Originally posted by Bob Sholtz
then you realize the rates mean only one out of a hundred children are fit to breed? for evolution to work, the rest would have to die without breeding (the paper even states this directly), while the one who didn't get any new deleterious mutations would have to mate with another and produce another hundred children to make one at the same genetic equilibrium, and even that would result in a population decrease of 50%. the study itself ignores the birth rate problem.

Please find me the quote in the study that says one of a hundred are fit to breed. We know that isn't true based on what happens in the real world. Somebody having a deleterious mutation does NOT make them unfit to breed, because it usually does not effect the organism as I have clearly stated already.

the paper was written by die-hard evolutionists, obviously it doesn't explicitly state that evolution is wrong. it's simply a matter of understanding what the deleterious mutation rate means (more cultures aren't needed. the estimate is accurate. care to prove it isn't?) then examining the solutions that evolutionists have concocted to try and solve the problem. none of them are feasible. the paper even admits as much:

No, it's a matter of you drawing your own absurd conclusion from the study. The estimate is based on a very low sample size, and doesn't prove evolution wrong. If it did, there would be huge pushes in the scientific community to find out the alternative, and this would be front page news all over the country. Sorry, only creationists are suggesting this, not scientists. Evolution absolutely IS proven, so simply throwing it out the window because of an anomaly that we don't fully understand yet makes no sense. It might be because the human population is way too high and this is nature's way of sorting it out and reducing it. It could be caused by pollution. There could be tons of other factors involved in why the deleterious rate seems high, but to simply say it means evolution is wrong is beyond absurd. Sorry. That is the narrow minded view.

Even if selection mostly occurs in the germline, it is difficult to envisage how such a high load could be tolerated by hominid populations, which have very low reproductive rates.

"difficult to envisage" means "humans can't have near enough children" therefore, evolution is impossible.

No it doesn't. It means difficult to envision or imagine! LOL at making up your own definition for a word because you so badly want it to be true. All they're saying is that it's hard to imagine how it could be tolerated. BUT IT IS tolerated. Proof is that we are all here and haven't gone extinct. It might pose questions about our future as a species, but prove evolution wrong?

this leads me to believe you don't understand much about genetics. while your definition of evolution is close enough, you fail to realize the consequences of such a high deleterious mutation rate.

That the human race might eventually have less diversity? Sure. That evolution is wrong? Not a chance.

What percentage of deleterious mutations are harmful?

It's also worth noting that humans have removed themselves from nature, so natural selection works a lot differently for us now. If we still lived in the wild and had to struggle to survive, a large amount of people that are alive today would not be because they are not equipped well enough. In today's society we make laws to protect stupid people and help the evolutionarily weak (handicapped, mentally challenged, etc). We have empathy, which changes everything about natural selection. It still applies, but in a much lower capacity.

I've been looking for that other experiment that shows a lower rate, but am having difficulty finding it still. I'll have more for you next time, I just need to find the time to search more thoroughly. It's been a year since this topic was first brought up.

Please find me the quote in the study that says one of a hundred are fit to breed.

The high estimate of U has important implications for hominid evolution. Even our lower bound estimate of 3.0 deleterious mutations would lead to a mutational load (L) of 95% (i.e., the fraction of individuals that fail to contribute to the next generation)

"fail to contribute" is referencing how many would have to die without breeding. they give evidence that demonstrates 3.0 is lower-bound biased, but even so, it would still require 95% of the population to die without giving birth.

We know that isn't true based on what happens in the real world.

thank you! that has been my point all along. the mutation rate is only a problem if one assumes evolution is true.

Somebody having a deleterious mutation does NOT make them unfit to breed, because it usually does not effect the organism as I have clearly stated already.

the trouble comes from us steadily losing genetic information. if those that get deleterious mutations breed, the genome shrinks, and this far outpaces beneficial mutations, making evolution impossible. evolution requires beneficial, information adding mutations, but in reality the opposite is happening.

No, it's a matter of you drawing your own absurd conclusion from the study. The estimate is based on a very low sample size, and doesn't prove evolution wrong.

my conclusion is the logical one. you haven't offered any counter to it besides saying "you're wrong". the numbers are based on TONS of data (comparing both humans and chimps, and mice/rats respectively), not a limited sample size. again, the paper is peer reviewed and published, not some amateur concoction. can you offer evidence that the deleterious mutation rate is wrong?

If it did, there would be huge pushes in the scientific community to find out the alternative, and this would be front page news all over the country.

don't kid yourself. evolutionists grasp their theory like a downing man clutches a straw. this paper is evidence of that.

Evolution absolutely IS proven, so simply throwing it out the window because of an anomaly that we don't fully understand yet makes no sense.

yup. figured you'd say that. what was that about pushes to find an alternative? the deleterious mutation rate is no anomaly. it doesn't make sense if you assume evolution is true, but it makes perfect sense otherwise.

It might be because the human population is way too high and this is nature's way of sorting it out and reducing it.

all knowing nature to the rescue, that sentence almost sounds like you're arguing that a higher power exists O.o

That is the narrow minded view.

the narrow minded view is refusing to follow the evidence wherever it leads. stating "evolution is FACT and nothing can prove it wrong" is the narrow minded view.

No it doesn't. It means difficult to envision or imagine!

it would require every human female to have one HUNDRED children just to produce ONE without new deleterious mutations. sorry, that is more than "difficult to imagine" it's simply impossible. oh, but i forgot evolution MUST be fact, right? so instead of considering alternatives, lets just ignore this inconvenient fact.

Proof is that we are all here and haven't gone extinct.

as i've said, the deleterious mutation rate is only a problem for evolution, because evolution requires beneficial, information adding mutations outpacing the deleterious ones. here is evidence that this is not the case, ergo evolution is wrong. i'm following the evidence wherever it leads, i could care less. you, however, seem quite hung up on evolution. not very scientific, or truth oriented.

That the human race might eventually have less diversity? Sure. That evolution is wrong? Not a chance.

wow. actually a higher deleterious mutation rate will cause more genetic diversity through LOSS OF INFORMATION. something not compatible with evolution

What percentage of deleterious mutations are harmful?

in what manner? technically all of them, since they remove information from our ever dwindling genome.

if we still lived in the wild and had to struggle to survive, a large amount of people that are alive today would not be because they are not equipped well enough.

a fair argument (the paper uses a similar one), but it wouldn't affect the RATE of deleterious mutations, so you still have the problem of how humans could give birth to over 100 children each to produce one that can breed without losing more information. also, we know for a fact that death rates have never been 99%, meaning that natural selection wouldn't even kill off enough.

the word "high" doesn't even do it justice. 99% of the population couldn't contribute to future generations for evolution to work. this is not the case, so it logically follows that evolution is incorrect.

Now you claim some opinions which you have not substantiated such as birthrate overcoming mutation rate. I might ask you why you think that birthrate would alter mutation rate.

you must have misread. i'm stating that for evolution to break even genetically, over 100 births per person would be necessary. this number is obtained by using the deleterious mutation rate and plugging it in to the poisson probability distribution formula. you essentially have it backwards. evolution NEEDS birthrate to overcome the deleterious mutation rate in order to function, but i'm showing that it can't because humans cannot have that many kids, and we know for a fact that humans HAVEN'T had that many. ergo, evolution can't happen.

I totally agree that it is important and actually necessary to consider that you could be wrong. That's the only way science is going to work. The question here is quite interesting. I have suggested that the huge variability in primates might be related to this mutation rate.

the problem no one seems to be grasping is that the mutation rate hominids have is incongruous with evolution. we're losing way more information than we're gaining. this suggests that our genetics started off as better than it currently is, and it has been decreasing over time. variations within species are not a result of beneficial mutations, but already existing information being narrowed down.

Debunking scientific papers one sentence at a time......k

You do realise all those on talkorigins are supported by papers very similar to the one you keep referencing?

Seems to me that this is just a great example of a layman with an irrational bias, reading scientific papers and articles and then reaching their own inevitable conclusions in their hopes that 9/10 readers are too ignorant of molecular biology (which they no-doubt are) to contest...

Do you really believe that you've personally managed to debunk the last 150 years worth of research conducted by thousands of scientists, where all others attempting to do so have failed?

If so, please for the sake of humanity produce a paper of your own and get it published, send copies to all the media outlets, make this information accessible to everyone on the planet. You have a responsibility to do so. And in the process you'll no doubt become very wealthy, if not for yourself, you could make a lot of money for charitable causes.

In other words, put up or shut up...

Originally posted by Bob Sholtz
i could care less if evolution were true or not, but i have actual reasons why i don't think it's true backed by research.

You just don't come across as someone capable of falsifying a scientific theory, after all it is quite a claim...

Originally posted by Bob Sholtz

Evolution does not require additions to outweigh subtractions.

it actually does. if more is being taken away then added, how/where did the genetic information come from in the first place? genetically we are in a state of regression, which is the complete opposite of evolution. the author of the paper admits it is a big problem for evolution.

Survival of the species might depend on it, but evolution does not. Even if the human genome withers away (which would take some 200,000 years of breeding with the same exact race of human, I calculate the rate and factor in deletions and insertions) and humans go extinct, THAT STILL COUNTS AS EVOLUTION. Would we not be changing over time?

You'd also have to assume that they did not interbreed with other cousin / sub species that are the result of convergent evolution. This is just an example here, but suppose what you are saying is true. The human genome is shrinking over time. It is proven via genetics that humans have interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans at the very least. That is two 'separate' species of hominid that lived at the same time. They just left Africa earlier and adapted to a different environment. The human genome is shrinking, but Neanderthals do not have such a high rate of deleterious mutation and have a larger genome. What happens when they breed? The genetic diversity increases a lot, the genome gets bigger and the rate changes. It could also be the opposite. Homo sapiens had the lower rate and they inherited the faster rate from Neanderthals. The genome might slowly decrease, but there is enough interbreeding going on to give it the boost it needs. Again, there are way too many possibilities to simply dismiss them and claim evolution is impossible, because we know that it is possible.

The problem might simply be that humans have mostly removed themselves from natural selection, and as a result other races are not becoming different enough to breed together to bump the diversity and size of the genome again. If we took 2 human populations and separated them for 50,000-100,000, one in Africa and one in Russia, and had them live naturally off the land, they would change and as time goes on get more different. If they diverge enough to the point where they can no longer breed with one another, they become separate species.. BUT if they become different, but don't quite get to that point and then breed again, both people might look quite different, but the offspring will be a combination of both, where certain traits are inherited and certain ones are not. The genome overall will probably increase.

You are making the bold assumption that all other organisms have high rates of deleterious mutations AND you are assuming that the rate has always been this high. Many organisms don't even come close to humans with the rate of deleterious mutations. You can't say it disproves evolution without looking at every one of them. You can't selectively say that evolution applies to every creature on earth except humans. It poses a question about why the rate is high. It doesn't disprove evolution. Why is that so difficult to grasp?

Again, the changes are small and I proved that deleterious mutations can be beneficial. That debunks your entire premise. You're equivocating beneficial with insertion mutations. They are not the same.

For U = 3, the average fitness is reduced to 0.05, or put differently, each female would need to produce 40 offspring for 2 to survive and maintain the population at constant size.

This high rate is difficult to reconcile with multiplicative fitness effects of individual mutations

www.genetics.org/cgi/content/full/156/1/297?
they go on to invoke something called "synergistic epistasis" as a solution, but it doesn't negate the birth problem.
at invoking something in a scientific study. They gave a possible explanation and you instantly dismissed it because it goes against your worldview about evolution. You can't keep insisting this proves evolution wrong until at least one evolutionary biologist agrees with that. You claim they are biased, but that is just another BS claim. They are scientists. They follow the data, not worldviews. Evolution is beyond proven as a process that is responsible for the diversity of life and organisms changing over time. While you sit back and just make flat out assumptions about what the deleterious rate means, the actual scientists are doing more research and studies to find out more about it. Let them do the work, and make the conclusions. You can still believe in god or ID or whatever your view is without attacking evolution as if it doesn't hold merit. THAT is the real joke here.

talkorigins is a very biased source. many of the "facts" and "proofs" given are outright falsehoods. in another thread i went through 5 or 6 organisms they gave as evidence for evolution and debunked them all. i'm attempting to find the page so i can demonstrate the bias of the source. ahh, here it is. i won't post all of them, just enough to show you the claimed "evidence" is tripe when examined.

Talk origins is pro science and backs up every claim they make with actual scientific studies. If you wish to debunk them you need science of your own that contradicts it, not conjecture and one liners.

Two strains of Drosophila paulistorum developed hybrid sterility of male offspring between 1958 and 1963. Artificial selection induced strong intra-strain mating preferences.

through forced mating they created a hybrid fruit fly incapable of breeding. this isn't evolution or speciation.

More wild assumptions. Various environmental factors were introduced and the flies changed after many generations do to genetic mutations and adapting to the environment. You call that a debunk? Look, this is just a red herring and an ad hominem attack on the source. Read BOTH of the links I posted. It is clearly explained. Talk origins is back up by several scientific studies and if you disagree, you can simply look them up. Sorry, you aren't qualified to debunk something like that with idle chatter and assumptions. You need actual evidence or alternative explanations rooted in science.

You can test evolution with a very basic lab kit. Take a microscope and put a bacterial culture under it and observe it. Watch them multiply. Now add bleach or some other harmful substance. It will instantly kill off MOST of the bacteria, but some will survive and continue to replicate. Keep doing this over and over and you will eventually have a culture of replicating bacteria that is immune to the negative effects of the bleach. That's a slam dunk for evolution right there. A creature changes to adapt to the environment over time and eventually the trait dominates the population because it's necessary for survival.

Sorry, your claim is bogus and doesn't prove evolution wrong. It brings up questions as to why humans have a higher rate of mutation than most other species, but that doesn't debunk it.