ROBERT RAPIER
I agree that it is time to wrap this up. This is my final post in this thread. I am going to have three parts to my response. The first is the super-short summary. The second is a longer and more comprehensive (but not too technical) summary. The third part deals specifically with Fred’s most recent post.
SUPER-SHORT SUMMARY
Fred Williams: I cannot conclusively prove that 1667 isn’t enough because there is not enough sequence information available for both chimps & humans (even if there was, it would still not be provable because we cannot obtain a sequence from the alleged 10-million-year-ago ancestor).
That’s really all you need to know. If this admission had been made in Fred’s first reply, I wouldn’t have had anything else to argue about. My biggest complaint over this issue is that Fred and Mr. ReMine have repeatedly made claims that 1667 beneficial mutations can’t turn a common ancestor into a human. They take this as a fact, and then base arguments off of this
fact. In the extraordinary admission above, Fred acknowledges that this claim has zero scientific basis; it is an argument of disbelief. Therefore, Mr. ReMine has no scientific justification for his basic premise in his treatment of Haldane’s Dilemma. As I said, his treatment of Haldane could be 100% accurate, but the premise that he bases it on is not scientifically supported. Therefore, this is not remotely a scientific argument.
SUMMARY
If we ever had an audience during this debate, we have probably lost most of it by getting bogged down in technical details. Therefore, I am going to try and summarize my arguments here, and do so with as little technical detail as possible. My summary will also be unique in that these points are non-controversial. In other words, I don’t think Fred can dispute any of them. If you haven’t followed the argument to this point, this summary will tell you everything you need to know about the problem.
What Walter ReMine has done is effectively provide a falsification test for human/chimpanzee common ancestry. If his argument is completely correct, it proves that humans and chimpanzees did not share a common ancestor. However, if he is incorrect, that obviously does not prove common ancestry by default, nor is it an indictment against Creationism in general. It just demonstrates that his argument is invalid, and therefore deserves a place among the refuted Creationist arguments. A brief summary of the relevant issues:
1). Walter ReMine wrote a book,
The Biotic Message. In this book he addressed the subject of Haldane’s Dilemma, which highlights the difficulty of getting beneficial mutations established throughout a population. His conclusion is that any hypothetical common ancestor to both modern humans and chimpanzees could have only accrued 1667 beneficial mutations over the course of 10 million years.
2). Various solutions to Haldane’s Dilemma have been proposed since Haldane wrote his 1957 paper. In Mr. ReMine’s book, he attacks the proposed solutions, but spends absolutely zero time pondering the obvious questions: Are 1667 beneficial mutations enough to account for the differences? How many should there be? Without addressing these questions, Mr. ReMine’s point fails because he has not established that there is actually a dilemma. This is like prosecuting a crime before first establishing that a crime has been committed. If, for example, it is determined in the future that 854 beneficial mutations are estimated to have accrued between common ancestor and man, Mr. ReMine’s entire argument fails.
3). Mr. ReMine also wrote that Motoo Kimura showed that 25,000 expressed neutral mutations could also have accrued over the same 10 million year period. By expressed, that means that the mutation makes some kind of detectable difference in the organism. This may be as simple as a single amino acid modification in a protein.
4). Fred Williams and Walter ReMine have both been engaged repeatedly on this matter, but both have consistently refused to put forward an argument that 1667 beneficial mutations and 25,000 expressed neutral mutations can’t account for human evolution. They just assert it over and over. This is not science.
5). In science, the person making the claim is expected to provide the evidence. Claims are not accepted as true unless proven false. If this was the way science operated, then science would be placed in the position of having to refute any claim from anyone: alien abductions, perpetual motions machines, bigfoot, etc. It seems quite obvious that if I claim to have encountered bigfoot, that it is not up to science to disprove my claim. If I really want to convince people, then I need to bring some pretty convincing evidence. Yet Mr. ReMine and Fred Williams seem to believe that no evidence other than their statements of disbelief are required to show that 1667 beneficial mutations can’t account for human evolution. Fred only makes statements like “If you want to believe 1667 is enough, go right ahead”. This is not remotely scientific.
6). While the burden of proof is not on me, I made an attempt to show that 1667 is not “out of the ballpark”, as Fred once claimed. I looked at the coding differences between man and common ancestor. The coding area of the genome is the area responsible for producing the proteins that build an organism’s brain, heart, skin, muscles, etc. In other words, this is the region that builds a human, a chimpanzee, or a common ancestor. The difference between human and common ancestor in this region is estimated to be 216,000 base pairs.
7). Fred protested that I had only included coding regions and he pointed out that non-coding areas have been implicated in diseases. He tried to expand the area under consideration to some 10 million base pairs (5 million for the human/common ancestor comparison). Fred’s statement
may have some merit, but there are a couple of problems with it. The first is that Haldane’s Dilemma is only concerned with beneficial mutations, and the only references Fred provided were related to disease. The second is that by all accounts, the vast majority of mutations are either neutral or harmful. So, even if we greatly expand the area under consideration, only a small fraction of the mutations would be beneficial, and therefore relevant to the problem. This is why Fred’s argument, while potentially interesting, doesn’t really help his case.
8). I demonstrated that 1667 beneficial mutations and 25,000 neutral expressed mutations can easily equate to several hundred thousand or even several million base pair differences between species. This does not even count neutral mutations that aren’t expressed, and harmful mutations, which Fred has indicated are the most predominant.
9). Conclusion: Neither Walter ReMine nor Fred Williams even attempt to meet the burden of proof in establishing that 1667 beneficial mutations and 25,000 neutral expressed mutations can’t account for human evolution. The major weaknesses in their case are: 1). The ancestor has not been identified, therefore the required adaptations are unknown. 2). If the ancestor had been identified, it is still unknown how many beneficial mutations are required for various adaptations. 3). Comparisons between human and chimp genomes have indicated that the genetic similarities are closer than previous estimates had indicated. This significantly weakens the ReMine/Williams argument.
10). Unless Fred or Walter ReMine are ready to step forward and present evidence that 1667 beneficial mutations and 25,000 neutral expressed mutations can’t account for human evolution, you may consider their argument refuted. ReMine’s discussion of Haldane’s Dilemma is moot, as he failed to establish that there is a dilemma as it pertains to human evolution.
REGARDING FRED’S LATEST POST
I have to truly wonder if Fred is skipping over large sections of my post, because much of what he wrote is irrelevant. He also clearly misinterpreted parts of my post, and in doing so wrongly declared them to be in error. I have stated multiple times that my argument is not whether or not Haldane’s assumptions were correct. I indicated that they might not be, (in fact many biologists argue that they are not) but I accepted for the purpose of this argument that they are. Therefore, 2/3 of Fred’s response is moot, because it dealt with Haldane’s assumptions, neutral theory, etc. None of these are relevant to my argument, which I have repeated numerous times:
Are Walter ReMine and Fred Williams justified in presuming that 1667 beneficial mutations can’t turn a common ancestor into a modern human. There is no reason for me to address these moot parts of Fred’s response.
Fred Williams: Even if Robert had made a case that 1667 is a reasonable number to account for human evolution, he would still be mistaken to claim that this rendered Haldane’s 1 per 300 generation number moot.
Misrepresentation. You clearly demonstrate a misunderstanding of my position. If 1667 is a reasonable number, it means that there is no dilemma with respect to human evolution. It has nothing to do with 1 substitution every 300 generations, and I never stated otherwise. In fact, I stated that with respect to this discussion, I accept Haldane’s assumptions. It is just common sense that if 1667 is a reasonable number, then there is no dilemma in the case of human evolution. Therefore, ReMine’s entire discussion on Haldane is moot as far as human evolution is concerned.
Fred Williams: In his analysis that attempts to show 1667 may be enough, he assumed “expressed differences” lie solely in the exon areas of the genome. He completely dismisses the remaining 99% of the genome.
Uh, Fred, since 99% of the respective genomes are
identical, I am perfectly justified in dismissing 99%. It is the remaining 1%, in which the differences lie, that is relevant to our discussion. Perhaps you just misstated the point you were attempting to make. As it stands, I don’t see how looking at identical portions of the genome are relevant.
Fred Williams: Considers 1667 as bunches, and extrapolates this to as many as 500,000 bp differences! This particular error now seems to be Robert’s focal point. This magic wand of his is quite amazing! I will address this in more detail below.
Exaggeration/misrepresentation. I only considered that a mere 10% consist of “bunches, using ReMine’s own hypothetical. Are you saying that Mr. ReMine just pulled these numbers out of thin air with absolutely no basis for this hypothetical? I would be shocked if this were the case.
Fred Williams: I have provided evidence that we know that some unknown percentage of introns (which represent 25% of the genome) plays a functionally significant role, which means they too likely impact “expressed differences”.
And I countered Fred’s assertions in two ways. The first is that all of your references related to disease. Haldane’s Dilemma is concerned with beneficial mutations, therefore it can correctly be pointed out that you have provided no evidence relevant to Haldane’s Dilemma. Second, I pointed out that even if I consider all the differences (some 20 million base pair differences between human and common ancestor) your argument still fails the burden of proof required to be considered scientific.
Fred Williams: I suspect even Robert will now admit that for evolution to be true, positive selection got them there.But I bet he will still stick to his claim that there is only a “tiny fraction” of them, despite evidence to the contrary (he later confuses the issue by saying they are “under little selective pressure now”; those that are functionally important would obviously be under negative selective pressure upon mutation, as my citations showed.)
Unless you are making the claim that beneficial mutations make up a significant fraction of total mutations, then I am easily justified in stating that only a tiny fraction are relevant to Haldane’s Dilemma. After all, Creationists continually stress the rarity of beneficial mutations. Therefore, a tiny fraction of regions outside coding regions would be beneficial, and therefore relevant. The only way to counter this is to assume that beneficial mutations are not rare.
Fred Williams: I’ll remind the reader that this is a pseudo-red herring on Robert’s part, as it detracts from our debate regarding the errors I claim Robert made while trying to justify 1667 as enough.
I will remind the reader that the core of my argument is that Fred’s and Mr. ReMine’s claim is not scientifically supported. This is why I asked Fred to read my previous posts; so that he would understand my position. Clearly he did not read my earlier posts, and therefore misrepresents my position.
Fred Williams: Robert makes this challenge because he was unable to do the opposite, to demonstrate that 1667 is a reasonable number to account for human evolution.
Not true. I made the challenge because the burden of proof is on he who asserts. You and Mr. ReMine asserted; I did not. I said I don’t know, but it is not scientific to assert without evidence.
Fred Williams: A minor note is that it is only in the last year that I recall Robert capitulating to this position that is shared by Robert Williams and Scott Page (a position that is not supported in any scientific journal, I might add).
Actually, you again show your misunderstanding of my position. I said that I don’t know if 1667 is enough, so how could I have capitulated to a position. The burden of proof is on you for making the assertion, and you seem to have capitulated to the position of “it just can’t possibly be enough”. In addition, Mr. ReMine did not make his claims in a scientific journal, so why would they have been addressed? Note that I am not saying that Haldane’s Dilemma is not discussed in the literature, I am talking about Mr. ReMine’s claim that 1667 is not enough for human evolution. Finally, the position that I (and others) have taken, that the burden of proof is on you, has been taken every time Mr. ReMine posts on a board to defend the issue. Following is in an exchange that occurred just last week, on August 3rd. A poster (“Steven J.”) on the newsgroup alt.talk.creationism posed the following questions to Mr. ReMine who had dropped in:
Steven: How does one propose to know how many substituted mutations the theory needs to explain, without comparing two (alleged) lineages, and having some idea of how long it's been since they diverged? Without knowing that, how does one know whether it falls above or below the limit imposed by Haldane's Dilemma?
Walter ReMine: I won't be staying here long enough to discuss. So take this brief answer as a clue to my thinking.
We have vast real-world experience with nucleotides and substitutions -- in the lab, in breeding pens, in the field -- and this experience does not depend on how you or I presume macroevolution is 'supposed' to occur. We just observe the power of nucleotides and substitutions -- and what you see is what you get. (That is, these observations are relatively theory-free and un-biased about evolution or creation.
Whereas comparisions between modern chimp and modern humans are inevitably chock-full with assumptions about how macroevolution is assumed to occur.)
At any rate, we have lots of observational, scientific experience with nucleotides and substitutions, and their power (or not) to create biological designs. Compare what we have thusly seen with the Haldane-limit of 1667 substitutions (nominally 1667 beneficial nucleotides) in ten million years for explaining ALL human adaptations in that time. We are on solid scientific footing to make such a comparison.
Note that Mr. ReMine did not even attempt to address the question, except with evasive qualitative arguments. He also tried to evade the only scientific possibility of addressing this question by downplaying human-chimp comparisons. If he is unwilling to address the question in this manner, then he has absolutely zero ground left to stand on with respect to this issue. Note also his reference to “nominally 1667 beneficial nucleotides”. I have discussed the particular wording of this statement in the past with Mr. ReMine. Apparently Mr. ReMine considers that if 90% of the mutations are point mutations, as in his hypothetical, the final product is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1667 beneficial nucleotides. I have demonstrated that this is not remotely true.
Fred Williams: But common sense alone suggests that 1667 beneficial changes is way too low given that there are at least 30 million bp differences separating us from chimps (more on this below). Yes, many of these may be neutral differences, but only 1667 beneficial?
Without knowing how many base pairs 1667 beneficial mutations equate to, this is an invalid comparison. Also, how rare are beneficial mutations? You say they are exceedingly rare, which supports my argument in this case. Let’s compare human to modern ancestor, and assume that every mutation is a point mutation. This is a very generous assumption for your case. Then we have 1667 beneficial mutations out of 20 million total base pair differences. What is the ratio of beneficial mutations to the total? ReMine states that a population of 100,000 is not likely to see one every generation. 1667 out of 20 million is equal to 1 beneficial mutation per 12,000 total mutations. This probability is increased as soon as more realistic assumptions are used (e.g., not every mutation is a point mutation). Again, even with the most optimistic assumptions, your argument fails.
Fred Williams: To claim 1667 may be enough is a complete capitulation of the issue. Does such a claim appear anywhere in the evolutionist’ science journals? I recommend Robert (or someone qualified) take such a position to the evolutionist journals and allow an open discussion on it.
This is also the position that Mr. ReMine has taken, which is quite unusual since the ReMine/Williams claim has not been made in any science journals. So why would anyone address it there? To use a familiar analogy, no one in the science journals has refuted the claim that the moon is made of green cheese. The reason is that no such claim has been made in a science journal. If you or Mr. ReMine wish to make claims in science journals, they will be addressed.
Fred Williams: Is contrasting 1667 to 30 million bp differences (ranging from deleterious to beneficial) between human and chimp a valid comparison? I say yes, despite Robert’s protests otherwise. It forces the evolutionists to postulate that the vast majority of these mutations are neutral (indeed this was Kimura’s approach).
Once again, as I have pointed out (and Sumac and others pointed out over a year ago) without knowing how many base pair substitutions 1667 mutations provide, this is an invalid comparison.
Fred Williams: This is merely Robert’s opinion. Robert again has provided absolutely NO evidence to support this claim, other than to twist a hypothetical Mr Remine wrote to illustrate a point. Let’s explore this further. Robert arrives at his estimate primarily via duplicated genes.
False. It presumed that only 3.6% of the total consisted of duplicated genes. This is a far cry from “primarily”. I was also using Mr. ReMine’s hypothetical, and merely applied the math (no twisting required) to demonstrate the trouble his hypothetical provides for his own (and your) argument. Do you believe that he completely made these numbers up, or do you think he had some kind of basis for his hypothetical?
Fred Williams: There is no evidence of even a single duplicated gene that exists in humans that does not exist in chimps. Robert arrives at his number by assuming 60 of these! How convenient!
Convenient? No. I just used Mr. Remine’s hypothetical to illustrate the point. But that brings up another point that I should have addressed earlier. What evidence do you have of
any beneficial mutations existing in us that don’t exist in chimpanzees? I am sure you have some that you can share? The only significant difference I am aware of is the one that John Paul and I discussed earlier, the sialic acid mutation. But that involves a 92 base pair deletion, so would more likely fall into the category of deleterious mutation for humans. But note that it is not a point mutation. Therefore, the only evidence we have for an expressed difference between humans and chimps involves a 92 base pair event. If you wish to counter, you need to come up with some expressed differences due to point mutations. To be completely relevant, they should be of the beneficial variety.
Fred Williams: If Robert were correct that it is reasonable to make such an incredible extrapolation, why have no other noted evolutionists since Haldane (Kimura, Crow, Maynard Smith, GC Williams, etc) latched on to this argument?.
Because Mr. ReMine’s claims are not made in a scientific journal. To confuse Mr. ReMine’s claims (that 1667 is not enough) with discussions made in the literature on Haldane’s Dilemma is ludicrous.
Fred Williams: I could not help but respond to this. I only asked this *after* YOU MOVED THE GOALPOSTS! It is YOU who issued the red-herring, goal-post moving challenge to show that 1667 isn’t enough!!!
More evidence that you have not been reading my posts. This is the absolute crux of my argument; how can it possibly be a red herring? I have stated this in every post I have made.
Fred Williams: Hard data, actual, direct sequence comparisons, currently provide solid evidence that chimps and humans do not share a common ancestor. The hard data is showing that there are far too many bp differences to account for a shared common ancestor.
False. If your claims were true, geneticists would support them. Can you point me to a scientific journal where anyone is suggesting that sequence comparisons imply that chimps and humans don’t share a common ancestor? If not, it is once more mere assertion on your part. Assertion is not evidence.
Fred Williams: I will again note that this is an incredibly trivial error, no worse than Robert’s trivial errors in this thread.
I think it is very important to note how you deal with your errors. In every single case you deflected responsibility for them. In this particular case, you acknowledged the error, stated that it was trivial, and then “corrected” it. However, your correction was also in error, so you had to make a second correction (changing the number by an order of magnitude!), once again calling it trivial. My point in highlighting this is to demonstrate that with such poor attention to detail, how are your articles supposed to instill confidence that you are doing quality work? Your numbers were all over the map in this case, and yet according to you the errors were trivial.
Fred Williams: I could remove the entire paragraph on Haldane’s Dilemma from my article and it would not impact my core argument one iota.
I agree with this, which is why I could never understand why it was in the article in the first place. But note that I did not attack your article in general, I attacked the small section on Haldane’s Dilemma, which is completely relevant to our debate. The rest of the article is not relevant to our debate, and I did not attempt to address it here.
Fred Williams: Now to Robert’s claim that the “serious error” in my article was pointed out to me several times in the past. I recall quite well my exchange with Sumac. Now I know why Robert refused to email me this. His claim remains completely unsubstantiated and I expect a retraction. I would like to ask Robert where, in that entire sequence of posts that he copied here (I’m quite flattered you save my posts), that mutations within the 1667 number may include multiple bp substitutions (or “bunches” as you call them), such as duplicate genes, inversions, etc. THAT WAS THE CONTEXT OF YOUR CLAIM!!! Go back and read it (August 02, 2002 12:28 PM). This is what I thought you were referring to, and what I agreed to add a footnote for elaboration. DO YOU DENY THAT THE 1667 != BP SUBSTIUTION WAS THE CONTEXT OF YOUR CLAIM?
First of all, as I mentioned I have an archive of Haldane’s Dilemma posts. It has nothing to do with you personally, so no reason to feel flattered. Second, I have no idea why you expect a retraction. In fact, this was precisely the reason that I wanted to put the posts out there and let the reader decide. I said that you compared 1667 substitutions to millions of base pair differences as if they were equivalent. I pointed out that 1667 substitutions can equal a lot more than 1667 single nucleotide substitutions. I stated that this had been pointed out to your before, and you denied it. A quick reading of Sumac’s posts, particularly the parts in bold, demonstrate that you were told before that your approach is incorrect. In fact, you acknowledge that you remember the exchange well, so you can’t claim you didn’t see it. Note Sumac’s statements:
you equivocate the 1667 beneficial mutations calculated by ReMine with the total nucleotide difference between humans and chimps.
You wrote about the calculated 1667 beneficial mutations and the total number of nucleotide differences as if one has bearing on the other. Why else would you directly compare the two numbers? You should really be comparing ReMine's number with the number of beneficial mutations that are thought to have been fixed during the divergence of humans and chimps. Trouble is, no one knows what that number is or even how to estimate it. So, while the calculation is potentially interesting, it is impossible to determine if ReMine's number has anything to do with the real world or if it is simply an interesting mathematical exercise.
What is your purpose for presenting the total difference here?
Since you agree that only a very small percentage of the total number of substitutions will be fixed beneficial mutations, then you should agree that only a small percentage of the total number of substitutions will be relevant to ReMine's number. Why don't you say that? Ideally, you should provide an estimate of the number of relevant substitutions.
Given the above statements, which clearly indicate that you were incorrectly equating beneficial mutations with base pairs (which was exactly what I said), it is bewildering to me why you think a retraction is in order. On the contrary, I was expecting an acknowledgement of error from you. But again, that’s the reason I put the statements out there. The reader can decide whether or not your error was pointed out to you over a year ago.
In conclusion, I reiterate the position I have maintained throughout this debate: My position has never been that 1667 beneficial mutations are clearly sufficient to account for the differences. I have always maintained that until we work through the problem, it is not a very scientific approach to just assume that they are not. This has been the primary criticism of Mr. ReMine – that he did not establish this fundamental premise before launching into an attack on the proposed solutions for Haldane’s Dilemma. They key question is: Are Mr. ReMine and Fred justified in asserting that 1667 beneficial mutations can’t account for human evolution from a primitive ancestor?
Fred answered this question in his latest post, which effectively puts an end to this debate, by establishing that they were not justified in making the assumption:
Fred Williams: I cannot conclusively prove that 1667 isn’t enough because there is not enough sequence information available for both chimps & humans (even if there was, it would still not be provable because we cannot obtain a sequence from the alleged 10-million-year-ago ancestor).
To use a final analogy, despite the ability of Johnnie Cochran to confuse the jury, O.J. Simpson was certainly guilty of the crime with which he was charged. The core issue was pretty simple to resolve, but Mr. Cochran took a long detoured approach which confused the jury to the point that they didn’t know what to believe.
. If you stick to the topic, then I have read all of the sections that pertain to this discussion. Which by the way is almost nothing, as most of the section addresses proposed solutions to the dilemma without first establishing that a dilemma exists.