lucaspa

That's part of the problem. Electrolysis is the most common method of making hydrogen. But where do you get the electricity? The cheapest way is coal-fired generating plants. But the pollution and greenhouse gasses released by this are going to be greater than that saved by having hydrogen fuel (second law of thermodynamics). Then there is transportation. How do you transport hydrogen from where it is being generated to the filling stations? Pipelines don't work too well. Explain please. Or less. We may have traded less pollution and greenhouse gasses in the city for more pollution and greenhouse gasses overall.

I would say the definition is pretty "sharp". Futuyma's definition (echoed by other evolutionary biologists) is sharp. Not short, but sharp. What gets us in trouble is 1) the reductionist definition of change in allele frequencies and 2) the colloquial use of "evolution" or "evolve" to mean a permament change in the population. The definition of "species" is imprecise precisely because evolution is true. With a gradual and continuous transformation of a population from one species to another, there is no way to make a precise definition of species. Some population, somewhere, is always going to fit in the gray area while evolving from one species to another.

This isn't the point, either. We are not discussing the existence of God. We are talking about how to get design. And I am submitting that Darwinian selection is the ONLY way to get design. Even if God designs, He is going to sort thru the possible designs in His mind against the environment He has mentally set up. He will select those designs that fit the environment. Only after that design process has completed will He manufacture the object. Humans do the same thing. It's still Darwinian selection, only it is taking place in a mind rather than only in the physical universe. "Natural" selection refers to Darwinian selection operating solely in nature.

It's still Darwinian selection. In this case the selection is going on in human minds before they are doing the grafting or gene transfer. IOW, there are several possible graftings that can be done -- variations -- and we select among those variations the one we are actually going to perform in the real universe. It's still trial and error. I am somewhat familiar with how green fluorescent protein is transfected into other animals. And it too is Darwinian selection. First there were several possible candidates of fluorescent proteins to use. An initial Darwinian selection was performed in human minds against the environment of available fluorescent filters. Then further selection was performed as to which fluorescent proteins were the brightest when transfected. In addition, there is also Darwinian selection going on in terms of the promoter. In the area of vascular research, there were at least 10 different promoters -- all proteins thought to be expressed when endothelial cells differentiated. These were picked -- by Darwinian selection -- in the minds of the researchers among all the possible promoters. Only those promoters possibly fit the environment of being expressed by only endothelial cells. In the event, 3 of the promoters didn't work. Either they really weren't expressed by endothelial cells or it turned out they were expressed by other cells as well. And they were eliminated as candidates to transfect GFP into mammalian cells.

You're actually looking for Type I, "slow twitch",Type IIA, "fast twitch", and Type IIB muscle. Type I is also called "red" and Type IIA is called "white". Most muscles are composed of a combination of fibers. Sprinters tend to have Type II while long-distance runners are Type I. However, strength depends not on muscle fiber types but on 1) cross sectional area of the muscle and 2) moment arm of the muscle and bone. As I recall, the different anatomy of apes gives them greater moment arms. Also, short term strength (such as punching or ripping) also depends on the efficiency of anerobic metabolism. Cross sectional area can be increased by training. Moment arm is genetic, and the efficiency of anerobic metabolism would also be, to some extent, genetic.

We are not talking about a simplistic or polar view. But looking at the hypothesis that, in evolution, humans traded strength for dexterity. But can humans voluntarily reach the maximum strength of great apes? Remember, we have 2 bell-shaped curves. The question is whether those curves come from different populations or are sampling errors from the same population. I remember one incident in grad school where a monkey escaped from a cage. My fellow graduate students engaged in a Keystone cops chase thru the graduate school. Now, this primate had been caged for months -- unable to do strength exercises. The grad students, OTOH, all ran and went to the weight room. Yet, when cornered, the monkey wiped the floor with them. It took six of them to finally subdue the monkey. I find your objections to generality somewhat disingenuous, since you too are using generalities. I would note that I am the only one, so far, who has contributed scientific literature to this discussion. And that search turned up a paper showing differences in dexterity between humans and apes. Why didn't you do a PubMed search? What you are doing is arguing the premise of the hypothesis: apes, including chimps, are stronger than humans. But instead of looking for data, you are tying to use rhetoric. Doing a quick search on ask.com, I have come up with these sites that all affirm that, in general, apes are stronger than human. The bell-shaped curves are indeed different. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1541283-1,00.html http://schoolweb.missouri.edu/ashland.k12.mo.us/jn/03page/webpage.htm "Chimpanzees are both smaller and stronger than humans." http://www.hsus.org/wildlife/issues_facing_wildlife/should_wild_animals_be_kept_as_pets/fact_and_fiction_monkeys_and_apes_as_pets.html "When they begin to express their normal and instinctual behavior as they mature, monkeys and apes become extremely difficult to handle and can be up to seven times stronger than humans. " Now, if you want to argue this, you would need to look at dexterity and see if apes are also as dexterous as humans. They do have opposable thumbs, after all.

1. We are letting "nature" take its course. After all, we and our decisions are part of nature! So, our technology is now part of the "environment" under which natural selection works. In this environment some selection pressures are eased. 2. In order to be "better off", someone MUST make the decision about who is unfit. Otherwise the environment (our technology) preserves those individuals. So despite your protests, your position does amount to someone going around and killing people deemed "unfit" -- killing them by witholding the technology to keep them alive. 3. I'm arguing there is no "maybe" about it. Natural selection is much, much smarter than we are. I would rather let it decide who survives in a particular environment -- including an environment where technology preserves what in a different environment would be "unfit".

Damn! The link was valid several years ago. They changed the web address. Try this one: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=1297 But now it's not free like it used to be. Damn again. Of particular interest is the sarcasm Lewontin shows in these passages: "What seems absurd depends on one’s prejudice. Carl Sagan accepts, as I do, the duality of light, which is at the same time wave and particle, but he thinks that the consubstantiality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost puts the mystery of the Holy Trinity “in deep trouble.” Two’s company, but three’s a crowd. Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen. " Notice the sarcasm that starts the description of science as absolutely materialistic. Lewontin is poking fun at Sagan's position. The complete paragraph is one of the more famous misquotes used by creationists. It is a misquote because it doesn't recognize the tongue-in-cheek critique of Sagan started by the final sentences in the preceding paragraph, or the criticisms of the book as a whole in the rest of the review. Lewontin is saying that the absolute materialistic view is not part of science, despite Sagan's rhetoric (which is quite good).

Perhaps. But this isn't the point. It simply means that arm ripping is within the capability of both species. It doesn't say anything about relative strength. THe poster also gave several other examples where chimps and other great apes have strength capability exceeding the maximum of humans. In general, chimps are much stronger than humans.

The articles here might help you answer your question: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itool=pubmed_DocSum&db=pubmed&cmd=Display&dopt=pubmed_pubmed&from_uid=9503091 When you have a question like this, PubMed is always the place to start. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=citation&list_uids=9503091&query_hl=4&itool=pubmed_docsum http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itool=pubmed_DocSum&db=pubmed&cmd=Display&dopt=pubmed_pubmed&from_uid=10999274 This article: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itool=pubmed_DocSum&db=pubmed&cmd=Display&dopt=pubmed_pubmed&from_uid=10999274 Would indicate that you are correct: trading strength for precision Primates. 2005 Oct;46(4):275-80. Epub 2005 Sep 6. Related Articles, Links Muscle dimensions in the chimpanzee hand. Ogihara N, Kunai T, Nakatsukasa M. Laboratory of Physical Anthropology, Department of Zoology, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, Sakyo, Kyoto, Japan. ogihara@anthro.zool.kyoto-u.ac.jp We dissected the forearms and hands of a female chimpanzee and systematically recorded mass, fiber length, and physiological cross-sectional area (PCSA) of all muscles including those of intrinsic muscles that have not been reported previously. The consistency of our measurements was confirmed by comparison with the published data on chimpanzees. Comparisons of the hand musculature of the measured chimpanzee with corresponding published human data indicated that the chimpanzee has relatively larger forearm flexors but smaller thenar eminence muscles, as observed in previous studies. The interosseous muscles were also confirmed to be relatively larger in the chimpanzee. However, a new finding was that relative PCSA, which reflects a muscle's capacity to generate force, might have increased slightly in humans as a result of relatively shorter muscle fiber length. This suggests that the human intrinsic muscle architecture is relatively more adapted to dexterous manipulative functions. Shortening of the metacarpals and the intervening interosseous muscles might accordingly be a prerequisite for the evolution of human precision-grip capabilities.

But look at HOW humans designed it: by Darwinian selection! I submit that Darwinian selection is the ONLY way to design. The issue is whether the method is used by intelligent entities or happens without them.

Look at "god literally sculpted Adam and Eve from clay ... a few thousand years ago." That is a specific method of creation by a specific deity Yahweh (usually referred to as "God"). It is also a scientific theory that can be tested: humans are manufactured artifacts that appeared in their present form a few thousand years ago. This can be tested, has been tested, and has been shown to be wrong. You and Coulter are saying that this refutes belief in Yahweh. What you are saying is: if Yahweh didn't create this particular way, then Yahweh didn't create and Yahweh doesn't exist. You can easily see the non sequitor here. Yahweh simply creates by another method. And, in fact, Christianity accepts that Yahweh created by the processes discovered by science -- including evolution. Fundamentalism does not. I would submit that Fundamentalism is a new religion and is not Christianity. What you have found, in general, is how God gets into science despite the limitations of Methodological Materialism -- by the back door. God is proposed to use a particular material method. Science then tests the material method. But, that isn't testing God or belief in God. Just the method. However, you can see why atheists want the non sequitor: it's the only way they can use "science" to disprove the existence of Yahweh in particular or deity in general. But it's a misuse of science. Ironically, the literal text of Genesis 1 contradicts the method you stated also. In Genesis 1:25-27, people are created together -- both men and women (plural in the Hebrew). And they are spoken into existence -- "let there be" -- instead of forming one man out of clay and one woman out of a rib of the man. So Coulter's insistence on a literal Bible is contradicted not only by science but also by the text of the Bible! Please expand on this. I would say that it is possible for religion to be consistent with science. That is, not contradicted by science. In fact, that has been the way it has been for centuries. Science has been viewed for most of the history of modern science simply as discovering the way that deity works. It is only within the last 40 or so years that we have had the supposed conflict of science and religion. Partly that is due to the rise of Fundamentalism and partly to the rise of militant atheism.

People like Coulter do this. But militant atheists also try to make the issue about theism vs atheism. PZ Meyers, Dawkins, EO Wilson, Peter Atkins, Daniel Dennett, and a host of militant atheists on the internet make the same mistake as Coulter. The threat of militant atheists to science is more subtle than the threat of creationists, but even more devastating. Creationists object to particular theories and would close down research in some areas. Militant atheists would change the very nature of science and would make science just as dogmatic as they say religion is. IOW, they would turn science into a dogmatic religion.

Coulter does do this. But she is mistaken. Creationism vs evolution is not about theism vs atheism. One of the most effective counters is to note that at least half of evolutionary biologists have been Christian. What you did was undermine the counter and supported Coulter! The belief in God is fine as a scientific theory. It's simply one that science can't test. Therefore, it is NOT appropriate to refute belief in God on scientific terms. Science will NOT refute belief in God. In terms of science, there are still 2 questions where direct intervention of God is still a viable (unfalsified) hypothesis: 1. Why does the universe exist? 2. Why does the universe have this order rather than some other order. Science deals with material causes. Science cannnot answer whether the material processes observed by science are sufficient as causes. Do the material processes require supernatural input in order to work? This limitation of science is called Methodological Materialism (or Naturalism). One way to express this is to propose the following hypothesis: "The only distinct meaning of the word 'natural' is stated, fixed, or settled; since what is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent agent to render it so, i.e., to effect it continually or at stated times, as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once." Butler: Analogy of Revealed Religion. (but that isn't where I found the quote) Now, the first statement is accurate. "natural" is only what is stated. The hypothesis is that natural requires an intelligent agent in order to happen. There's nothing in science to refute that hypothesis. Therefore you can't say that "belief in God ... as a scientific theory, holds no water whatsoever" That's a wrong statement -- by science. Creationism and evolution -- for the theist -- are both specific mechanisms of HOW God created. See quote below. In terms of science, both creationism and evolution are scientific theories. Evolution is a currently valid theory (supported by the data) and creationism is a falsified/refuted theory. So all science has done, for the theist, is tell the theist how God created. Coulter confuses belief in a literal, inerrant Bible with belief in God. Coulter doesn't really have belief in God. Her god is a literal, inerrant Bible. This is called Bibliolatry. In theological terms, it's worship of a false idol.

The "mentally similar" humans has a flawed consideration: IMM is comparing human infants to adult animals or comparing mentally intact animals to mentally damaged humans. Apples and oranges. If we compare the capabilities at comparable ages or comparable health, then the argument falls apart. Also, IMM maintains that there is a continuum of "feeling" and "self-awareness" within living organisms. How do you quantify this? How would you tell that a rat is more "self-aware" than a squid? Or a plant? ALL living organisms react to stimuli. It is one of the necessary conditions to be alive. Even unicellular organisms -- such as bacteria -- communicate and act as a group. The amoeba Dictylostelium sometimes self-organizes to reproduce sexually and make a multicelled animal with specialized organisms. It does that in response to certain environments. Is this response "self-awareness"? If not, why not?

Are they? That is what we are trying to decide. It's not a consensus that what they are doing is "right". Also, considering that some of the animals they have released are incapable of living outside the lab, they are also, in the end, torturing and killing the very animals they say they are trying to "save". Oh, the irony! All this may partially explain why you and I so often have opposite positions. Apparently you haven't had much training in hypothetico-deductive reasoning. Instead, you must learn to deal with the irrationality of investors, who buy and sell for reasons that have nothing to do with the fiscal reality of the company involved.

If this is your "evolution based moral theory", then it is flawed because it misrepresents evolution and natural selection. First, you are making the mistake of saying that some traits are absolutely bad. In evolution, you can't do that. Traits are beneficial or harmful only in relation to particular environments. Also, you are saying you are smarter than natural selection and that you have such a complete knowledge of the environment and the future that you can pronounce what is going to be "beneficial" for all time. You don't. Look at Stephen Hawking. He has one of those people who have "inherent genetic flaws" that you don't want to treat. BUT, he also has a superior intelligence. By refusing to treatment to Hawking, the gene pool loses the alleles for intelligence. You do need the statistics. "could ... have gotten better" is not the same as "would have gotten better". Yes, there are medical mistakes, but you need to document that they are approaching 50%. We are animals. After all, are we classed in a separate Kingdom?

Then why isn't their behavior "immoral"? They painfully kill other species. This is a bit misleading. Because it fails to take into account all the drugs that failed in animal testing: either failed in efficacy or failed in safety. The claim is saying that animal testing is "poor" in predicting success in humans. However, it doesn't address the accuracy predicting failure in humans. How many drugs that failed in animals are successful in humans? We don't have those numbers. Why? Because if they fail in animals we never try them in humans. So, in order for a drug to be "successful", we say it has to be efficacious and safe in both animals and humans. Any surprise that very few drugs meet those criteria for multiple species? No, what would happen is that more humans would die as we would fail to eliminate dangerous drugs via animal testing. Nope. All those are true. The underlying premise is that, if the treatment doesn't work on animals, it won't possibly work on animals. Now, working on animals doesn't guarantee it will work on humans. Look at my research. We are testing adult stem cells for bone regeneration. If we can't find a way for the cells to regenerate bones in rats, we aren't even going to try them in humans. Would you want us to? However, because of the difference in metabolic rates and absolute (not relative) size of the bone defects between rats and humans, adult stem cells may not be able to regenerate bone in humans. When it comes to ethics, we are the center of the universe. Ethics are what we determine are how we ought to behave towards other humans. As I've pointed out in other contexts, you don't consider the harm done to other species and neither do any other species. You are quite willing to have the farmer do whatever harm is necessary to rats, mice, voles, etc. in the field when he does his plowing. Or you are quite willing to have people do whatever harm to wolves, deer, rabbits, etc. when they clear woods to make more farmland. You are advocating extending consideration to animals in these particular circumstances. But you cannot base this on some universal regard for animals or universal ethics, because you don't adhere to those universals. IOW, by your behavior you consider the universals to be invalid.

These aren't the original claims: Lucas: Now, for evolution -- changes in populations -- to happen, alleles must become FIXED -- become the sole allele in the population. Dak: if an advantageous allele has increased so that it is predominant (but not exclusive), than that species has evolved. or: a change in frequency from 0.2 to 0.9 is a change in frequency, and thus evolution; it is not neccesary for the frequency to become 1 before it is evolution. You seem to have 3 simultaneous claims: 1. Evolution is a shift in gene frequencies without fixation. IOW, fixation is not necessary for the process to be included in evolution. 2. A shift in gene frequencies is tied to a change in designs, and that is tied to whether a "species has evolved". Do you see the difference? In 1 you are saying that a shift in gene frequencies is part of evolution. In 2 you say a shift in gene frequencies = a species has "evolved". Those 2 statements are not necessarily saying the same thing. 3. You say that a local change in gene frequency is not "species wide evolution" but you do say that a change in gene frequency means the population has "evolved" and use the term specifically for Africans and the sickle-cell allele. Let's start from the top. #1 is correct and my original claim was poorly worded. It does look like I'm saying that shifting allele frequencies within a population is not part of evolution. "Biological evolution may be slight ...; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportions of different forms of a gene within a population, such as the alleles that determine the different human blood types" Futuyma op cit, pg 4 Instead, what I meant to say was that loss of alleles and fixation of alleles is an inevitable result of evolution -- common ancestry: "The geneology of the genes in the present population is said to coalesce to a single common ancestor [individual]. Because that ancestor represents one of the several original alleles, the population, descended entirely from that ancestor, must eventually become monomorphic: one or the other of the original alleles becomes fixed (reaches a frequency of 1.00)" D. Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, pg 299 Of course, that means that the other is lost. So, let me rephrase: When evolution -- changes in populations -- happens, some alleles must become fixed and other alleles must become lost. #2. When we say "evolved", we most often mean complete changes in a population such that it is different from the original "Biology To develop (a characteristic) by evolutionary processes. " http://www.ask.com/reference/dictionary/ahdict/34692/evolve Changes in allele frequency most often don't fit this usage. For instance, the allele frequency in the peppered moths changed twice, but you could always find both light and dark moths in the population. When we commonly think of "evolved", it means that all the moths are now a new color. IOW, the bell-shaped curve of properties/traits has to shift so that there is no overlap with the preceding curve Just shifting gene frequencies won't do that. The curves will still overlap and represent simply variations of one population. You need to drop some alleles entirely and fix others so that the whole population is different. Also remember that changing traits in a population is not (most often) a case of one allele, but an accumulation of many alleles. You maintain that populations rarely have one allele at a locus. That is correct because mutations add alleles to the population. However, remember accumulation. Let's say there is Locus 1 that has alleles A and B. B has a higher selection coefficient than A. Eventually B will become fixed. But in the meantime 2 new alleles appear: C and D. C is worse than B and D but D is better than B (and C). So D becomes fixed. In that process alleles E and F also appear. E is worse than D and F, while F is better than D. So F is fixed. So, where you had a population that was A and B, you now have a population that is either all F or still has some D in it. Completely different set of alleles.

Simple denial without any supporting evidence. If fixation is not when the allele becomes present in every member of the population, then what is it? And please post your source. Well, you can drop the pretense of being an evolutionary geneticist. Why did you adopt the pretense to begin with? To try to give your posts some "authority"? Anyone who has done even casual reading in population genetics and evolutionary genetics must know what the terms mean. And, yes, I did identify them. Go back and read carefully. Or Charon was nice enough to give them to you. Simple denial without providing any information on what fixation is. Then using this as an excuse to bail on the discussion. Sorry, but I've seen the tactic before. It's not the most graceful way of admitting you were in error, but it is one way. FYI: "In the following, we study the simplest possible question: what is the probability that a single mutant generates a lineage that takes over the entire population? This fixation probability determines the rate of evolution. " http://www.univie.ac.at/virtuallabs/Moran/

No. Think of the sickle cell gene in African populations. The frequency of that gene is different from other human populations, but we don't say that H. sapiens has "evolved" because of it. Nor do you say that those African populations have evolved while the rest of the species has not. For every trait or allele, you can make a bell-shaped distribution curve where you plot trait or allele on the x-axis and number of individuals on the y-axis. During evolution, the bell-shaped curve shifts either left or right. In order to do that, some alleles must be lost (at the tail at the back end of the shift) and other alleles must be fixed (at the middle or front of the curve shift). As the curve continues to shift over generations, eventually the new curve will not overlap the old one. THEN we know evolution has occurred. You can see the bell shaped curves depicted and the divergence of them as new species are formed in Futuyma or 1. ME Heliberg, DP Balch, K Roy, Climate-driven range expansion and morphological evolution in a marine gastropod. Science 292: 1707-1710, June1, 2001 2. Kellogg DE and Hays JD Microevolutionary patterns in Late Cenozoic Radiolara. Paleobiology 1: 150-160, 1975. Changing frequencies of an allele within a population is not really evolution, which is another reason why the "change in allele frequencies" is not a definition of evolution. Your example -- which would be equivalent to the peppered moth -- is an example of natural selection at work. But natural selection, by itself, is not evolution either. In order to have common ancestry, and descent with modification, you must have fixation of some alleles and loss of others.

I said evolutionary biologists. You first try to make this "contributors" and then "notable contributor". Yes, Francisco Ayala is America's foremost living evolutionary biologist. You forgot Teilhard de Chardin, Kenneth Miller, Walcott, and others. So you have what we call "selective data". If you go through the authors of publications -- contributors -- you end up with still more than 50% of evolutionary biologists in the 20th century being Christians. What you are doing is trying to rank contributors to make atheists more prominent. Please stop trying to turn this into an atheist vs theist situation with evolution = atheism. All you will do by this is hurt science. Science does not back atheism. Science is agnostic, or neutral, on the question of God. You need to ask yourself: what is more important to me? Promoting science or promoting atheism? In your list, Haldane, Gould, Lewontin, Mayr, and Maynard Smith were/are agnostic. Even if not, they explicitly rejected any attempt to link evolution with atheism. For instance, Gould is famous for his NOMA. Lewontin, in a famous review of Sagan's Demon Haunted Woodland, savagely lampooned Sagan's attempt to associate science with atheism. http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?19970109028R@p1

Apples and oranges. What you are talking about now is mutations when you say "their appearance". Yes, alleles "appear" by mutation -- this is the "variation" in natural selection. But, after they appear, we are talking about changes in their frequency -- the proportion of individuals that have the genes. Now, for evoution -- changes in populations -- to happen, alleles must become FIXED -- become the sole allele in the population. The relative strength of genetic drift to natural selection is very low. Especially if the effective population size is greater than about 10. You need the equations on page 393 of Futuyma. If s = 0 the probability of fixation is P = 1/(2N). Whereas if s >0, then the probability is P=2s(1-e^-4Ns) if s is small and P = 2s if s is larger. So, let's take an effective population of 1000. If s = 0 (neutral), then P = 1/2000 or 0.0005. However, if s = 0.01 (a "large" selection coefficient) then P = 0.02. This is 40 times more probable than if s = 0. Now, if s<0, then P = 0.00004 by using the equation that combines probability of fixation by selection and genetic drift. Because the data you have is not fixation! What the data shows is that there are many alleles present in populations. But fixation means that only one of those alleles would be present. You aren't really an evolutionary geneticist, are you? The average time to fixation of a newly arisen neutral allele that actually does become fixed is 4N generations for a diploid population. So, if N = 1000, that is 4,000 generations! So what we are seeing with the data you posted is simply a snapshot in time. If we are dealing with humans and a generation time of 24 years, that is 100,000 years to fixation. Of course, most wild populations are much larger than 1,000. That increases the time a lot. Basically, gene frequencies are essentially unchanged from generation to generation under genetic drift in populations greater than N = 200. Actually, the answer is "yes" for both questions. The building was fit for a purpose -- (housing people) -- just badly fit. IOW, it was a bad design. What you have here is 2 criteria -- fit for the purpose of housing human beings and longevity. You are trying to conclude that longevity has to be maintained in order to for the building to be "designed". Does not follow. See? You realize it was designed, just poorly. No, your building would still be design. Not chance. After all, you too are being an architect. What you are saying is that you have no formal training in it. But you are designing a building (and manufacturing it). However, what you are saying is that you came up with a more long-lasting design than the professional architect -- but did so without the formal training on what you should be doing. Now, Gould has stated that one of the ways we can recognize that evolution happened instead of ID is that so many of the designs in nature are indeed poor ones. They are buildings that last for a day but not longer. Of course, they don't have to be better, but an intelligence (especially a supernatural one) could be reasonably expected to come up with only good designs. Gould is restating, in fact, an argument used by 19th century theologians to reject Special Creation (ID). I'm glad you "endorse" the obvious. I'm sure that Futuyma is so relieved to have your endorsement. What people are saying is: 1) Selection is the only one of these processes that produces adaptations (designs). 2) That chance, gene flow, and mutations are relatively minor ones of altering frequencies. Mutations, by their very nature, are initially confined to a very small proportion of the population. 3) Sexual selection (nonrandom mating), it turns out, is usually an extension of natural selection. Excellent. It will greatly facilitate communication and discussion to use the standard terms whenever possible. Thank you.

I suggest chapter 13 in Douglas Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology. Pay particular attention pages 371-373. Futuyma also cites this book as giving a comprehensive treatment: Endler, JA Natual selection in the Wild Princeton University Press, 1986 8. Gilad Y, Rosenberg S, Przeworski M, Lancet D, Skorecki K. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2002 Jan 22;99(2):862-7. Evidence for positive selection and population structure at the human MAO-A gene. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/99/2/862 "Data Analysis. We calculated three summaries of diversity levels: Watterson’s W (9), based on the number of segregating sites in the sample; (10), the average number of pairwise differences in the sample; and H, a summary that gives more weight to high frequency-derived variants (11). Under the standard neutral model of a random-mating population of constant size, all three summaries estimate the population mutation parameter 3N(for X-linked loci), where N is the diploid long-term inbreeding effective population size, and is the mutation rate per generation. To test whether the frequency spectrum of mutations conformed to the expectations of this standard neutral model, we calculated the value of three test statistics: Tajima’s D (12), which considers the difference between and W, Fay and Wu’s H test (11), which considers the difference between and H, and the HKA (Hudson–Kreitman–Aguade) test (13), which tests whether levels of polymorphism are consistent with levels of divergence, as expected under the neutral model, by comparison with one or more reference loci." That's 3 different tests. The equations didn't come thru well on copy and paste, but the article is free and you can get your own PDF copy to read. You still didn't provide a source of a colleague using the statement. You have seemed to have changed the terminology. We were talking about "true in general" but now you have "false in general". Apples and oranges. This does make more sense and I have seen this phrase used in my math classes and textbooks. It means that the equation is false for most values of x but that there are some values for which it is valid. BUT, this isn't the original we were discussing. It appears that what you are trying to do is extend what you do in mathematics outside of it. Let's do this in science: What you have here is the statement "sqrt(x) is an integer". That's really a hypothesis. It implies that the statement is true for ALL values of "x". As you have shown by testing, most values of "x" do not yield an integer. Therefore, as stated, the hypothesis is false. What happens in science, as opposed to what you are doing here, is to modify the hypothesis. We can probably come up with an equation (other than using integer^2) to describe the sequence 4, 9, 16, 25, 36 etc. Maybe not. I'm too restricted by time to try. But if all else failed, we could say "sqrt(x) is an integer only when x = integer^2". That's a supported hypothesis (altho somewhat circular and uninteresting). But it's more how science works rather than say "generally true".

Then you must show why Mayr's argument is not right. Simple denial doesn't cut it. Mayr gave the reasons that "change in allele frequencies" is an inadeqate definition: "This reductionist definition omits the crucial aspects of evolution: changes in diversity and adaptation. " A change in allele frequency does not tell you why populations split and we have cladogenosis. Change in allele frequency only gives us anagenesis. Also, changes in allele frequency does not tell us why we see adaptations (designs) in organisms. A change in allele frequency could simply leave the organism either: unchanged in adapation or less well adapted. You did see the source, didn't you? Douglas Futuyma. IF you are really into evolutionary biology (which I'm beginning to seriously question), you must know who Futuyma is. Here is the PubMed search page for him: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=search&DB=pubmed Here's the Amazon.com search of his books: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b/002-9368283-7697633?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Douglas+Futuyma&Go.x=8&Go.y=8 Here's his faculty page: http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/ee/futuyma.html You might want to note this from that page: "the President of the Society for the Study of Evolution and the American Society of Naturalists, and the editor of Evolution. He is the author of the successful textbook Evolutionary Biology." I drew the definition from that "successful textbook". "Successful" here means that evolutionary biologists use that book as textbook in their classes. So, if you are going to argue against the President of the Society for the Study of Evolution and the editor of the journal Evolution about the defintion of evolution, be prepared to back your claims with lots of data. Of course, you could also try to argue against the National Academy of Science: "Evolution in its broadest sense explains that what we see today is different from what existed in the past. Galaxies, stars, the solar system, and Earth have changed through time, and so has life on Earth. "Biological evolution concerns changes in living things during the history of life on Earth. It explains that living things share common ancestors. Over time, biological processes such as natural selection give rise to new species. Darwin called this process "descent with modification," which remains a good definition of biological evolution today." Appendix and Frequently Asked Questions Science and Creationism, A View from the NAS, the section "What is Evolution?" pg 27 Notice that they avoided "changes in allele frequencies" in their defintion. Or you can try another other successful college-level introductory evolutionary biology textbook: "Most of the processes described in this book concern change between generation within a population of a species, and it is this kind of change we shall call evolution. When the members of a population breed and produce the next generation, we can imagine a lineage of populations, made up of a series of populations through time. Each population is ancestral to the descendant population in the next generation: a lineage is an "ancestor-descendant" series of populations. Evolution, then, consists of change between between generations within a population lineage. Darwin defined evolution as "descent with modification," where the word "descent" refers to the way evolutionary modification takes place in a series of populations that are descended from one another." Mark Ridley, Evolution, 2nd Edition (1996) pg 4. "1. Evolution means descent with modification, or the change in the form, physiology, and behavior of organisms over many generations of time. The evolutionary changes of living things occur in a diverging, tree-like pattern of lineages." pg 19. How can you be an evolutionary geneticist and not know? The equations for frequency change under positive selection show gene frequency changing in only one direction -- toward fixation. That's "directional" It's Futuyma. You should read more carefully. And, if you would have read the entire definition before you started nit-picking, you would have found this: "Populations may become subdivided so that several populations are derived from a COMMON ANCESTRAL POPULATION. If different changes in the proportions of variant individuals transpire in the several populations,the populations DIVERGE, OR DIVERSIFY. " So, it is clear the "changes in diversity" means that the descendent populations are different from each other. And I cited a couple of papers to you to show that adaptation is not always posterior. Sometimes it has been predicted ahead of time what would be adaptive. You seemed to either have not recognized what the data showed or just chose to ignore it. The second is not good science. Oh, please. "hereditary similarity" simply means that offspring are similar to their parents. It is the same thing as Darwin saying: "from the strong principle of inheritance they will will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. " How can you possibly be a geneticist and not know that offspring are similar to their parents? Now, why the "Good heavens" in reference to variation. Darwin and many others have already demonstrated variation among individuals. As a geneticist, you should be very aware that recombination and mutation mean that, altho offspring are similar to their parents, they are not identical. Nor are siblings (other than identical twins) identical to each other. Yes. No one ever said this didn't happen. We have just said that it is not a complete or sufficient definition of evolution. Back to Mayr. If you confine the definition of evolution to "changes in allele frequency" then you omit critical and necessary parts of evolution. You do know what "omits" means, don't you? Go ahead and throw up. Means nothing. Within the limited scope that Futuyma is using it, "improves" is accurate. Here Futuyma is not using it as a long-term goal or that some traits are absolutely "good" or "better", but in the context that adaptations show an improvement in the ability to use nylon as a food source, or the improvement in the ability to avoid predators by puffing up to a large size, or the ability to survive in an acidic environment, or an improvement in the ability to circumvent prey being immune to venom, or improve the ability to live on mine tailings with high levels of toxic heavy metals: 1. Birth of a unique enzyme from an alternative reading frame of the pre-existed, internally repetitious coding sequence", Ohno, S, Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 81:2421-2425, 1984. 39. C. Zimmer, How the pufferfish got its puff, Discover, Sept. 1997, pp 30-31 3. D. Grady, Quick-change pathogens gain an evolutionary advantage.Science, vol.274: 1081, 1996 (November 15). The primary research articleis JE LeClerc, B Li, WL Payne, TA Cebula, High mutation frequencies among Eschericia coli and Salmonella pathogens. Science, 274: 1208-1211, 1996 (Nov.15). 7. S Grenard, Is rattlesnake venom evolving? Natural History 109:44-49, July/Aug 2000. 4. Macnair, M. R. 1981. Tolerance of higher plants to toxic materials.In: J. A. Bishop and L. M. Cook (eds.). Genetic consequences of man made change. Pp.177-297. Academic Press, New York. 5. Toxic Tailings and Tolerant Grass by RE Cook in Natural History, vol90(3): 28-38, 1981