N.Wells
Posts: 1836
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote (GaryGaulin @ June 28 2015,20:23) | I do not even have to care whether insect brains have this navigational network system included in them. And all of my previous models are still standing the test of time because of not needing the network to qualify as intelligent. Your talk about not being "ground-truthed" is a strawman argument.
The only thing I need to demonstrate right now is how surprisingly easy it is for a network of cells (or similar) to map out and learn how to follow navigational routes, to whatever the critter senses it needs such as food. How many other animals besides mammals have this included in their brain system is unknown. My model helps narrow down what to look for, so that a neuroscientists will know what they are looking at when it's there but in more miniaturized form. Whether insects have that or not does not even matter. Worse case scenario for the model is I could be more precise by making the critter look more like a rat, but I would not be surprised by insects having that too. The body to control that it now has is just fine and would have the same sensory anyway, just be calling its antenna "whiskers" and arrange the photoreceptors a little differently to make it an eyeball with pinhole or lens in front. Or in other words: you are demanding the "playing with labels" in order to make it appear that the problem is with me.
More on why I should not be wasting time with the Natural Selection generalization is now here:
http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2015.......5611086 |
| Quote | | Instead of wasting time talking about "Natural Selection" I have been working on such things as a better explanation of our origin, which in turn makes it easy to determine who is fully human or not by testing for the presence of a fusion that only humans have. And it's still doing wonderfully standing the test of time. |
Your model is not standing any tests of anything, because it isn't being tested. Your model is a bug without chromosomes, so it does not in any way address chromosomes, chromosomal fusions, human evolution, or intelligent design of life.
However, let's consider your assertions about chromosomal evolution in humans, that a major step in becoming human may have happened when we became homozygous for fusions of chromosomes 2 & 3:
| Quote | Chromosome Fusion Speciation (Immediate - Human)
Humans may be the result of ....Chromosome Fusion Speciation produced by a large head to head telomeric fusion of two average size chromosomes which became our second largest #2. Although there was not a significant amount of gene code scrambling at the fusion site, even in common much less disruptive fusion events which do not create a new species the rearranging of the chromosome territories can still produce large-scale gene expression (coding remains the same) changes elsewhere.
..........
48 and 48 parents produce a 48 offspring only.
48 and 47 parents produce a 48 or 47 offspring.
47 and 47 parents produce a 48 or 47 or 46 human offspring.
48 and 46 parents produce a 47 offspring only.
47 and 46 parents produce a 47 or 46 human offspring.
46 and 46 parents produce a 46 human offspring only.
The 47’s were a transitional stage that soon led to a stable 46 human design. New traits that may have appeared could have increasingly taken a 46 to find desirable, further accelerating speciation through the species recognition mechanism. |
That can work. Two 48ers (chimp-human ancestors with 48 chromosomes in 24 pairs) usually give birth to 48er children, but the accidental fusion of a #2 chromosome and a #3 chromosome (as numbered for chimps) created a 47er child (a hybrid with 47 chromosomes: a normal #2, a normal #3, and a 2&3 fusion). Let's assume for the moment that the fusion was not lethal and could recombine in some sort of configuration with normal separate #2 & #3 chromosomes, so that 47ers could hybridize without many problems with normal 48ers. All children, whether 48ers or 47ers, would have the same genetic components (two copies of every gene, most likely, unless a few genes got lost during the fusion), so everyone would most likely look alike and would be able to interbreed. However, it is probably no longer possible to have cross-overs between chromosomes, because at this point, a cross-over between a normal #2 or #3 and a fused 2&3 would likely drop out or duplicate whole chunks of chromosome, so there could easily be some depression of viability in hybrids. Evolutionary theory predicts that cases of lowered hybrid fitness (had it happened) should result in selection for differentiation between the two groups via reproductive barriers involving genetic incompatibilty, barriers, character displacement, behavioral isolation, and other types of assortative mating. Note that contra your claim but using your words, such a "species recognition mechanism" is very precisely evolution by natural selection.
Even more interestingly, because the old-style and new-style chromosomes should show a sharp drop in exchange of genes between old-style and new-style chromosomes, each chromosome type starts accumulating its own unique mutations (Navarro & Barton, 2003: http://www.sciencemag.org/content....ecsha). Gene flow occurs between individuals, so all the individuals remain one species, but gene flow has more or less ceased between the two types of chromosomes, so we have proto-chimp genomes and proto-human genomes starting to develop separately while in the same population and even in the same individuals. Hybrids (47ers) can have both the mutations on the old chromosomes and those on the new one (up to one copy of each, anyway), while pure 48ers only get the mutations that happened on the old-style chromosomes. As mutational differences build up, hybrid viability is likely to decrease (Noor et al., 2001: http://www.pnas.org/content....ecsha).
Now, assuming that a few generations go by and the number of hybrids (47ers) has increased, the moment that two hybrid 47ers mate, their offspring have a 25% chance of being pure old-style 48ers, a 50% chance of being another hybrid 47er, and a 25% chance of being homozygous mutants, i.e. 46ers. Since they are homozygous for most of the recent mutations on the new chromosomes and have lost all the alleles formed by recent mutations on the old-style chromosomes, they are now likely to be more noticeably different and to have even further reductions in hybrid fertility. This moves the 46ers much closer to being a new species, if it hasn't already made them one.
These sorts of speculations have been around since MJD White's book on chromosomal evolution in 1978. Now, you are assuming and asserting that the fusion is the critical event in the speciation of humans from the line of evolution to chimps. You could be right, although it is still possible that other events and changes were more important (just in terms of chromosomal rearrangements, there are nine entirely separate pericentric inversions, and beyond that there are possibilities for single-gene mutations that might have contributed something special to brain development or walking upright or the like, plus major ecological and geographical separations precluding pre-human / pre-chimp gene flow, or it could even have been a big change in the chimp line, making them much better chimps than our ancestors). A very recent investigation of chimp/human genetic changes concluded that the "absence of virtually any signature of 10 major chromosomal rearrangements on the rate of genetic divergence suggests that the speciation processes in the evolutionary lineages separating humans and chimpanzees are substantially different from what the chromosomal speciation hypothesis presumes": http://genome.cshlp.org/content.....full.). The authors also suggested that "the speciation events on the evolutionary lineages that eventually led to modern humans and chimpanzees may be numerous." Regardless, you haven't yet provided any supporting evidence for your claims. As you (for once correctly) say, you are proposing an operational definition for genus Homo, but that falls far short of constituting an explanation, and you still haven't done enough to justify your definition as reasonable and useful.
Worse, you preface all of this by asserting that "Humans may be the result of a molecular level good-guess called Chromosome Fusion Speciation" and you say | Quote | | Considering how I code models and write theory for explaining how our intelligent designer works: I can honestly say that my science work very much implies a "designer" involved. |
Neither of those are supported by anything that you offer. There is no indication that the chromosomal fusion is anything other than a standard mutational accident. There is no indication that "molecular intelligence" is at work, or that it even exists, or that anything "made a guess". There is no indication that an intelligent designer is required for this to happen. Your model does not imply the involvement or existence of a "designer". Your model does not explain how an intelligent designer would work. Emergent phenomena are distinct from designed phenomena.
The details are even more pathetic. If you are modelling an insect, it needs to be accurately modelled, which means that you need to have done ground-truthing to ensure that things work the way you say that they do, or else you are indeed just playing with computer code and labels. You can create code that develops some sort of idealized foraging, which could potentially have some value, but absent ground-truthing and backing up your claims, there's no evidence that your model has any relevance to anything in biology,starting with actual foraging. The problem (actually, many, many problems) are indeed with you.
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