haldane's Dilemma in the 21st century. In a time where major creationist organizations like AIG and ICR freely admit new species, genera,and sometimes families evolve from other species, and where speciation has been directly observed, there isn't much point in mathematically refuting reality.

Before the invention of DNA sequencing technologies, it was not known how much polymorphism DNA harbored, although alloenzymes (variant forms of an enzyme which differ structurally but not functionally from other allozymes coded for by different alleles at the same locus) were beginning to make it clear that substantial polymorphism existed. This was puzzling because the amount of polymorphism known to exist seemed to exceed the theoretical limits that Haldane calculated, that is, the limits imposed if polymorphisms present in the population generally influence an organism's fitness. Motoo Kimura's landmark paper on neutral theory in 1968[2] built on Haldane's work to suggest that most molecular evolution is neutral, resolving the dilemma. Although neutral evolution remains the consensus theory among modern biologists,[3] and thus Kimura's resolution of Haldane's dilemma is widely regarded as correct, some biologists argue that adaptive evolution explains a large fraction of substitutions in protein coding sequence,[4] and they propose alternative solutions to Haldane's dilemma.

But here's the problem with Haldane's dilemma. He writes that:
In the introduction to The Cost of Natural Selection Haldane writes that it is difficult for breeders to simultaneously select all the desired qualities, partly because the required genes may not be found together in the stock; but, he writes,
" especially in slowly breeding animals such as cattle, one cannot cull even half the females, even though only one in a hundred of them combines the various qualities desired."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haldane%27s_dilemma

This is a pretty good argument if there is only one herd of cattle, and only one farmer selecting for favorable traits. But of course, reality isn't like that. In different populations of the same species, different traits may be selected for, and so long as this doesn't result in speciation, interbreeding can move these new trait quickly into other populations. So it's more than Kimura's neutral mutations.

Usually, creationists only invoke Haldane's Dilemma among themselves or to their own followers, these days.

[The Barbarian]

Haldane's Dilemma is not a creationist argument. Haldane' believed in evolution he was just honest enough to show how it was not possible for selection to cause the diversity of life because of the cost involved in selection. So your selection model that you are proposing with your kitty cats is simply not possible to cause the diversity of life by selection the cost is too great so it takes too much time to change even small portions of the genome.

It's not just observed speciations that refute your interpretation. It's that for example, the evolution of a new digestive organ in a population of relocated lizards (in about 20 years time) shows that major evolutionary changes can occur rather quickly, if the selection is strong enough.

Would you like to learn about that?

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to The Barbarian in post #34]

Usually, creationists only invoke Haldane's Dilemma among themselves or to their own followers, these days.

So are you denying the fact that deleterious mutations are 10 times more likely than beneficial mutations?

Eldredge and Gould are the founders of punctuated equilibrium. Here is what Eldredge had to say about the fossil record.

Paleontologists just were not seeing the expected changes in their fossils as they pursued them up through the rock record... That individual kinds of fossils remain recognizable the same throughout the length of their occurrence in the fossil record had been known to paleontologists long before Darwin published his Origin. Darwin himself ... prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search... One hundred and twenty years of paleontological research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin's prediction. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction is wrong.

The observation that species are amazingly conservative and static entities throughout long periods of time has all the qualities of the emperor's new clothes; everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Paleontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin's prediction pattern, simply looked the other way. Eldredge and Tattersall, 1982 p 48

Darwin's prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservativism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record. Eldredge and Tattersall 1982 p 48

Polymorphisms or SNPs are variants that are NOT mutations unless they result in a measurable change in phenotype and function.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to The Barbarian in post #0]

It's not just observed speciations that refute your interpretation. It's that for example, the evolution of a new digestive organ in a population of relocated lizards (in about 20 years' time) shows that major evolutionary changes can occur rather quickly if the selection is strong enough.

As you learned in the different thread these lizards of yours did not produce any new function they simply enhanced an existing function. And as you just learned polymorphism is not a mutation.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to The Barbarian in post #0]

It's not just observed speciations that refute your interpretation. It's that for example, the evolution of a new digestive organ in a population of relocated lizards (in about 20 years' time) shows that major evolutionary changes can occur rather quickly if the selection is strong enough.

As you learned in the different thread these lizards of yours did not produce any new function they simply enhanced an existing function. And as you just learned polymorphism is not a mutation.

[Purple Knight]

But here's the problem with Haldane's dilemma. He writes that:
In the introduction to The Cost of Natural Selection Haldane writes that it is difficult for breeders to simultaneously select all the desired qualities, partly because the required genes may not be found together in the stock; but, he writes,
" especially in slowly breeding animals such as cattle, one cannot cull even half the females, even though only one in a hundred of them combines the various qualities desired."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haldane%27s_dilemma

This is a pretty good argument if there is only one herd of cattle, and only one farmer selecting for favorable traits. But of course, reality isn't like that. In different populations of the same species, different traits may be selected for, and so long as this doesn't result in speciation, interbreeding can move these new trait quickly into other populations. So it's more than Kimura's neutral mutations.

The bolded part is really important, because in the wild, animals absolutely go through bottlenecks. At one point, they estimated there were only 33 individuals of the Florida Panther left in the wild.

Now, outside of the wild, in a domesticated population, you will get an individual with a super-trait, which everyone wants. I'm presenting this example because it's extreme and it's a single trait even though people don't really eat these (nonsense that they don't; I bet it would taste amazing with no nasty little bits of icky fat on):



Now, if left to their own devices, Haldane is right: Precisely because you are taking domesticated care of your herd and making sure it won't be decimated, you will never have every cow a muscle cow, even if the trait provided an extreme advantage.

But what actually happens is that others will see this trait and want it, so they will buy it. Once a male possesses the trait, his sperm will be collected and sold, and he will have virtually infinite offspring.

Let's say I want that trait. Well, it will be expensive, but I gamble it will pay off when I'm selling mouth-watering fatless steaks, so I dose every single one of my females with the sperm of that bull. It will take up to two generations to pay off, but I will reach a point where I can cull only half my herd and have all of them possess the trait. Since they're beef cattle anyways I'm happy to kill off half of them and eat the profits.

This does have consequences though. I know about it because I actually do breed animals. It's called the popular stud effect and you can read about it.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to Purple Knight in post #33]

Right, but this is an example of diversity actually being achieved in 50 years. Dogs that have been bred for hundreds of years no longer resemble wolves. No one would say a pug was the same as a wolf if they didn't already know so. It's not a huge leap to suggest that what can happen in the lab can happen in the field. Assuming it can't would be the assumption you'd have to justify.

And no one should consider your puppy example as evolution. Polymorphism is not considered a mutation.

I will go through a couple of flaws with Haldane's Dilemma, but you don't have to read them. I'm not obligated to trust Haldane any more than you are obligated to trust any other expert. I especially don't trust that math always describes reality when it comes to biology, and I extra-especially don't trust somebody who crunches a few numbers and tells me something can't happen. The numbers turn out to be flawed or there were factors that weren't considered. If I'm not mistaken people had these arguments about flying machines until someone turned an electric air-popper for popcorn into an airplane and flew it through space.

A person's perception will be incorrect when they do not understand the terminology needed to understand the problem. And another thing is that math is true whether you want to believe it or not.

First, the limitation on how fast evolution can occur doesn't include multiple advances being made every generation and then recombining due to sexual reproduction. Next, it doesn't include detrimental (or neutral, most mutations are neutral) mutations that are possibly retained in speciation. I can think of two examples in human evolution: We're naked, and we have about 1/3 to 1/5 the strength of our chimpanzee cousins. The nakedness is an example of Nature giving us lemons, out of which we made lemonade. Losing fur is a detrimental mutation (don't make me post a picture of a naked cat) but we made it work, and that made us human. Haldane's dilemma is too linear. Theories like it, such as those that posit we could never get from gene A to gene B, never account for evolution working by two steps back and one forward. You can get a detrimental or neutral mutation that doesn't happen to be killed off right away and given a few more mutations, it can blossom into something helpful.

What you are suggesting is not possible according to Darwin's theory. There is no reason why a weak naked ape should survive. Darwin's theory is in serious trouble not only from creationists but also secular biologists. https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/

It can produce diversity in a limited amount of time, the 50 years to produce an Oriental Shorthair proves that the question is just whether it actually does happen in the wild.

Again polymorphism is only considered a mutation if it changes the phenotype. So I don't believe your oriental kitty is from mutations in the genome. Especially duplication.