lucaspa

Remember while you are reading that, should deity exist, it is going to have to communicate thru our material brain. So, as you read about the neurological states that correspond to religious experiences, ask yourself -- where is the stimulus that triggers those states coming from? Also remember that most people's experiences of deity do not involve altered states of consciousness.

Be sure to be critical. Think of alternative explanations to the ones that Dawkins proposes. Remember that there is no peer-reviewed scientific paper showing that diety is a delusion. Dawkins does some very bad science in the book.

"God did it" isn't an explanation. When you say that, your next statement must be HOW "God did it". I think what you are referring to is the ad hoc hypothesis "we don't know why God would do things this way; His purposes are beyond ours". I've seen that one trotted out when I remind IDers that the panda has a perfectly good thumb but it is fused to the other digits. Therefore, all the IDer had to do was free up that thumb instead of cobble together a makeshift one (no matter how "complex"). Then the ad hoc hypothesis comes out to explain why God didn't make the sensible choice. However, that ad hoc hypothesis fails when we consider the scientific implications of intelligent designer. After all, we are allowed to infer that the ID must be at least as intelligent as we are (otherwise it wouldn't have been smart enough to manufacture us). And that, of course, gets us back to the theological problem -- Judeo-Christianity can't allow for a dumb deity. Perhaps "Design Theory" could, but notice it has to drop the "intelligent" from the name. But that isn't the scientific sense. To add the word "improving" is to invoke the pre-evolutionary idea of the Great Chain of Being. Evolution does not have a "direction" of "improving". A shark is just as good in its ecological niche as we are in ours (perhaps better). Neither Genesis creation story is talking about any kind of evolution at all! Both creation stories have theological messages about the who and the why of creation. The "how" is just a mechanism to move the stories along, and the "how" is different for each creation story. That's an interesting hermeneutic, but not one supported by the text or other writings of the time. Instead, the text means just what it says: light. You can't interpret the Bible by trying to read into it what you want from the 21st century. The Rules of Interpretation demand that you look at what it meant for the people at the time it was written. And they didn't mean that, because they had no concept of "civilization", "primal dream state", or any of the other concepts you are using. If you read the Enuma Elish -- http://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/enuma.htm -- you get a very good idea of what Genesis 1 is all about. What Bible are you reading? All the ones I've read has Yahweh forming Adam from the dust of the ground -- not "appearing". Sorry, Genesis was written long after the rise of the first civilizations. While the Genesis 2 creation story may come from a primitive oral tradition, Genesis 1 was written after the Babylonian Captivity. The rest of Genesis also dates to later times. In the order that the books were "written", Exodus comes first. Genesis is later. No, it doesn't. What is required is the discovery of agriculture. No change in brain power. Also, hunter-gatherer cultures are quite sophisticated. You are mistaking technology for intelligence. It's quite a common mistake. But more advanced technology does not = increased intelligence. This particular bridge position is falsified both by the Biblical texts and Biblical scholarship and by science. If you want a "bridge" position that is defensible, use theistic evolution.

Not all of them. We now have two exceptions to that specific claim -- "all". However, these seem to be the outliers. We've got enough sampling in N. America and Europe to see that, in those areas, mammals were confined to small, shrew-like species. The stereotype is still very accurate. All we have are 2 exceptions to it in one location. In the dino world, a meter isn't very big. After all, velociraptors are bigger than that. Compsagnathus and some of the other species in that family are smaller, but those are in Europe or N. America. I'd like to see a survey of the dinos from S. America and see if there are any small dinos there. I do recall that S. America is where the largest sauropods and theropods have been found. So I hypothesize that S. America is a a place where the small predator niche was not filled (for reasons unknown) by a dino such as Compsagnathus but instead was filled by a mammal.

For the changes not to be heritable you would need this particular generation only to have the changes. Taking a random sample of the population -- of all ages (which they did) -- falsifies that. The only way the changes could have gotten to this generation was to be inherited from previous generations. Yes, it appears that the authors are attempting to change the definition. In their view, if the beech trees would not have become white again, the change in coloration of the peppered moth would have been "macroevolution". But because the environment fluctuated, the change also fluctuated. I haven't found any other evolutionary biologists who have stated this view of macroevolution. "Persistently directional" selection will give new species because some alleles are fixed and others are lost -- thus the population changes its allele constitution. However, that alone won't make a new species. You need enough change to have reproductive isolation.

The Miller experiments and abiogenesis. They have mangled the Miller-Urey experiments to think that they were supposed to show origin of life when they showed abiotic synthesis of amino acids, sugars, and bases. Then they "combine" that with Darwin's "warm little pond" (= mudpuddle) and throw in a little of Frankenstein and you have an electric discharge into a mud puddle making life. Bad even for IDers. Altho they do like to use misapplied rhetoric like this. "Species" per se are not "living things". Rather, they are a group of living things. So it's not the origin of life, but the origin of new types or groups of living things. Of course, the real counter is Darwin in that book: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." C. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, pg 450. That is even more off topic than most ID arguments. The standard ID argument against abiogenesis experiment is that the experimenter is using "intelligence". A bit more work. But you are somewhat on the right track. This is more a theological argument, not a scientific one. Kenneth Miller gives a satisfactory theological response in Chapters 7 and 8 of Finding Darwin's God. The observable problem is on science's side, not deity's. Methodological Materialism hobbles science in that we can't directly observe the supernatural. We're limited to material causes without being able to see if those are all the causes. So science has to smuggle deity by the back door. What science has to do is propose a material method by which deity works and then tests the method. For instance, saying deity instantaneously creates entities (planets, stars, life, species) in their present form ("poof") is a material mechanism. We can test for that and say this isn't the method deity uses. Similarly, Flood Geology says that a world-wide Flood is the method deity used to make all geological strata. Again, that method isn't the method. However, if you say that deity created the universe by the Big Bang, galaxies, stars, and planets by gravity, life by chemistry, and the diversity of life by evolution, then you have lots of evidence for those material methods. Nope. Instead, the experiments were set up to simulate natural conditions and then those conditions make life. The "control" is only to make sure the simulation is accurate. For instance, to have a "controlled" experiment like you mean it for the protocell experiment would have Fox and colleagues using a protein synthesizer to put the amino acids together to make specific proteins. But that isn't what they did. They simply heated a mixture of amino acids in the conditions of an underwater thermal vent (where observations have shown dissolved amino acids are present) and let the chemical reactions make the proteins and the proteins spontaneously make cells. Those cells are then tested to see whether they have the characteristics that define life. They do.

Yes to the first, no to the second. Start here for getting a cell starting with amino acids: http://www.theharbinger.org/articles/rel_sci/fox.html http://www.siu.edu/~protocell/ Neither DNA nor RNA will readily form from abiotic reactions. However, there are nucleic acids that will do so: 20. L Orgel, A simpler nucleic acid. Science 290: 1306-1307, Nov 17, 2000. 222/sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/290/5495/1306 Threose nucleic acids are easy to synthesize under prebiotic conditions and act like RNA chemically.

Define "complex life". I think it highly likely that life would evolve to multicellular organisms -- which satisifies the scientific concept of "complex life". What Sagan is really talking about is sapient species. What are the odds that a sapient species will evolve? I think the odds are 1, but that the time frame could be very long. However, once natural selection begins exploring the Library of Mendel (all possible genomes) it will eventually get to the wing that contains genomes for sapient organisms. That "eventually" might be a VERY long time, however. It's not the DNA molecule, but metabolism. It appears that the first 2 billion years of life on earth was evolving an efficient and robust metabolic system. The DNA molecule gets longer by gene duplication or translocation.

Since I can't readily find the other threads discussing the movie, I will say I've seen the trailers and parts on UTube. It is a recycling of already falsified arguments and strawmen. I predict it will cause a small resurgence in ID and make a lot of work for those of us who try to give good science education to the public. We are now going to have to -- again -- correct all the mistakes and lies contained in the movie. Did you notice that in the new ad Stein asks about the beginning of life and puts that in evolution? Any person educated in evolution will tell you that 1) The beginning of life is not part of evolution. Evolution assumes that life exists. 2) Abiogenesis is chemistry. And yes, there are experiments getting life from non-life. What is lacking is knowledge of how directed protein synthesis started.

Let's make no mistake, when you are making this argument, you are finding a theological flaw in creationism, not a scientific one.And a flaw that got creationism abandoned by Christians to begin with in the period 1859-1880. The creationist argument isn't based on the idea of a "perfect" creator. Rather, Judeo-Christianity has as a core belief that Yahweh is good (some say "perfect"). Therefore when creationists were invoking the Argument from Design they would always note the "perfect" designs in organisms and then say that you needed a "perfect" deity to get those designs. However, in the period 1830-1860 as naturalists began looking at more and more species, they found designs that were not only "not perfect" but downright stupid or sadistic. Darwin noted several of these. Just 2 are woodpeckers on the pampas of Argentina and ichneud wasps. The woodpeckers have very good designs for pecking wood, but there isn't a tree for hundreds of miles! What use such a design? And how bright was the Creator that put them there? Ichneud wasps have great designs for their ovipositors. They can sneak up on aphids and inject an egg into the aphid so fast that the aphid never even feels it, much less has time to avoid it. Yet the result of that design is that the wasp larvae hatches inside the aphid and then eats it alive from the inside out! Just like Alien. This is one reason why evolution was regarded by Christians as rescuing Yahweh from Special Creation (ID). If we look at all the designs in living things, we must conclude that the ID is stupid, sadistic, and suffering from Alzheimer's. This is not acceptable for Judeo-Christians. So ID and the Argument from Design was putting Christians in an untenable theological position. Having Yahweh create by the material process of natural selection got them out of that position. ID is falsifiable. That's what makes it invalid. Cap'n Refsmmat, if a theory is not falsifiable then you can't show that it is not valid! Duh! All you can do is declare it "not science" but even that is debatable. Science contains lots of theories that aren't falsifiable. However, the only way you can declare a theory both unfalsifiable and not valid is to hold to the philosophy of scientism, and that philsophy is indefensible.

That's because the paper didn't look at nuclear genes. The full paper is here: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/105/12/4792 "Genetic mitochondrial DNA analyses indicate that the lizards currently on Pod Mraru are indeed P. sicula and are genetically indistinguishable from lizards from the source population" So the mtDNA didn't change. We wouldn't expect it too. I'm afraid that part of the NewScientist article was misleading. There could be lots of changes in the nuclear genes. What the scientists were trying to establish by looking at the mtDNA was that the lizards did indeed come from the population they seeded and the mtDNA was the best way to demonstrate it precisely because it would not change. The authors were eliminating the hypothesis that the lizards are the descendents of another species that accidentally colonized the island. We don't know if there is a new species. No breeding experiments were conducted. So we don't know if the new population can interbreed with the old. I wish they had done that.

Every species is unique! You could make up a list of uniqueness for every species on the planet! Most of your list is a byproduct of technology. For instance, our small gut is a byproduct of cooking our food. We have the ability to make tools to make tools and the ability to manipulate abstract concepts.

Let me second Paralith. No, evolution and ID cannot both be true. ID postulates a particular method of the origin of species: direct manufacture by deity. God somehow ("miracle") manufactures either whole species or at least parts of them (IC or CSI). Thus, the new species has no historical connection to the species that went before. It is a manufactured artifact. The data unequivocally shows that this is not the case. Now, can creation by deity and evolution both be true? YES. Darwin thought so and there has been no data since that overturns that. HOW did "God created simple life billions of years ago"? Did God directly manufacture the first cell or the first several species? Darwin left open that possibility. However, today we think the first life came about by chemistry, not direct manufacture. Does this mean deity is absent? No. It simply means, for theists, that chemistry is the "secondary cause" that deity used to create. That's a theological position, but it's one that is consistent with science.

Somewhat. The entire culture was suffused with racism and sexism so that people didn't even notice. One of the more cogent objections to natural selection came from Fleeming Jenkins and was based on the idea of inheritance prevalent in the day: blended characteristics. It was based on unrealized racism. But, at the time, evolution was seen as anti-racist. The idea was that if we all descended from a common ancestor instead of being separately created, then the races are not inherently different. Of course, it didn't take long for racism to try to warp evolution. Within 30 years of the publishing of Origin, Virchow, Haeckel, and others were stating that some "races" were "more evolved" than others. Guess which race they thought was the "more evolved"?

Remember, natural selection works to adapt a population to an particular environment. There are no absolutely "good" traits or absolutely "bad" ones. We are adapting to our current environment, which includes all that technology. You are worrying about being able to survive in an environment without all the technology. Let's look at this. Before technology, Stephen Hawking would have died childless. Thanks to the technology, he has children. Do we really want to lose all of Hawking's alleles in the pursuit of some ideal that some alleles and traits are universally bad? We are not free of natural selection. Just let it work.

The information I have says that mammals and dinos evolved at roughly the same time: "Mammals and dinosaurs evolved from different groups of comparable-sized reptiles during the Triassic, which ran from 248 to 206 million years ago." http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6874 Mammals evolved from the mammal-like reptiles. Because they were on 2 legs and were partially warm-blooded, dinos outcompeted the early mammals for the large predator and herbivore niches. Also because they were only partially warm blooded and did not have insulation like feathers or fur, dinos had to grow very large to conserve body heat. The article on Repenomamus doesn't dispute that (despite the hype). A meter was still pretty small for a dino and Repenomamus would have made a good meal for a velociraptor or tyrannosaur. Also, this occurred in S. America. Digs in N. America and Europe shows that most mammals were indeed vole or shrew sized or a bit larger. So the dinos occupied the large herbivore and predator niches until toward the end of the Cretaceous. Their populations and diversity was in decline for about 10 million years when the Chixulub meteor did them all in.

It's time to discuss the terms "necessary" and "sufficient". When looking at characteristics you have a list of characteristics that are "necessary" for life, but the total list has to be "sufficient". That is, "necessary" means that you can't leave it off the list but "sufficient" means that the list is complete, you don't need anything else. In this case "movement" is necessary but not sufficient. My problem was that "movement" was proposed as "sufficient". That is done for us by nature. We observe that some entities are very different from others (living from non-living). Now comes the tasks of listing the necessary conditions that distinguish life from non-life and then deciding when that list is sufficient. When we have that list, we have a "definition". And we can test that list since each entry on the list is a hypothesis: response to stimuli is a necessary and sufficient condition for something to be alive. We test that against observations living and non-living things. Thus we come to the conclusion that response to stimuli is necessary but not sufficient. The first 2 are the theories mentioned above. The first is that viruses are the ultimate parasite and evolved from parasites as unnecessary components were eliminated by natural selection. You can view mitochondria and chloroplasts as intermediates. In both cases, many of the necessary components are coded by the nucleus and made in the cytoplasm. Do you have a citation for this reduction hypothesis? How does that work? After all, you still have the same problem you noted in #3 above: how could they aquire protein making ability in an RNA world? Actually, "spontaneous" movement is irrelevant to a stimulus-response. And the response does not always have to be "movement" as in the "organism moves" This is where the protocells are so cool. When stimulated either by "prodding" or changes in their chemical environment, they have an action potential identical to that of a neuron! Przybylski AT. Excitable cell made of thermal proteinoids. Biosystems 1985;17(4):281-288. Vaughan G, Przybylski AT, Fox SW. Thermal proteinoids as excitability-inducing materials. Biosystems. 1987;20(3):219-23. Ishima Y, Przybylski AT, Fox SW. Electrical membrane phenomena in spherules from proteinoid and lecithin. Biosystems. 1981;13(4):243-51. So, single cells can act as a "nervous system". Steve, if you limit life to "movement" as in the whole organism and requiring a nervous system, you are going to eliminate all single celled life.

If you go the protein first route of abiogenesis, then there is a definite line. It is when the proteins form a cell. That cell is alive. Now, if you look at the RNA World hypothesis, there is no definite line. That's a tough one. Remember, the "corpse and a living body" refers to a multicellular organism. Even when you have a corpse, not all the cells in that corpse are dead. For humans, the criteria for being dead is lack of electrical activity in the brain. Let's face it, lack of motion is not necessarily dead for people. You can have no gross movemnt of the body, the heart stopped, and breathing stopped and the person is still "alive" in that you can do CPR and all the motion is restored. Now, at the molecular level, yes, living things all have molecules that are in motion. BUT, so do non-living things. If you make motion a "fundamental quality", then fire is alive. So are rocks, because the atoms in the crystals vibrate (move)! Remember, we want something that all living things have but all non-living things don't have. So you have to test your criteria not only against living things to see if they have them, but look to see if non-living things also have them.

There may be a difference. The RNA World hypothesis envisions a smooth transition from non-life to life, but the protocell hypothesis has a sharp demarcation. Viruses are a little bit special. Most people consider viruses as going from non-life to life. However, the reality is backwards to that. Viruses are going from life to non-life. That is, viruses started out as bacterial parasites and have evolved to get rid of a lot of non-esssential functions. Non-essential for an obligate parasite, that is. Remember, in natural selection everything has a cost as well as a benefit. Yes, having all the genes to code for ribosomes to make proteins is a benefit, but it takes energy to make the DNA, the transcription factors (proteins that need still more DNA), etc. to get the ribosomes. So, if an organisms is an obligate parasite and only lives in another cell, then those individuals that don't have to make all that stuff but can use the host ribosome has less cost than others. So there is selection pressure to go from an obligate cellular parasite -- such as the tuberculosis bacterium -- to a virus. So, yes, biology studies viruses, but they are not a step from non-life to life. Rather, they are a degenerate form of life.

Not necessarily. Anabolism could result in either 1) holding the organism constant or 2) lag behind metabolism and result in the slow degradation of the entity. Also, in order to reproduce, an organism has to "grow" larger so that it can do the mitosis thing. Or budding. Or if it sexually reproducing get large enough to have separate germ cells. I think you are relying too much on the idea that biology is the "study of life". Then you play semantics and say "if biology studies it, then it must be alive". That's a non-sequitor. A living entity must have a criteria to be alive independent of the definition of biology. Biologists could have made a mistake. And yes, we intuitively know that there is a difference between life and other materials. The question is: what? In the beginning of life, protocells represent a discontinuity between non-life and life. There isn't a "life-like" intermediate. The amino acids polymerize to form proteins - which aren't alive. And then the proteins spontaneously form cells -- which are alive. Boom, instant life. Noz, if the criteria I listed happens, then the entity could not evolve! That's the problem. The "capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution" involves several premises that might not be met. I was looking at stituations where the entity would be "alive" but wouldn't fit the criteria necessary to undergo Darwinian evolution. Therefore, if we can have alive entities that don't fit a criteria to be alive, then the criteria has problems. The criteria to be "capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution" was added by the RNA World people. They did it for a very simple reason: replicating RNA molecules don't meet the other criteria. So, if your "alive" entity doesn't meet the criteria, what do you do? Well, you could admit it isn't alive. Perhaps on the way to directed protein synthesis, but not alive. OR, you could change the criteria! If you can't win by the rules, change the rules. You'll have to decide whether this tactic is good science.

It's an interesting twist on the RNA World hypothesis. Of course, it begs the question on how do you get RNA to begin with? Abiogenetic chemistry won't give you RNA. You need a simpler nucleic acid. L Orgel, A simpler nucleic acid. Science 290: 1306-1307, Nov 17, 2000. 222/sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/290/5495/1306

The assumption is probably invalid. After all, humans have so little hair that having it kinky is not going to provide enough protection from UV. UV breaks down folate (a B vitamin) and the result of too little folate is neural tube defects during embryogenesis -- babies are born with seriously impaired CNS. We don't know the adaptive advantage (if there is one) of kinky hair. Since humans went thru a severe bottleneck in population about 150,000 years ago, this may simply be a result of genetic drift and a feature getting fixed by accident in a small population.

Jerry: "So far it does seem that evolution, when pressured by limited resources likes to find a superior organism and favors it so strongly as to possibly deselect all weaker ones. " I've got a thread around here on the "three forms of natural selection". Natural selection has 3 forms: 1. Directional 2. Purifying or stabilizing 3. Disruptive. People who have not studied evolution tend to equate natural selection with only the first: directional. This is the form that alters a population over generations to new traits and/or species. However, it should be obvious that once a population is well-adapted to an environment and that environment is stable, then natural selection is going to "purify" the genome and eliminate all the variations that are not as good as the best one. Congrats, Jerry, but you just re-invented the wheel. But thanks for the additional data on purifying selection.

1. The assumption here is that all the alleles that would give darker skin color are dominant. Therefore if you had a lighter skin color, that would mean the parents only had the recessive alleles and could not produce a darker color. However, that assumption is not true. 2. Most of the references come from the 1800s when the predominant genetical theory was "blended characteristics". Under that theory, your statement was true and this is, of course, what was seen. Even so, there is at least one exception to your statement: "Two white parents in New Jersey, were very much astonished to find in their child unequivocal marks of the African race and blood.... His wife protested her innocence in terms so strong and solemn, that he was finally led to believe in her integrity. Still, no explanation of the phenomenon appeared. At length he sailed for France, and visited a town on its frontiers where her family had resided for several generations, and found, to his joy, that his wife's great grandfather was an African." That paragraph itself contradicts the statement in the OP.

Yes, they have. Jerry, this is one area where you are ignorant of what has been done. First, remember that "variation" is a part of natural selection. Natural selection is a two step process: 1. Variation 2. Selection Second, population geneticists have done numerous studies on natural selection both in the wild and in the lab. The place to start is RA Fisher's book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Yes, the greater advantage will limit the lesser. And, in any real population, they will always compete for the same resources. After all, they are in individuals and those individuals compete for the same resources. As Mayr notes, this is the confusion of "selection of" and "selection for" The unit of selection is indeed the individual. But what is being selected for is the allele. I'll let Mayr explain: "Much confusion about this problem can be avoided by considering two separate aspects of the question: 'selection of' and 'selection for'. Let us illustrate this with the sickle cell gene. For the question 'selection of' the answer is the individual who either does or does not carry the sickle cell gene. In a malalrial region the answer to 'selection for' is the sickle cell gene, owing to the protection it gives to its heterogenous carriers." Ernst Mayr What Evolution Is, pg 126 And no, the variation is not "ultimately is an advantage to reproduction". It doesn't mean that the possessor (variation A) will have any more offspring than an individual with the other variation (B). It simply means that more of those offspring will survive. That's what we meand by "differential reproduction". You are focussing only on the absolute number of offspring. That is what your simulation does, but it is a special case because the entire "organism" is an RNA molecule and the only thing it is required to do is replicate. That's all your "environment" requires. You are speaking of your special case and calling it all of natural selection. I am looking at all of natural selection and saying that your special case is not representative. Close, but not quite. 1. The allele will become the dominant allele in the population, even eventually the only allele (fixed). But it doesn't mean the entire genome will become fixed. 2. The phrase "natural selection" is describing not the effects on reproduction but rather an process to give design. Here is Darwin's summary of natural selection: "If, during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organization, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometric powers of increase of each species, at some age, season, or year, a severe struggle for life, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each beings welfare, in the same way as so many variations have occured useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection." [Origin, p 127 6th ed.] Then that is a problem right there. It's not "natural selection", is it? However, there is an implicit selection involved in steps 5-8. Now, notice that you have a "large number of RNA sequences". You alter one of them and then see the effect on replication. Since you have a fixed number of nucleotides, in this situation the RNA sequence that reproduces the fastest will eventually come to dominate the population. However, you have the problem that any one of those "large number of RNA sequences" may have replicative ability greater than the mutation you introduced. The reason your results show that you have to get a value >1.4 times the original replication rate is because this represents a value that is at least 2 standard deviations away from the mean replicative rate of those "large number of RNA sequences". It's like I said, you have to get a fitness greater than the best fitness already in the population. Your basic assumption is that NONE of the RNA sequences replicate. Why should that be true? My suggestion, Jerry, is to get an evolutionary biology textbook and look at the math on population genetics. When there are several alleles (forms of genes) in a population, what is calculated is the relative fitness of each of those to the others. The one with the highest relative fitness will end up being selected and becoming fixed. All the others, even if "advantageous" in the absolute sense, will be lost because it is not as good as the best. That is what is happening here. I'm sorry, but the GI is the assumption that there is no replication in any of those large number of random RNA sequences. And that is your selection criteria: replication. Now, what do you think is that "advantage to replication"? Is it allowing replication to go faster or is it at the same speed but ends up with a greater number of offspring because it doesn't stop? Either one means that mutation A will end up with more offspring than some of the others. Which is what you measure, right?