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All of efalken's Comments + Replies

Open Thread Feb 22 - Feb 28, 2016
efalken10

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.

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3gjm
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?
5gjm
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?
0entirelyuseless
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.
Open Thread Feb 22 - Feb 28, 2016
efalken50

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? E... (read more)

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7Kaj_Sotala
The 10,000 Year Explosion disagrees; to quote my own earlier summary of it:
8ChristianKl
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 ;)
5Viliam
White skin, blue eyes, lactose digestion in adulthood... (some people say even consciousness)... are relatively recent adaptations. What did you expect, tentacles? ;)
Open Thread Feb 22 - Feb 28, 2016
efalken30

Of the millions of proteins on the planet it is unremarkable most exist elsewhere, just as it's likely most parts in a car can be found in other machines. Further, these aren't identical proteins, merely 'homologous' ones, where there's a stretch of, say, a 70% match over 40% of the protein, so that makes this finding not surprising (lug nut in engine A like fastener in engine B). A Type 3 Secretory System has about 1/3 of the proteins in a flagellum (depends which T3SS, which flagellum), but to get from one to the other needs probably ten thousand new nu... (read more)

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4ChristianKl
Any present version of a protein that evolved >1,000,000,000 years ago is only homologous and not identical to it's predecessor. A billion years does happen to be really long, especially if you have very many tiny spots of life all around the planets that evolve on their own. What works in a lab in a few years is radically different than what works in billions of billions of parallel experiments done for billions of years. How do you judge something to be a new protein complex? Bacteria's pass their plasmides around. E.coli likely hasn't good radically new protein complexes in the last millions of years so anything it does presently is highly optimized and proteins are only homologous to their original functions. I think you are more likely to find new things in bacteria's that actually adept to radically new enviroments.
Open Thread Feb 22 - Feb 28, 2016
efalken110

I'm a big Eliezer fan, and like reading this blog on occasion. I consider myself rational, Dunning-Kruger effect notwithstanding (ie, I'm too dumb or biased to know I'm not dumb or biased, trapped!). In any case, I think the above is pretty good, but I would stress the ID portion of my paper, which is in the PDF not the post, is that the evolutionary mechanism as observed empirically scales O(2^n), not O(n), generally, where n is the number of mutations needed to create a new function. Someday we may see evolution that scales, at which point I will change ... (read more)

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2Gunnar_Zarncke
The question is: Would somebody who builds his argument on one more missing step reverse his stance when that more step is also found or would he just point out the next currently missing bit?
5MrMind
This is the part I cannot wrap around my mind: let's say that evolution, as it's presently understood, cannot explain the totality or even the birth of the life evolved on this planet. How can one jump from "not explained by present understanding of evolution" to "explained by a deity"? I mean, why the probability of the supernatural is so low compared to say, intelligent aliens intervention, panspermia or say a passing black hole that happens to create a violation of the laws of biochemistry? Have I understood correctly that, once estabilished for whatever reason that a deity exists, that you choose which deity exactly based on your historical and moral preferences?
5ChristianKl
The evolution of the flagellum works because proteins used in it are useful in other context:
On Terminal Goals and Virtue Ethics
efalken40

Ever notice sci-fi/fantasy books written by young people have not just little humor, but absolutely zero humor (eg, Divergent, Eragon)?

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1mare-of-night
I haven't noticed it in my reading, but I'm probably just not well-read enough. But I'm pretty sure the (longform story, fantasy genre) webcomic script I wrote at 17 was humorless, or nearly humorless. I was even aware of this at the time, but didn't try very hard to do anything about it. I think I had trouble mixing humor and non-humor at that age. I'm trying to think back on whether other writers my own age had the same problem, but I can't remember, except that stories we wrote together (usually by taking turns writing a paragraph or three at a time in a chatroom) usually did mix humor with serious-tone fantasy. This makes me wonder if being used to writing for an audience has something to do with it. The immediate feedback of working together that way made me feel a lot of incentive to write things that were entertaining.
1Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
I actually haven't read either Divergent or Eragon. I've been told that the fantasy book I wrote recently is funny, and I'm pretty sure I qualify as "young person."