Rumraket wrote:[
Weirdly, though, that just doesn't seem to be happening. Somehow we have a new variant called Omicron spreading rapidly and outcompeting the Delta variant, and with a considerable immune-escape component. So just when is this virus supposed to mutate itself out of existence? It's still around and appears to be going strong.

And now there are sub-variants of Omicron. I suspect it will take a few too many mutational turns and fizzle out eventually.

Wortfish wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

hackenslash wrote:What's that? You didn't know irreducible complexity is a prediction of the theory of evolution? Surely one of the knowledgeable people hereabouts has furnished you with the requisite information to aid you in your assessment. I've not been around for quite a while, and it's my first venture into the creationism forum proper since I returned, but Calilasseia is usually very on the ball about such things, and I find it hard to believe that he'd suffer such an oversight. It really doesn't sound like him at all but, as you say, you're being fair and balanced, so clearly the blame for this deficiency lies elsewhere.

Indeed, if you search for the term "Müllerian Two Step" in association with my name under "advanced search", you'll find I have no less than 13 posts covering this matter, many of them presenting the same paragraph from Müller's 1918 paper where the genuine concept of "irreducible complexity" was first presented. The easliest of these posts was my exposition on the bacterial flagellum posted way back in March 2010. The other 12 posts cover a 5 year span between 2010 and 2015.

To be fair, Wortfish didn't join until October 2016, so some of that past oeuvre of mine may have failed to come to his attention, but I suspect it won't now.

It amazes me just how many biological traits/parts can be dispended with by evolution to facilitate adaptation.

Presumably because you are not very knowledgeable about biology.

For example, the preponderance of biologists don't consider themselves adaptationists and widespread adaptationism hasn't been the norm for decades. It's actually Creationists who still employ adaptationist arguments for evolution, because they're ignore, hostile fuckwibbles who'd say any old shit about evolution just to pretend their antiquated mythology has a fighting chance.

You're outdated even in being outdated:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2784144/

Equally outdated is the (neo)Darwinian notion of the adaptive nature of evolution: clearly, genomes show very little if any signs of optimal design, and random drift constrained by purifying in all likelihood contributes (much) more to genome evolution than Darwinian selection 16, 17. And, with pan-adaptationism, gone forever is the notion of evolutionary progress that undoubtedly is central to the traditional evolutionary thinking, even if this is not always made explicit.

This article is from 2009.

Wortfish wrote:

Rumraket wrote:[
Weirdly, though, that just doesn't seem to be happening. Somehow we have a new variant called Omicron spreading rapidly and outcompeting the Delta variant, and with a considerable immune-escape component. So just when is this virus supposed to mutate itself out of existence? It's still around and appears to be going strong.

And now there are sub-variants of Omicron. I suspect it will take a few too many mutational turns and fizzle out eventually.

Great. Come back and post here when that happens.

Rumraket wrote:

Wortfish wrote:

Rumraket wrote:[
Weirdly, though, that just doesn't seem to be happening. Somehow we have a new variant called Omicron spreading rapidly and outcompeting the Delta variant, and with a considerable immune-escape component. So just when is this virus supposed to mutate itself out of existence? It's still around and appears to be going strong.

And now there are sub-variants of Omicron. I suspect it will take a few too many mutational turns and fizzle out eventually.

Great. Come back and post here when that happens.

Covid cases globally have been falling rapidly: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... -last-week

The virus is finding it increasingly more difficult to replicate itself and transmit to new hosts because of the mutational baggage that is carries.

I'm not sure "covid numbers are falling" justifies the conclusion "any old shit that popped into my head". I'm not sure it's got much to do with testing hypotheses either.

Maybe that's just me.

Wortfish wrote:

Rumraket wrote:

Wortfish wrote:

Rumraket wrote:[
Weirdly, though, that just doesn't seem to be happening. Somehow we have a new variant called Omicron spreading rapidly and outcompeting the Delta variant, and with a considerable immune-escape component. So just when is this virus supposed to mutate itself out of existence? It's still around and appears to be going strong.

And now there are sub-variants of Omicron. I suspect it will take a few too many mutational turns and fizzle out eventually.

Great. Come back and post here when that happens.

Covid cases globally have been falling rapidly: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... -last-week

The virus is finding it increasingly more difficult to replicate itself and transmit to new hosts because of the mutational baggage that is carries.

Nothing to do with the billions of doses of vaccines administered. No, must be because you poked the entrails of a goat.

Did wortfish just call the virus fat and lazy?

This is why groupers are superior.

Wortfish wrote:

Rumraket wrote:

Wortfish wrote:

Rumraket wrote:[
Weirdly, though, that just doesn't seem to be happening. Somehow we have a new variant called Omicron spreading rapidly and outcompeting the Delta variant, and with a considerable immune-escape component. So just when is this virus supposed to mutate itself out of existence? It's still around and appears to be going strong.

And now there are sub-variants of Omicron. I suspect it will take a few too many mutational turns and fizzle out eventually.

Great. Come back and post here when that happens.

Covid cases globally have been falling rapidly: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... -last-week

It's still around though, and there's no indication it's going to mysteriously disappear. Before cases drop, they rise, and after they rise they drop again. People become infected, cases rise, people develop immunity, cases drop, the virus mutates so it can re-infect previously immune, then cases rise, they develop immunity again, cases drop. Rinse and repeat.

All viruses that persist in the human population fluctuate in frequency and have their "seasons" where cases increase and then wane again. But they're all still around. Colds, flus, and all the other types of respiratory viruses, foodborne illnesses etc. They're all still around.

Come back here and post when SARS-Cov2 has no descendants detected in the human population. Until that happens, you coming here to post that cases are dropping is of no value or significance. The number you need is zero. Any frequency above zero, no matter where on a recent trendline, does not substantiate your case because we expect viruses to rise and fall in frequency all the time.

Rumraket wrote:
Come back here and post when SARS-Cov2 has no descendants detected in the human population. Until that happens, you coming here to post that cases are dropping is of no value or significance. The number you need is zero. Any frequency above zero, no matter where on a recent trendline, does not substantiate your case because we expect viruses to rise and fall in frequency all the time.

Already, many variants have of Sars-Cov2 have disappeared. This is how natural selection leads to extinction by eliminating diversity which means that the "organism" has less of a gene pool from which to adapt. Plus the fact that the high mutation rate of the virus will lead to deleterious changes that cannot be all filtered out.

Sounds like god’s got it sorted, then!

Pity about all the dead people, though.

Wortfish wrote:

Rumraket wrote:
Come back here and post when SARS-Cov2 has no descendants detected in the human population. Until that happens, you coming here to post that cases are dropping is of no value or significance. The number you need is zero. Any frequency above zero, no matter where on a recent trendline, does not substantiate your case because we expect viruses to rise and fall in frequency all the time.

Already, many variants have of Sars-Cov2 have disappeared.

And? So?

Wortfish wrote:This is how natural selection leads to extinction...

No, this is how external events (i.e. environment) lead to extinction.

Wortfish wrote:... by eliminating diversity which means that the "organism" has less of a gene pool from which to adapt.

Complete load of tosh.

Wortfish wrote: Plus the fact that the high mutation rate of the virus will lead to deleterious changes that cannot be all filtered out.

Deleterious effects can easily be 'filtered out' - it's called 'selection'.

You should read up about it some time, although you want to read a credible source rather than a fantasy fiction Creationist source.

Spearthrower wrote:

Deleterious effects can easily be 'filtered out' - it's called 'selection'.

You should read up about it some time, although you want to read a credible source rather than a fantasy fiction Creationist source.

Never heard of the mutational load? Selection cannot filter out slightly deleterious mutations very well. They just remain and are present in all of us. In relation to viruses, you might want to read https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4611170/

"Recent phylogenetic analyses indicate that RNA virus populations carry a significant deleterious mutation load."

Someone learned a new word. Deleterious.

Many syllables. Sounds smart.

Wortfish wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:

Deleterious effects can easily be 'filtered out' - it's called 'selection'.

You should read up about it some time, although you want to read a credible source rather than a fantasy fiction Creationist source.

Never heard of the mutational load? Selection cannot filter out slightly deleterious mutations very well. They just remain and are present in all of us. In relation to viruses, you might want to read https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4611170/

"Recent phylogenetic analyses indicate that RNA virus populations carry a significant deleterious mutation load."

Which perfectly establishes the point of my previous post: you need to stop lending credulity to Creationist propaganda and actually learn about the subject from credible sources.

You are naively regurgitating the latest catchy disinformation churned out by your preferred ideological propaganda outlet without having any ability to judge the value of what they're claiming because all of the information you have on evolution is derived from the same bullshit source.

If you were not naively regurgitating disinformation but instead were interested in the topic honestly, you would obviously know very well that all of this is STILL covered completely by selection, because comparing 2 individuals of a species, the individual with fewer deleterious mutations will still on average produce more surviving offspring.

You should read up about it some time, although you want to read a credible source rather than a fantasy fiction Creationist source.

Spearthrower wrote:
If you were not naively regurgitating disinformation but instead were interested in the topic honestly, you would obviously know very well that all of this is STILL covered completely by selection, because comparing 2 individuals of a species, the individual with fewer deleterious mutations will still on average produce more surviving offspring.

It depends on the strength of selection, not the number of mutations. You, incorrectly, claimed that selection weeds out all deleterious variations. It doesn't. All of us inherit slightly harmful mutations that marginally degrade our survival chances.

Wortfish wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:
If you were not naively regurgitating disinformation but instead were interested in the topic honestly, you would obviously know very well that all of this is STILL covered completely by selection, because comparing 2 individuals of a species, the individual with fewer deleterious mutations will still on average produce more surviving offspring.

It depends on the strength of selection, not the number of mutations. You, incorrectly, claimed that selection weeds out all deleterious variations. It doesn't. All of us inherit slightly harmful mutations that marginally degrade our survival chances.

In what regard are these mutations bad, if they don't result in a given organism falling prey to natural selection?

Wortfish wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:
If you were not naively regurgitating disinformation but instead were interested in the topic honestly, you would obviously know very well that all of this is STILL covered completely by selection, because comparing 2 individuals of a species, the individual with fewer deleterious mutations will still on average produce more surviving offspring.

It depends on the strength of selection, not the number of mutations.

No, it depends on the amount of deleterious mutations and what those mutations are. This is simply because each one is lowering the fitness of the individual - more deleterious impacts on the well-being of that individual, the greater the chance for that individual to fail to reproduce, or to reproduce as much as an individual suffering fewer deleterious mutations.

The strength of selection doesn't necessarily come into it - we're not talking adaptive evolution, but rather whether an organism can survive and reproduce with the unique array of genes it possesses.

Wortfish wrote: You, incorrectly, claimed that selection weeds out all deleterious variations. It doesn't.

Ahh then you will be able to quickly and easily quote me saying that 'selection weeds out all deleterious variations', won't you?

Or you'll acknowledge that you're not accurately rendering what I actually wrote.

Wortfish wrote:All of us inherit slightly harmful mutations that marginally degrade our survival chances.

Yes, I know.... just as I know that these aren't adding up in successive generations, building up a deleterious genome over time, which is what the Creationist propaganda outlet teat you're slurping on has told you.

But you don't know why this is the case because your 'knowledge' here is micrometers deep, which is why it's ironic that you believe you can lecture other people about a specialist topic you're so poorly informed about. Your belief in magical sky men doesn't mean you simply have mastery over all mundane knowledge, chap. You still gotta do the hard work, I'm afraid.

I will tell you why so you can pretend you knew all along.

It's because those slightly harmful mutations are not in the germ line, but rather in somatic cells. Those statistically shuffled mutations of somatic cells impact the life of the individual possessing them - for better, for worse, or negligibly - but have no impact whatsoever on descendants because they're not heritable.

Go on, keep up the pretense that you know what you're talking about, despite making such elementary errors; it's what a good God-fearing Christian does, amirite?

Greg the Grouper wrote:

Wortfish wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:
If you were not naively regurgitating disinformation but instead were interested in the topic honestly, you would obviously know very well that all of this is STILL covered completely by selection, because comparing 2 individuals of a species, the individual with fewer deleterious mutations will still on average produce more surviving offspring.

It depends on the strength of selection, not the number of mutations. You, incorrectly, claimed that selection weeds out all deleterious variations. It doesn't. All of us inherit slightly harmful mutations that marginally degrade our survival chances.

In what regard are these mutations bad, if they don't result in a given organism falling prey to natural selection?

He doesn't really understand what he's talking about. It's live action roleplaying, unfortunately. One glance through the OP will show you what kind of mind this is!

Your point is sound, although I'd rephrase the last part, though, I would change 'fall prey to....' to 'the individual's fitness being negatively impacted'.

An organism doesn't need to die from deleterious mutations for it to experience the negative effects of mutations - it can lead a wonderful, healthy, and abundant life - but may just not be able to reproduce, for example.