Sunday, 18 October 2009

TIGER IN HILAND PARK FLAT

"I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I
may learn how to do it."

-- Pablo Picasso



/////////////////////A warm smile is the universal language of kindness." --William Arthur Ward



////////////////////////,,,speculate that the difference the author alludes to is that "historical facts" happened and are "recorded" end of story. No need for more experiments here's the f'ing fossils.

Whereas "scientific fact" is one that like gravity or quantum physics can only be proven through experimentation and theorising. It might after all be angels helping us to eat apples by pushing them towards earth and nothing to do with Newton.



///////////////Dawkins start using 'fact of evolution' and 'non-random process



///////////////........se of the word "random" mutations. Of course they are random to that extent that we don't yet (if ever) have enough knowledge to predict them. Obviously that does NOT mean that they are truely random in the absolute sense. Random is just a word for us not understanding a phenomenon.




//////////////////.........Mutations are genuinely random in 2 important senses:
(1) Which mutations occur is due to wavefunction collapses, which is genuinely indeterministic (as far as we can tell). This may not be true of the largest mutations such as gene or chromosome duplication, but it is certainly true of point substitutions for example.
(2) Mutations are good, bad or neutral, with no general tendency (or perhaps a slight negative one), i.e. adaptation is due to a bias in the success of mutations rather than in their occurrence.



////////////////.......n't think "random" means "something we don't understand". Mutations could be following a pattern we completely understand (a pattern based on the digits of pi, say) and natural selection would still take place. In any case, the word random has no "absolute sense" but can always be taken to mean "random for all intents and purposes", which is the sense in which scientists use it.




/////////////////////.......
1) Well, even quantum physics can't be random in the absolute sense. We might never be able to fully understand the mechanism, but a truely random phenomenon would be a DISASTER for ALL natural sciences. With true randomness I mean ZERO possibility to count probabilities or predict results. Would that not be quite a disaster for science, don't you think :-)

2) Well, I'm just writing of experience. The word random is misinterpreted in the most grotesque ways. Believe me. Talking about irreducible complexity, I can only say that ambivalence is quite common among the creationists I have met.



////////////////........tations definitely tend towarsd the deleterious, if they're in active genes. Consider that a one amino-acid change in protein X now changes the tertiary structure just enough that it no longer fulfills its prior function as it previously did... what is a realistic probability that the new structure will be better, functionally, than the old£ Another way of putting it would be that there are a much larger number of changes that will damage performance than those that actually improve it. The difference being that the deleterious mutations, if they're really lethal, don't have time to accumulate in the gene pool and show up.



//////////////////MOST MUTATIONS ARE DELETERIOUS



////////////////////....e crucial point is in the post-mutational selection rather than which mutations go on. However, as it counter-intuitively happens, the data show most possible mutations have no discernible effect on protein functionality. Cystic fibrosis is a classic illustration of this. It's caused by an especially rare type of mutation, a triple point deletion, whose reading frame position happens to result in codon deletion. Which codon is deleted? One of only about 8 in over 1,000 amino acid residues that would actually matter have been deleted. Indeed, although over 1,000 mutations of CFTR have been documented, only a handful are deleterious. How to make sense of this? Because all that matters in a protein's effects is the shape of its active site, which is only sensitive to a few of the many degrees of freedom in the structure because the active site is a tiny part of the whole molecule.



POST MUTATIONAL SELECTION IS WHAT MATTERS



///////////////Evolution exists, get over it.




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