Evolution

I saw nothing indicating that blogger was a microbiologist. His references were all Wikipedia, is that where microbiologists get their information on biology? That article actually follows back to this guy... 

Hey Goldy. Given up on your mission?

Despite the fact that a key assumption in evolution theory is false. But let's not address the point.

Then you didn't read the parts of the article where he quoted a microbiologist. What a surprise.

If I thought it was fact, I would have stated it as such, not called it a suspicion.

Here is an example of how I state a fact: you are wrong that the probability of inheriting a single mutation from one parent is 25%. It is, in fact, 50%. It is not a mater of me having a suspicion that you are wrong, or of my opinion differing from yours. Your claim is as factually wrong as saying 2+2=5.

What is uncertain is which of two possibilities are true. Either you truly misunderstand basic Mendelian inheritance and Punnet squares, or you intentionally misrepresent your understanding. Initially I leaned toward the former, but after you held to your claim despite exhaustive explanation and multiple examples at the level of high school biology, I now suspect the latter, especially since you seem intelligent enough that you ought to be able to grasp such a basic concept.  

That sentence (and the study) has nothing to do with the probability of inheriting mutations. All it is saying is that you can't predict the effect a single mutation will have on a trait, because traits result from many mutations acting in concert.

Ah. You think heredity in Mendelian inheritance represented in Punnet squares is like addition. Lol. You are wrong homer. Mutations are recessive, and recessive genes do not get expressed in offspring at a .50% ratio when only one parent carries the mutation. The ratio is .25%.

As I said to your other self-praising zealot, no one cares what you think of me. You are wasting your time when you prattle on about how your wonderfulness eclipses mine. No one cares. Least of all, me.

And what is the functional difference to you between your suspicion and fact? Because youy behavior for both looks the same.

What if when it's a single genetic mutation? Lol. Cue the jargon.

No sir. It is saying that a key assumption in evolution theory is false. But you deleted that part. Wonder why? If you delete it, it doesn't exist huh?

The question under discussion was the probability of inheritance, not the probability of expression. You continue to conflate the two. Not only that, but you don't even have the probability of expression correct.

Take blue eyes as an example. Blue eyes are due to a recent mutation in one gene. Call the original version B and the mutated version b.

Each person is one of BB, Bb, or bb depending on whether they have zero, one or two copies of the mutated gene. Because b is recessive, only someone who is bb has blue eyes. BB and Bb both have brown eyes. That is what it means for a gene to be expressed. 

So if you are Bb, you do not have blue eyes, but you still carry the mutation. You have inherited the mutation, but it is not expressed.

Our debate was about how a novel mutation that occurs in a single individual could spread, so the applicable case is where one parent is BB and the other is Bb. Look what happens.

    B     b

B  BB  Bb

B  BB  Bb

How many of the four offspring have the blue-eyed mutation (inheritance)? Two, or 50%.

How many of the four offspring have blue eyes (expression)? None, or 0%.

Yes, it is as straightforward as addition.

I responded to what you quoted in your post to me. How could I delete something you did not put in your post?

You are wrong. It isn't my responsibility to educate you. And my purpose is not your education.

And unfortunately, it had to be explained to you because you didn't read the paper, didn't understand the paper or just wanted to misrepresent science yet again.

That would be the electrical engineer quoting from Wikipedia. Notice how you lied about the author being a microbiologist and have now changed your story.

What about the Theory of Evolution.

WOW 500 is such a big number, probably more than there are believers in your religion.

Discovery Institute, is this now the comedy forum? bwuahahahahahaha

He was not quoting wiki, he was quoting a biologist who is also quoted in wiki.

microbiologist, he was quoted by the author of the article. Read it slowly. That might help.

You're lying again, the references used by that electrical engineer are from Wiki, it says so right in the article.

Clearly, you were fooled by the article into believing it was written by a microbiologist, which shows very poor reading comprehension skills.

Be careful now. You know bad things happen you you get rude.

If a comment is on wiki and on discovery, though a reference may cite wiki, it is ultimately quoting discovery which first had the quote.

But to show your pettiness, this is what you're buttaching about, where a quote comes from. You've got nothing Goldy. And it shows.

Discovery Institute is a well known den of liars who have an agenda. I understand why you would support them

Says the guy who has nothing. But please do go on supporting the Discovery Institute that we may understand your motives.

No, I'm not wrong. Anyone with a high school understanding of Mendelian inheritance knows that if one parent is genotype BB and the other parent Bb, 50% of offspring will inherit a b.

As you have also latched onto pettiness, I'll free you to go bore someone else.

You have a good day now.

I thought I would just add, he is correct. Not that Stronn needs me to defend him, just that you seem to be ignoring his argument repeatedly.

If You have two copies of a particular gene, your offspring will get one of them, and which one they get is random. Meaning there is a 50% chance one particular copy will be chosen.

As there is nearly a 100% chance your offspring will get 1 copy of a gene: - it means If you have a recessive gene if some kind, there is a 50% chance the one your child has will be recessive.

I suspect you are confused by terminology - if two parents have a recessive gene - the child has a 50% chance of having two recessive genes - and then having whatever genetic disorder comes with it - sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, red hair, etc.

It doesn’t really matter whether your blog post was quoting a programmer who was quoting a discovery institute page that was quoting Wikipedia, which was quoting a news article that quoted a biologist.

The claims were wrong, and that was shown in a portion of a post a few pages ago that you decided to not respond to.

What an excellent argument - the level of evidence and justification you just provided is unparalled.

i will be sure to put your name forward if they ever award a Nobel Prize in “telling people how wrong they are.

You'd win.

Now that you've returned repeatedly to tell me you're right, and your buddy is right, after you both have been dismissed, please take your Nobel and be off. Other than your petty buddy, I doubt if anyone is interested in you telling me yet again how "wrong" I am.

Surely you have a life.

The author quoted the author. You're getting funnier.

Ahh yes, you’re dropping the “I’m rubber, your glue” defense.

Let’s take a moment to mourn the arguments you have made that are no longer with us:

1.) You have dishonestly quote mined at least two examples of scientists in the media.

2.) you have dishonestly misquoted me: by omitting a line that put my statement into context. Using that omission to - twice- claim I was saying something I obviously was not saying.

3.) You and your blog post - made a claim about what should be seen in conserved proteins that relies on evolution stopping on one branch but not the other. And a claim that completely misunderstands the intent of CytC comparrisons.

4.) You’ve claimed earthworms and lizards and birds do not match Cytochrom C patterns - Deapite me linking you the ensembl genome browser, and giving you specific examples of what I’m doing, you haven’t bothered to provide any further details.

5.) Youve made claims about chronology that misrepresent what I’ve said: specifically that I’m claiming about relative times of divergence - and using this to claim I’m talking about absolute times.

6.) You dishonestly portrayed a list of dissenters to darwinism as significant and compelling; yet was dwarfed by qualified supporters of Evolution called Steve.

7.) Your discovery institute link ignore that we know virus insert the genes into our DNA - that’s how virus work. Both your links seem to object to the idea that viruses can inject genes into the genome, and if they do insert genes into the genome - they must not evolve - because the discovery institute said so.

8.) Your link on birds I’m sure was an accident on your part, as it is not talking about genes for the purposes of phylogeny, but to predict changes based on single gene changes. Genes work together - so individual changes are rarely down to single gene changes (though sometimes they are). This is not exactly controversial. So this appears to you simply throwing a link out without understanding what it even meant.

9.) You’ve claimed that a recessive gene copy has a 25% chance of being passed to a child - it has been shown by multiple people that this is wrong.

So you have repeatedly misrepresented scientists and me, have quote mined, and stated incorrect science which I have corrected. You now seem to have dropped everything you have claimed thus far, and moved on to the next manufactured controversy.

Sorry. I should not have assumed you had a life. Please don't be offended if I ignore you from now on, I do have a life.

You go crazy.........oops. No pun intended.

Readers can judge for themselves which one of us is being petty.

Since you are no longer making even a token effort at actual debate, I'm done trying to get you to address the point. Readers can verify easily enough which one of us is correct. 

You’re already ignoring me, and everyone else. This is the point of my reply.

You’re being repeatedly dishonest through multiple quote mined and deliberately misrepresenting peoples positions, you’re getting basic science wrong at a fundamental level, and when this is all pointed out, you drop every point you’ve made only to throw out another point you won’t defend.

Now, not only is it clear you either can’t or won’t bother to defend anything you’ve said so far, you ask seem to be intent in dragging the whole discussion into petulant name calling and childish insults.

So please, feel free to keep ignoring everything: it reflects much more poorly on you than it does anyone else.

Apologies for the delay, and the circus. Please bear in mind the plagiarism analogy - it’s a very good description of what’s going on.

So let’s start this post with some of the scientific systematics: what you can and can’t use, and what the problems with actually making measurement are.

This is an interesting problem that science is very interested in, but overlooked by many people, like EthanG, in terms of what is and is not valid to check. 

Often, you find creationists and creationist websites make incorrect claims about you should or shouldn’t see: only to find that when you use evolution to predict what a measurement should be - you see no such thing.

For example, contrary to what some people demand: Comparisons at individual gene levels are actually difficult, if not impossible. If a gene is the target of selective pressure - if a gene is changing as a species evolves - it may change rapidly, or lots. Between two closely related species. If evolution were true, it is no surprise that you would see random results if you picked any protein. So picking a random gene, getting a random result and then shouting ‘Ah-hah!’ Is largely meaningless. 

The amount of change evolution could produce on a gene over 10my, is likely pretty substantial, which is why we often limit ourselves to conserved proteins like CytC.

With the advent of genome sequencing, we can use genomes as a whole. We have sequenced thousands of species, and can compare these genomes.

We see exactly what is expected - whole genome analysis shows closely related species are very close genetically, whereas disparate species are not. Due to the nature of differences, once you get far away from two species, the number of changes between two organisms as a whole can become too large to meaningfully compare the whole organisms genome - there are so many differences, a percentage difference becomes much less accurate.

The reason is actually fairly simple, from looking at our own genes from one generation to another, we know DNA is both added and deleted by mutations. If two species of organisms diverged so long ago that large regions may have been added and removed over that time, it becomes harder to compare what remains.

But saying that, at the top level, comparing whole genomes in this way is still broadly accurate - but not accurate enough to trace exact lineages (and by exact lineages - I mean being able to accurately place multiple branches that diverged close to each other, especially when you understand how the percentage numbers are generated. There are some curious exceptions where we find some species have undergone massive amount of gene deletion and have much less DNA than others, and vice versa: but never the type of pattern that would outright invalidate evolution (for example two disparate species - works and humans - having substantial regions of identical DNA)

 

So, Cytochrome C shows the pattern, when you take into consideration the type of errors that can occur and apply them to whole genomes - that shows the same patterns too.

So from here, we now have three independent ways of determining how related species are - and they all give the same answer.

Following on from that: there are two specific additional predictions that have come from modern genetics I can talk about.

1.) we know that chimp and humans have a different number of chromosomes (humans have 1 pair fewer). If evolution is true, then we should be able to find one of the human genes being a fusion of two chimpanzee chromosomes. Which we do.

2.) Retroviruses add their DNA in to the host cell DNA to make that host cell copy it. It doesn’t always work, so your cells have deactivated virus DNA in them (note this is how many cancers end up forming), such sequences can end up being passed onto your children - and eventually into the genome of the species. We can track those sequences in humans and other animals too - and find the same correlations of hereditary there too. 

Red hair is a genetic disorder? Heh.

Evolution is manifest through speciation events.

There are examples of all of those.