JohnW
Posts: 3217 Joined: Aug. 2006
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Quote (N.Wells @ July 09 2014,22:08) | From Gary, over at NCSE, at http://ncse.com/blog.......3906919 Quote | From what I read seasonal finch beak design is a learned epigenetic change (the DNA code does not have to change at all) that for the most part knows what to do ahead of time. |
1) What the heck is seasonal design?????
2) In what reality is design a "learned epigenetic change"?
3) Epigenetic changes are not learned changes in any normal sense of the word "learn"
4) Changes in finch beaks are changes in population means, which result from differential survival and reproduction (is death now a process of learning, Gary???).
5) Peter Grant's team showed that beak parameters have high heritability, specifically 65 percent of the phenotypic variance in beak length and as much as 90 percent of the variance in beak depth (Boag 1983, Grant and Grant 1993). (The remaining percents presumably could cover a wide range of possibilities such as differential access to or availability of food during growth, variability in yolk volume when they were in their eggs, and differences in parental feeding behavior while in the nest. The Grants also documented changes relating to instances of inbreeding, genetic drift, and some immigration and hybridization that added additional complications.)
6) Your mangled phrasing seems to imply seasonal changes in beaks, but that of course would be nonsense. Individual finch beaks do not change seasonally: an individual finch's beak is fixed and determines its owner's success in harsh years and lush years. The population mean shifts in harsh seasons as individuals die, and the mean also changes between generations as different phenotypes experience differential reproductive success.
7) Who said anything about DNA code changing? Mutations already happened in order to produce the alleles, and present changes simply reflect changes in percentages of the alleles in the population, as caused by natural selection, etc.
8) Where the heck is some evidence for your assertion "that for the most part knows what to do ahead of time"? Individuals survive or die in dry years according to their beak size. Individuals breed more successfully or less successfully in lush years, again as determined by their body size and their beak size (their food needs and appropriate food availability). Nothing about this suggests knowledge "ahead of time".
All of this is documented in numerous papers representing over three decades of field work by the Grants, following the lives of all the individual birds on one of the islands over multiple generations, plus careful documentation of food availability and resource utilization. This is what actual data and evidence look like, in sharp contrast to your meaningless unsupported assertions. This is conclusions based on evidence, as opposed to your assertions based on beliefs, which is why the Grants have a theory and you don't.
Come on, Gary, prove me wrong: back up your words or retract them.
(All issues relating to beak size are complicated a bit by some instances of hybridization, but the main gist is clear. Another complication is changes in mating preferences following changes in song behavior, which do indeed have a learned component. Endocrine levels in sparrows can result in changes in parental feeding behavior, which can influence growth rates and total growth [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/01/08/1317165111.abstract], which can presumably happen in finches, but has not yet been documented there as far as I know. Nonetheless, these factors are clearly minor, because heritability values are so high.)
http://ncse.com/files......ion.pdf http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content....65.full |
Well, yeah, but if we suspend disbelief and consider the possibility that individual finches are changing their own beak configurations...
... and we postulate some never-before-even-hypothesised hyper-Lamarckian process, within a single organism instead of between generations...
...whereby something intelligent within the cell can cause a finch's beak to change shape and size in response to a predicted future external stimulus...
...and ignoring the fact that this would be equivalent to getting your fingernails to grow themselves shorter...
...and if we accept for the sake of argument that Galapagos finches really can accurately forecast the weather months in advance, and Gary didn't pull this out from where the sun don't shine...
...I still don't see how it helps Gary's theory in any way. Nothing to do with intelligent molecules somehow generating higher-level intelligence, his video game, or That Fucking Diagram.
-------------- Math is just a language of reality. Its a waste of time to know it. - Robert Byers
There isn't any probability that the letter d is in the word "mathematics"... The correct answer would be "not even 0" - JoeG
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