Re: random walk mutation


"Perplexed in Peoria" <jimmenegay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"g" <gillawton@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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[repost]
[snip]
We could have nine die (singular for dice), colored red, orange, yellow,
green, blue, white, black and ivory. [snip]

Er... If there are nine of them, why do you use the singular 'die'? Does
it have something to do with the reason you only supplied 8 colors?

Quite right. When I visualize something like that, am much inclined to make
errors in simple arithmatic. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, PURPLE,
black, white, and ivory would make nine. And purple is more easily imagined
by many that indigo and violet... which I find hard to distinguish from one
another unless they are side by side.

The actual number of game pieces is not critical. In fact more would (as I
intuit only) just result in a better "sampling" of clusters.

If I gave you the impression I was trying to come up with a new theory, I
really, really blew it. My purpose was to convey to you and others that
random mutations would tend to move progeny around RANDOMLY, and I was (and
am) desiring input from others far more knowledgeable than I) as to how in
hell it could provide, as it were, the WHATEVER upon which "natural
selection" could EXERCISE ITS ALLEGED POWER to make sense out of
nonsense.

If anybody has worked out a theory of how natural selection has PERFORMED
its selection at the genetic, cellular and molecular level, then I shall
want to read it, after I have finished about forty others that lie waiting.
However, if they have formed any theory based on nothing other than POST
HOC analysis of paleontological evidence, then that is not going to tell me
ANYTHING that I want to know.

The intuitive problems I have with NSDI (natural selection did it) are AT
LEAST as meaningless to me as those based upon GDI (Gd did it)... by which I
mean that neither, so far as I know, has done more than take some
before-and-after snapshots, as it were, and given a name to something NOBODY
YET UNDERSTANDS whereby something occurred IN BETWEEN.

If I am not making this clear, then mark it down to naivete. However, I
know of no theory that more than GUESSES as to any details of what happens
whereby any viable life form evolves, rather than mutates in ways totally
out of control. Or, to put it another way, it just seems to this old fart
that natural selection could not make a super bowl winning team (a viable
species) if it has nothing but a hit or miss chance of getting enough USEFUL
mutations to work with, when the statistical odds of any given mutation's
being other than deleterious is enormously rare.

There just has to be more to it, I think. And that "something" needs to
take into account how all the little interim increments click into place.

Having taken quite a few university credits in accounting, I tend to think
that any business... be it a mom and pop shop or a mega-corporation, has to
account for the way transactions interplay between the beginning and the end
of a fiscal period. A chart of accounts, acted upon by, say, the standard
procedures in force by the AICPA, fairly well dictates how money FLOWS
through hundred, thousands, millions... of interim transactions.

I feel that change (including speciation) has to occur in accordance with
some genetic, intra-cellular, inter-cellular and molecular "transactions"
that are not yet known.

It does NOT satisfy me for someone to simply deomonstrate that change
occurs, and to say "NSID" (i.e., natural selection did it).

But, as always, I bow to your superior knowledge to mine. Maybe you have it
all figured out, already.

g


In any case, if you want to develop an intuitive feel for what mutation
can accomplish over time, I would suggest that you consult an evolutionary
genetics textbook in which you will find more realistic models presented
and analyzed. No need to re-invent the wheel, badly.


Duly noted and taken under advisement.


.

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