Re: Dr. David Berlinski Destroys Darwinism In Under 5 Minutes ;-)
- From: John Edser <edser@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 8 Mar 2009 14:42:45 -0500 (EST)
"Perplexed in Peoria" <jimmenegay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:-
Berlinski is actually addressing the critical problem as to how ADDITIVE
HERITABILITY can alone account for a cow like ancestor evolving into a
whale which is something like a car transforming itself into a
submarine.
Hi John. Its odd. I didn't hear Berlinski mention the issue of additivity vs
epistasis. But I suppose you wanted to talk about it regardless of what
Berlinski said.
JE:-
Hi Jim,
My point: Berlinski did not mention it when he should have done. I
venture this was because he did not know much about it. He is not a
fool. I would say that reason he doesn't mention additive/non additive
heritability issues is because he understands little about them only
because the appears little, if at all, in the public domain. Additive Vs
non additive remains critically linked to the contentious,_unsolved_
unit of selection problem within poly-centric Neo Darwinism. Berlinski's
mathematical criticism of mono-centric Darwinism appears to be based on
popular, Neo Darwinian oversimplifications of Darwinism, i.e. it only
included additive issues.
The simple answer: IT CAN'T. However, NON additive genetic
epistasis (many genes coding for the same phenotype) and the necessarily
relative opposite pleiotrophic effect (one gene codes for many different
phenotypes) both of which remain deleted from oversimplified uncorrected
models of Darwinism, can provide the missing answer. The many thousands
of COORDINATED phenotypic changes that just a FEW well placed genes are
required to code for can in principle, account for how a cow like mammal
could have evolved into a whale because it is known that most mammals
hold the vast majority of their coding genes in common.
It is critical NON ADDITIVE (geometric) HERITABLE effects of just a
handful of genes that can theoretically code for these many thousands of
required, complex, coordinated heritable changes. The problem: Neo
Darwinism simply deletes the solution defining NON ADDITIVE
EPISTATIC/PLEIOTROPHIC CHANGE to remain "inherited but "non heritable".
This incredibly outdated proposition was only a simplification of
Darwinism which was required by Fisher and Haldane who assumed that non
additive heritability would be disposed of by meiosis. IOW, only if
poly-genetic effects remained additive, as they are in human height
genes, can their heritability be preserved because additive events
remain INDEPENDENT events. IOW, no matter how much meiosis shreds a
genome additive effects remain heritable simply because they are
additive. OTOH genome shredding by meiosis can in principle, entirely
destroy non additive relationships by removing the gene/genes between
which this highly geared relationship exist.
That is a pretty good exposition of the issues. It is pretty much what I
might have said a few years ago when I was pontificating to you about
these issues. Trouble is, I was wrong about one important detail. It
was incorrect to say that fitness arising from epistasis is *not heritable*.
I should have been saying that it is *less heritable*. I.e. it creates a
problem for evolution, but not an insurmountable problem.
JE:-
Lets face it, because Neo Darwinian models have no constant, fitness
frame of reference, _nothing is actually prohibited just reduced to less
probable_. Probability only represents mathematics and not a science.
What passes for falsification within these models is just a non
verification. For example, when applying Hamilton's Rule, if an
altruistic gene spreads when rb<c (this configuration prohibits such
action) then the rule is only non verified and not refuted. This is
because rb and c cannot be _meaningfully_ compared to each other because
they are variables. To be able to determine the largest from the
smallest, both have to be compared a missing fitness constant. I contend
that empirically, this can only be represented by Total Darwinian
Fitness which represents the only falsifiable fitness maximand that we have.
The points missed here are:-
1) Pleiotrophic effects allow any removed non additive relationship to
be taken over by a different genomic gene.
2) A lost phenotype to be retained via an epistatic event from a
different gene.
In short: non additive heritability is amazingly BUFFERED within nature
(Waddington proved this empirically over 50 years ago), IOW Haldane and
Fisher's model is NOT empirically based.
Two other points which I think are even more important.
1. Genetic linkage makes many examples of epistasis almost completely
heritable.
JE:-
Ok
2. When one of a pair of epistatic genes is already fixed in a population,
the epistatic effect of the other is fully heritable.
JE:-
Since the vast majority of genes remain the same, what genes CANNOT be
considered to have at least one gene already fixed as a _high_ probability?
Moreover, due to
population structure (non-random mating), one of the genes can easily
become fixed in a subpopulation by genetic drift, so that the other can
easily be selected to fixation.
JE:-
Most of the genes are the same so the same problem (above) applies, i.e.
what genes are not easily fixed in this way as a probability?
My conclusion: NON additive epistatic effects must be MORE easily
inherited than additive effects. IMHO this contradiction to Neo
Darwinistic dogma is required to be examined in a non prejudiced way.
Many Regards,
John Edser
Independent Researcher
edser@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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