Mea Culpa - A Mistake

[bob b]

My opponents here have accused me of never admitting a mistake.

That is not true: I have done this several times in the past.

Today I announce a newly found error I recently discovered in one of my statements. I hope this will not damage too much my forum error rate, which currently hovers around one or two per year.

The current error can be found on the Haldane's Dilemma thread where I stated that Haldane had estimated the number of generations for a beneficial mutation to become fixed in a population at around 30.

I was reviewing Walter Remine's fine book this morning on the topic of Haldane's Dilemma and discovered to my surprise that the correct number was 300 not 30. In my defence there was on the same page a figure of 30, but this pertained to a different parameter which led up to the 300 estimate.

I sincerely apologize to all for making such a grevious error.

I will try to do better in the future, but for those of you who have mistaken my low error rate for an unwillingness to admit I am ever wrong, please note that I do admit my error when I actually make a verifiable mistake.

[la rubia]

Um, you might have also made an error in your title- isn't it supposed to be "mia" instead of "mea"? :D
I'm just kidding, I couldn't resist!:p :D

[bob b]

I'm glad you were only kidding, otherwise you would look pretty silly for pointing out a mistake that wasn't. :D

Just kidding, but in any case I don't count or apologize for spelling or grammatical errors (fortunately).

[la rubia]

Originally posted by bob b
I'm glad you were only kidding, otherwise you would look pretty silly for pointing out a mistake that wasn't. :D

Just kidding, but in any case I don't count or apologize for spelling or grammatical errors (fortunately).
Thanks for letting me off the hook... looking silly is my specialty...:eek: haha

[Rohan]

Bob, out of curiosity, what mistakes have you itemized?
I know a couple of threads you've abandoned in the midst of conversation, so if you could clarify which points you were wrong about it might help bring a sense of closure to those still waiting for a reply.

[bob b]

Rohan,

If you could be more specific it would help to separate cases where my failure to continue arguing endlessly past a useful and reasonable point from cases where you are obviously assuming (perhaps wrongly) that I stopped because I realized I had made a mistake.

On the other hand perhaps my sole mistake has been in assuming that my superior reasoning would eventually prevail in a discussion with dogmatic evolutionists.

[Stratnerd]

my superior reasoning would eventually prevail

i remember you had a signature about the proud and how God feels about it. I don't remember exactly but maybe you could remind me how God feels about the proud and what he does to them...

"dogmatic" : coming from a creationists is ironic esp. someone that just told someone to essentially "ignore the details".

[Rohan]

Originally posted by bob b
Rohan,

If you could be more specific it would help to separate cases where my failure to continue arguing endlessly past a useful and reasonable point from cases where you are obviously assuming (perhaps wrongly) that I stopped because I realized I had made a mistake.

On the other hand perhaps my sole mistake has been in assuming that my superior reasoning would eventually prevail in a discussion with dogmatic evolutionists.


Ok, I'll buy that you silently backed out of the debates I referred to because your superiority was being wasted on such trivial pursuits. It makes sense to duck and cover, especially when you have the answers (I guess).

As a person who spends a great deal of his own time correcting himself (though not much of it here, as my post count is still low), I think it would be enlightening to see the posts in which your made errors. Please, share your imperfections with us, oh great soldier of the lawd.

[bob b]

Rohan,

I couple of years ago I argued that the word translated as "gopher wood" only appeared once in scripture and therefore we could not be sure that wood was the main building material of the Ark.

It turns out that I got the "gopher" part of the story right, but did not realize that the "wood" part was from a separate Hebrew word that appears many times in scripture.

I quickly confessed my error as soon as someone pointed it out.

If I can recall any other cases I will relate them to you, but this is all I can remember off the top of my head. There were probably at least a few others.

[bob b]

S,

>>i remember you had a signature about the proud and how God feels about it. I don't remember exactly but maybe you could remind me how God feels about the proud and what he does to them... <<

You are correct, and my pride is one of my many failings, but in the particular case at hand you should be smart enough to realize that acting smug and sure of oneself is a common tactic for talk show hosts to expand their audience, due to the fact that many people are drawn to a good fight. It does seem to work! :D

>>"dogmatic" : coming from a creationists is ironic esp. someone that just told someone to essentially "ignore the details".<<

You don't ignore them, you just don't start there and try to work your way up.

[Mr. Ben]

The probability that a mutation will become fixed in a population in a given amount of time is a function of population size, but so is the number of mutations introduced into the gene pool.

As far as the number of generations for a mutation to become fixed, let me give you a little analogy...

At my feet is a P3 computer.. it has a 12 stage pipeline in its CPU, meaning that each instruction processed takes 12 computer cycles (1 cycle being the Mhz or Ghz of the computer) to complete each instruction.

But my P4 has a 20 stage pipeline!! In the P4, it takes a whopping 20 cycles to complete each instruction! What was Intel thinking? They've just increased the time it takes to complete each instruction by almost a factor of two... Why would they do that?

The answer is that the number of stages in the processor pipeline do not matter, it is the number of instructions INPUT into the pipleline and OUTPUT from the pipeline in each processor per cycle. The processor stages are like an assembly line. Each cycle, one instruction is added to the beginning of the line, and the others are moved down one stage, and the one at the end is popped out finished. So even though each instruction must go through 20 stages in the P4, the P4 can actually output more instructions per cycle on average than the P3, and because each stage is simpler than the P3, the P4 can operate at higher clock speeds.

Likewise with the number of generations taken to fix a gene. It may take 300 generations to fix a single gene, but how many genes enter the population each year, and how many genes are fixed each year? It really doesn't matter how long each gene takes before it is fixed, the numbers that really count are how many start their 300 year journey each year, and how many complete it each year. That is the real rate of mutational change.

[Stratnerd]

acting smug and sure of oneself

If I thought it was just an act I wouldn't have thought it worth noting. Bad excuse, because there's not much of an audience.

[Hank]

You are correct, and my pride is one of my many failings, but in the particular case at hand you should be smart enough to realize that acting smug and sure of oneself is a common tactic for talk show hosts to expand their audience, due to the fact that many people are drawn to a good fight. It does seem to work!

Hey Bob you wrote something I can agree with. You may be weak in the logic area but you are entertaining. Lots of times reading your posts makes my day. LOL

[bob b]

Ben,

I understand how computers work. I have been in the field since my first experience with them in college over 50 years ago. My son designed them when he worked for Zenith. I consider computers to almost be a friend of mine. :D

Your belief that what happens in transformation of an ancestor has some similarities to your computer analogy is partially true, but it is not close enough to warrant the conclusions you have made. There are critical differences.

First we must distinguish between specific individuals in a population and the population as a whole when we talk about the "pool". Many times in non-technical discussion there is switching back and forth between these two perpectives that is not easy to notice off the top of one's head: it takes analysis and/or more careful thought.

In the case at hand the claim is made that mutations ae going on in parallel. That is true, but what is the significance of this, i.e. how does this impact the overall conclusion?

First off, as I pointed out previously, what counts in this discussion is the line of descent of specific individuals, for eventually the population will have been presumably been generated by changes in the genes of the individuals in that line of descent. Ultimately population genetics argues that all other lines of descent will be eliminated as the single remaining line of descent becomes dominant throughout the entire population (it takes it over).

Thus, most of the mutations in other lines of descent will be purged from the population pool, but not all. Some will have been retained through interbreeding with the line which ultimately survived and took over the population.

Population genetics is the mathematic science that studies how this process operates. One of the three main founders of this mathematical science was a guy named Haldane who was a geneticist as well as an excellant mathematician. In his classic "Haldane's Dilemma" (he didn't coin the name) he pondered about the estimates he had made regarding populations of slowly reproducing mammals. It appeared that the mathematics of the process indicated extended numbers of generations for the process of beneficial gene replacement to take place.

Haldane was not naive about the processes going on in gene replacement in a population. Some assume incorrectly that Haldane thought that one mutation had to wait until it was fixed in the population until the next one could begin. That is not the case to be sure, but calculating the probabilities of multiple mutations ending up in the same individual is not simple: it takes a lot of sophisticated math.

So Haldane did a lot of work using different population sizes and circumstances and developed tables of what happens mathematically. From this he estimated the average number of generations per mutation passed on. Because he used an average one can multiply by the number of mutations required to get the number of generations required. In other words the parallism effects mentioned here were already factored into the equations Haldane used to develop his tables, and ultimately his estimate of the average number of generations per mutation.

You may choose if you wish to believe that you are smarter than Haldane and therefore there is no problem. You are wrong.

One of the top experts in this field, G. C. Williams, has stated that Haldane's Dilemma was never solved, and it hasn't been. But don't take my word for it, or anyone elses who tries to make it go away with misleading slogans like "hard selection", "soft selection" or even "truncated selection".

BTW, Robert Williams treatice on the subject, referred to at talk.orgins, has a fatal math error in it (at least it did the last time I looked), and besides he never got around to saying how many average generations he would have estimated instead if he didn't like the average number that Haldane estimated. He apparently was simply hoping to discredit Haldane and by this approach hope that everyone would just go away concluding that there probably wasn't really a problem after all.

[Mr. Ben]

First we must distinguish between specific individuals in a population and the population as a whole when we talk about the "pool". Many times in non-technical discussion there is switching back and forth between these two perpectives that is not easy to notice off the top of one's head: it takes analysis and/or more careful thought.

The distinction is clearly made in evolution.

In the case at hand the claim is made that mutations ae going on in parallel. That is true, but what is the significance of this, i.e. how does this impact the overall conclusion?

First off, as I pointed out previously, what counts in this discussion is the line of descent of specific individuals, for eventually the population will have been presumably been generated by changes in the genes of the individuals in that line of descent. Ultimately population genetics argues that all other lines of descent will be eliminated as the single remaining line of descent becomes dominant throughout the entire population (it takes it over).

But with sexual recombination, that line of descent includes practically the entire body of our successful ancestors. Each individual has two parents after all.

Thus, most of the mutations in other lines of descent will be purged from the population pool, but not all. Some will have been retained through interbreeding with the line which ultimately survived and took over the population.

Ultimately, almost all of our sucessful ancestors will have had a chance to pass on novel genes to us. That doesn't mean that they all did.

Population genetics is the mathematic science that studies how this process operates. One of the three main founders of this mathematical science was a guy named Haldane who was a geneticist as well as an excellant mathematician. In his classic "Haldane's Dilemma" (he didn't coin the name) he pondered about the estimates he had made regarding populations of slowly reproducing mammals. It appeared that the mathematics of the process indicated extended numbers of generations for the process of beneficial gene replacement to take place.

Only to you and other creationists Bob. The rest of us understand that mutations do not occur in serial fashion.

Haldane was not naive about the processes going on in gene replacement in a population. Some assume incorrectly that Haldane thought that one mutation had to wait until it was fixed in the population until the next one could begin.

Haldane's model was based on radical changes in the environment which exacted a replacement cost on the population. This is not characteristic of soft selection.

That is not the case to be sure, but calculating the probabilities of multiple mutations ending up in the same individual is not simple: it takes a lot of sophisticated math.

But a relatively simple computer program. Since evolution itself is very simple, you can simulate recombination, selection, and different selection pressures of different phenotypes easily. To describe the relationships mathematically is somewhat more difficult, but to actually "watch" what happens is rather trivial. The fact is that mutations with selection pressures within an order of magnitude of eachother are fixed in parallel. This negates the replacement cost in haldane's dilemma.

So Haldane did a lot of work using different population sizes and circumstances and developed tables of what happens mathematically. From this he estimated the average number of generations per mutation passed on. Because he used an average one can multiply by the number of mutations required to get the number of generations required. In other words the parallism effects mentioned here were already factored into the equations Haldane used to develop his tables, and ultimately his estimate of the average number of generations per mutation.

No they weren't Bob.

You may choose if you wish to believe that you are smarter than Haldane and therefore there is no problem. You are wrong.

I am aware of other work on population genetics that postdate haldane. You simply ignore the rest of the modern body of work because one early researcher in the field once said something that you want desperately to believe.

One of the top experts in this field, G. C. Williams, has stated that Haldane's Dilemma was never solved, and it hasn't been.

He is wrong, as anyone familiar with population genetics will tell you.

But don't take my word for it, or anyone elses who tries to make it go away with misleading slogans like "hard selection", "soft selection" or even "truncated selection".

Forget the slogans Bob, we don't need them to understand what's really going on.

Soft selection is very simple. With soft selection (which is characteristic of how ambient populations work as far as we know.. NOT hard selection) mutations are introduced into the population at large by every new individual, the mutations are culled with each death and each recombination, and some time later (perhaps 300 years), the products of that process are output. The measure of rate of change is the number of changes per year that are fixed in the population, and with many mutations going through different stages of the process at once, the rate of fixation is quite adequate.

BTW, Robert Williams treatice on the subject, referred to at talk.orgins, has a fatal math error in it (at least it did the last time I looked), and besides he never got around to saying how many average generations he would have estimated instead if he didn't like the average number that Haldane estimated. He apparently was simply hoping to discredit Haldane and by this approach hope that everyone would just go away concluding that there probably wasn't really a problem after all.

You're in an imaginary world of your own construction. People who work the numbers in population genetics are aware of Haldane, and know what he was talking about, and know the difference between his model and what goes on in the real world.

But since Haldane says something you want to believe you stick with it regardless of the obvious problems with his model.

[shima]

Bob b:
>>One of the top experts in this field, G. C. Williams, has stated that Haldane's Dilemma was never solved, and it hasn't been.<<

As with ALL models, we need to verify if the ASSUMPTIONS in the model are in agreement with the real world. If they are not, then any conclusion based on that model will be suspect. Thus, what is termed "Haldane's Dilemma" is based on a faulty understanding of the real world. Given that Haldane's work is quite old with respect to the recent works, I'd say its not that hard to understand that his model is flawed in some aspects.

However, it is quite sad that Creationists need to cling to an outdated Genetic model to be able to keep their beliefs. In almost all fields of science, Creationism has been long dead and buried as a scientific model of origins.

[Dimo]

Bob posted:

You are correct, and my pride is one of my many failings,

Dimo:

Bob, add to that your memory or lack thereof, your inability to see the implications of your own argument (IOW logic, but as Smilax has pointed out, not classical logic), your sense of humor, your inclination to be overly defensive (IOW taking a criticism as a personal insult rather than someone elses observation).....

Bob posted:

but in the particular case at hand you should be smart enough to realize that acting smug and sure of oneself is a common tactic for talk show hosts to expand their audience, due to the fact that many people are drawn to a good fight. It does seem to work!

Dimo:

So are you acting or are you sincere?

Is your whole goal on this forum to get good ratings or to search for truth?

Yes, many people are drawn to a good fight. Many people are compelled to stare at train wrecks because of a strange fascination with tragedy, as well. I read your posts on this forum for the latter reason rather than the former. Kind of like watching the Anna Nicole show. I think it is a horrible show. But if I happen to pass over it when changing channels I can't help watching for a few minutes just to make sure that it is still horrible.

I am hopefull however, that many people who visit here are aware of the lack of substance that characterizes your posts.