I was reading a paper (not necesarily the most formal thing you've ever seen, but a paper nontheless) which talked about a computer simulation called Mendel which, when the correct rates of muation, fraction of deleterious muatations, muation rate, selection efficiency, etc., it showed a trend of degeneration, leading to extinction. Do you think this poses a serious problem to evolutionary theory? I'm not well-versed in this kind of stuff (I'm an American high-school student, after all. I'm not well-versed in anything
).
Quote of the Paper I was talking about:
The user manual for
Mendel’s Accountant (
http://www.mendelsaccountant.info)
describes in detail how to input all the relevant data
for different biological situations in the most honest
way possible. Mendel’s specific results depend on
the specific input data used. However the general
patterns which Mendel reveals are surprisingly
consistentas long as the input data which is
used is even remotely realistic biologically. These
general output patterns are revealed in the example
given below. In this particular example Mendel’s
human default parameters (see the user manual at
http://www.mendelsaccountant.info) are used, except for the
following exceptions: (a) the frequency of beneficial
mutations is increased 10,000-fold so that the ratio
of deleterious to beneficial is 9:1; (b) for simplicity, all
mutations are made co-dominant.
Although we use here the default mutation rate for
Mendel (which is presently set at ten new mutations
per individual per generation), there is growing
evidence that this should be set about one order of
magnitude higher. We presently use a mutation rate
of only ten just to be generous to evolutionary theory,
allowing for the notion that 90% of the genome might
be irrelevant junk DNA. If this example employed
the accepted human mutation rate (>100), the
degeneration described below would be much more
severe and extinction would be rapid. The default
selection pressure used in this example (six children
per female, four of which are selected away every
generation), represents extremely intense selection.