The End of Evolution By Means of Natural Selection

Well, if you had a magic wand that abolishes neutral variation, then I guess that is pretty much what would happen under those particular set of circumstances, if you waited long enough.And if, on the other hand, you started with one allele and there were twenty different environments into each of which adaptive radiation can take place, such that different versions of that gene would be suited to different environments, then you'd end up with twenty different alleles, if you waited long enough.What's your point?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

By looking at just one gene, and by considering the moment of fixation as an end state instead of just more of the middle of the process, you've ignored equilibrium heterozygosity. Well this is where your argument really breaks down, isn't it? Because the fixation of an allele in one population doesn't magically cause its fixation in another. So long as there's room for adaptive radiation, the diversity will in fact increase. Your argument applies only when the ecology has reached such a climax of diversity that one species can only be replaced by one other species, instead of diverging into two.The production of additional net diversity has, I suppose, to stop at some point --- just as someone climbing Mount Everest must eventually reach a point where he can't get any higher. But this is not a valid argument that it is impossible to climb up Mount Everest, only an argument that it is impossible to climb up when you're on the summit.

Good, 'cos it isn't. And if you gave the ostrich as your sole example of a bird, "pared down to its essentials", then this would assist you to make the point that it is impossible for birds to fly.It would not, however, provide you with a valid form of argument.

* sigh *But this process may reduce the diversity in each breed of dog but increases the number of breeds of dog, thus producing a net increase in diversity.The net result is that breeding by humans has quite visibly and obviously increased the diversity of the dog/wolf species.

If you are really unable to find a single error in anything that I've written, you could convey this best by agreement followed by silence.

Well, good, I look forward to it.But what I find rather odd is that before you've actually gotten round to discussing one single thing that I've actually said, you've put up a snide remark pro tem.It is you, I think, who needs to learn the lesson of "patience". If I'm wrong, then you can analyze my wrongness at your leisure. I'm not going to rush you. If, on the other hand, I'm not wrong, then you shouldn't have rushed to write a post contemning me personally when my whole offense was to write something so correct that at present you are utterly unable to dispute it.

* sighs again *In the case that you bring up, the action of evolution may well have diminished the variation within species, but it also produced more species. Thus increasing genetic diversity.The interesting thing about what you're doing is that you appear to be committing the fallacy known as "moving the goalposts" inside your head, but without ever doing so explicitly. In your line of argument, as soon as radiative adaptation starts happening, you move the goalposts and it becomes two separate examples of evolution, both of which are conservative.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, this is why I wrote in post #32: Now, in case you've never met Faith before, then you should know that Faith is a creationist. She is not trying to argue that futher evolution is impossible now (which would merely be silly) but that evolution was impossible in the first place (which is downright crazy).In effect, you are trying to twist her words so that they mean something nearly reasonable, whereas the thing that she's actually trying to say is gormlessly stupid.

And yet no matter how fast and furiously you spin your words and juggle the goalposts, the result is still a new variety of finch.

And since these alleles were not subtracted from the gene pool of the parent species, what we have is speciation with no net loss of genetic variation.Indeed, since the new allele must have arisen at some point, the total process involves an increase of genetic variation.

Well yes. Fixation of an allele involves he loss of other alleles.Where do you want to go from here? Remember, your goal is to deny evolution, not to say things that every biologist knows to be true simply by definition.

Paranoia is not an attractive trait.May I suggest an alternative that you've missed --- that the reason that every biologist disagrees with you (a non-biologist) about biology is in fact because they know more about biology than you do. I have in fact been reading it. This is why I'm so certain that you're talking blithering nonsense. The reason that evolutionists include mutation in any account of genetics is that it exists. This is neither "facile" --- whatever you mean by that --- nor "false", and there is nothing whatsoever you can say that will prevent us from knowing it.I can see why creationists would wish that it didn't exist, or at least that you could stop people from knowing that it exists, but you can't. You'd find a simple statement of the truth to be a lot quicker and less fatiguing. But, of course, also less agreeable to your religious beliefs.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Having read your screed, I think I see the essence of your mistake.Let's try to formalize our language by labeling genes with letters and alleles with numbers, so that, for example, c1 and c2 would be two alternative alleles of gene c. OK so far?Now, you seem to be imagining the origin of species by a whittling away of alleles.For example, imagine a species which has two alleles for every gene, and twenty-six genes (twenty-six because that's how many letters of the alphabet I have to work with). So it has alleles a1, a2, b1, b2 ... z1, z2.Now, you seem, stop me if I'm wrong, to be imagining speciation happening by a process which reduces the alleles, so that a new species can be produced by a series of selection events which leaves the daughter population with only the alleles a1, b1 ... z1.But this would not actually be speciation. For a member of the daughter population would be indistinguishable from a member of the parent population such as might be produced by recombination. So we might be able to find a member of the parent population which was genetically indistinguishable from a member of the daughter population. So how could we say that two identical organisms were members of different species?(In Noah's flood, the reduction of giraffes to two would have severely depleted the genetic diversity of giraffes, but this would not mean that the two giraffes selected by Noah were somehow non-giraffes.)So when you write: ... then this is true, but it's only half the story. Because you need some production of new alleles to displace the old ones in the daughter population, otherwise what you are seeing is not speciation. There must be an increase as well as a reduction, otherwise you haven't produced a new species.Your confusion is most evident when you write: Now, that's a bad thing if your aim is to preserve the purity of a breed. But it's exactly what you need if you want to produce a new breed. If no mutation had arisen that made dogs have webbed feet, then no-one could have produced web-footed breeds of dogs.And in general, if dogs had been produced simply by selecting from the genetic material already available in wolves, then each dog would be indistinguishable from something which wolves might have produced themselves by sexual recombination. You would have to suppose that it was possible for two feral wolves to have sex and, by a lucky chance, produce a chihuahua or a dalmatian or an Old English Sheepdog because the pre-existing wolf alleles had happened to get arranged in just the right combination.Again, you write: Italics mine. Yes, enough mutations "destroy the species". And therefore, by definition, create a new one. That's what speciation means --- that the new kind of organism is a different species from the one from which it is descended.---You have made a number of minor errors in genetics and the theory of evolution, but I think that this is where your fundamental error lies.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

A distinction without a difference. The reason that poodles, greyhounds, bulldogs and so forth look more diverse than wolves is because of an underlying genetic diversity. How else? See my last post.

You do? The animals went in two by two, hurrah, hurrah. Do you suppose that the two wolves contained within themselves sufficient genetic diversity to produce every breed of dog --- so that when they bred, sexual recombination might have at once produced a litter consisting of a greyhound, a chihuahua, a bulldog, a poodle, a Pomerian, and an Old English Sheepdog?