Questions about genetics and poor math.

[farmerjay86]

Hi everyone,

 

I am a horticulturalist who is interested in learning more about genetics. In the mean time I have an annoying question to pose, this question comes from my father who is a devout Jehovah's Witness and believes he has debunked evolution and exposed lies in Genetics. I know he is wrong about this and the math he uses to prove his point is a gross oversimplification however I don't know enough about genetics to point out the flaws in his supposed "discovery." Can someone with an elementary knowledge of this please help me?

 

Here it is:

 

 

"Base Pairs & Math.

Your particular favorite sect of evolutionism says that evolution happens very slowly over millions of

years.

Evolution “currently” says the first simple cells appeared about 3.5 billion years ago out of the

primordial soup, assumingly starting with one base pair and then evolving into more complex organisms.

We know modern humans today have about 3 billion base pairs in their genome.

x = Modern Humans have 3 billion base pairs of genes

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome)

y = 3.5 billion years of evolution

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_history_of_life)

The math shows that a slow mutation process would produce on average .87 base pairs of genes per

year in humans.

Humans will gain 87 new base pair of genes in 100 years?

Humans will gain 50+ base pairs in you 70 year life span?

The Modern human has existed for roughly ten thousand years with no obvious “new” physical changes

whatsoever.

The Protopterus aethiopicus (marbled lungfish) 130 billion base pairs

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome)

37.8 base pairs per year?

The plant Paris japonica as 150 billion base pairs

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8196572/Worlds-largest-genome-belongs-to-slow-growing-mountain-flower.html)

42.8 base pairs per year?

This means that, if you average the amount of base pairs, every year a new base pair should be added

to the genome of every organism on the planet.…..?

Is evolution science running experiments with organisms see if increases are actually occurring?

I looked, I couldn’t find one. I found challenges to have this done, but so far no universities\scientists

have taken this up. You know the results of this would either put a stake in the heart of creation or in

the heart of evolution, so of course you know darn well why this experiment is not being run. .......

Evolution, if it is the source of all of nature, should be as constant as the flow of a river. It should be

ongoing. Did the driving mechanism for evolution stop suddenly for some reason? If not, where is it?

Variations (aka mutations) ARE NOT NEW GENETIC MATERIAL. I know you think over millions of years they would be, but this makes your problem even worse because mathematically for a slow even process you need a lot of new base pairs each year - just to tie out the numbers.

Mathematically the average organism would have to gain about 100 base pairs of NEW GENETIC MATERIAL per year to make your theory of slow steady evolution to work.

Numbers don't lie dude.

Why do you not only refuse to answer the questions - but you refuse to even acknowledge them?

Why is this not happening now?
When did it stop, or are you saying it happens in fits and starts?

If you are having trouble acknowledging the start of my serious questions, should I continue?"

[CharonY]

The problem with this kind of arguments is that it is based on a complete lack of understanding of genetics and argues from there. One cannot really deconstruct individual arguments without pointing out that everything is nonsense and educated from the very basics, which would take more time than most (on either side of the argument) are willing to invest.

 

Nonetheless, a few points to address:

- changes in genome size can be quick and dramatic. Common mechanisms are duplications of whole areas and even chromsomes, but also due to mobile genetic elements such as viruses, transposons, plasmids, integrons and so on. These changes may not persist through the generation if they are deleterious, but there are plenty of examples in which they do (just think about polyploidy, i.e. multiplications of chromosomal sets) in plants. The additional genetic material may not even change the phenotype, but they allow for mutations and creations of genetic variants which may not have beem possible with a more restricted genome.

 

This leads me to the topic of mutations. Of course mutations do create novel material. A change in a base can result in a change in an amino acid, which in turn may change the function of a protein. More dramatic changes can be induced by changing the expression pattern (e.g. by mutating regulators or regulatory DNA sequences). There are plenty of examples for that too (again, basic genetics).

 

The summary is basically that evolution has nothing to do with randomly adding base pairs to the mix, nor do the molecular mechanisms work that way, which makes all the toying with numbers (I am hesitant to even call that math) rather pointless.

[Arete]

I merged the two duplicate threads.

 

assumingly starting with one base pair and then evolving into more complex organisms.

 

The assumption is false, and thus the entire following argument starts from a false premise. A single nucleotide would be insufficient for any DNA based life form (for a start you need three nucleotides to code for one amino acid) and life is not necessary for the existence of a chain of nucleic acids to exist.

 

See - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesis

 

The math shows that a slow mutation process would produce on average .87 base pairs of genes per

year in humans.

Just reiterating charonY here - the gain and loss of genetic elements in a genome does not occur in a nucleotide by nucleotide stepwise manner. Entire genomic regions can be lost, gained, moved around, turned on, turned off, etc. Assuming that nucleotides are gained one by one in an orderly manner is a false assumption which shows an exceptional lack of understanding of very basic genetics.

Humans will gain 87 new base pair of genes in 100 years?

No. As explained above, it is simply not how genetics works. As an example a person who acquires an unbalanced Robertsonian fusion event (a trisomy) will gain an entire chromosome and thus millions of nucleotides in comparison to their parents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trisomy

Humans will gain 50+ base pairs in you 70 year life span?

Aside from environmentally induced, epigenetic changes, an organism generally doesn't acquire mutations or addtional genetic information during its lifetime. Most gross recombination happens as a result of replication/reproduction. Another fundamentally false assumption.

The Modern human has existed for roughly ten thousand years with no obvious “new” physical changes

whatsoever.

Changes in the human phenotype are observed over a period of less than 100 years.

http://www.boston.com/business/healthcare/articles/2009/10/26/evolution_continues_framingham_heart_study_says/

This means that, if you average the amount of base pairs, every year a new base pair should be added

to the genome of every organism on the planet.…..?

As explained above - No, it doesn't. The premise is fundamentally flawed.

Is evolution science running experiments with organisms see if increases are actually occurring?

Many experiments regarding the gain and loss of genetic material exist: here's a few:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534703000338

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/256/1346/119.short

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7082/abs/nature04562.html

http://www.genetics.org/content/160/4/1651.short

You're not going to find an article supporting the author's assertions about evolutionary theory, as the deviate fundamentally from any accepted model of it - effectively forming a strawman argument and then "proving" that there's no evidence to support this mythical argument. It's the same as me saying that I can't find any observations of pink unicorns therefore the Christian god is non-existent. Christians never claimed that unicorns exist, nor is it in any way relevant to whether or not God exists, so such an argument would be irrelevant - much like this one.

Evolution, if it is the source of all of nature, should be as constant as the flow of a river. It should be

ongoing. Did the driving mechanism for evolution stop suddenly for some reason? If not, where is it?

It is. see the above cited article on the Framingham heart study for an example of it being observed, in humans, in the last 100 years.

Variations (aka mutations) ARE NOT NEW GENETIC MATERIAL. I know you think over millions of years they would be, but this makes your problem even worse because mathematically for a slow even process you need a lot of new base pairs each year - just to tie out the numbers.

This is a fundamental misuse of the term mutation - again displaying the author's lack of understanding of very basic genetics. Mutations are simply changes to genetic material over time. They include point mutations (e.g. a change from an A to a C at a given nucleotide) in addition to insertions, deletions, duplications, gene expression changes, gene duplications, etc.

Mathematically the average organism would have to gain about 100 base pairs of NEW GENETIC MATERIAL per year to make your theory of slow steady evolution to work.

No, as explained above the whole argument is based on false assumptions.

Why do you not only refuse to answer the questions - but you refuse to even acknowledge them?

See answers above.

Why is this not happening now?

It is. See citation above.

When did it stop, or are you saying it happens in fits and starts?

It didn't, see citations above.

Edited February 5, 2013 by Arete

[farmerjay86]

Are there examples like trisomy where the duplications are not detrimental to the organism? That would be his first response.

[Ringer]

Are there examples like trisomy where the duplications are not detrimental to the organism? That would be his first response.

Then he would be moving the goal posts if he just wanted examples of genetic information being added. You could use polyploidy in plants as an example as well.

[Arete]

Are there examples like trisomy where the duplications are not detrimental to the organism? That would be his first response.

 

 

"Most people with Robertsonian translocations have only 45 chromosomes in

each of their cells, yet all essential genetic material is present, and

they appear normal"

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robertsonian_translocation

[farmerjay86]

Hello Folks,

 

First I would like to thank you very much for the replies so far they have been extremely helpful, however my father still believes that he has a math equation that will prove that evolution couldn't happen and genetics is wrong. He has cited the Wistar Symposium of 1966 as one of his main sources for the math. At this point I would like to mention that he is a Software Engineer and plans on using C++ or another language to do the number crunching. Anyway I will be posting several of his emails as they come to me and I would appreciate any input on inaccuracies as this stuff is starting to get way over my head. This email is the most recent and is the "starting point" he plans to begin the mathematical model with. Let me know what you think and Thanks.

 

 

As far as the Math thread goes, so far we have agreed that:

· Evolution is responsible for both adding and subtracting genetic material from the genome

· The plant Paris aethiopicus has a whopping estimated 150 billion base pairs in its genome

· Many mutations happen, a lot bad, some good some neutral

· The amount of base pairs an organism has does not represent the number of mutations it has gone through but in fact this number is much greater as evolution adds, subtracts and adds again to the genome.

· Life started about 3.6 billion years ago (give or take a couple 100 million)

· The first “living” organism\bacteria started with one base pair in its genome.

· This first single organism built itself up, very rapidly adding pair after pair and lived long enough to develop the functionality of consuming material (eat) and asexual reproduction.

· They were the first, a single ancestor to all life, no others evolved alongside them; all organisms came from them.

· Millions of years later, two of these first organisms, evolving in parallel, one male, one female, happened to evolve at the exact same time, in the exact same place, right next to each other and started to sexually produce offspring.

· As the first organisms reproduced and continued mutating, branched off and produced every living organism that has ever lived.

· Mutations are always random

· There are no unequivocally (no bad side) beneficial mutations

· The smallest genome is the virus of E. coli with 5,385 base pairs

· We will begin our discussion of the discipline of mathematics as applied to the theory of macro-evolution at the starting 3.6 billion years ago with the prokaryote

· The 2nd macro-evolutionary step took 200 million years, was 3.4 billion years ago with Stromatolites (algae)

· The time scope applicable to the first stage of our discussion is 200 million years

· The working ratio of Good to Neutral\Bad mutations for the prokaryote is 0.00041

 

 

New data points to agree upon:

 

 

The first algae’s were the cyanobacteria.

(http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100603172209.htm)

The sequencing of the brown algal genome is also a milestone in the efforts to reconstruct the evolution of photosynthesis. "We now know that oxygen-producing photosynthesis was „invented" before about 3.8 billion years ago, by cyanobacteria, sometimes erroneously called 'blue-green algae'," says Valentin about the elemental capability of plants to convert sunlight into biologically usable energy, whilst releasing oxygen. "Green and red algae have developed this ability after their ancestors scavenged living cyanobacteria, and thus more or less captured photosynthesis, to the benefit of both sides, since this symbiosis resulted in tremendous competitive advantages in the primordial ocean."

 

 

Our target base pair amount is 2,488,635 in 200 million years

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sequenced_bacterial_genomes#Cyanobacteria)

Species Type Base Pairs

Corynebacterium diphtheriae Actinobacteridae 2,499,189

Corynebacterium diphtheriae Actinobacteridae 2,530,683

Corynebacterium diphtheriae Actinobacteria 2,488,635

Corynebacterium efficiens Actinobacteria 3,147,090

Corynebacterium glutamicum Actinobacteria 3,309,401

Corynebacterium jeikeium Actinobacteria 2,462,499

 

Do you agree ?

[Ringer]

Hello Folks,

 

First I would like to thank you very much for the replies so far they have been extremely helpful, however my father still believes that he has a math equation that will prove that evolution couldn't happen and genetics is wrong. He has cited the Wistar Symposium of 1966 as one of his main sources for the math. At this point I would like to mention that he is a Software Engineer and plans on using C++ or another language to do the number crunching. Anyway I will be posting several of his emails as they come to me and I would appreciate any input on inaccuracies as this stuff is starting to get way over my head. This email is the most recent and is the "starting point" he plans to begin the mathematical model with. Let me know what you think and Thanks.

The thing is, it doesn't matter what his mathematics say. Math can say anything as long as it's internally consistent. The math means nothing in science if it doesn't agree with observation. So if his mathematical model doesn't show evolution happening, it doesn't represent the real world. We have seen evolution, math disproving it is disproving an alternate dimension.

 

· The first “living” organism\bacteria started with one base pair in its genome.

Not necessarily true. That is assuming protolife was DNA based, which is pretty unlikely.

· Millions of years later, two of these first organisms, evolving in parallel, one male, one female, happened to evolve at the exact same time, in the exact same place, right next to each other and started to sexually produce offspring.

Not really. There are plenty of species that can both sexually and asexually reproduce. Even bacteria can transmit DNA to each other without sexual reproduction.

· Mutations are always random

Not always, mutation rates vary. Some types of sequences are more prone to mutation than others.