BILL NYE VS KEN HAM: TONIGHT AT 7 PM

[pocaracas]

I would like to dedicate this post to Luckie, since she loves long posts.

-SW

I read the whole thing!!!!
Do I get a cookie?

Ah, the debate... personal attacks, moi?

Not so much you, but sadly you’re the exception.

I always get that.... "you need to be more aggressive", they say...

Actually, it was indeed you... and it was a paper you referenced yourself! I almost forgot about that! look at our exchange back then:

*looking*

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Interesting paper...
Didn't read the whole thing, but I did read some particular bits:
- mutations arise primarily from the father zygote, given that the father produces millions of sperm per day, the odds of some error are greater than on the mother's side, who produced all the zygotes before birth... this checks out with something I read recently that stated that there are more autistic kids from older fathers than from younger ones. IF you're over 35, you have a higher tendency to produce an autistic child than if you're 20.
- Deleterious mutations are removed from the population in about 80 generations.
- On the other hand, there's this gem "In [...] people, recessive mutations may persist for thousands of generations. "

Thousands of generations.... and yet you claimed that "Humans have been around for fewer than 250 generations "... Another piece of your story that doesn't add up. Care to produce some evidence for this 250 number?
Or should I just take your word for it?

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I had forgotten about this, thanks for bringing it to my attention. I am not sure it is possible to claim that mutations are filtered out in 80 generations in higher organisms since that is over 2,400 years and we simply cannot observe that to be the case. I’d be interested to see how he’s arriving at that since it sounds like a rescue mechanism to me.

Well... dogs, cats and quite a lot of mammals can breed at one year of age... do those count as "higher organisms", to you?
Mice can breed after a few weeks making them perfectly suitable for a lot of experimenting.
But that 2400 year number comes from humans and a historically high estimate for the age at which people have kids.... 30.

Sanford’s research indicates that in higher organisms 90 percent of all deleterious mutations are not significant enough to be filtered out. As for the thousands of generations remark, just because Crow has his data correct does not mean he has his implications correct.

3-5% per generation?
Are you seriously considering this?
10 generations and you could get 50% degeneration..... 20 generations and total chaos... Tell me, do you accept that humans existed 20 generation ago?... That's about (1 generation every 30 years [high estimate, I know]) ~600 years ago!

It’s not up to me to arbitrarily accept or reject the figure. That’s the empirically measured rate per Lynch in 2010. Crow puts the rate at 1-2%, which is what Sanford agrees more with. Either way, these rates are very friendly to the Biblical timeline and view of history.

I haven't gone back to read the study and it is possible that he measured it well...
But did he take into account the self-correcting mechanism on the genes that became faulty over the last generation?
1% of the genetic makeup may degenerate every generation (ughh... bad word choice), but what is degenerated in one generation gets corrected over the course of the next few generations... if it is indeed deleterious.

You also said this just yesterday "90% of all deleterious mutations would be un-selectable."... why?
If a mutation is deleterious, it has an impact on the individual's ability to function and survive.

Yes, but not always enough to be selected against. Take for instance color blindness. It’s a fairly significant condition caused by several different mutations and yet it was never filtered out of the population.

Indeed... and also more prevalent in men.
In hunter-gatherers, telling the colors would be required when picking berries and some fruits... but not so for hunting... so, if women did the berry picking and men the hunting, then color-blindness would have had little impact on the person's ability to survive and, subsequently, to breed.
But if that condition arose in a woman, it could be fatal.
That's why it hasn't filtered out of the male population... no pressure.

There are some that only show up at a late stage of life and can be easily passed on, like Parkinson's... but 90%? I'm curious to know where you got that number.

I got that number from Sanford’s work; it’s also a number that is supported by Ohta who is the world’s most renowned expert on near-neutral deleterious mutations and their linear preservation.

Ah.... all your numbers pertain to "near-neutral deleterious mutations... ah... that makes more sense.
Why were you making a case for deleterious mutations as a whole when your source pertains only (or mostly) to "near-neutral" ones?


Now, to mildly address all the other replies to everyone else:
Why do you think that the bible is "the word of god"? The god which is infallible?
It seems to be a collection of texts written by men who believed in the existence of some sort of god... sometimes it even sounds like they believed there could be more than one.
If the contents of the bible were written by men, is it not to be expected that some parts are as fallible as any other text?
If it was written by men, and the Vedas were also written by men, and the Buddhavacana were written by men, and many other accounts claimed to be from some greater spiritual entity were written by men.... how do come to the conclusion that the bible is correct, while the others must be incorrect? What is your criterion?
Surely, I've asked this before.... I just can't remember the answer, right now...