Posted: Jan 06, 2015 1:25 pm
by Rumraket
MarioNovak wrote:
Rumraket wrote:
Some hypotheses cannot be directly empirically tested because the timescales involved are practically not achievable. That's when we use phylogenetics or computer simulations instead. These testify that evolution did in point of fact happen, get over it.

As an analogy, nobody has seen an entire star form from a coalescing disc of interstellar dust and gas. We can only see snapshots of the process by taking pictures of distant stars, but the timescales are still way beyond practical human timescales. It's the same with evolution and geological time. We cannot practically reconstruct this process in the laboratory, stars are bigger than our planet, the masses, distances and timescales involved are beyond all human capacity to control. Some things really just are too big, or take too long a time, for us to be able to directly observe and control them in nice experimental fashion. This is where we build models instead, out of practical necessity. And then we test the predictions of the models against observations in the real world, whether those be pictures of distant stars and galaxies, or sequences of proteins in living organisms.

These models in turn then serve as justification for the claim that evolution (or gravity) produced the diversity of life (stars).

Bad rationalization(making excuses).

These are concrete empirical facts, things really just do take the time they do. You don't grow a 300 foot redwood tree in a week either. Stop being ridiculous please.

MarioNovak wrote:Appeal to a large time scale is really funny if we consider the recent development of evolutionary thought. Have you heard of the new phrase that originated(evolved) in evolutionary Think Tank : "rapid evolution"? In a study of Caenorhabditis briggsae and related species, researchers compared over 2000 genes. They proposed that these genes must be evolving too quickly to be detected and are consequently sites of very rapid evolution. So, at first evolution is not observable and empirically testable because it is too slow, but now evolution is not observable and empirically testable because it is too quick. :crazy:

Wait, it is testable, just not directly. We cannot reconstruct ancient historical progressions before our very eyes. Tough shit, that's just an inherent limitation of being human.
Once again you get it wrong. What we can do, If we postulate some event happened in the past, and took a very long time, we can test this through building a model of the event and making predictions about what we should be able to find if the event really took place. One of the ways we do this is through phylogenetics. If these predictions are confirmed, we can start having confidence that the event/process postulated really did take place.

MarioNovak wrote:
Rumraket wrote:You cannot compare the rate of origin of de novo genes in an experimental bacterial population to the evolution of large multicellular eukaryotes WHEN THE FORMER HAVE NO JUNK-DNA.

So, the new ad hoc hypotheses(excuse for science ignorance) in evolutionary thought is as follows: organisms that have junk in their genomes can evolve new genes. But when junk is missing, evolution of new genes is not possible or is to slow to be detectable and empirically testable. Gotcha.

Wrong again. What is being said is that you cannot test the hypothesis for the rate of origin of ORFan genes in multicellular eukaryotes with an experimental bacterial population. That's it.

MarioNovak wrote:But... your ad hoc excuse have been debunked by science, again.

http://genome.cshlp.org/content/14/6/1036.full

However, most bacteria contain large numbers of ORFans, that is, annotated genes that are restricted to a particular genome and that possess no known homologs.
...
The high frequencies of ORFans detected in bacterial genomes were originally attributed to the limited set of sequenced genomes then available for comparison, and it was predicted that this category of genes would dwindle as databases expanded. Nevertheless, the number of ORFans in databases has grown despite an increase in the number and diversity of complete genome sequences. A recent survey estimated their frequency to be 14% of the total genes from 60 completely sequenced genomes.

Nobody is saying, nor did any one even insinuate that bacteria do not contain ORFan genes. :lol:

Why do you also link a paper that explains the origin of these ORFans by testing a hypothesis?:
If ORFans originate in phages, it is anticipated that their sequences will harbor additional characteristics of bacteriophage genes. Because dinucleotide frequencies can provide signatures that discriminate among sequences from different organisms and have been used to identify alien genes within genomes (Karlin 1998), we compared the dinucleotide frequencies from native genes, ORFans, and bacteriophages known to infect E. coli (see Supplemental material). Recent ORFans and phages are similarly biased for CpG, TpC, ApG, CpC, and ApA, whereas the older ORFans progressively approach the dinucleotide compositions of native genes. These results provide further support of an ancestral relationship between the ORFans present in the E. coli genomes and bacteriophages.

Notice how they start out by making a prediction from their postulated model(as I explained above is how we can test hypotheses about ancient and slow events), then test it against observations in extant life.

They invariably always take on this general form:
If X happened, we would expect to find Z in entity Y because of process A. That's how you test hypotheses about things you can't directly observe. It works in science and in criminal forensics. We throw people to jail on this general principle.