efalken comments on Open Thread Feb 22 - Feb 28, 2016 - Less Wrong
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The years thing seems to make everything probable, because we have basically 600 MM years of evolution from something simple to everything today, and that's a lot of time. But it is not infinite. When we look at what evolution actually accomplishes in 10k generations, it is basically a handful of point mutations, frameshifts, and transpositions. Consider humans have 50MM new functioning nucleotides developed over 6 million years from our 'common ape' ancestor: where are the new unique functioning nucleotides (say, 1000) in the various human haplogroups? Evolution in humans seems to have stopped. Dawkins has said given enough time 'anything' can happen. True, but in finite time a lot less happens.
They've been looking at E. coli for 64000k+ generations. That's where we should see something, and instead all we get is turning a gene that is sometimes on, to always on (citT), via a mutation that put it near a different promoter gene. That's kinda cool, and I admit there's some evolution, but it seems to have limits.
But, thanks for the respectful tone. I think it's important to remember that people who disagree with you can be neither stupid or disingenuous (there's a flaw in the Milgrom-Stokey no-trade theorem, and I think it's related to the 'Fact-Free Learning' paper of Aragones et al.)
There's your flaw in reasoning. 64000k is relatively tiny. But more importantly bacteria's today are highly optimized while bacteria's 2 billion years ago when the flagellum evolved weren't. I would expect more innovation back then.
One example for that optimization is that human's carry around a lot of pseudogenes. Those are sequences that were genes and stopped being genes when a few mutations happened.
Carrying those sequences around is good for innovation as far as producing new proteins that serve new functions.
The strong evolution pressure that exists on E-coli today results in E-coli not carrying around a lot of pseudogenes. Generally being near strong local maxima also reduces innovation.
If you want to look at new bacterias with radical innovations the one's in Three Mile Island.
No evolution in humans hasn't stopped.
It is strong enough that natives skin color strongly correlates to their local sunlight patterns. We don't only have black native people at the equator in Africa but also in South America. Vitamin D3 seems to be important enough to exert enough evolutionary pressure.
In area's with high malaria density in West Africa 25% have the sickle cell trait. It's has much lower prevelance in Western Europe where there's less malaria.
Western Europe has much higher rates of lactose intolerance than other human populations.
Those are the examples I can bring on the top of my head. There are likely other differences. Due to the current academic climate the reasons for the genetic differences between different human haplogroups happen to be underresearched. I would predict that this changes in the next ten years but you might have to read the relevant papers in Chinese ;)
The 10,000 Year Explosion disagrees; to quote my own earlier summary of it:
Allele variation that generates different heights or melanin within various races, point mutations like sickle cell, the mutations that generate lactose tolerance in adults, or that affect our ability to process alcohol, are micro-evolution. They do not extrapolate to new tissues and proteins that define different species. I accept that polar bears descended from a brown bear, that the short-limb, heat-conserving body of an Eskimo was the result of the standard evolutionary scenario. I have no reason to doubt the Earth existed for billions of years.
Humans have hundreds of orphan genes unique among mammals. To say this is just an extension of micro-evolution relies on the possibility it could happen, but you need 50MM new nucleotides that work to arise within 500k generations. Genetic drift could generate that many mutations, but the chance these would be functional assumes proteins are extremely promiscuous. When you look at what it takes to make a functioning protein within the state-space of all amino acid sequences, and how proteins work in concert with promoter genes, RNA editing, and connecting to other proteins, the probability this happened via mutation and selection is like a monkey typing a couple pages of Shakespeare: possible, but not probable.
This all argues for a Creator, who could be an alien, or an adolescent Sim City programmer in a different dimension, or a really smart and powerful guy that looks like Charlton Heston. The argument for a Christian God relies on issues outside of argument by design
You claimed that evolution in humans seems to have stopped. Kaj_Sotala gave you evidence that it hasn't. Of course the examples he gave were of "micro-evolution"; what else would you expect when the question is about what's happened in recent evolution, within a particular species?
There's some reason to think that most human "orphan genes" are actually just, so to speak, random noise. Do you have good evidence for hundreds of actually useful orphan genes?
I'm curious what you think the earth looked like during those billions of years. Scientists have pretty concrete ideas of what things were like over time: where the continents were, which species existed at which times, and so on. Do you think they are right about these things, or is it all just guesswork?
When I was younger I thought that evolution was false, but I started to change my mind once I started to think about that kind of concrete question. If the dating methods are generally accurate (and I am very sure that they are), it follows that most of that scientific picture is going to be true.
This wouldn't be inconsistent with the kind of design that you are talking about, but it strongly suggests that if you had watched the world from an external, large scale, point of view, it would look pretty much like evolution, even if on a micro level God was inserting genes etc.
White skin, blue eyes, lactose digestion in adulthood... (some people say even consciousness)... are relatively recent adaptations.
What did you expect, tentacles? ;)