Evolution Requires Reduction in Genetic Diversity

I think she's in big trouble there, see my post Message 506.
Basically: any instance of population bottlenecks can drastically diminish then number of alleles. But these alleles will these alleles will completely vanish from the species' genome. All the drowned people take their alleles with them in their inundated graves.Hence, the current junk DNA can't be explained out of allele diversity lost during the Fall or Flood.The same applies to eventually lost genes. The will also disappear into oblivion along with their owners dying in the Flood.
But Faith is assuming that 95% of the current genome is junk (the exact % isn't much of a deal here). And that most of the junk (she doesn't specify) are pseudogenes (disabled genes).As far as I know, a Flood cannot delete or disable genes. For that you need mutations. But during a few months lasting flood there can't be all of a sudden that much mutations to account for such a huge loss of genes.So the only escape Faith has is to assume all those genes becoming pseudogenes is by death of so many people. But dying people leave no silenced genes in the genome OF THE SURVIVORS. The survivors can't all of a sudden gather all disabled genes that were in the genomes of the dead.Hence, also genes that are lost due to mass extinction cannot contribute to junk DNA in the surviving population.Besides, when the population that died during the Flood would take away so much genes ("95%"), that would imply that thousands of genes (even when not all junk DNA turns out to be pseudogenes) apparently were in the extinct part of the population while the surviving part is only left with 5% of the original genetic diversity. That implies there was an unbelievable genetic variation in the original genome. That's by all means impossible for INTRASPECIES variation.In other words, junk DNA is not an argument for Faith's proposition whatsoever. Edited by Denisova, : No reason given.Edited by Denisova, : Corrected dBcodes.

And NOW reality as observed in nature:

1. in a population bottleneck many alleles will be lost but almost no genes
2. new alleles are formed due to genetic mutations in conjunction with natural selection
3. the forming of new alleles is observed in the human genome that possesses an abundant number of alleles for all kinds of genes. Apparently since the Flood many alleles have been added: some genes have as much as 59 alleles
4. there is no other way to explain such a gain in alleles
5. among dozens of other reasons from geology and by sheer logic, this BTW refutes such mass extinction events like the biblical Flood to have happened: such increase in alleles ending up in as much as 59 alleles for a single gene implies an astonishing, I even would say a baffling rate of evolution allowed in the time frame of the Flood (4,500 years ago). Such rates of evolution are by all means impossible
6. the particular way genetic mutations and natural selection indeed leading to new alleles of existing genes but even to the emerging of new genes, is observed in different experiments: E. coli long term experiment of Lenski but other ones on prokaryotes and eukaryotes (beetles, yeast, fruit flies and dog breeds like dachshunds) as well. I pointed you out to those
7. there is no evidence provided for deteriorating genomes, although Sanford tried to substantiate it empirically. He failed altogether and utterly
8. non-functional DNA is quite well explained. It tells the story of evolution like the abundance of pseudogenes silenced in all kinds of animals due to changing and innovating genomes under selective pressure. I have provided many examples of these.

In reality the alleles that were lost in bottlenecks will gradually be replenished by new ones added to the genome. This is evidently proven by the fact that Adam & Eve had a combined genome with a maximum of 4 alleles for each gene. Now we have genes with up to 59 alleles. The evolutionary mechanisms are well known and proven to actually work by the many experiments on both prokaryotes and eukaryotes (mentioned above). No gene will be compromised.
Even in your fictional Flood story there are 8 persons left and within that population each gene will have 2 alleles. These are passed to the next generation and will stay within the genome of that population until it is selected out due to chance by genetic drift or selective pressure. The bigger the population grows, the greater the number of individuals with the same allele and, thus, the lesser the odds that genetic drift will delete alleles by pure chance. Moreover, alleles are replenished by genetic innovation, see above.So, as I explained, the total genetic diversity of the population has not declined, that is a flaw by you, but is DISPERSED among the breeds. Each breeds carries a subset of the original combined genome and all subsets tallied up over all breeds will equal the diversity of the original genome. ONLY when one of those breeds will split of into a new species, some proportion of the original genetic diversity will be lost to the ancestral genome. But the diluted genetic diversity due to the emergence of breeds is constantly replenished by genetic innovation. No it didn't happen.
Junk DNA CAN NOT be explained by al loss of alleles, as explained.
A mass extinction will kill off many alleles but those alleles will be gone with the individuals who died who take them with them in their graves. the same applies to eventual genes that were unique for the ones that died in the flood.Those alleles that were left over in the surviving population will just be passed over to the next generations and only vanish due to genetic drift and most likely when the population still is small and more prone to random chance.Alleles are NOT very likely to disappear due to deleterious mutations. THAT would imply that in the very same generation ALL individuals owning the same allele would have been struck collectively by a harmful mutation hitting that particular allele. That would be extremely rare event. Because as soon as one individual (out of a growing number due to population growth) survives with that allele intact, it is still within the population and will spread in next generations.There are only two mechanisms known in genetics to account for a loss of alleles:

1. natural selection. When the environmental pressures do not favour a particular trait anymore, individuals hit by mutations that jeopardize the alleles and genes responsible for that trait, will not experience lower survival and/or reproduction chances by those mutations. Because in the new environmental setting those traits are not essential anymore. Once deleterious mutations now became neutral ones.
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   ONLY THEN mutations will "turn" alleles and whole genes for that matter as well, into pseudogenes and junk DNA. And by definition this kind of mutations ARE NOT deleterious. they are neutral (with respect to fitness and related to the whole genome).
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   AS LONG as genes and alleles represent useful and functional traits that are under selective pressure, that is, contributing to the fitness of the individual in terms of survival and/or reproduction chances, any mutation that silences an allele or gene will bring lower survival and/or reproduction chances to its owner and thus have lower odds to be passed to the next generation - THUS tend to be weeded out of the species' genome. ONLY then those mutations are called deleterious.
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2. genetic drift. Alleles can be deleted by random chance. Genetic drift describes random fluctuations in the numbers of gene variants in a population. Genetic drift takes place when the occurrence of variant forms of a gene, called alleles, increases and decreases by chance over time. These variations in the presence of alleles are measured as changes in allele frequencies.
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   Typically, genetic drift occurs in small populations, where infrequently occurring alleles face a greater chance of being lost. Once it begins, genetic drift will continue until the involved allele is either lost by a population or until it is the only allele present in a population at a particular locus. Both possibilities decrease the genetic diversity of a population. Genetic drift is common after population bottlenecks, which are events that drastically decrease the size of a population. In these cases, genetic drift can result in the loss of rare alleles and decrease the gene pool. Genetic drift can cause a new population to be genetically distinct from its original population, which has led to the hypothesis that genetic drift plays a role in the evolution of new species.

Edited by Denisova, : No reason given.

No I do believe that much of the human genome is non-functional.
And that much of the non-functional part consists of pseudogenes.
Even after the excellent job done by the ENCODE team, which reduced the proportion of functional DNA to 12% - but unfortunately with flawed conclusions drawn - even 88% of non-functional DNA remained. So your 95% is too high but the exact figure is not essential to the discussion here. Even 88% will do for your argumentation.But it is a major flaw to imply that all those non-functional DNA parts are due to a genetic bottleneck. It is well explained by me in post Message 518.

Interesting article!
It much parallels the genetic mechanisms of loss of hind limbs in cetaceans (FYI): Just a moment....

OK, be careful with your eyes and see you back!

Apart from the obvious nonsense of people growing 5 meters or taller or ageing 500 years or older, which is directly contradicted by archaeological finds, there is hardly any indication that extant humans are fainter than people 4,500 years ago.With ups and downs, longevity has increased throughout the past millennia. Archaeologists can estimate the age of death from buried people for instances. Also written attests from old cultures help. For instances, in the Ptolemaic era, Egyptians began to pretty systematically note the age of death of the deceased. It yields an average age at death of 54 years for men and 58 for women.However, note that these merely were the elite of whom we know this. As the elite always tends to live longer than "ordinary" people, the actual, population-wide age at death should have been lower. If we take the differences found between elite and common people in medieval England, this may subtract 7 years or more from the average, population-wide age at death. These differences in longevity between elites and common people persist even today in developed countries.Moreover, in ancient cultures not all child deaths were recorded. It is not possible to calculate these effects but it must have had a considerable effect on the average life expectancy at birth (which is quite distinct from average age at death).What about Sumer? Examination of 17 skeletons from al-Ubaid, of fourth millennium date, learned that humans were not living longer than ~60 years. At a burial site in Kish the average age at death was even lower. Again, these are mere the numbers for the elite.Now what will happen when the average age at death rises?
Then you will get ever more people who are old. And, the older a person is, the more medical problems he or she will experience. For instance, cancer still MAINLY is an age related disease. Only some 10% of all new cancer cases involve people younger than 45 years.This also applies for most other diseases. In other words, the raise in health care costs and the increasing incidence of all kinds of diseases, mainly is just due to an ageing population.

I know.
As soon as I'm finished with her genome flaws, I will address that.
When she thinks that she just can discard dating techniques out of thin air argumentation, she will get a hard time with me.As soon as someone discards the results, I want to know for which reasons, to be found where and backed by what empirical evidence precisely.Until now I observe most here are merely debating by answering her questions and raised problems. I tend to ask questions first. Until now none of these have been answered by her whatsoever. She will find me being very insisting on those.

God indeed doesn't seem to manage to make up his mind.
In humans he lets a tail start to develop first, later in embryonic gestation to be reversed again.Occasionally he also makes mistakes: for instance at those moments cetaceans are born with fully developed hind limbs. And accidentally he left the genes for growing a pelvis and hind limbs in the genomes of cetaceans. Maybe he forgot to remove them after having experimenting with hind limbs in earlier cetaceans like Dorudon and Basilosaurs, which had a pelvis with hind limbs but ridiculously very tiny ones and the pelvis being detached from the spinal cord. First he made a mistake by leaving fully marine animals stuck with redundant and superfluous hind limbs they couldn't use due to engineering flaws anyway, but then even forgot to remove the genes for them altogether.A very funny one is the pharyngeal nerve. When designing fish, God still got a knack of it and constructed two laryngeal nerve branches to directly run from the brain to the larynx. Now, even from our humble mortal's perspective one may think what could go wrong here. But apparently in mammals he probably must have lost attention. Maybe Satan was accosting him again. Anyway, in mammals one of the branches directly runs to the larynx, like in fish. But the other one makes a weird detour all the way around the aorta in the thorax only then returning to its final destiny in the neck again. In giraffes this causes an astonishing detour of several meters.It must have pleased Him. A real artist He is.Edited by Denisova, : No reason given.Edited by Denisova, : No reason given.

Hi Percy,is it possible to change preferences for background and text colours.
I was thinking of Faith who has troubles with her eyes but also other ones who might have reading troubles.
A better contrast may be much more comfortable for people with poor eyesight.
The current blue palette is not providing much contrast.Just asking.
Greetz, Denisova.Edited by Denisova, : No reason given.

Well, read Darwin, for a start - and the about a few thousands of empirical, observational studies on natural selection - both field observations and experiments. But you may confine to the exmaples I provided until now. Unfortunately for you your arguments implode by themselves.
As I demonstrated, in YOUR scenario, there must have been a remarkable recovery of the genetic diversity as well. How otherwise are there as much as 59 alleles per single gene observed in the extant human genome today while the maximum in the Noah population could not have exceeded 16 alleles. A lack of evidence does not need evidence. A lack of evidence does not need evidence.
In case you didn't notice: a lot of such "projects" are already performed on these "guesses".
It is called genetics, biology and especially the population genetics part is relevant. The number of empirical "projects" number into the thousands. These comprise studies like Lenski's long term experiment, the studies on yeast, beetles and Dachshunds as I provided them. these empirical observations tell you are wrong. The following questions:

1. WHAT ***EXACTLY*** was wrong about what Darwin said, WHY and please back up your answer with EMPIRICAL OBSERVATIONS.
2. From the beginning, Darwin was exposed by often ****massive opposition****, both in science and society. May I be informed by you, how this massive opposition eventually did end up today? And why it ended up this way, do you think?
3. WHAT exactly has decades of creationist "science" yielded?

Edited by Admin, : Fix grammar in first question of last paragraph.

Apart from the troubled reasoning, there are also plain flaws here.
Mutations introduce genetic INNOVATION. Hence, mutations bring DIFFERENT combinations of alleles than those produced my mere recombinations in Mendelian processes.
As demonstrated in the experiments by Lenski and the ones on beetles, yeast and other sexually reproducing eukaryotes.

The problem here is not disabled genes being called junk DNA but junk DNA supposedly only consisting of pseudogenes.Please answer points made by several persons here on the observation that the vast majority of junk DNA is NOT disabled genes and discuss it in line with your claims.

Wikipedia is not meant for providing extensive scientific elaborations. It is just an online encyclopaedic.But I (and others here) have been providing you several studies where the genetic mechanisms are spelt out. For instance, my contributions, the Lenski experiment, experiments on beetles and yeast (sexually reproducing, eukaryote multicellular life) as well as Dachshunds.Now how long will it take before you going to start to address those instead of pussyfooting around?I also note that NONE of my MANY questions were addressed, let alone answered satisfactory.Are we in a DEBATE here or not?

Well, here are they AGAIN.It is quite annoying I must say.Here are the major assumptions of your position:

1. There has been a decline in genetic diversity last 4,500 years in the genomes of all species
2. There is no such thing as genetic innovation (mutations acted upon by natural selection leading to new genes or the loss of genes)

No. 1 cannot be empirically backup up by you. That is, until now I’ve seen nothing yet. There are several ancient genomes sequenced as I pointed out to you: Denisova, Neanderthal, Heidelbergensis, ancient Homo Sapiens. These genomes are also mutually compared by geneticists. All those genomes are genetically very close. As a matter of fact, Svante Pbo and his teams (and others as well) found that at least Denisova, Neanderthal and Sapiens have interbred. But, anyhow, we HAVE the genomes sequenced of very old hominids. And these show you ARE WRONG. Because when Denisova, Neanderthal, ancient Sapiens genomes turn out to be very similar to extant human ones, the apparently weren't many genes silenced and turned into junk DNA.Moreover, John Sanford tried to prove empirically for a decline in genetic diversity in genomes. He utterly failed. Even cheating on the work of others couldn’t help him.Now, I already provided this stuff 4 or 5 times, if not more.May I FINALLY have you elaborations on this?No. 2 is directly refuted by the Lenski experiment, along with an abundance of similar experiments on both bacteria and sexually reproducing eukaryotes like beetles, fruit flies and yeast. I even spelled out the results of Lenski’s experiment in post Message 431. Percy had to remind you to provide an answer too.As these experiments refute your assumption, may I have your elaboration on these? Now I already asked this 4 or 5 times. When do we get the answers?But there are more questions unanswered by you:

3. If many genes were silenced and turned into junk DNA, which traits were lost than? Because your position implies that an astonishing number (accounting for at least a substantial part of the current 95% junk DNA) of different traits must have been lost.
4. Adam and Eve both could only have a maximum of 4 alleles and the Noah's crew a max. of 16, while in extant human populations, some genes can have as much as 59 alleles. How would you explain that while you are assuming a steady DECLINE in alleles?
5. Genetic, empirical studies on pseudogenes (cetaceans, platypus, mammals, toothless animals, chickens, primates, humans etc. — all provided to you) show that pseudogenes are telling the story of evolution: the loss of traits due to changing environmental pressure sand conditions not favouring them anymore — backed by observations of the fossil record, embryology, recurring atavisms, etc. etc.
6. The fossil record shows that life greatly changed throughout the eras. The different geological formations all have their own, quite distinct biodiversity. In ANY of the Lower Cambrian formations EVER examined (and this has been done thousands of times) you will find even ONE single specimen of land plants, fish, amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, bird or mammals. Hence, life has changed. This implies a vastly and continuously genetic innovation. To avoid unnecessary diversions here: WHERE did I mention dates??????

And of course this very old point, form the very beginning when I joined the debate here:

7. The correct way to conceive evolution in ring species is NOT "....you are getting a series of subspecies by the reduction of genetic diversity from subpopulation to subpopulation rather than "speciation" at any point as evolution defines it." BUT: "....you are getting a series of subspecies by the dispersion of genetic diversity among the subpopulations and eventually resulting in "speciation" as evolution defines it."
   THAT is what REALLY happens.

Now, in post Message 461 I already remarked: You may also go back to my post Message 462. Or Message 474. Or Message 479. In the latter I wrote: Or maybe you try post Message 522. Or Message 555?You are also found to be profoundly wrong on the effects of population bottlenecks.

Of course they DO OCCUR.
As demonstrated by me and others here abundantly:

1. Leski's E. coli experiment
2. similar experiments on other bacteria
3. experiments on sexually reproducing eukaryotic species like beetles, yeast, fruit flies and genetic studies on dachshunds - only SOME of them
4. fossil record

Well, shortly, the dozens of questions and points dodged by you.I am afraid I also have to explain evolution theory to you - again.The low frequency of beneficial mutations is quite irrelevant.
The reason for this is natural selection.
Beneficial mutations are favoured.
The reason for this is BECAUSE they are beneficial.
And "beneficial" or "deleterious" are defined in terms of fitness: survival and/or reproduction chances.Deleterious mutations are weeded out. That's why in most species only a rather tiny part of the newborn eventually will make it and reproduce themselves, passing their genes on to the next generation. In frogs the vast majority of the fertilized eggs will survive. In mice likewise. Even in humans fertility research found that only 15% of all conceptions end up in the birth of a living child. Then the selective pressure persists. In all species a considerable percentage of newborns will not manage to survive up to reproduction age. And when that hurdle is taken, sexual selection starts, leaving especially many male animals abiding their lives without ever passing their genes to the next generation.Many studies even revealed that there is a direct correlation between the selective pressures animal species are experiencing within their habitat and the number of offspring: the more fierce the pressure, the more offspring.Beneficial ones though are favoured. they will not be weeded out by natural selection.Let's do some calculations:

• assume we have a population of, say, humans, of 100,000 individuals. Very moderate assumption but deliberately to make my point by using very conservative estimates;
• let's assume mice have the same mutation rate as humans, that is 70 per newborn (as observed in diverse genetic studies);
• let's also assume a stable population with no growth or decline - that assumes each generation will bring forth 100,000 offspring;
• now here we go: in the first new generation 100,000 newborn X 70 = 7,000,000 mutations have been accumulated in the population genome. In 5000 generations this adds up to 1,000 X 7,000,000 = 35,000,000,000 mutations. In other words: after just 5,000 generations (about 10,000 years, evolutionary spoken just a blink of the eye) the WHOLE human genome (35 billion base pairs) could potentially have been altered ENTIRELY.

You see, in statistics we have the law of great numbers. It tells that, how small the odds for a particular event may be, if the number of trial is large enough, that event MOST LIKELY will occur.