Peter & Rosemary Grant, Darwin's Finches and Evolution

You are making something out of very little.I use the term "groupings" in lieu of using the term species because the term species is not defined well enough for this discussion. If a bird can be a new species or (sub species) simply because of having a different beak shape, then why in the world are you complaining about my using the example of ear shape.For example, we consider all of the breeds of dogs to be of a single species, while breeds of cat having similar levels of variation are considered different species.All that is required for speciation is variation + some type of isolation against cross breeding. The isolation can be geographical, or it may be that the variants are not inter-fertile. Trying to set some minimum limit on the amount of variation is a fool's errand.And besides that, what is the point of your objection? If I provide an example that works for one trait, we can repeat the example for two traits or ten traits. But in the end, there is no requirement that the members of a species by homogeneous. Consider the variation among Homo Sapiens Sapiens.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Ouch. The place where I address the issue that wolves with curly ears were less diverse than the original population would be the line of my post in message 70 that starts as follows: And since you have already acknowledged that a mutation adds diversity, it seems pointless to argue that a second mutation cannot do the same thing.You can have the last word on this.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

"choosing to blind yourself"Thanks for giving me something to consider because I had reached the conclusion that Faith was simply lying. She now says she is not interested in the process for forming breeds, despite her position that evolution is just like breeding. That's kind of goal post shifting is too tiresome to bother with at 2:00 AM, for me anyway.At this point I think it is pretty clear that Faith has no argument that has not been refuted in other threads, and that her claims of being misunderstood are without substance. But perhaps you are right and she isn't quite the dishonorable person I thought she was.

The analogy I've come up with is that Faith is looking down a telescope backwards and ignoring a bunch of stuff. She pictures a final breed that is narrowly defined coming from an initial diverse population and figures that all of those traits not in the final breed are lost.That may be what dog breeders do. I'm guessing that they neuter, discard, or otherwise eliminate from the stock the dogs that don't look like the ones they want. But in the wild, unless the new traits provide some survival possibility, those 'mistakes' continue to thrive and can drift through either both populations. In the end, it might well be that in the population of dogs, no traits are lost.For example, humans have traits that were re-integrated from Neanderthals.And of course as someone else has noted, some new traits provide new opportunities for diversity. Using the given example, a mutation that provides a plume also provides opportunity for colorful plume variations. Or we might look at all of the variations mammals have in their inner ear that only became possible once the structure had evolved.And of course, there is the fact that if mutation come overcome the loss of diversity from one trait, it is only logical that the same can happen to counteract the loss of diversity from several traits.Is all of current humanity, 7 billion people less diverse phenotypically and genetically than a hypothetical pairing of Adam and Eve, only 6000 years ago? Or than eight people 4400 years ago? Really?Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I am reminded of watching WWE wrestling matches. The bad guy pulls brass knuckles out of his skin-tight tights, and everybody in the arena sees it. Well everyone except the referee who is cartooningly oblivious. And according, to you, we cannot then have any mutations because we would 'lose the species'. That is a remarkably obtuse thing to say. We originally start out allowing a species to have a large amount of diversity. But once we have a distinct species, you claim that any new changes are disallowed.Then you claim that just having a curly ear is not enough to claim a new breed. If so, then why can we not add a curly ear to your new distinct species without 'losing it'.Note that we can point out exactly where your thinking goes wrong, but you in contrast can only wring your hands about nobody, in general understanding you.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

This could not possibly be what Faith actually means. Allelle frequencies are simply the proportions or ratios at which given genetic traits appear in a population. She surely means to make new combinations of the alleles themselves and not just their relative appearances.Still wrong, but at least such a thing is not a gross misunderstanding of terminology.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I understand that error on Faith's part. But I don't believe even that concept is well expressed as "mixing of new allele frequencies". All that's actually happening is that the allele frequencies have been changed.

I think words like 'optimum' and 'best suited' over state the case in an otherwise excellent description. One reason is because of the focus on individual traits versus fitness of the overall organism. Optimization of particular survival strategies like hawk-like eye sight and extreme running speed just don't play much of a role in civilized society.I don't think there is any question that things like myopia are sub-optimal, but there might even be at least some survival potential in being able to detect parts of the light spectrum that are damaging to our bodies using or eyes or other senses.Humans can actually fit into a wide variety of environmental niches without making any changes because of the intelligence and tool using ability that separates us from all other primates and indeed all other land animals (at the very least).The other issue is that the only thing that is important with regard to selection is survival to breed/sire and raise offspring to adulthood. Surviving to ages older than necessary, memorizing long strings of dates, and being a great backgammon player are not going to be naturally selected for because those things don't play a role in propagating (ignoring the odd mating partner who values those things).Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.