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ChristianKl comments on Open Thread Feb 22 - Feb 28, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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 ;)