Friday, July 26, 2013

On Beating Dead Horses

I've mentioned this before but it bears repeating. One of my Ph.D. students (Sharon Shtang) wrote her thesis on sequence comparisons and phylogenetic trees. She found a quotation from Emil Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling in their 1965 review. They were commenting on using amino acid sequences to prove evolution. This seemed at the time to be an example of overkill since evolution was then, and is now, a fact. They said ...
Some beating of dead horses may be ethical, where here and there they display unexpected twitches that look like life.
I was reminded of this while reading Salvador Corova's latest post on Uncommon Descent because he refers to beating dead horses [If not Rupe and Sanford’s presentation (8/6/13), would you believe Wiki? In this case, yes]. I'm not going to make any comments. Read it and weep for the IDiots.
Theme

Mutation
Evolutionists reluctantly admit most evolution is free of selection and therefore non-Darwinian (neutral evolution). When pressed, they’ll say neutral drift is real, but they don’t like it when the dots are connected in a way that demonstrates neutral evolution refutes Darwinism, that there is a contradiction between Dawkins’ vision and neutral evolution! The way Darwinists deal with this violation of the law of non-contradiction is to pretend no contradiction exists. They’ll obfuscate and fog the issue with myriad technical terms and irrelevancies so that the illusion of non-contradiction is protected from public view. Confusion and the illusion of some higher knowledge are their friends, clarity and education of the public are their enemies.

If Dawkins had been faithful to the facts, he wouldn’t have even written The Blind Watchmaker because population genetics precludes his vision of evolution from being reality in anything but his silly Weasel simulations.

There is a simple formula from Wiki that says the rate of new mutations is the rate at which new mutations become features of every member of the population (a process called fixation).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_(population_genetics)


The population size is N and the Greek symbol μ (mu) is the mutation rate.

It stands to reason a slightly deleterious mutation is almost neutral, hence, approximately speaking the rate that slightly deleterious mutations become part of every member of the population is on the same order of the slightly deleterious mutation rate. That means if every human is getting 100 dysfunctional mutation per generation, about 100 dysfunctional mutations are getting irreversibly infused into humans every generation (a ratchet so to speak).

But as bad as that is, it’s actually worse in reality. Remember broken bacterial parts in anti-biotic resistance, or blindness in cave fish, or sickle cell anemia? Those are “beneficial” (in the Darwinian sense) mutations, but destructive in the functional sense. So it is actually generous the creationists are modeling the dysfunctional mutations as slightly deleterious (whereas a fair argument might actually model some of the dysfunctional mutations as “beneficial”). So the creationists are cutting Darwinists a lot of slack, and yet, even then the dysfunctional mutations will get fixed (become members of all individuals) in a population! Not to mention, lots of bad may get purged from a population only to get replaced with new generations of bad....

But obvious math is something Darwinism hates dealing with! The above equation should be painful evidence against evolution being some process of increasing complexity from a primordial virus to incredible minds like Newton or Einstein. Darwinist won’t come to terms with it, they won’t come to terms with even a computer simulation based on population genetic models. Oh well! But anyway, Christopher Rupe and John Sanford will be presenting the results of a computer simulation that illustrates the above equation. It’s sort of like beating a dead horse or beating living puppies. It’s not very sporting, but Darwinists keep propping up that dead horse for creationists to keep beating.


Zuckerkandl, E. and Pauling, L. (1965) in EVOLVING GENES AND PROTEINS, V. Bryson and H.J. Vogel eds. Academic Press, New York NY USA