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Author | Topic: Can mutation and selection increase information? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1465 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
It seems to be a common creationist claim that evolutionary processes either cannot produce new "functional information," or that if they can, they cannot produce enough to account for the life forms we see in the world today. Yet I've never known any creationist show that either is actually the case. So, I propose a thread on which creationists can support either or both of those claims... Well, I'd been assuming that new information WAS needed for all the diversity of life to exist, because that's often claimed, but now I don't think anything new is needed, it was all built in to the original genome of each Kind at Creation, most or all of it provided through genes for traits made up of two and only two forms or alleles. As I showed on the thread about YEC supposedly needing mutations and positive selection, a mere two genes with two alleles each provide sixteen different versions of a trait simply by combining the effects of the four different proteins produced by the four different alleles. Since many traits have quite a few more genes than two the possible variation in only one trait is enormous. No mutations needed, no extra alleles needed, just the combining of the two-form genes through sexual recombination. (I'm only thinking of sexually reproducing creatures). If there had been no Fall, meaning no death or any kind of disease in living things, this system would have worked just fine to produce all kinds of beautiful diversity in our world without any loss. We would probably have to have spread out to other planets to accommodate it all of course. (As with evidence for the Flood, it turns out to be a lot simpler than we first expect -- Fossils n stratified sediments prove the Flood just fine, and genes in two forms are all it takes for all biological variation.)
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1465 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Yes I agree that there are lots and lots of mutations. Whether any of them are actually functioning alleles I doubt but if some are then I'd explain it as a fluke, since an allele is after all just a long sequence of chemicals that could occasionally be replicated by mistake.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1465 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
My first answer is what I think was the plan at the Creation, but the question usually comes up in discussions of what evolution actually does -- that is, the process of evolving loses information, that's how you get new phenotypes. I prefer to describe it as losing alleles which I think is clearer than "information." And the example I use because it's so clear is domestic selection or breeding: to get a purebred animal requires losing all the genetic material, alleles, for other breeds. You select them out of the breeding pool, so you get the purebred on the basis of homozygosity at the loci that are the main traits of your breed, and that means eliminating all the other alleles.
Since genetic loss is how you get new breeds, it's also how you get variations in nature, usually by population splits in which a portion of the larger population becomes isolated and inbreeds over a number of generations. All the other alleles for other varieties or races remain in the greater population. But where active evolution is happening, in this isolated population, genetic diversity is of necessity being lost, so that after a number of such population reductions the species can run out of the genetic diversity needed to keep on changing. But the ToE requires the ability to keep on changing. It's all about how a species can go on changing indefinitely eventually even becoming another species. This is where the question comes in whether mutations could provide the necessary genetic diversity to keep on changing. My short answer is that if they could they would have saved the cheetah by now. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1465 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
And genes duplicate. Would you please explain to me how genes duplicate? Since they occupy a position along the DNA strand, and they are thousands of codons long, and the replication process follows the strand codon by codon how does a copy of a gene get separately inserted into the strand? Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1465 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
I've certainly heard of gene duplications but not how they work, and I'm still not getting it. Please don't refer me to links, they are hard for me to read.
How do they duplicate? Does the strand break apart to admit a whole new segment or what?
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1465 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
So, if a mutation did produce a new functional allele with a new effect on the phenotype, wouldn't you agree that that constitutes new information, whether it's "needed" or not? I would figure it had managed to replicate an existing allele, not anything actually new, but so far I'm not convinced that anything new at all, even in that sense, is ever created by a mutation. Evidence you gave on the other thread was all based on a supposed high frequency which I think is just an illusion based on assuming a new allele instead of a neutral mutation which doesn't change the protein or the function of the original allele. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1465 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
If that paper is above Percy's pay grade as he put it, it's certainly above mine. I read what I was able to read, and nothing you said gave evidence that new alleles actually exist. As I keep saying the "evidence" of supposed positive selection shown by increased frequency is an illusion if the allele in question is really a neutral mutation, which would be passed on and easily look like increased frequency based on your assumption.
You seem to think that paper actually shows that new alleles give immunity to different parasites, but it doesn't. It assumes it. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1465 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
I understood what I understood, and interestingly you don't say one thing that shows I'm wrong about that.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1465 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Quote it if it demonstrates I'm wrong. It doesn't. It assumes what you think it proves, it does not prove it. That's why Percy asked for evidence.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1465 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Just curious: How much junk DNA is there in that amoeba genome?
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