LOL. Thanks again RussT.
Your mistake (and thereby your misunderstanding) lies in this:
How does a species survive after 1,000,000,000,000 harmful mutations?
Curiously by the same mechanism that concentrates the beneficial mutations. Those organisms that suffer from harmful mutations generally do not survive to adulthood, or to breed, and they are eliminated with the organisms that carry them.
So if "most" means 90% (which is
very charitable compared to the real world) this still leaves 1,000,000,000,000 x 10% = 100,000,000,000 undesired mutations. I don't think this math is so very hard. It might be harder if one couldn't afford to be off-the-top-of-one's-head charitable and had to quibble over which estimates to use. That's not the case. One can afford this luxury and more.
The mutations that aren't eliminated spread throughout the population. How many steps backward can one take for every step forward and still make progress? Even if the population only accumulated 2 bad mutations for every good mutation, extinction clearly must result; and it doesn't take a billion years either.
Most of the mutations are neutral (not selected for nor against) and this leads to variation and diversity within populations.
Another propaganda word game. Neutrality cannot be demonstrated; only
assumed. But fine, say 90% are somehow actually meaningless (implies the code that contained them was meaningless, but one can
always readily and confidently be extremely generous in these matters). 100,000,000,000 x 10% = 10,000,000,000. That's an awful lot of backward steps. One step forward just doesn't match up. It's not even a drop in the bucket.
I hope that it is a waste of time to even do these maths. Surely folks understand that ten billion bad mutations,
after discounting generously for evowishes like selection & neutrality, add up to more than one baby-step mutation toward something good (which itself may not survive the first round of selection).
Of course you do. You call it "natural selection".
Actually "natural selection" is what Darwin called it, and it has been verified, observed and validated in the real world. Some organisms survive and breed to a better degree than others and as a result they pass on more of their hereditary traits to their offspring and to the population as a whole than those less endowed.
Now this is the real part I intended to respond to. Once again I must challenge the hype about 'natural selection'. To my knowledge it has never been observed/verified in any way.
I have requested evidence on this on other forums, and never once has anyone directed me to an observation of 'natural selection'. I have been directed to observations of artificial selection and/or poisoning. Yes, it is widely believed that poisoning events prove 'natural selection', judging by the responses.
But if anyone is aware of actual observations of 'natural selection' I'd like to see where it happened. It should be unambiguously natural, and the fitness must not be defined simply as "those that survived". Such circular reasoning does not impress me. I consider it most mockworthy, in fact.
And speaking of circular reasoning, here's a fine example:
OK, so where are all these harmfully-mutated fossils?
Curiously there are thousands: all the fossils of juveniles that died before they reproduced. There are likely some adults too, however it is harder to determine whether an adult has reproduced or not (more so with males than with females).
Catch that? Any juvenile that is fossilized didn't reproduce. It was 'selected'.
So it must have had a harmful mutation.
Now we know death comes to all in the real world. There is no evogod looking out for the fit, ensuring their survival.
The other side of the coin is that most of the harmful mutations cause malformation of the zygote/embyro/fetus. In humans, for instance, we know that upwards of 80% of conceptions never make it to breathing fresh air. This kind of high reproductive failure rate is likely found in all species, yet the birth rate of living organisms is still enough to more than compensate for the older organisms that die in any year, and thus refill the population coffers.
More yakking. But what's missing? For all this information that's supposed to impress the readily impressible, one fact is conspicuous by its absence: in sexually reproducing life, the vast majority of all mutations are recessive! They're undercover mutations, hiding from the selection god. In a generation or three, they may come out to play, but by then the original mutant has already evaded selection and reproduced!
But trivial details like this... The math was already hopelessly lost. It's just not sporting to go back and add in all the bad mutations, now is it? What'd be the point? The true believers don't care, that's for certain.
Still, the main point of my post was to challenge the assertion that 'natural selection' has been observed. This is commonly claimed, but I haven't seen it backed up. I know folks used to venture out into nature, choose this or that trait, and keep track of how helpful it turned out to be. I know they experienced many a failure. Real science is capable of making successful predictions, is it not?
I understand that RAZD is not around, but that matters little. The myths about 'natural selection' being observed/verified/confirmed are many, and nothing says one even needs to believe in it to know of some documentation. Maybe this time we'll come up empty again, and maybe we won't...
A good yardstick here is to go by what Thomas Huxley would've accepted. I've seen nothing that would have altered his opinion that 'natural selection' might occur, but it was unscientific to claim that it does because there wasn't evidence to support the claim. As far as I know, there still isn't.
