Daily Archives: July 27, 2017

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It was pretty much a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Earlier in July, a 2006 Mitsubishi Evolution MR was put up for sale, and the car was brand-spanking-new. As in, it was never even driven off of the dealership lot. It wasnt even registered.

With only nine miles on the odometer, the 2006 Evolution MR was put up for sale by a California-based dealership on eBay Motors. The auction is now over and the winning bid came in at a staggering $137,954.

When it was new, the rally-inspired sport sedan arrived with a $37,000 MSRP, but the biddersof which there were 80inflated the auction price past six figures. Heck, the price paid is almost double what the very last Evo ever made sold for.

The Evolution MR arrived with a 6-speed manual transmission over previous Evo's 5-speeders. It also had Bilstein shocks, BBS wheels, and MR badging to signify its "Mitsubishi Racing" roots. It was the top-dog of Evos more than 10 years ago.

So, how did a California dealership end up with this car? A Reddit commenter stated the dealershipSouth Coast Mitsubishiwas notorious after it bought up a bushel of Evolution IXsat the time of the car's launch. The dealer let the cars sit and sold them years later, likely to the tune of fat profits. This Evo IX MR maybe the icing atop the dealer's collector car treasure chest.

What this means for used Evolution MR values is uncertain, but there is clearly a demand for low-mileage Japanese performance cars. But more than $100,000 for an 11-year-old car? Ring us if and when an Evolution wagon surfaces for sale. In the meantime, there are a handful ofEvolution X Final Editions looking for loving owners at much lower prices.

Excerpt from:

Someone paid $138K for a brand-new 2006 Mitsubishi Evolution MR - Motor Authority

New York, NY:Marketing Evolution, a real-time omnichannel marketing optimization service provider, today announced PlaceIQ, the location data and insights company, as a new certified partner inside the Marketing Evolution attribution platform. With the addition of PlaceIQ dataset into the Marketing Evolution ROI Brain, brands can easily identify how all their online and offline marketing touchpoints such as TV, digital, direct mail, and social drive physical world visitation outcomes.

This partnership connects PlaceIQ data with hundreds of omnichannel campaign data points to facilitate simple applications for Marketing Evolution customers to measure and maximize marketing ROI, and optimize campaigns in-flight to drive visitation and bottom line revenue. This integration creates a closed loop solution for customers with brick and mortar locations, such as retailers, restaurants, and automotive dealerships, to help brands and advertisers understand marketings effect on real world visitation. With PlaceIQ data, brands can also use location data to understand visitation trends on a market-by-market basis, identify key customer audiences based on their propensity to visit certain locations, connect campaigns to out of home (OOH) advertising, and gather additional insights that can inform end-to-end media decisions.

Location data continues to act as a truth set for brands to accurately measure ROI, learn from customers and effectively engage with them in new ways, said Duncan McCall, CEO and co-founder, PlaceIQ. Partnering with Marketing Evolution extends these benefits, as well as the value of our advanced location dataset, to their impressive roster of Fortune 500 customer brands for the first time. By aligning with a leader like Marketing Evolution, we continue to make good on our promise to make our dataset ubiquitous, in a way that lets brands realize the value of visitation data quickly. Our data in their platform allows marketers to optimize campaigns in-flight, which provides immediacy for optimizing media budgets and driving ROI.

Marketing Evolutions ROI Brain integrates hundreds of different data sets across thousands of variables at the person-level to evaluate how each marketing message motivates different types of brand perceptions and behaviors. In the ROI Brain, Marketing Evolution connects both proprietary brand specific data feeds and publicly available data sets at the person-level to provide forecasting for forward-looking budget optimizations. Brands measure and optimize everything in one platform: direct mail, email, display and video impressions across devices, TV, OOH, radio. The ROI Brain applies artificial intelligence over this integrated data set seeking predictive and prescriptive optimizations in the coming days, weeks and months to maximize the ROI of your media.

We are thrilled to bring this game-changing feature to our current customers and the broader market, said Christine Grammier, Head of Partners & Alliances, Marketing Evolution. By adding the location-based data leader, PlaceIQ, to the Marketing Evolution partner ecosystem, brands, both large and small, are now finding media and message optimizations that drive 25-35% more visits per marketing dollar spent. We are reducing friction for brands large and small to reap the bottom line benefits of this data.

Marketing Evolutions current customers are already realizing the benefits of this integration now and if you are a brand searching for the best way to leverage geolocation data, please reach out to Marketing Evolution.

Here is the original post:

Marketing Evolution and PlaceIQ Partner to Deliver Marketing Actionability - MarTech Advisor

We all know the neo-Darwinian story: random mutations are naturally selected for fitness, leading to innovation over time. By this elegant process, bacteria over billions of years became humans. But when you eliminate the question-begging circular arguments, distracting definitions, and ideological assumptions, can evolutionists really demonstrate any unambiguous cases of innovation? To clear away clutter, heres what we mean by eliminating faulty answers:

Two classic cases of innovation claimed by evolutionists are the citrate story in Lenskis lab and the nylonase story. For the example of citrate metabolism, Michael Behe explained that it was a switch-on of a pre-existing function, not an innovation. Ditto for the nylonase story, which Ann Gauger recently revisited. Now, lets look into some recent papers for more examples of innovation by chance mutations. The papers promise them; do they deliver?

What better place to start than a paper edited by Richard Lenski himself? Lets search for innovation in their paper in PNAS, Hitchhiking and epistasis give rise to cohort dynamics in adapting populations. The opening sentence sounds promising: Beneficial mutations are the driving force of adaptive evolution. Indeed, this paper is full of the words beneficial mutations, adaptive, and fitness. Sounds like a good place to hunt, as we watch them tweak yeast genes to see if something novel, something innovative, arises by random chance. They will even consider mutations that might work in synergy to provide a new benefit. Heres the Abstract:

Beneficial mutations are the driving force of adaptive evolution. In asexual populations, the identification of beneficial alleles is confounded by the presence of genetically linked hitchhiker mutations. Parallel evolution experiments enable the recognition of common targets of selection; yet these targets are inherently enriched for genes of large target size and mutations of large effect. A comprehensive study of individual mutations is necessary to create a realistic picture of the evolutionarily significant spectrum of beneficial mutations. Here we use a bulk-segregant approach to identify the beneficial mutations across 11 lineages of experimentally evolved yeast populations. We report that nearly 80% of detected mutations have no discernible effects on fitness and less than 1% are deleterious. We determine the distribution of driver and hitchhiker mutations in 31 mutational cohorts, groups of mutations that arise synchronously from low frequency and track tightly with one another. Surprisingly, we find that one-third of cohorts lack identifiable driver mutations. In addition, we identify intracohort synergistic epistasis between alleles of hsl7 and kel1, which arose together in a low-frequency lineage. [Emphasis added.]

Their prime example of intracohort synergistic epistasis (e.g., two mutations that interact somehow) as a case of adaptive evolution fails tests #1 and #2. All they notice is that the alleles localize to the poles of the yeast cell somehow, but they dont know why. As expected, most of the mutations are neutral, or have effects that are so small as to get lost in the noise. Lets cut to the chase and look for innovation or novelty:

Deletion of HSL7 is deleterious under a wide range of conditions, including the rich glucose media used here; thus our data suggest that the evolved hsl7 allele bestows a novel function or alters an existing function. Extensive characterization of such rare beneficial mutations requires long-term high-replicate evolution experiments followed by comprehensive analysis linking genotype to phenotype. Likely due to their large target size, loss-of-function mutations dominate adaptive evolution experiments, though rare beneficial mutations and epistatic interactions may provide the raw material for molecular innovation in natural populations.

Do they identify a new function? No; they might have just found a mutation that alters an existing function. All they know is without it, the effects are deleterious somehow, but they dont know what the allele is doing. They tell us that beneficial mutations are rare, and that adaptive evolution experiments are dominated by loss-of-function mutations. Dont look for a new wing or eye emerging in this paper. Instead: rare beneficial mutations and epistatic interactions may provide the raw material for innovations in natural populations. Their lab culture, we notice too, is not a natural population.

So that was the only use of the word innovation in the paper: a lone suggestion that some beneficial mutation or interacting set of mutations may provide the raw material for innovation someday over the rainbow. And how did they measure the adaptive fitness of all those alleged beneficial mutations they talk about? Look in the Materials & Methods section: they measured it by survival. Tautological evolution rears its lovely head again.

We should briefly consider the possibility that survival might reduce fitness. Imagine a population of yeast cells that divides recklessly, like cancer. Say theres an organism in the natural environment that likes the taste of those mutated, rapidly dividing yeast cells and snacks on them. Youre not going to know that in the lab. Lenski and this team will just measure them out-competing other strains, and assume they are adaptive. What we are looking for is proof of a chance mutation that produces a new, useful, novel, innovative function. That is not in evidence here.

Lets try another paper. Phys.org tells about a research team that tried to re-create the Precambrian version of beta-lactamase. If that enzyme sounds familiar, its because Biologic Institute scientist Douglas Axe did work on beta lactamase to measure the tolerance of protein folds to mutation. These researchers approach the enzyme from an evolutionary angle, seeing if the supposed primitive form of beta-lactamase might have been capable of finding a new active site.

The first question should be, how can they resurrect an ancient protein? This is where the circular reasoning comes in. By comparing todays sequences to each other within an evolutionary framework, scientists can reasonably infer the sequence of an ancestral protein from which the modern versions descended using models of sequence evolution. So they will try to infer evolution within an evolutionary framework. Guess what they will find! Obviously, with different assumptions, one could come to completely different conclusions. If you compared the ignition from a Toyota, a Ford, a Cadillac, and a John Deere tractor within an evolutionary framework, how solid would your model of a Precambrian ignition be?

They announce that the Precambrian enzyme was more malleable (their word is promiscuous) than the modern beta lactamase enzymes, which they assume have become less tolerant to change as they became more specialized. So when they constructed the mythical Precambrian enzyme, lo and behold, it could find a new active site!

We have found that a minimalist design to introduce a de novo activity (catalysis of the Kemp elimination, a common benchmark in de novo enzyme design) fails when performed on modern -lactamases, but is highly successful when using the scaffolds of hyperstable/promiscuous Precambrian -lactamases, says Eric A. Gaucher from the Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences, Georgia Institute of Technology.

Well, thats great. We might expect our mythical Precambrian ignition could also tolerate more types of keys. Would that make it more innovative? Hardly; it would be less secure! The Kemp elimination reaction is only a test of whether the engineered enzyme can extract a proton from a carbon atom; it is a non-natural reaction that is unknown to biological organisms. Engineers use the test for rational enzyme design. Apparently, lack of a selective pressure to generate Kemp elimination activity during evolution indicates it is a useless activity for real living organisms. Notice that the paper in Nature Communications doesnt even mention innovation or novelty, but begins with a statement of Darwinian faith:

Protein engineering studies often suggest the emergence of completely new enzyme functionalities to be highly improbable. However, enzymes likely catalysed many different reactions already in the last universal common ancestor. Mechanisms for the emergence of completely new active sites must therefore either plausibly exist or at least have existed at the primordial protein stage.

The best part may be the opening two paragraphs. Notice that after all these years, nobody has a good case of an enzyme evolving a new active site. Watch them also call it a huge unsolved problem in molecular evolution, and admit that everybody knows that finding a new functional active site is highly improbable. Note lastly how much intelligent design has factored into their efforts to solve the problem:

Enzyme activity is determined by the structure of a particular region of a protein called the active site. The generation of completely new active sites capable of enzyme catalysis is, arguably, one of the most fundamental unsolved problems in molecular biology.

Rational and modern design approaches to this problem have been developed using complex computational methods, but without conclusive results. Indeed, protein engineering studies often suggest that the emergence of completely new enzyme active sites is highly improbable.

But in the actual paper, they do not demonstrate any new active site with a clear functional advantage certainly not by chance, since they inserted their engineering hands into the work:

Here, we use resurrected Precambrian proteins as scaffolds for protein engineering and demonstrate that a new active site can be generated through a single hydrophobic-to-ionizable amino acid replacement that generates a partially buried group with perturbed physico-chemical properties. We provide experimental and computational evidence that conformational flexibility can assist the emergence and subsequent evolution of new active sites by improving substrate and transition-state binding, through the sampling of many potentially productive conformations.

In essence, they engineered a mythical Precambrian enzyme by intelligent design, and found a way to make it promiscuous. That dog wont hunt. Instead, we find that Doug Axe is vindicated again; the team admits that finding a new active site is highly improbable. The only reason they believe they emerged by chance is because they exist. (See faulty answer #3 again.)

One more angle: the hunt for clear evidence of an innovation arising in the fossil record. David Klinghoffer just wrote about the Rangeomorph bang in the Ediacaran fossil record, the sudden appearance of large frond-like extinct organisms before the Cambrian explosion. Heres another Ediacaran critter called Cloudina (see our discussion in March of this simple creature). A paper in Nature Scientific Reports looks into Ecological interactions in Cloudina from the Ediacaran of Brazil: implications for the rise of animal biomineralization. The word innovation appears three times here, so lets look for a true chance innovation.

Unfortunately, all the talk of innovation here falls under the third fallacy we discussed in the opening: ideological assumptions. Their evidence boils down to, Its there, design is verboten, therefore it evolved.

These evolutionary novelties led to the escalation and systematic organization of food webs, guilds and niches during the Cambrian radiation. It was the dawn of animal life.

The Rhapsody in Blue performance was nice, but we came for the magic act. We were looking for a rabbit to emerge out of a hat without a magician. We found a pre-existing rabbit and a hat, but no connection between the two.

In summary, we went looking for evidence of true innovation by chance. Evolutionists desperately tried to provide examples, but each time vanished in a cloud of suggestions. All prospective examples fell into the three faulty answers that disqualify them as scientific.

What really impressed us were the frequent admissions that the emergence of novel function is highly improbable, and one of the most fundamental unsolved problems in molecular biology evolutionary molecular biology, that is.

Image credit: Courtesy of Illustra Media, from Origin: Design, Chance and the First Life on Earth.

Read more:

Desperately Seeking Evolutionary Innovation by Chance - Discovery Institute