How can any example be "uncontroversial"? All you need is one creationist to be wrong about it and you've got a controversy
By uncontroversial I don't mean some uninformed idiot doesn't believe it, I mean that we have got to the stage where science can remove words like "strong evidence for," from its papers and replace them with "and therefore we have demonstrated that" to the extent that other scientists can't second guess it.
What we've seen in this thread is that we haven't quite been able to prove to our own satifaction that a mutation of a gene has produced a beneficial change that has consequently been selected for and caused a population change. We need to kick the last brick away don't we?
Once upon a time creationists argued that species couldn't change at all, now we have them (well the saner ones, at least) arguing about the mechanisms of molecular genetics. They're being pushed further and further back.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
As a first instance, let me direct you to the Ames Test. The initial state is known, the final state is known, and the mutation keeps the bacterium from dying of malnutrition.
I'd have a couple of complaints if I was a creationist.
1) It's artificial - it starts with a deliberately faulty lab-bred bug. 2) The mutation that occurs (if it occurs) simply takes it back to the bugs normal functioning (ie the way god intended) - not a new trait. 3) You haven't isolated the actual mutation and proved that it is genuinely new. I think it was there all the time and occasionally gets switched on when the bugs are starving.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
I love Lanski's stuff - it's real, proper, rigorous, long term science. But not being a micro-biologist I've always taken it at face value, never tried to see it as a creationist would. No doubt they have severe objections.
This was the question in the OP.
"I accept that natural selection does occur and that it can cause a population to change, but you need now to show me how the genome created those novel features because, until you do, I can say that the genome must have had them to start with."
Does Lenski's stuff do that?
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
Or, so you say. What if we don't have the means to find the evidence...proper technology? What if we are wrong about what true evidence should look like?
So far the evidence that we have supports the theory that we have.
The theory existed before we had any knowledge of DNA or the technology to resolve genomes to their molecular components. Everything we've since learned about DNA has supported the theory - it didn't need to, it could have completely shattered it - it could have proved common descent to be wrong very simply. But it didn't, it confirmed it.
Now it maybe that the theory is still wrong and it maybe that a new technology or evidence will crop up that we have no inkling of at the moment that will prove it wrong - but I wouldn't bet a penny on it and I'm betting that you wouldn't either.
In the meantime, 'what ifs' will be ignored because they come with absolutely no supporting evidence. Get some evidence and you have something to discuss.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
This thread died around page 6 when we couldn't pin down the gene(s) that changed in the mice and haven't as yet been able to provide another likely candidate for a complete audit trail from mutation to selection.
Shame, it leaves the insane with an almost reasonable argument.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
When I started this thread, I had hoped that we could move from the theoretical - take it as accepted that mutation followed by natural selection is the mechanism for novel features to evolve - and actually demonstrate it in an animal big enough for creationists to think it's 'proper'.
We started well with lizards and mice but stumbled when we couldn't totally nail it. Let's not go backwards to argue the theoretical.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
You seem to think that "guided mutation caused by environmental information flow" is an nonscientific or natural issue. Can you tell me why?
In this thread I don't give a stuff about guided mutation. As has been pointed out to you many times, this thread is not about guided mutation. If you want to talk about guided mutation take it elsewhere.
Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
I think I'm going to intervene here and make a OP's decision.
If something is new and different; it's novel. As we are definately not going to see a bacteria evolve to become a fruit fly - because that would be a miracle, not evolution - it's fair to say that a strain of bacteria previously unable to metabalise citrate in the presence of oxygen, that has changed so that it now can, is a good example of a novel feature evolving.
What's more, we have found the genes that have changed in order to do it. To remind ourselves:
We were particularly excited about the actualization stage, Blount said. The actual mutation involved is quite complex. It re-arranged part of the bacteria’s DNA, making a new regulatory module that had not existed before. This new module causes the production of a protein that allows the bacteria to bring citrate into the cell when oxygen is present. That is a new trick for E. coli.
The change was far from normal, Lenski said.
It wasn’t a typical mutation at all, where just one base-pair, one letter, in the genome is changed, he said. Instead, part of the genome was copied so that two chunks of DNA were stitched together in a new way. One chunk encoded a protein to get citrate into the cell, and the other chunk caused that protein to be expressed.
My only quibble with this is that it's a change that's happened in a bacteria and not something bigger - but heyho, needs must.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
I do not believe that transport threw the cell wall of citrate by E. coli was any major innovation. It was a complex and coordinated adaptation. The evolutionist is apt to blow up any such adaptive finding way out of proportion and must grok the evidence to their paradigm.
We're not looking for major innovations (whatever they are). We're looking fot a novel feature, no matter how small, that is new, creates a selective advantage and can be traced directly to a genetic mutation.
It's an amazingly difficult task, as we've seen, but the citrate example seems to do it for us and the mice got very, very close.
Waving your arms around and saying that it's not novel enough for you or just an 'adaption' isn't working. Soon now, as our understanding of molecular genetics improves, you're going to be presented with evidence you can't make excuses for. Have you thought how you'll deal with that?
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
A novel adaptation would have to include an entire population where that population becomes homozygous to that trait. An individual organism variation would not constitute a novel trait, in other words that trait must be fixed in a population and homozygous to all individuals with new trait substituting into the original genome of the species. That is the heterozygosity completely being cleansed in the resulting genome (a classic sweep in evolution).
Well that's a fairly typical switch, you're asked what novel is and you reply with a requirement for a second condition that has nothing to do with any definition of novel. Cute.
But never mind, what do you think would happen to a mixed population of of citrate and non-citrate eating bacteria with nothing to eat except citrate in the presence of oxygen? I'm guessing that you'd be left with a replicating population of citrate eaters only. Wouldn't you?
Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
™ Version 4.2
(1)