Mimicry and neodarwinism

Before I go into your post could you clarify something.Are you agreeing that your previous argument made no sense?You made an assumption from essentially nothing and used it as the basis for a worthless probability calculation.And now you go on on to criticise the research paper on the basis of 'assumptions full of phantasy'?TTFN,WK

So what? How many 'morphs' of human eye colour might one find in the 'population' of a large school? you yourself give a probability of 1:3,000,000 for such a group of 6 traits arising, a probability almost as dubious in derivation as your previous one but even so a trivially achievable one compared to the 10^-n values you were coming up with previously. Well done, you can see exactly what he says you should. The pattern of black elements, which are thought to be controlled by the H locus, is the same in cenea and ochracea but the background colour is different. There is no claim that all of the mimetic adaptations are linked to 11 alleles of the H locus only that those affecting the pattern of the black portions is. The background colour can easily be different due to differences in the level of papiliochrome deposition due to differences in the genetic background independent of the H locus. The same relationship of similar 'pattern' but distinct background is seen in trophonius and lamborini as Nijhout points out. Assuming you mean the actual coloured portion, rather than the deepness of the melanic deposition, the answer is the same as I just detailed above, different levels of papiliochrome deposition due to differences in the genetic background not linked to the H locus. In fact the colour of niobe's backwings seems a pretty good intermediate form of the colouration of the back wings of trophonius and planemoides again contrary to you assertion of a lack of intermediate morphs, especially significant since this 'intermediate' closely resembles an already extant mimetic morph. Perhaps a more pertinent second element to quote would have been... Don't forget that the non-mimetic forms are male-like so it is quite possible that the selectional constraint on the male-like pattern is stronger due to sexual selection than the predation constraints are on mimetic patterns. Selection doesn't need to be based on the protection from predation. Non-mimetic forms seem principally to be male like in colouration, the sort of 'trasvesite' change you scoff at for no apparent reason.I agree that all things being equal however we might expect less variation if the mimetic pattern was being strongly selected for and non-mimetic forms were not subject to strong selection. We don't have any substantial evidence to suggest that this is the case however, although the male-like pattern may not be selected for in females it may still be subject to strong selection. Why do you assume that rather than follow the actual logic Nijhout presents that although it has previously been suggested that the male form is ancestral, I'm not sure why you think that a theory Nijhout suggest in this paper is being put forwarded as accepted, the fact that the male morph is highly distinct from those of closely related sister species suggests that this may not be the case. If you think that Nijhout fails to make his case then why not say why, but don't try and represent it as some sort of widely held tenet of faith amongst evolutionary biologists in order to avoid a bit of hard work? Apart from the several paragraphs he uses to decribe the differences in background colours? I'm not sure what the technical term is for a fallacy based on the sarcastic use of quotation marks, but it seems that whatever it is called that is all your argument here boils down to.What 'this' is is Nijhout's suggested origin of some of the mimetic patterns based on his theory that the pattern can de derived with comparatively few mutations from one of the patterns of P. phorcas. If you have a counter argument to make you haven't put any of it forward here but it is still Nijhout's hypothesis you would be rebutting not 'the modern, "scientific" neodarwinistic account for Papilio dardanus polymorphism'. As far as I know there is no such thing as yet. Unlike creationists and ID proponents people who actually do science to find things out rather than bolster some idee fixe are prepared for uncrtainty and tenuousness. We can bide our time and work away at determining the specific genetic bases of various morphological traits and then reassesing hypotheses like Nijhout's which are based on cruder preliminary data. It isn't a matter of 'phantasy' that the 'male like' patterning can be dominant or recessive depending on the genetic background, which would quite simply account for the female dimorphism, why [i]P. phorcas[/p] has not become purely monomorphic I don't know, but simply because the species is not mimetic it might be rather premature to assume that the non-male form is completely independent of selective pressures.Indeed Cook, et al. (1994) suggest that while male-like forms are more visible and prone to predation they may allow females to escape 'sexual harrasment' by males.TTFN,WK
***********************Cook, S.E., Vernon, J.G., Bateson, M. & Guilford, T. 1994. Mate choice in the
polymorphic African swallowtail butterfly, Papllio dardanus: male-like
females may avoid sexual harassment. Anim. Behav., 47, 389-397.

Is there any reason why you insist on casting aspersions on people all the time? I might as well ask if you have deliberately failed to read and understand great chunks of Nijhout's paper so you could make up your ridiculous theories and fatuous probability calculations. I'm sure you're not sure but then you seem to have only the most tenuous grasp of what neo-darwinism or modern evolutionary biology have to say about anything. There are a number of selective pressures on any population which could easily include both predation and sexual selection of varying forms. It could easily be that strategies to account for differing pressures produce highly distinct morphs. If P .phorcas can have dimorphic females why shouldn't dardanus? Becuase predation is not the sole selective pressure. It would be interesting to see if males from the Abyssinian population showed the same mate preferences as those used in the study suggesting male-like patterns helped avoid unwanted mating attempts.After this I'm afraid you become very hard to understand as your english seems to be breaking down. On important possibility isthat Darwin may be wrong, he is was wrong on some other things, it is no tent of faith amongs evolutionary biologists that Darwin's word is holy writ, science does not work like that.The answer to what I understand your question to be would be that there is very little change required between the male forms of phorcas and dardanus, principally the loss of the green colouration in the male like phorcas pattern and some changes in the marginal patterns. The male like patterns appear dominant in both phorcas and dardanus and seem to support Vane-wright's 'transvestite' hypothesis as well as the idea that dardanus may have had a phorcas like ancestor (Clarke, 1985).As long as the males all changed gradually together and were always prevalently monomorphic it wouldn't be a problem for sexual selection to even drive the changes in pattern between phorcas and dardanus. Yes, and? Not all populations of butterflies are subject to the exact same selective pressures, get over it. Oh, you know what the factors are now do you? They are no longer unknown as of today?No, they are still unknown and quite possibly non-existent.TTFN,WK*************************************Clarke, C., Clarke, F.M.M., Collins, S.C.L. & Turner, J.R.G. 1985. Male-like
females, mimicry and transvestism in butterflies
(Lepidopteraapilionidae). Syst. Entomol., 10, 257-283.

Clearly this isn't always the case as the intermediate morphs amongst the dardanus populations show. All this suggests is that Punnet didn't look at enough mimetic species to find the ones which didn't act in that way. I don't know that this is the case for 'morphs', very distinct morphs could easily be the result of differing alleles in completely seperate genes rather than variation at one locus such as we have been discussing. Hmm, I don't think I would necessarily agree with this. There is sufficient scope for transcription factor binding sites to arise de novo that a gene may be captured by a pathway it was not previously associated with. But in general I would probably agree that a master control gene is likely to have arisen before most of the downstream factors it affects. I don't know if this was Punnet's opinion but certainly very small genetic changes can produce drastic morphological differences which could easily encompass the discontinuous variation Punnet observed. I don't see how this necessitates switch-genes and the genes downstream of the switch having to arise simultaneously unless the 'switch' gene has no other function. If the switch gene also has a function largely independent of mimetic pattern then it can easily arise well before the downstream elements which effect the mimetic patterning of the wing.I think that this point also addresses much of the later part of your post.'m not sure if I fully understand what you mean by a 'switch' gene since the very end of your post didn't make much sense to me.TTFN,WK

Actually I didn't. I said that I thought that pre-existing genes could be capture by new pathways, but I was prepared to accept your view of the upstream elements arising first. Not if, as I suggested, the genes also have other functions or similar roles in other pathways, such as the Notch/Distal-less pathway mentioned in the Joron paper Notch is involved in the development of eyes antennae and legs as well as the patterning of the wing. Distal-less similarly has a role in limb development in genral and not only wing patterning. As I pointed out before phenotypically 'macro' effects need not be linked to 'macro' mutations, a single base pair substitution, the most gradualistic mutation imaginable, can easily cause radical changes in morphology and a 'macro' gentic event (such as a locus swapping chromosomes) may have a minimal affect on the phenotype. As the paper suggests we won't really know until the loci are sequenced and we can reconstruct the evolutionary history of the regions involved more accurately.TTFN,WK

We certainly have and here you seem to be merely blindy restating your previous assumptions and assertions which have been addressed several times.The whole point is to move the debate on, not to take it right back to the beginning and start over again, as you have initiated since Zhimbo is now making many of the same points to you that I made on the first page of this thread.TTFN,WK