[fishtank]

Quote from the article:

In the present day evolutionary biologists have been insanely angry at the NIH,

particularly the Billion Dollar ENCODE-pioneered set of projects which argues against the idea of junk DNA.

Evolutionary biologist Dan Graur said ENCODE is “bonkers”[v]

because “If ENCODE is right, evolution is wrong.”[vi]

[Governor Dinwiddie]

LOL. This ass clown names "theorems" after himself! How pompous, this clown is not a mathematician, he is barely a bona fide "scientist".

Theorems require proof. And the proofs require tracebility to axioms which you can just pull out of your a$$ if you want. So whether your "theorem" has any useful meaning in the real world depends on which axioms you offer. Choose the right axioms and you can prove any "theorem" you want.
 

[ClearCase_guy]

I can't comment on the exact content of this article, but I have vague recollections of an article from recent years which noted that Evolution violates the First Law of Thermodynamics -- in that the energy or complexity in the system increases over time through evolutionary growth. I was never sure if I thought this was really a solid point worth making.

The current paper seems to identify decay occurring over time which would be in keeping with the Third Law of Thermodynamics.

My standard thinking about Evolution is that scientists don't know nearly as much about this stuff as they think they do. I lot of it is guesswork, conjecture and hope rather than science.

[VaeVictis]

So are we to trust actual studies based on observable samples (encode) or theories about what fossils mean?

[rightwingcrazy]

“An informally stated corollary of Fisher’s theorem is that a population will continually increase in fitness.”

That’s just silly. Beyond some point, “fitness” would no longer give additional reproductive advantage. Also, the factors defining “fitness” can change or vanish from one generation to the next, or even between generations.

[arrogantsob]

Overall society’s fitness is declining.

1) we are subsidizing the production of viscous and/or stupid people, people at around a Standard Deviation from the normal IQ;

2) they are collected in the low end of the socioeconomic system wherein they replicate. On the whole the parent’s IQ
is a reliable predictor of the child’s IQ.

3) the vast majority of welfare goes to the lowest percentiles of the population where it apparently does more harm than good. See destruction of the Black family as an example.

3) “The Bell Curve” lays out the whole problem which the social scientists pretend does not exist and shows the evidence which says it does There is a hierarchy of Intelligence: Jews, East Asian, American whites, Blacks with the average Black being about 30% less intelligent than the average Jew.

4) the book shows how and why a cognitive elite is being created separated from the low IQ population. It too replicates itself but there too small numbers of births to pass the trait so the average is brought down.

[fella]

“have been warning the human genome is crumbling and the damage is likely irreversible”

Makes me wonder if drug use before and during inception, maternity, childhood and adolescence have anything to do with that.

Primitive societies appear to be doing well.

[Honorary Serb]

Researchers are finding functions for DNA segments that had been defined as “junk”all the time!!!!

That happens so often that it no longer is considered “news” in journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, etc. Some of the specific functions and pathways are news, however!!!!

Graur is all wet! And researchers do not understand the basic mechanisms of evolution, as they thought they did some 30 years ago!!

[bk1000]

Take physical education out of the schools, heck, don’t even let the kids run and play because the might get “overstimulated” or something. Then, give them an iPhone to sit and stare at when they aren’t sitting there staring at a video game. Loss of fitness? What the Hell did you expect? Liberalism is a mental disease.

[Sacajaweau]

Fitness is declining?? But we can easily live past 35.

[metmom]

I’m so surprised......

[JoeFromSidney]

p>Entropy increases, and it will get you every time. Disorder always increases unless efforts are made to overcome it, which requires expenditure of energy.

[firebrand]

We can’t measure evolutionary change by our temporary, arbitrary standards of “fitness.” What is evolving is necessarily, logically, the creature that best fits the changing surroundings.

[BroJoeK]

Headline: "Keynote Speech at Biology Conference Falsifies Major Claim of Darwinism "

from the article: "...for decades it has been noted that many populations are declining in fitness.
Geneticists... have been warning the human genome is crumbling and the damage is likely irreversible.
Thus, Fisher’s Corollary could not be right because it did not agree with observable facts."

"In the present day evolutionary biologists have been insanely angry at the NIH, particularly the Billion Dollar ENCODE-pioneered set of projects which argues against the idea of junk DNA. "

This is all nonsense, for which any scientist involved should be ashamed, because they know better.
Sure, it might even be true the human genome is "crumbling" but the reasons have nothing to do with some alleged "flaw" in evolution theory.
Rather they are directly caused by the fact that human medical interventions prevent natural selection from doing its job, which is to increase "fitness" by weeding out the weakest.
In the process, Medicine helps redefine what that word "fitness" even means.

• Not so many years ago "fitness" meant strong, agile & clever hunter.
  
• More recently it meant hardworking observant & careful farmer.
  
• Today it can mean success in your chosen career, which might have nothing to do with your physical condition, or it might simply mean you have "access" to government welfare programs based specifically on your lack of physical fitness.

Point is, the human genome still rapidly evolves towards "fitness", but "fitness" is even more rapidly redefined to mean something very different from ages past.
The long-term solution, we might presume, is genetic engineering wherein human intervention replaces natural selection by removing defective DNA mutations at the time of conception, or later.

Genetic engineering, aka "designer babies" is often presented as some sort of boogieman to be feared, but precisely our "crumbling" human genome and unwillingness to let natural selection take its course could someday make such engineering all but necessary.

As for "junk DNA" the term was first used to describe non-coding DNA, meaning the, what 90%?, of DNA which produces no tissues.
Since then it's been learned that some small porting of "junk" can have functions, perhaps regulatory, in switching other DNA on or off.
But no functions have been observed for most of it and no discernable effects result from random DNA mutations in those "junk" regions.