Originally Posted by RAZD
Hey Russell2, just a quick note:

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This would prevent erroneous arguments like RAZD's claim that mutations have been accurately counted and categorized, so we can clearly see why there is a preference for 'neutral'.
This is another one of CTD's repeated false interpretations of what I said. I said that we can accurately measure mutations, and we find that they fall across the spectrum from beneficial to deleterious.

His emphasis on accurately counted and categorized misrepresents this position by overstating it.
What RAZD actually said:
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We can actually watch and count and measure these so we do know that they fall across the spectrum from beneficial to deleterious.
There's more, but this will suffice to set the record straight, even for those with broken scrollbars or deficient browsers.

Even just now, in your feigned denial of accuracy, you say "I said that we can accurately measure mutations, and we find that they fall across the spectrum from beneficial to deleterious."

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Curiously we do not need to count every mutation, and categorize every mutation, in order to show that some are beneficial, some are deleterious, some are neutral. Nor do we need to count every mutation to show the pattern of distribution within a population of those that are known.
As I already pointed out, there is no way to determine neutrality.

R2 omits to mention that DNA can be read more than once. It is sometimes read forwards, then again backwards and/or skipping every so many letters. The information density is astonishing, as some of you may know. Just because one function of the DNA isn't degraded, that does not mean others aren't.

And the only way for a typo to fail to degrade a text is if an optional letter or a placeholder is involved. For example, potatoe can lose the e on the end and still be potato. Both spellings are correct. Also, a partially degraded text can be read sometimes, but further deterioration will make it useless.

The farmer milked his cow.
Thh farmor milked hii cow.
Shh farmod milled hii ckw.
Shh fyrmoo qillen hbi dkw.

At which point does it become impossible to read? Which degrade was neutral? Now imagine I'd been clever enough and taken the time to encode another message in the text. The word "wilt" is present, reading backwards, but the number of intervening letters isn't constant. Pretend it was. See how easily that message can become garbled even if the first one can still be deciphered?

And the fact remains: not all functions of any given stretch of DNA code are known. You could scramble the beans out of the routines that deal with hotkeys, and a person using a text editor might never find out - until/unless they went to use the hotkeys. Since DNA is known to use the same stretch of code for more than one purpose, until we know all the purposes and circumstances under which the code is designed to be read, it is nothing but a blatant argument from ignorance to claim the code isn't degraded, and call an unknown element 'neutral'.

Note that the very same argument was used with vestigial organs. R2 repeats history. How accurate did it turn out to call organs with no known function 'useless'? It is to be expected that they'd like you to make the same mistake all over again, folks. So do you learn from history, or not? That's the question here.

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