Sex and Evolution

ReMine quotes . . . oh man, that cracks me up. Gunga Dim, you're a jewel.

Most would view laughing at one's betters as a sort of a defense mechanism...

Back with your Haldane Dilemma again eh?
Remember, Haldane was corrected by his peers based on removing a few very simple misguided assumptions he made .Even he said that "Im probably wrong somewhere"

I was watching that youtube on their "Hydraulics engineer" who was trying to poo poo sedimentation rates. He made the amazing statement that the energy of a moving pile of sediment (IF THE VELOCITY IS CONSTANT) is a function of the mass of the particles. >Using his same equation we see that the energy is equivalent to 0.7times the MASS TIMES the square of the velocity.

I hate it when they **** with equations to get a Creationist view. An equation is a balancing act of components.
He was trying to make a bogus claim (I suppose) that all the sedimentary roacks were deposited by a single FLOOD.
This guy got a PhD somewhere, did he just have someone suck his brains out of his head after graduation?

PS, Rimine is a douche bag with his "Creation genetics"

Haldanes error was primarily based on the sepeed and cost of "fixing" a mutation in a population.
He never knew that two mutations can be fic=xed simultaneously. HE assumed that one mutation takes "X" and two mutations take "2X" time.
He was corrected because his math made him run out of population v time of evolution for "beneficial mutations"

Even Haldane said "OOPS"

but the Creationists, still dumb as a bag of doorknobs, keep hounding about this **** , and come up with Remines "Creation genetics"

The Haldane dilemma can be understood in very simple terms on first principles and, thus, is not something which anybody can wave his hands at and make go away. Once again for any who might have missed it, Remine's simplified version:



In a rational world, that should be as far as most people need to read. That basically says that even given a rate of evolutionary development which is fabulously beyond anything which is possible in the real world, starting from apes, in ten million years the best you could possibly hope for would be an ape with a slightly shorter tail.

Because in a rational world people know that isn't how evolution works.

If having a "defense mechanism" means never suffering from whatever condition it is that leads Gunga Dim to spout all the horseshit he spreads around here, i'm all for it.

That's all bullshit because HAldanes own calculations made the mistake of assuming that if one mutation took a unit time to be fixed in the population, two mutations would take TWICE as much time. It is known that in sexual recombination two (or more) mutations can be fixed SIMULTANEOUSLY.


That was the basic error that Haldane himself admitted to. Thus, all of Remines blabbery is merely repeating Haldanes original error over and over and over.
That's what Creationists do, they lie.

On a , perhaps, more interesting note, I saw Nick Wades article in the NYT that DNA extracted and sequenced from a 24500 year old childs skeleton near Lake Baikal in E Siberia, showed it to contain a mDNA mix of European and Amerind genes.This provides yet another explanation for the "Solutrean" source for PaleoAmerican tools. The obvious answer is that,
no Solutreans took a boat ride across the Atlantic. Instead, a hybrid population (haplogroup X according to Planck Institute) containing specific genes that were part European an part Amerind genes (Also discounting the belief that Amerinds were a group that separated from one of the Asian haplogroups and migrated Eastward across Beringea. Instead, this finding suggests that the group containing Amerinds were already separated .
SO we may be getting evidence that the Soultrean theory may not be correct after all. (I loved it, it was such a tale of European stalwartness)

And, maybe the Solutrean "point technology" that we renamed as "folsom" really came via the Western route over Beringea and the Innuits, who were part of the haplogroup that included Koreans, remained fixed with their own unique point technology.

It takes the adventure out of the story (thinking that a several 1000 mile "hike" over a snow covered land bridge and down the NA continent was just a walk in the park)

Pretty sloppy, FM. There is no such thing as "Solutrean MtDNA" (and i'm not saying you said there is). There is ancient European MtDNA, but Solutrean is just the name of an h.s.s. culture which describes cultural artifacts found in what is now southwest France and northeast Spain. It is by no means a term which can be applied to everyone living in Europe 24,500 years ago. In fact, the current archaeological thinking is that the Solutrean culture flourished from about 22,000 ybp to about 17,000 ybp. Additionally, one of the objections to the Solutrean hypothesis is the significant difference in technique between Clovis points and Solutrean points. I've brought that up in these fora before. Solutrean pressure flake technique involved removing the spalls on a line perpendicular to the long center-line of the point. A most distinctive feature of Clovis technique is that the spalls are removed on a line diagonal to the long center line.

Solutrean point:



Clovis point:



While there have been some Clovis points found with perpendicular spalling, and some Solutrean with diagonal spalling, the images above show the characteristic spall lines of these points.

I am not heavily invested in the Solutrean hypothesis, and there are many cogent objections to it. There are also may questions which have been asked in support of it which have not been well answered. Your comments here are irrelevant, as the Solutrean culture did not exist 24,500 years ago. Furthermore, the land bridge hypothesis cannot account for the extraordinarily high percentage of ancient European MtDNA in Amerindians of eastern Canada--about 25% as compared to 3% for the entire rest of the Amerindian population of the two continents (according to a Canadian geneticist). It also doesn't account for the finds of bi-facial, pressure flake points found in Pennsylvania and Virginia which have been dated to 14,000 ybp or earlier, which is well before the roughly 11,500 ybp of the earliest Clovis points. Largely, i enjoy the spectacle of academic bitch fights over intellectual turf.

While certainly interesting, i see no connection between the find you are reporting and the Solutreans or the producers of Clovis technology.

By the way, one of my favorite "turf" stories has to do with the ancient "white" tribe of China. Here's a couple of links, i couldn't find anything really scholarly in a brief search. But the turf story is that the Chinese government shut down the project claiming it didn't have money for it. I strongly suspect that they were made uncomfortable by a contradiction to the development in isolation hypothesis about the "Middle Kingdom" (i.e., the kingdom which lies between heaven and earth, as the Chinese long called their land).

The Takl Makan Mummies

Same find, different presentation:

The White Tribes of Ancient China

I suspect that people traveled extensively and traveled far in human pre-history, but it has not been systematically studied because of academic turf defenders.

I didn't say that the article said anything about the DNA being Solutrean. Hers what I said


The Amerind /European mDNA has already been given a haplogroup designation so you may have to argue with Svante Paabo's team at Max Planck.

The technology (that weve all recognized as Solutrean, is also a close precursor to Folsom and Clovis. The DNA data presents another possibly compelling argument as to where the point culture (and a small amount of mDNA of European origin in Potawnami, Ojibwa and
Sauk populations.

My point (, and I think youre just hunting for an argument where there is none) was that the childs DNA provided a more reasonable solution to the "relationship of Clovis/Folsom to Solutrean typology (The issue of pressure flaking on a diagonal v non diagonal is more a function of mineral cleavage than technology)

Finding a child of 24500 ybp and its DNA is quite compelling of a Beringea travel plan since the small amount of European DNA within STR's of the Great Lakes tribes has never been explained away satisfactorily .
The Solutrean technology being dated at any value is kinda precious, especially since boundaries and migrations of technologies take place over millennia, and "pre-Solutrean" technology involving similar hafting as those of Paleo Indian points is remarkeably coincident without SOME form of exchange.

Remember, this baby was found near Lake Baikal(which, for the geographically inquisitive, is just N or MONGOLIA) its not right at the edge of the Beringean Pathway or the Canadian western Costal plin. The kids bones are just a CLUE as to a possible route for genes and tools.

All the data isn't even in yet so Im only reporting the news. There was no conclusions made, only suggestions forwarded.

I didn't say that, and in fact, i made a point of acknowledging it, but i guess you were in too big a hurry to ramp up an argument.



I look at the rest of your post later.

OK, as i've already pointed out, the child's DNA provides no such thing. Solutrean culture did not develop until well after the time when that child lived--thousands of years later. You'll have to hunt your argument elsewhere.

Not two "beneficial" mutations. Problem is that the overwhelming bulk of all mutations are harmful; to get two useful mutations at the sam time, you'd get so many harmful mutations along with, that you'd die out.

How long would it take to make a point like that?

Doesn't matter, ANY mutations can get fixed simultaneously. That ws Haldanes mistake. If you don't get it then you don't understand that all you are doing is progenating the errors by trying to continue his expansion math with incorrect assumptions.
That's ok, you are being true to your Creationist roots. "Faith over truth" as spendi is fond of preaching.