Natural Selection

Wehappy - even mainstream researchers extrapolating from mouse to man expect about 30 new gene families in man. And there is one known example that distinguishes between cetain primates as an example. We'll see.

William EHI basically agree with you although I wouldn't get too caught up on the number of bases per year. Are you aware that there are huge chunks of (mainly 'junk') DNA that does distinguish between otherwise completely normal humans? Horizontal transfer, copying errors etc. There are wierd sections of DNA that, becasue of repeats, you get frequent miscopyings and the thing gets bigger and bigger!If you concentrate back on genes I'll agree with you almost entirely except your exact numbers. Then you can decide how valuable your arguement becomes.One issue to be carful about is that mammals pretty much have near identical genomes (we have recently got the mouse genome). Man and mouse differ by only 300 gene families I think (someone correct me if I am wrong). I don't know when mice supposedly arrived by evo-theory but if we put them at 30 million years that makes one new gene family per 100,000 years.For the evolutionist the hard ask is that novel biochemical systems require many multiple new genes to be operational. I'm not saying that all are needed but aminimal subset is. The idea that the immune system arrived one gene at a time is ludicrous. Evolutionists are telling a far bigger fairy tale than the one they accuse us of.Probably the better arguement along these lines is that we should have seen substantial macroevolution of new gene families in artificially stressed bacteria. In the lab the euibvalent of millions of years of evoltuion has been observed. And evoltuion really works very well. It just doesn't make new genes so far - it's really good at optimizing existing genes for new circumstances though.

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[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 07-15-2002]

William EHYes, lab evolution is simply speciation or less with the priviso that species vs genus is pretty subjective so I wouldn't have a problem getting new genera via microevoltuion. This really does have to be clarified at the moelcualr level. Evoltuion ultimately works there. I think it's great that creation can vary beak shapes. It can be called geniation for all I care. The point is that what happens in finches is not even expected to be the origin of new gene families.Darwins finches include several genera but I believe they are related via microevoltuion (ie SNPs). The genetic data of course can't rule out new genes (we don't have full genomes on one finch let alone all of them!) but even mainstream researchers would not be claiming the morphological variety was due to new genes.Evoltuon - I don't have a problem with the word myself. It's just a matter of defintion. Genomes evolve in my opinion, but I just don't beleive they ever evolved new functional gene families.

Laugh a minute Moose.

I agree Will EH. How genera get defined is something I have not spent time getting into. It is no doubt somewhat subjective and certainly isn't based on issues of mechanistic molecular novelty but I respect it as the best thing we currently have for cataloging all of life.[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 07-28-2002]