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Author Topic:   Evolution Requires Reduction in Genetic Diversity
Rahvin
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Posts: 4032
Joined: 07-01-2005
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Message 87 of 1034 (691855)
02-25-2013 6:21 PM
Reply to: Message 85 by Taq
02-25-2013 5:55 PM


Re: Mutations Don't Add Anything That Could Rescue the ToE
How so?
Faith has a very specific idea of speciation. It's relatively easy to represent numerically:
Let's say we have Species X. Let the number range 1...10 represent Species X.
As Faith understands it, a new daughter species can arise, let's call it Species Y, as a subset of Species X, and it can be represented as the range 3...6.
If Species Y further subdivides, we can have Species Z that can be represented as the integer 5.
At this point, according to Faith's understanding of genetic diversity, no further evolution can occur - there are no more integers, there is no more "space" for additional variety to arise. This is what she calls her "built in ultimate ending point."
As she understands it, there is a finite amount of variation that can ever happen, and every time a new variant evolves, the total remaining variety that can still arise from extant species is decreased.
Her mistake is that genetic diversity is not like a numerical range of integers. While each subclade carries the inherited traits of its parent clade and all ancestor clades, diversity is unbound. She would be closer if she compared diversification to taking a subset but allowing decimals as well as simply integers (because at least that way you can simulate the infinite amount of variations between any two numbers), but even that's not entirely accurate. Daughter clades can diversify in ways that are wildly different from a sufficiently distant ancestor clade. Entirely novel features can evolve over sufficient generations, and existing features can atrophy, becoming vestigial and even disappearing entirely.
Speciation does not translate to taking a slice of the parent's DNA to comprise the daughter species, repeating until there's no DNA left...but that's how Faith understands it.

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. - Francis Bacon
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. — Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 85 by Taq, posted 02-25-2013 5:55 PM Taq has not replied

  
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