Forum Poll :Evolution Re:Majority of Americans reject theory of evolution (doh!)

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Well at least we're more pro-evolution than the country as a whole. What's up with the 3 people who choose option 4, though?

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I have a dim view of evolution mostly because I have a dim view of (macro)biology. Macrobiology is little better than a pastiche of fashionable prejudice held together by bones and duct tape, and nearly as unscientific a discipline as Freudian psychoanalysis.

I recall angus saying that some biology book he was reading didn't contain a single equation (i.e., a quantifiable observation), so he got bored and just put it aside.

There are plenty of quantifiable things with genetics. You can find books on biological Markov chains.

Did you know that 16 million people are a direct male desendent of Ghengis Khan (or maybe one of his not so distant ancestors)? They have a Y-chromosome, and from genetic mutations you can figure out about how long ago their common ancestor lived.

Don't tell me that biology has nothing quantifiable just because you're reading the wrong book.

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I have a dim view of evolution mostly because I have a dim view of (macro)biology. Macrobiology is little better than a pastiche of fashionable prejudice held together by bones and duct tape, and nearly as unscientific a discipline as Freudian psychoanalysis.

I recall angus saying that some biology book he was reading didn't contain a single equation (i.e., a quantifiable observation), so he got bored and just put it aside.

There are plenty of quantifiable things with genetics. You can find books on biological Markov chains.

Did you know that 16 million people are a direct male desendent of Ghengis Khan (or maybe one of his not so distant ancestors)? They have a Y-chromosome, and from genetic mutations you can figure out about how long ago their common ancestor lived.

Don't tell me that biology has nothing quantifiable just because you're reading the wrong book.

See, now you're confusing microbiology, which I have no problems with (as it is based on the detection of mutations in DNA structure or protein strands, both quantifiable by techniques like NMR, GPC, etc.), and, the larger, "grander" macroevolution, a brief run through can be seen here. And even there, I had to filter out a lot of polemic  nonsense just to find that one fact-based page.

In short, I find the connection between the first method, based on proven chemistry, and macroevolution, tenuous.

Define the difference.  If you're talking about speciation
1. A species can gradually evolve as a whole without speciation
2. Speciation has been observed.
 http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html

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Hmm. You quote one of the many sources that I threw out of my initial search.

Why did you throw it out?

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You can have little change in a population for long periods of time. See turtles and alligators, for example. That probably means that there's no minor modification that improves their fitness much. Eventually a major modiciation will occur through mutations, or an outside pressure will make something more desirable.

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What do you expect? It's a statistical model.

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There's a lot of math being used in biology. Computational biology is an exploding field. Some parts of biology are easier to quantify than others. Genetics is fairly mathematical, and so are predator-prey relations. So other things don't work as well. Biology is not the only science to suffer from lack of quantization in some areas. Geology doesn't do so great either.

Anyways, the fact that we don't have precise equations for everything in Biology now is no evidence against evolution.

Ever hear of genetic algorithms?

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Hmm. You quote one of the many sources that I threw out of my initial search.

Why did you throw it out?

...Rest of thread...

The quality of a source is nearly as important as the source itself, so I throw out every web site search result that (1) is not written by someone with credentials in the field (2) poorly referenced (i.e. no peer reviewed journals) or not referenced at all (3) has a polemic or apologetic nature.

The source you found came from a Usenet discussion group, so out it went. I don't bother citing cranks, whether the crank support my argument or not. The data do that for themselves.

So, following my own criteria, I found a delightful little page from your university that couples statistical algorithms to the mutations of DNA. They even wrote a PostScript book on the subject that I've downloaded. Wild stuff.

However, in the PostScript book, the models they derive are applied to point mutations in specific creatures, namely Drosophilia. Yes, the models describe mutation rates of DNA over generations of one creature (well-characterized by biochemical methods), but they don't describe mutation rates in populations of the same creature, which is the basis of macroevolution.

To be truthful, I'm curious about the direction that research will take, so I will suspend my judgement until those computational biologists create theorems that can describe mutation rates in statistical ensembles of genomes.   

I already told you, movement of a population's genes as a whole varies on how genetically fit they are relative to those of smallish changes. Some things seem to be more able to evolve that others. If their genes are a local optimum of genetic fitness, you will see less evolution. One problem is that what genetically fit means changes with outside pressures. You really can't state a theorm here, the system is too complicated. The best you could do is compare different populations and how fast they seem to evolve, and come up with a statistical distribution.

Have you ever heard of genetic algorithms? They do something similiar but with computer algorithms, FPGA, or walking robots.

As for your your criticism of talkorigins,

1. How do you know they don't have credentials?
2. You missed the very long reference list at the bottom.
3. What do you expect when they're refuting ID?

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Hmm. You quote one of the many sources that I threw out of my initial search.

Why did you throw it out?

...Rest of thread...

The quality of a source is nearly as important as the source itself, so I throw out every web site search result that (1) is not written by someone with credentials in the field (2) poorly referenced (i.e. no peer reviewed journals) or not referenced at all (3) has a polemic or apologetic nature.

The source you found came from a Usenet discussion group, so out it went. I don't bother citing cranks, whether the crank support my argument or not. The data do that for themselves.

So, following my own criteria, I found a delightful little page from your university that couples statistical algorithms to the mutations of DNA. They even wrote a PostScript book on the subject that I've downloaded. Wild stuff.

However, in the PostScript book, the models they derive are applied to point mutations in specific creatures, namely Drosophilia. Yes, the models describe mutation rates of DNA over generations of one creature (well-characterized by biochemical methods), but they don't describe mutation rates in populations of the same creature, which is the basis of macroevolution.

To be truthful, I'm curious about the direction that research will take, so I will suspend my judgement until those computational biologists create theorems that can describe mutation rates in statistical ensembles of genomes.   

I already told you, movement of a population's genes as a whole varies on how genetically fit they are relative to those of smallish changes. Some things seem to be more able to evolve that others. If their genes are a local optimum of genetic fitness, you will see less evolution. One problem is that what genetically fit means changes with outside pressures. You really can't state a theorm here, the system is too complicated. The best you could do is compare different populations and how fast they seem to evolve, and come up with a statistical distribution.

Have you ever heard of genetic algorithms? They do something similiar but with computer algorithms, FPGA, or walking robots.

As for your your criticism of talkorigins,

1. How do you know they don't have credentials?
2. You missed the very long reference list at the bottom.
3. What do you expect when they're refuting ID?

From the Questions and Answers page of Talkorigins:

Isn't the Talk.Origins Archive just some website that has no particular credibility? Those FAQs and essays aren't peer-reviewed, and many are written by interested laymen rather than specialists, so they can be ignored, right?

   We encourage readers not to take our word on the issues, but rather to look at the primary literature and evaluate the evidence. While materials on the Archive have not necessarily been subjected to formal peer-review, many have been subjected to several cycles of commentary in the newsgroup prior to being added to the Archive. Most of our materials provide links and/or bibliographic references to enable the reader to evaluate the evidence for themselves. While anyone can decide to ignore our materials, the Archive has been recognized as a valuable online resource by many well-known groups, magazines, and individuals. Further, a number of college courses have chosen to use materials from the Archive in their coursework. See: Awards, Honors, and Favorable Notices for The Talk.Origins Archive.

I don't take them on their word, and found independent literature on the the topic, exactly as the site recommends.

And from a site on Genetic Algorithms

Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are adaptive heuristic search algorithm premised on the evolutionary ideas of natural selection and genetic. The basic concept of GAs is designed to simulate processes in natural system necessary for evolution, specifically those that follow the principles first laid down by Charles Darwin of survival of the fittest. As such they represent an intelligent exploitation of a random search within a defined search space to solve a problem.

I could be a deep cynic like the authors of the physics textbook I'm studying and claim, "when a physicist speaks of a heuristic solution he is apologizing in advance for a sloppy and nonrigorous one," but because I am a chemist, I already know that plenty of science is already sloppy and nonrigorous.

Indeed, the GA site states:

GAs were introduced as a computational analogy of adaptive systems. They are modelled loosely on the principles of the evolution via natural selection, employing a population of individuals that undergo selection in the presence of variation-inducing operators such as mutation and recombination (crossover). A fitness function is used to evaluate individuals, and reproductive success varies with fitness.

The Algorithms

1. Randomly generate an initial population M(0)
2. Compute and save the fitness u(m) for each individual m in the current population M(t)
3. Define selection probabilities p(m) for each individual m in M(t) so that p(m) is proportional to u(m)
4. Generate M(t+1) by probabilistically selecting individuals from M(t) to produce offspring via genetic operators
5. Repeat step 2 until satisfying solution is obtained.

The paradigm of GAs descibed above is usually the one applied to solving most of the problems presented to GAs. Though it might not find the best solution. more often than not, it would come up with a partially optimal solution.

But I think I found the reason why evolutionary biologists find microevolution, which is indisputable, so pallid an alternative to macroevolution:

The attractiveness of macroevolution reflects the exhaustive documentation of large-scale patterns which reveal a richness to evolution unexplained by microevolution. If the goal of evolutionary biology is to understand the history of life, rather than simply document experimental analysis of evolution, studies from paleontology, phylogenetics, developmental biology, and other fields demand the deeper view provided by macroevolution.

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1525-142x.2000.00045.x

In fact, Dr Erwin is directly contradicting your view. You both can't be right.

I remember hearing something about a genetic algorithm that made a robot learn how to walk.


Most mutations have zero noticable effect. In mammals, a rate of 1 mutation per 500 million base pairs is typical, or around 6 base pairs out of the 3 billion in our DNA..
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11792858&dopt=Citation

Mutation rates aren't constant with respect to where you are in the genome.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=2911369&dopt=Citation


A crude calcuation is 3 base pairs per year, pgymy chimps are 1.2% different, so they differ by 12 million years of evolution. Since some of that evolution will be repetitive, we have a common ancestor about 7 million years ago.

Remember most of our DNA is junk, so most mutations are safely kept.

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/H/HominoidClade.html

Classifying species in terms of how they are related is very quantative now. Yes, not too long ago, it was more of an art than a science, but genetics has made quite a lot of progress since they found the double helix.