Kevin R. McCarthy- Proud to be Willfully Ignorant

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Yup Kevin is at it again. This time he is using AVIDA as evidence that unguided evolution can produce new abilities. See mutations do create new abilities.

Earth to Kevin- when AVIDA is programmed with realistic parameters, it does NOT create new abilities.

1- Avida "organisms" are far too simple to be considered anything like a biological organism

2- Avida organisms "evolve" via unreasonable parameters:

The effects of low-impact mutations in digital organisms

Chase W. Nelson and John C. Sanford

Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, 2011, 8:9 | doi:10.1186/1742-4682-8-9

Abstract:

Background: Avida is a computer program that performs evolution experiments with digital organisms. Previous work has used the program to study the evolutionary origin of complex features, namely logic operations, but has consistently used extremely large mutational fitness effects. The present study uses Avida to better understand the role of low-impact mutations in evolution.

Results:

When mutational fitness effects were approximately 0.075 or less, no new logic operations evolved, and those that had previously evolved were lost. When fitness effects were approximately 0.2, only half of the operations evolved, reflecting a threshold for selection breakdown. In contrast, when Avida's default fitness effects were used, all operations routinely evolved to high frequencies and fitness increased by an average of 20 million in only 10,000 generations.

Conclusions:

Avidian organisms evolve new logic operations only when mutations producing them are assigned high-impact fitness effects. Furthermore, purifying selection cannot protect operations with low-impact benefits from mutational deterioration. These results suggest that selection breaks down for low-impact mutations below a certain fitness effect, the selection threshold. Experiments using biologically relevant parameter settings show the tendency for increasing genetic load to lead to loss of biological functionality. An understanding of such genetic deterioration is relevant to human disease, and may be applicable to the control of pathogens by use of lethal mutagenesis.

The main problem is Kevin's willful ignorance. Even after he was shown that ID is not anti-evolution he chooses to believe that it is. Even after giving him references explaining what ID is and what it is arguing against, he sez no one has ever said anything about that. Even after referencing evolutionists who say that evolutionism posits blind and undirected chemical processes, Kevin claims that is a strawman.

Kevbo also thinks that macroevolution is just more microevolution and that speciation takes care of that- what an ignorant ass. There isn't one case of speciation nor microevolution that we can take to extrapolate macroevolution. Not one.

So Kevin R. McCarthy is not only a coward but he is also proud to be willfully ignorant.