aelyn

I'd be happy to address them if my addressings were read, comprehended & led to substantive two-way exchange. And I have! Like, literally two comments ago for example! But we're not in that phase of our conversations right now, so. Pretty confused as usual what you're talking about here but it occurred to me, is this a reference to past comments (in the LUCA thread in particular) where I said most of the people you were referencing didn't deny natural selection happens? If so you're still conflating "natural selection" and "the modern synthesis". (also I wasn't referring to Noble in those previous comments; I didn't know enough about him to do so. Even now having read more of it he does look like he wants to deny natural selection happens, which makes it all the more interesting that he doesn't quite seem to say that in the article you linked).

I'd prefer to have a conversation with someone who's actually here but if you have a source or quote where he directly addresses the points I raised in my comment then by all means. That didn't address anything I said at all. Yes. And do you know what the sequence of words in the comment by me you were quoting mean? For one thing they were about natural selection, and if you knew what either that expression or "the modern synthesis" mean you'd know they're different things. Why is that sentence in quotes, is it something someone said? Because I sure didn't. Anyway, we're clearly back to you not responding to what I actually wrote. I'm a bit less in a position to complain here given I took a week to respond, it's easy to forget the context of a conversation over that time (re-reading the conversation is usually a good way to compensate). Nevertheless it's still not a style of engagement I'm interested in, so all the usual about getting back to me when you feel like etc.

I put "solving" in quotes for most scientific questions, always for the same reason. "Solving" is a word from mathematics and puzzles that suggests a very clear question and the challenge of how to find the answer to it. Scientific problems don't usually work that way, usually translating even a distinct problem into a specific clear question is itself a challenge, and more usually it turns out to involve many different questions bundled together with many different answers that raise new questions in turn etc. I still think "solving" is a fair word to use because you can see plenty of cases historically where some scientific question eventually got answers that people in general felt were satisfactory enough to say "this problem has been solved". But I'm uncomfortable enough with the suggestion that it's a simple, well-defined, on-off process to use scare quotes. I'm not sure what manner you're referring to. If it's "reproducing the whole sequence of chemical reactions involved in abiogenesis step-by-step in different lab setups" that's a manner you described.

In what way are gene duplications is cell-mediated, but deletions, transpositions, nucleotide substitutions etc are not? I'm not sure what you think "mutation" means. It's just a generic term for changes in DNA; I'm not even sure it's inherently random, as indicated by the fact "random mutation" is an expression that's used. It's also completely separate from natural selection, which is the action of the environment on heritable variation, regardless of the cause of that variation. It's entirely possible to have natural selection lead to adaptation with inheritance of acquired characteristics, or extrinsic causes of mutation! It gets dicey when there's so much of that that it prevents heritability (like, if you have a trait that is changed by the organism every generation it doesn't really matter if it gets passed down to the next - it's changed right afterwards so the actual trait any individual will express most of the time won't be inherited), but other than that there's no issue. Actually you said "most inorganic reactions happen almost instantly", which is completely different from "almost all happen instantly". The counter examples I gave are actually much stronger against the second claim than they were against the first, but the bigger issue is that you don't seem very clear yourself on what proportion of inorganic reactions you're even talking about, and how instant they are. A single cite would be helpful but you don't have any do you. As for the question, I answered it when you asked it. The conversation is now about the follow-up claims you made to argue my answer wasn't adequate. "Jumping genes" is in today's textbooks along with natural selection and Darwinian adaptation. They're all completely compatible and accepted as different things that happen in biology. No, actually the question - the thing you explicitly questioned, telling me I was wrong about - is whether heritable traits can impact reproductive rates. I'd tend to agree with you that "nobody questions that" except that it's exactly what you did, so. Have you changed your mind? The source of the heritable traits is completely orthogonal, as I explained higher up - there's a reason adaptation in the modern synthesis is described as "natural selection AND random mutation". Because they're two distinct processes, and you can have natural selection with variability that isn't "random mutation" - it just needs to be heritable and impact reproductive rates. My statement that you disagreed with was about natural selection. We can definitely discuss whether "random mutation" is a thing that happens and plays a role in population changes over generations but it's not strictly relevant to what I said about natural selection. If we were going to do that I'd be curious of your answer to this question I asked earlier: "As for it being "the cell is figuring it out", what is your explanation for cells from different strains "figuring it out" at different rates? It being due to differences in their heritable traits accounts for it very well; I have no idea what else would but you presumably do." Thank you for the article by Noble. His objections to natural selection are completely different from the ones you made so I'm not sure in what context you're bringing him up. The objections he made don't make much sense either - as far as I can tell I'm not sure he makes any objection at all, he thinks natural selection as commonly understood excludes intentional selection and also thinks examples of evolutionary change commonly thought to involve unintentional natural selection actually involve intentional selection, but he doesn't seem to actually argue that unintentional natural selection can't work or can't result in adaptation, or give reasons why those who attribute specific evolutionary changes to unintentional selection are wrong beyond battering the strawman that the modern synthesis says intentional selection can't happen at all.

Eh, I guess I'll still address this bit more specifically after all. On the mechanisms of "different genes" appearing: gene duplication is a type of genetic mutation. Is there a reason this type of mutation appears in your list of mechanisms by which a "different gene" can appear but others don't? The question was whether the rnk-ciT module they isolated is heritable and promotes the cell's reproduction. I don't even know why this is a claim you disagree with since by your own account this specific module should be something you think happens, as it involved a gene duplication. As for it being "the cell is figuring it out", what is your explanation for cells from different strains "figuring it out" at different rates? It being due to differences in their heritable traits accounts for it very well; I have no idea what else would but you presumably do. You might be confusing mutations to regulatory elements with mutations caused by regulatory elements.

I'd agree with that since it turns out it never happened. I see in your next comment you decided to reorient the conversation yet again; does that mean you now agree that cells can have heritable traits that impact reproduction? Or do you still claim they don't, in which case I still want your explanation of why the rnk-ciT module doesn't qualify. If you read the paper you'll see they didn't isolate the actual mutations beyond figuring out based on outcrossings which bits of the chromosomes they'd be on. What they found was that the trait impacted reproduction and was heritable, which is what you said doesn't exist outside of cancer and aging. Are you saying that makes the trait I mentioned not heritable or does it make it no impact reproduction? Or are you updating your original claim to "outside of cancer, aging and genetic engineering"? How about the heritable & reproduction-impacting traits found in these yeast cells which weren't "artificially modified", notably the amplification of SUL1: https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1000303 No, that's why I was waiting for an explanation of what you were talking about before I discussed it. It's called "epistemic humility", maybe you should try it one day because it looks like you straight-up misremembered something here. "Most inorganic reactions happen almost instantly" is completely false, the kinetics of reactions in inorganic chemistry vary wildly. Just taking oxidation as an example most metals don't rust or corrode instantly. Insofar as it may look like inorganic reactions happen disproportionately fast the reasons I gave (that life involves disproportionately unlikely reactions, and that carbon is uniquely capable of making a larger variety of complex molecules) accounts for it fine. Reactions with kinetics such that they only occur in very specific circumstances will by definition not be observed as often as those that happen readily - unless a mechanism exists to contrive such circumstances. Life is such a mechanism and it mostly involves organic chemistry (hence the name). But the human chemical industry is another such example and its whole point is to find how to catalyze kinetically difficult reactions, organic or inorganic. Some random examples of such slow or catalyzed inorganic reactions: https://ceramics.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jace.19441 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201906700 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19070-8 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0957-4484/17/15/026/meta https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/ta/d1ta00772f#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S138111691200252X No, the person making a claim is typically supposed to defend it. Otherwise the other person could just say "well I make the claim that you made this up and it's up to you to disprove that", it just doesn't work for advancing a discussion. I claim that to a first approximation the association of organic chemistry with living systems and the suitability of carbon to make complex molecules together account for catalysts being more important to organic chemistry than inorganic chemistry. I don't even know why you disagree with this, it seems pretty obvious but more to the point I don't see how it impacts any of the arguments either of us is making. Going back up it looks like you originally brought this up when you transformed by claim that arguments need to follow logic into something about the cell not operating by logic, which made no sense to begin with.

Interesting, I haven't found anything about such retractions, could you give a link or do you know which papers were retracted? This example doesn't seem linked to Lenski; it involves a salt-tolerance trait that authors find to both promote reproduction in Drosophila flies in their high-salt experimental setup and be heritable. Sci-hub full paper: https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/s10709-010-9535-z EDIT: and if the "cell" part was important enough that multicellular organisms don't qualify as examples here, how about the M435I mutation in the strain of yeast described in this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-03822-7 It's not well known by me, not for abiotic reactions at least which you've said is what you're talking about. Do you have a link to some resource that talks about this phenomenon?

Okay, take the rnk-citT module found in Lenski's Cit+ variant e-coli. Being a sequence of DNA that gets copied and passed down during cell duplication makes it heritable, and Lenski et al found it slightly improved replication rates compared to others in the population ("ZDB595 had a small (1.0%) but significant competitive advantage over ZDB30 in the same environment", from the paper on sci-hub: https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/nature11514). Thank you for clarifying your objection, I understand it now. You're right that "organic" in "organic chemistry" refers to carbon-based molecules, not molecules used in living things; the word "organic" is used because life uses mostly carbon-based molecules most examples of such molecules (especially the more complex you get) are made by living processes, but that association isn't inherent in the definition and it was my mistake to assume you were talking about the molecules associated with life specifically. In that case could you clarify to what extent catalysts do play a larger role in the chemistry of abiotic carbon-based molecules than that of non-carbon molecules of the same complexity? I'm definitely aware of the difference when it comes to the chemistry of metabolism but I take it here you're talking about synthetic chemistry and I know less about the catalysts involved in that. Offhand (again) if it happened that carbon is suitable for creating a much larger variety of molecules than other elements then it would make sense for any specific such molecule to be kinetically unlikely but I really would want to better understand/read up on the kind of molecules and catalysts we are talking about here before going further.

Hey Yorzhik glad to see you back! Breaking is exactly one mechanism by which it could happen; merging could be another. Maybe "gene-swapping" is a misleading term because it suggests a specific process with that purpose - which modern prokaryotes have. But in terms of muddling ancestry and making things trace back to an ancestral population instead of individual, all you need is for genes from one individual to end up in another in some way other than vertical descent. Protocells breaking (thus releasing genes into the environment where they could be taken up by others) or merging would fit the bill. In a hypothesized system where this is happening because mechanisms to avoid it haven't developed yet this would all be accidental and not the specific "gene-swapping" modern prokaryotes do, but it would have the same effect on ancestry. When I talk about "membrane heredity" I'm usually thinking of the mechanism proposed in papers like this one; it's not a generic concept it's a specific idea. It involves fatty acid vesicles forming spontaneously in the pores of alkaline hydrothermal vents where a reaction converting CO2 and H2 to organic molecules happens spontaneously. The theorists already had the idea that this induced the possibility of "virtuous cycles" where chains of reactions that led to molecules that strengthened the CO2-fixing reaction (like peptides that bound to the pore minerals) would dominate over other possible reactions. This "membrane heredity/metabolic heredity" idea basically ties the concept to protocells, with the idea that vesicles in this environment would contain organic material that reacted with each other with potentially catalytic peptides migrating to the membrane & nucleotides concentrating inside (for chemical reasons), and in such a situation vesicles containing molecules and reactions that happened to catalyze CO2 fixation more strongly would grow faster than others (because they produced more organic material including the fatty acids making up the membrane), and when their fissioned after reaching a certain size the daughter vesicles would inherit a similar composition of organic molecules & membrane peptides. The heredity in such a system wouldn't be strong or faithful enough for the system to be "evolvable"; this would just be an amplification of the chemical selection involved with all autocatalytic cycles. This selection would only be towards favoring the cycles of chemical reactions that promoted CO2 fixation at the expense of other chemical reactions. It is the hypothesis of the authors however that those cycles would basically have been a version of the Wood–Ljungdahl metabolic pathway and would involve the creation of short strands of RNA as part of the overall autocatalysis - which is enough to generate the conditions within which actual genetic information could evolve. (for example, RNA can template the formation of peptides that depend on the RNA's sequence and RNA can replicate itself - if RNA molecules arose that templated growth-promoting peptides and replicated themselves, or were part of a cycle in which both happened, the vesicle hosting that cycle/that RNA would now have genetic heredity and be what we think of as an evolvable system). All this is a bit of a digression to answer your question; the reason I brought this hypothesis up originally was to contrast two ideas of how life might have been "encapsulated" at its very origins. RNA World hypotheses often imagine early RNA replicators existing outside of cells, with cells arriving later. The hypothesis I just described very clearly has RNA inside of and part of a cell-like structure (that would itself be directly ancestral to actual cells) long before either the RNA or the cell-like structure start being "life". Hence, "poorly-encapsulated" instead of "not encapsulated". I think what you're suggesting is that if we had a system with tons of vesicles with RNA that are ancestral to life but mix things up between each other enough that we can't trace back the origin of life to a single vesicle or RNA molecule, that the overall system generating the vesicles and RNA would be thought of as a single ancestor? If so, I think you're right that we could think of it that way but we don't have to. That just gets to the ambiguity of the concept of the individual; by the same token I've seen some say we should think of a population of clonal dandelions as a single organism; it's even more common to say this of colonies of social insects. It is what we literally do of "colonies" of cells in multicellular organisms. So sure, we could definitely think of "the whole chemical system within which abiogenesis occurred" as "a single ancestor". But we could also think of individual protocells, or individual RNA strands, that way, and think of the whole system as "a population" or even just "a system". One or the other can make more sense depending on context and I don't see a compelling reason to pick the first over the second in this case. I should also note, I'm not quite sure how we ended up again talking about LUCA as the first defineable life but it's very much not. LUCA is the latest universal common ancestor, not the first. AFAIK most agree based on phylogenetic evidence that LUCA was a full, complex, living cell with a long history of evolution between it and the earliest life. Talking about the earliest life being a population and LUCA being a population are different things; for example none of what I said about non-encapsulated or poorly-encapsulated early life swapping genes by accident applies to LUCA, a full cell that is thought to have had specific processes for gene-swapping like modern prokaryotes do. I also noticed looking at the Wikipedia page you originally commented on that it no longer talks about LUCA as a population at all: It seems the edit dates back to September of last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Last_universal_common_ancestor&diff=prev&oldid=1176298800 It's worth noting that "ancestral cell" doesn't contradict the idea that gene-swapping implies a population of ancestors because it's basically looking at two different kinds of ancestry: one involves tracing back events of genetic replication, the other traces back events of cell division/fusion. The whole point of vertical vs horizontal genetic transfer is that in one case the two match and in the other they don't. The Wikipedia page is probably clearer this way because while things can be confusing with genes which mostly replicate as a unit but don't always, I think it's much clearer that cells arise via only one process (for prokaryotes): cell division. The only things that could confuse ancestry at that level would be haphazard merging or partially incorporating parts of each other and such, which can be imagined with sufficiently-primitive protocells but I've never heard of happening in archaea or bacteria (outside of eukaryogenesis, an event rare enough that only one example left any evidence), and I think most views of LUCA have it "modern" enough for that not to happen with it either. I think what you just said was a very good description of the field twenty years ago, even ten years ago, but doesn't describe the field today (even if it might take another few years for a big part of the field itself to realize it). The alkaline hydrothermal vent hypothesis is clearly "closer to a correct idea" than the alternatives in the sense that none of the other hypotheses are close to it in scope and evidence, and even more strikingly its evolution over the last 10 years has all the hallmarks of "getting closer to a correct idea". We could argue that this is all illusory, that the hypothesis looks like the kind of hypotheses that turn out correct but isn't, and that's absolutely true! But when we say things like "we have no idea how this could possibly have happened" we are describing a situation where we don't even have hypotheses that look like they could be correct, and this used to be true of abiogenesis, and maybe it it will be true of it again in 10 years if the alkaline hydrothermal vent hypothesis fails to pan out in a major way, but it's not true today. Why would you think I have blind faith in the alkaline hydrothermal vent hypothesis? Like, why would I care about any specific abiogenesis hypothesis? It's hardly required for atheism or physicalism or believing life arose from nonlife via basic chemistry if that is what you mean; I believed all those things 20 years ago before I knew anything about this hypothesis and assumed that abiogenesis would never be solved within my lifetime. If I were going to pick a specific abiogenesis hypothesis for pure faith reasons this isn't the one I'd go for a priori anyway, my original instincts were more along genes-first, RNA-world ideas. This "confidence I feel" didn't exist when I first read enough about the hypothesis to think it seemed really promising 14 years ago. I started really thinking this would be the one when I read about the connection between the AHV hypothesis and the archaeal/bacterial divergence, some 10 years ago now. My confidence has admittedly only increased since as I followed Nick Lane and saw the ideas evolve - from "we're trying to verify this experimentally but haven't really succeded yet" to "we've now managed to confirm this or that aspect via experiment", from not discussing the origins of cells or genetic information at all to fixing the big problems of RNA-world with this metabolic heredity idea & actively exploring (and to some extent experimentally confirming) the dynamics of vesicles in an AHV environment, and now expanding into the origins of protein synthesis and the genetic code with potentially a fourth independent line of evidence in favor of life appearing under these conditions... But that's the kind of stimuli you'd expect evidence-based confidence to increase from, not blind faith. You are right; I actually don't believe that scientists "solving" abiogenesis to their own satisfaction wouldn't convince any creationist. That was a bit of shorthand on my part; what I meant was that the theory of evolution is a scientific theory that clears all the bars of evidence scientists set for their theories and people generally believe it on that basis - either because they understand the evidence themselves, or they trust that scientists do. It follows that people who reject the theory of evolution (which I summed up as "creationists" although they're not quite the same thing) aren't people for whom "the kind of evidence scientists are satisfied by" is necessarily enough, meaning that having such evidence in the case of abiogenesis wouldn't necessarily convince them either. However it's true that this kind of falls into a stereotype that "creationists" are people who can't be swayed by evidence at all and I don't think that stereotype is true, I think beliefs are complex and how they interact with evidence is complex too, and what makes people change their mind or fails to make people change their mind isn't always what we expect. So I do think that there are at least some people who are creationists who really would be convinced by a scientifically-accepted hypothesis for the origin of life. However I would argue that the reason those people would be convinced would be somewhat idiosyncratic and not (or not just) because the hypothesis cleared a scientific bar - because the people who form their beliefs primarily according to that standard aren't creationists.

... your threads? The only other thread started by you I ever posted in was in 2017 and we didn't even interact in it. This thread was literally about something I said, my nym is in the first post and everything. If you don't want me involved then don't involve me. And if (when) you do want me involved then have some grace about it.

No, if you wanted to hear my take on anything you'd be reading my responses to you carefully enough to form cogent, relevant responses. I certainly have no interest in giving takes that don't get such responses. As usual, get back to me when you're ready to do that.

No slips and slides, just you not having the respect to read what people write for comprehension apparently. I've addressed all of it, my first comment on your thread was addressing it, and you have yet to make a response that formed a valid rebuttal to it or otherwise engaged with what I actually said. Yeah I'm not going to bother with the random stuff you add that's not addressed to me when you don't even engage with replies you ostensibly solicited by responding to me directly. Looking those up all I find is her discussing cell's ability to self-repair. I'm loathe to consider... that cells don't work by arguments?????????? You're no longer even making sense. If that's where pointing out that "arguments follow the rules of logic" gets us then I guess the non-sequitur my original reply got was the best response it could ever have gotten from you huh. The sentence this is responding to didn't talk about cells at all. Your ideas on what it proves don't hold much weight when I can't tell if you even read it. It's so funny to me that this is a recurrent complaint you have of my "trying" to sound "intelligent" or "scientific". As it happens what I said fully answered your question and I dare you to demonstrate otherwise. You won't because that would require working through arguments logically and engaging with what's written. You have no idea whether I answered your question or not, you just hope that by saying I didn't you can avoid having to read it. In that specific case (oh no I'm distinguishing different situations, that's gonna go over well in the lil comprehension modules) you brought up what noble said in an invalid answer to a question I asked; there was nothing to address other than explaining how the answer indeed wasn't one. The imaginary aelyn in your head that you seem to be talking to instead of me keeps getting weirder and weirder. Well, we really speed-ran this one. It's a pity, you bring up plenty of interesting points I'd love to have in-depth exchanges about but that's not possible if you can't or won't engage in a two-party conversation.

That wasn't an "if" casting doubt on the claim, it was part of an "if... then..." sentence making an argument that's all the stronger for the "if" part being true. I can easily reformulate it without the "if": "Various scientists have made that specific argument, and various scientists claimed natural selection is circular, however it doesn't follow that various scientists said this specific argument in service of that specific claim and in fact it's highly unlikely any did because it would be logically invalid." Hopefully this frees you up to respond to what that sentence was actually saying. Or not. (see the previous posts on the previous page for what "that specific argument" refers to, if you forgot or didn't bother to track). And plenty who wrote that these claims were incorrect. If you can't restate those arguments for why it's circular in your own words (and that "if" absolutely is casting doubt on your ability to do so, given your reluctance to do it) then you can't evaluate whether the counter-arguments are correct or not and aren't in a position to form an opinion based on what any of those scientists wrote. Or for that matter be sure that they really do back your opinion, if it happens that what you're doing instead is forming an opinion and then trawling through the literature for scientists who seem to agree with it. Her research did revolutionize evolution, she's in the textbooks. She won that Nobel, literally the most high-profile scientific distinction there is. She won it in 1983, 40 years ago, after facing opposition for her work 20 years before that. Same with Woese, or Kimura's neutral theory of molecular evolution that Koonin's arguments on genomic change are a continuation of. What's next, complaining that modern geology is going down a wrong path because it's ignoring the ideas of this young Wegener chap? Could you be more specific about which of her research is still being denied? I'm assuming it's not the specific research she won a Nobel for; those usually aren't denied unless proved incorrect after the fact. Arguments work by logic, and those are what I was referring to in that quote. Really weird to have missed that, almost like you're not reading the things you're responding to very carefully or something. Sure, sounds fun. Off the top of my head: organic chemistry is the chemistry involved in life, and life is characterized by structures tuned to perform functions. This includes obvious macroscopic things like eyes and limbs but chemical reactions are obviously also impacted, and translates to life's chemical reactions having disproportionately unlikely kinetics (just like the shapes of living things are disproportionately unlikely shapes), and unlikely kinetics require specific catalysts. Which of the two parts of that sentence is he saying what if? Or is he saying neither, which the rest of your answer sounds like but means you're again not directly answering the question? Not that this would have been a direct answer of the question anyway because I asked what you were saying, not Noble. As your beliefs coincide then answering in your name should be equivalent to answering in his and would have the benefit of being a clear answer to the question asked instead of yet another niggling doubt on if you even read the question.

I'm not saying you came up with it, I'm saying it's a thing that you are saying in this thread and it's you I'm talking to, not Tam Hunt. If I were talking to Tam Hunt I'd write pretty much exactly what I did in my first reply and if he replied something about cells manufacturing genetic sequences I'd make the same reply about conflating different arguments that I made to you. IIRC Nick Lane does in his book "The Vital Question". There is no in-principle obstacle to standard Darwinian processes leading to the evolution of intelligence in cells in the standard theory of evolution, given that theory has our own intelligence arising by that process. The idea that individual cells aren't intelligent in the same way is generally based on general knowledge of cell function, not the idea it couldn't evolve. Again, focus on the actual subject of the sentences you're replying to. I was asking whether a specific argument you made was in service of the claim that natural selection is circular, or a different claim invalidating natural selection. Even if various scientists made that specific argument, and various scientists claimed natural selection is circular, it doesn't follow that various scientists said this specific argument in service of that specific claim and in fact it's highly unlikely any did because it would be logically invalid. Or so it seems to me; if you think the sentence I was referring to was a logically valid argument for natural selection being circular I'm happy to be walked through the logic. Oh, so are you back to claiming natural selection isn't dominant, something I have repeatedly agreed with to various extents? Or do we indeed disagree on whether it happens at all?

Please focus; is this still about natural selection being circular or have you moved on to a new objection? My "we don't need to know" was purely in the context of natural selection not being circular; there are plenty of other contexts where we might indeed want or even need to know. Investigating the inheritance of acquired traits might be one but I don't see the link to natural selection being circular. You seem to have many different objections to natural selection and that's fine, something can be wrong on many different fronts, but they all have different implications and therefore involve different arguments, you can't take my response to one and apply it to another (I mean, you can, nobody can physically stop you but the logic won't follow). Here's the claims I've seen you make so far as I understand them: 1) Natural selection is circular (i.e. it's invalid even in principle, an empty concept) 2) Natural selection isn't what effectively happens in living things. Instead mutations are intentionally directed by cells towards certain adaptations (?) 3) Natural selection + random mutation leading to adaptations happen but aren't the only or even the dominant process in evolutionary change [I don't think you actually believe that because you keep disagreeing with me when I say it but it's what some scientists you keep quoting to support your point say, like Koonin or Woese] 4) Natural selection + random mutation leading to adaptations doesn't happen at all [it sounds like your actual position given you keep arguing with me when I agree with (3) but I don't think you've explicitly confirmed it, and maybe you're actually somewhere between 3 and 4 idk] My response was to your claim of (1), but your own response seems to be saying (2) which is completely different - it's possible for natural selection to be a valid concept and just not what happens in living things, so pointing out it's not what happens in living things doesn't make it circular. I'm happy to discuss any of those claims, we just need to keep track of which it is. For example on the circularity issue, could you clarify in your own words how natural selection is circular? Some things you said about it (like caterpillars turning into butterflies being an example) don't match the usual arguments or the ones Hunt makes in your quoted paper so I'm not sure what the claim actually is. On the cells directing mutations issue, it sounds like you're saying this process accounts for all changes we otherwise think of as "evolutionary" - so would you say this process is what led to bacteria developing citrate metabolism in the Lenski experiments for example?