YEC genotype/phenotype challenge!!

[tas8831]

I posted this as part of another thread last year, and the year before that, and I had no takers. 3rd time a charm?



Creationist electrical engineer Walter ReMine wrote:

Take an ape-like creature from 10 million years ago, substitute a maximum of 500,000 selectively
significant nucleotides and you would have a poet philosopher?... Is this enough to account for the significantly improved skulls, jaws, teeth, feet, speech, upright posture, abstract thought, and appreciation of music, to name just a few?
- The Biotic Message, p. 209​

Clearly, ReMine thinks that 500,000 beneficial mutations is just not enough to get a human from an apelike ancestor.
He never says why he thinks this, but it has become a mantra among creationists that even if evolution were true, there are not enough beneficial mutations to explain us evolving from an apelike ancestor.

So... the challenge -

How many mutations would it have taken to get a human pelvis (left) from an Australopithecine pelvis (right)?

Show your work please.

I was once told by a creationist computer tech that it must be 1 million! He could not explain why, he just "knew" it.
And yet... We actually know that a single mutation can produce this kind of pelvis:

from normal human phenotype parents... so, I'm thinking a million is maybe ~999,990 too many..

 

[exchemist]

I posted this as part of another thread last year, and the year before that, and I had no takers. 3rd time a charm?



Creationist electrical engineer Walter ReMine wrote:

Take an ape-like creature from 10 million years ago, substitute a maximum of 500,000 selectively
significant nucleotides and you would have a poet philosopher?... Is this enough to account for the significantly improved skulls, jaws, teeth, feet, speech, upright posture, abstract thought, and appreciation of music, to name just a few?
- The Biotic Message, p. 209​

Clearly, ReMine thinks that 500,000 beneficial mutations is just not enough to get a human from an apelike ancestor.
He never says why he thinks this, but it has become a mantra among creationists that even if evolution were true, there are not enough beneficial mutations to explain us evolving from an apelike ancestor.

So... the challenge -

How many mutations would it have taken to get a human pelvis (left) from an Australopithecine pelvis (right)?

Show your work please.

I was once told by a creationist computer tech that it must be 1 million! He could not explain why, he just "knew" it.
And yet... We actually know that a single mutation can produce this kind of pelvis:

from normal human phenotype parent... so, I'm thinking a million is maybe ~999,990 too many..

Why is it always the electrical engineers!

Most of the anti-Einstein and anti-QM cranks on science forums are electrical engineers as well.

(Don't get me wrong: some of my best friends are............)

 

[Nimos]

Clearly, ReMine thinks that 500,000 beneficial mutations is just not enough to get a human from an apelike ancestor.
He never says why he thinks this, but it has become a mantra among creationists that even if evolution were true, there are not enough beneficial mutations to explain us evolving from an apelike ancestor.

Not an expert in evolution, but doesn't it kind of depend on how severe each of these 500000 mutations/changes are? It seems like someone just throwing out a number and assuming that basically nothing changes at all and therefore there isn't enough.

 

[Twilight Hue]

Not an expert in evolution, but doesn't it kind of depend on how severe each of these 500000 mutations/changes are? It seems like someone just throwing out a number and assuming that basically nothing changes at all and therefore there isn't enough.

It's not as much severity as it is adaptation to the environment.

Sharks haven't really changed because they really didn't need to.

 

[Nimos]

It's not as much severity as it is adaptation to the environment.

Sharks haven't really changed because they really didn't need to.

I know that. But from what he wrote it seems like a number you can't use for anything, because its without context.

Like me saying, if you eat carrots each day, you are 10% less likely to get a heart attack... But if the chance of getting a heart attack is 0.000001% then eating carrots doesn't really change anything, despite 10% seems like a lot.

 

[Yazata]

I posted this as part of another thread last year, and the year before that, and I had no takers. 3rd time a charm?
Creationist electrical engineer Walter ReMine wrote:

Take an ape-like creature from 10 million years ago, substitute a maximum of 500,000 selectively
significant nucleotides and you would have a poet philosopher?... Is this enough to account for the significantly improved skulls, jaws, teeth, feet, speech, upright posture, abstract thought, and appreciation of music, to name just a few?
- The Biotic Message, p. 209​

​

It's a legitimate question. There are only about 20,000 protein encoding genes in the human genome, plus an unknown amount of regulatory sequences (which constitute the great majority of the genome). Explaining how we get from the information encoded in human dna to a fully developed organism is a fundamental area of research in developmental biology. Clearly the uniqueness of the human species isn't just the product of which proteins human genes specify, but perhaps even more crucially on when, where and in what order those genes are switched on and off.

In my opinion and in the opinion of most biologists it's pretty clearly the product of evolution. But precisely how we get from the level of single cells like bacteria to immensly complex organisms like human beings is still very poorly understood. How does one move from a genetic code in a fertilized egg, through all sorts of embryonic developmental steps, to... us? Why do other organisms follow such different developmental paths? How did these pathways come about? This is perhaps the hottest research area in contemporary biology.

It has nothing necessarily to do with creationism. But the fact that creationists might make use of the remaining unknowns in their rhetoric is no excuse for pretending that the unknowns don't exist or for pretending that we know more than we really do. (The unknowns are where the interest and excitement are.)

There's just so much of this stuff that contemporary biology still doesn't fully understand.

Evolutionary developmental biology - Wikipedia

 

[tas8831]

Not an expert in evolution, but doesn't it kind of depend on how severe each of these 500000 mutations/changes are? It seems like someone just throwing out a number and assuming that basically nothing changes at all and therefore there isn't enough.

Exactly true.
I have encountered ReMine directly on several occasions over the years, and he has never even tried to address such questions - there seems to be a strange belief among non=scientist creationists that any and all mutations have a common phenotypic impact, and that is uniformly small.
A few years ago, the creationist Supersport (many may recall the name) declared that to get shorter digits (as in going from the relatively long digits of apes to the relatively short ones of humans) , there had to have been a series of mutations shortening them by a millimeter at a time. And, of course, that would have "taken too long".

 

[tas8831]

Why is it always the electrical engineers!

Indeed.... The occasional mechanical engineer, also (e.g., Walt Brown).

Most of the anti-Einstein and anti-QM cranks on science forums are electrical engineers as well.

(Don't get me wrong: some of my best friends are............)

Same!

 

[GardenLady]

I think the last photo in the OP looks like an albino bat.

That's all I got.

 

[tas8831]

I think the last photo i n the OP looks like an albino bat.

That's all I got.

FYI, its from an achondroplastic human (familial dwarfism).

 

[gnostic]

I think the last photo in the OP looks like an albino bat.

That's all I got.

Ha. Now that you have mentioned it. It does look like a bat!

Strange, how I didn’t see the resemblance when I first saw the pic. I must be blind as a bat.

 

[tas8831]

And still no creationists attempt an explanation. Maybe @MrIntelligentDesign?

 

[exchemist]

And still no creationists attempt an explanation. Maybe @MrIntelligentDesign?

Not if you are looking for a serious discussion.

More generally, the creationists we have here generally seem to wait until they have read some new (to them) argument on one of their websites and then they will start a thread about it. None of them will want to go in to bat without a quiver of ready-made "talking points" to shoot off.

 

[tas8831]

Not if you are looking for a serious discussion.

More generally, the creationists we have here generally seem to wait until they have read some new (to them) argument on one of their websites and then they will start a thread about it. None of them will want to go in to bat without a quiver of ready-made "talking points" to shoot off.

I know, but I keep trying...