John.... don't keep playing silly buggers with me.
When a person on the internet who's angry because I dared challenge their beliefs tells me they want to fuck my severely disabled 65 year old mother, then YES, that person is a TWAT.
So the onus is on you to stop being a twat. If you act like a twat, then do feel free to point your facehole towards the exit and perambulate - if you can manage to engage with good faith, then I will meet you there. But don't fucking pretend I'm the one being mercurial here.
So you don't contend that it's mathematically impossible? Because if it WAS mathematically impossible, then yes, you would be able to pull out some numbers, plug them in, and prove (this being math, rather than science) that it's mathematically impossible - that's the entire value of mathematics.
I asked you for the math, not explanation about what you think could possibly maybe be...
You stated "I think it's mathematically impossible for a scenario like a small land mammal became a whale." - thus, I don't think it's at all unreasonable of me to expect you to provide some math here.
What likelihood?
What variables?
What odds?
These are not just terms, they necessarily have values to be considered 'mathematics'.
I answered ALL of this in your other thread. In detail.
Rare for it to be beneficial? But it doesn't need to be beneficial. It only needs to not be detrimental. Selection will obviously reward a beneficial mutation, but neutral mutations occur all the time and are retained through drift because they're not 'seen' by evolution. In turn, those mutations offer novel opportunities for further mutations.
But regardless, we can't calculate odds without numbers, can we?
The odds are against offspring surviving to reproductive age?
Clearly, this is only true of a species that is on its way to extinction.
Again, I addressed all of this already.
Untrue, just flat wrong. They have nigh on exactly 50% chance of getting either parents' genes.
Either because a) it confers an immediate advantage, which means that there's a strong selection pressure benefiting the possessor of that gene, or b) because it doesn't confer any disadvantage.
The first answer is the part you're referring to with respect to selection: because some is better than none.
If the mutation is conferring a selection advantage, John - then definitionally, they've got superior chances to survive and reproduce, and statistically to pass on those favourable genes. That means that the gene will become MORE represented in future populations, and this process is exponential - the more offspring with the favourable gene, the more offspring they're likely to produce with those favourable genes. That's the entire point and power of selection, yet you're querying it as if positively selected genes disfavour the possessors - this is obviously wrong.
Time only flows one way. It's nothing to do with Biology, purely Physics. A reptile is a class of animals that evolved at a specific time. A non-reptile could evolve all a suite of characteristics identical to a reptile, but still not be a reptile - it will never be a reptile - it will be another grade of organisms which are just very similar to reptiles.
A fin is a limb, a fin that became a leg can go back to being used as a fin - who said otherwise?
A whale's great-ancestor was a fish, it's slightly more proximate ancestor was a terrestrial tetrapod walking on legs. The whale's more immediate ancestors' legs began to adapt to their aquatic environment and lost their smaller appendages - the whale's fin today looks unlike a foot on the outside, but looks very much like a foot in its skeletal morphology: finger bones, but just no fingers as the flesh is all fused together.
And?
Are you planning to offer any numbers here at any point?
How's "10 million years"?
How's "millions of generations"?
Where's the mathematics showing that millions of generations CAN'T produce these changes?
Why does the fossil record SHOW this transition you say is impossible? How do you marry your denial with the physical evidence?
Uh?
As opposed to....?
?
I'm lost - we're supposedly talking about selection, which necessarily means that retained mutations are extremely beneficial to the reproductive fitness of the organism carrying it - so this would be directly opposite the idea that "each step never suitable for its environment".
Who says that snakes changed very little in 50 million years? What measurements are you using?
I can show you plenty of snakes that changed dramatically in 50 million years.
They did John - all of your questions are predicated on the wrong idea, so you're asking me questions that are not relevant.
I'm not really sure what to say - the above indicates you haven't really grasped a lot of the central concepts of evolutionary theory, so if you can be this mistaken, it's hard to understand how numbers are going to resolve anything.
But still, none of the above contains any of the mathematical proof you said you'd show, so I guess I will just wait for that.
