Re: West Virginia creationism

On Fri, 10 May 2024 23:09:28 +0200, Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:

On 13/04/2024 19:26, Bob Casanova wrote:

On Sat, 13 Apr 2024 16:17:50 +0200, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me>:
 

On 13/04/2024 01:58, Bob Casanova wrote:

On Fri, 12 Apr 2024 11:04:15 -0700, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Vincent Maycock
<maycock@gmail.com>:
>

On Fri, 12 Apr 2024 12:41:29 -0400, Ron Dean
<rondean-noreply@gmail.com> wrote:
>
<snip>

In the most cases where adaptations and minor evolutionary changes are
observed it's not because new information is added to DNA, but rather
there is a loss of information.
>
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-57694-8
>
Bad mutations seems to be the rule.

>
*Most* mutations are harmful, but to disprove evolution you need to
show that *all*  mutations are harmful -- those rare beneficial
mutations can be selected by and amplified through natural selection,
resulting in better-functioning organisms.
>

As I understand it, most mutations are neutral; the
beneficial and harmful ones are (approximately) equal in
number, and are far outnumbered by the neutral ones. But
don't expect your correspondent to accept any of that.

>
>
I understand the same thing on most mutations being neutral but do you
have a cite on beneficial and harmful ones being approximately equal in
number? From first principles you'd expect that once a system is vaguely
optimized (which all life is), changes that are harmful should be more
likely than changes that are beneficial.
>

No, I don't; sorry. I only (vaguely) recall that being from
several comments here, some by people (unlike myself)
qualified by training to make such a statement. As I recall
it, the comments were to the effect of "About 98% of
mutations are neutral, with the balance fairly evenly split
between beneficial and harmful". Your point is well-taken,
however, and it's something I never considered. I suppose it
depends on just how optimized the system is *in a particular
environment*, and how the environment is changing, since I'd
guess few mutations are inherently either beneficial or
harmful.

>
A propos of nothing I just ran into this paper which seems to speak to
the question:
>
https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/168/4/1817/6059315
>
I think it confirms the idea that beneficial mutations are less frequent
than deleterious ones; the thrust of the paper is that beneficial
mutations are more frequent than usually thought but that still works
out to under 10% for most of the numbers it actually gives. There is one
exception which I wonder might be the source of the commenters you
remembered, where apparently one paper found the half-and-half
distribution you describe in a mutation-accumulation experiment in
Arabidopsis Thaliana.
>
snip

The cited experiment by design biases the type of mutations likely to
be detected in the sample population, to those that produce the
"petite" variation.  Extrapolating the results from this experiment
specifically to a conclusion about the relative frequency of
beneficial mutations generally, unreasonably goes beyond the evidence.

--
To know less than we don't know is the nature of most knowledge