A New Run at the End of Evolution by Genetic Processes Argument

PaulK is right. You've repeated your nonsense but without fixing any of the holes in it. Genetics doesn't work like that. It works in accordance with the observations made by geneticists

No it doesn't. But that's by-the-by. A more important point is that unlike the obsolete methods abandoned by breeders, natural selection was never interested in making every member of a species or sub-species as alike as possible. Indeed, since doing so, as you admit, leads to ill health, natural selection would act against this.So you are taking these deprecated breeding methods as a model for natural selection when both observation and principle tells us that it isn't.And this has been explained to you, Faith. But this is just something you made up. This is why you're not providing any references, any, what's the word? ... evidence. But also, it seems that mostly you can't get new phenotypes unless you have new alleles. I have shown you evidence of such events occurring. This has been explained to you. Your fantasy that the loss of diversity in cheetahs was caused by the speciation event is a fantasy for which you have no ... evidence. You just made that up. And if that's really how genetics usually worked, you creationists wouldn't have to go on banging on about cheetahs all the time, you could choose any species. But your fantasies about the mechanisms for these examples of evolution are not evidence, nor are they evidenced. Mutations happen. This has been explained to you.

This is such an excellent idea that I've already done it, on another thread. I'll just quote again what I wrote before:Let us consider the two Noachian ur-wolves from which all dogs are descended. Between them, as we know from the Faith Theory of Evolution, they must have had all the genetic diversity of modern dogs. Indeed, they need to have exhibited more genetic diversity than there was room for in their loci: they need to have had five transferin alleles, for example, and five alleles in the E series, controlling the distribution of eumelanin, five in the A series, which also controls coat color, at least six alleles for the D4 dopamine receptor, and so on.Passing over that for the moment, let's think about what they would have been like phenotypically. If they carried examples of every modern allele between them, then they would actually have exhibited every autosomal dominant trait. For example, at least one of them must have been a ridgeback.Alas, not all autosomal dominant traits are this harmless. Between them the two ancestral wolves would have exhibited (among other traits) hairlessness, missing or abnormally shaped teeth, chondrodysplasia, hyperparathyroidism, three different ways to go blind (progressive retinal atrophy, ocular melanosis and hereditary cataract), at least four separate kidney diseases (cystinuria type IIa, cystinuria type IIb, nephritis, and polycystic kidney disease), anemia, progressive spinal atrophy, Alport syndrome, von Willebrand's disease, Ehlers Danlos syndrome, and an inherited tendency to kidney cancer and bone cancer.Now if the genetics of wolves as created In The Beginning was such that any two wolves picked 2,000 years later would exhibit this array of symptoms, then wolves would not in fact have lasted for 2,000 years. That can't be it. Instead it must be the case that Noah was the unluckiest guy in the world, who just happened to pick two really awful wolves. (He had similarly bad luck with cats, but that's another story).These wolves are, depending on how you look at it, either the unluckiest or the luckiest wolves in the world. On the one hand, they are obviously not going to have long happy lives. On the other hand, they must be descended from four wolves that shared those diseases between them, and all four lived long enough to breed. What are the odds?One thing is clear: the two most defective wolves of all time are not going to survive the 375 days of Noah's flood. We know this because they wouldn't survive five minutes on an inflatable lounger in the shallow end of a swimming pool.You might think Noah and his family might have held their paws and nursed them through, but bear in mind that Noah and his family between them were suffering from Marfan syndrome, Waardenburg syndrome, von Hippel Lindau syndrome, Peutz Jeghers syndrome, Ehlers Danlos syndrome, von Willebrand disease, Huntington's disease, tuberous sclerosis, neurofibromatosis, retinoblastoma, myotonic dystrophy, hypercholestrolemia, polycystic kidney disease, familial adenomatous polyposis, hereditary spherocytosis, achondroplasia, acute intermittent porphyria, hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy, hereditary hemorrhagic telengiactasia, osteopetrosis type II, hypokalemic periodic paralysis, and seven different types of brittle bone disease. So what with being blind, mad, dwarfish, crippled, and in excruciating pain, they probably had enough on their plates.

Well, I hate to put words in your mouth but ...Are you suggesting that these diseases were floating around in the gene pool, but there were other genes also present (metaphorically) shouting to the metabolism "Hey, don't listen to those jerks, listen to me! Don't do the bad disease thing"? And then they somehow disappeared because of the Faith Theory of Evolution?Well, I thought of that, but then I thought ... but the absence of that gene would be a mutation which would have to begin in one individual, and then actually become fixed in the gene pool (otherwise the gene for the disease would not present as autosomal dominant). So you require a harmful gene to become fixed, fighting upstream against natural selection all the way.And then you need that to happen over and over again, for each disease.

You have superpowers! Do you also wear a cape and have a secret identity?

Not necessarily. Genes don't work like that. In particular, there's loads of stuff on the internet which will tell you exactly how the genes for the color of a dog's coat works. Well, I mentioned that at the start. The two wolves would have had four loci for each gene, they could have at at most four alleles, one per locus. But there are loci with more.

Why is that an opinion of Admin rather than Percy?

Could you have that translated into Latin and then sung by a choir of monks in plainchant while they burn a witch? Only that's pretty much the only thing I can think of that would accentuate the irony.

Perhaps just for a change you could be wrong about something else. But Faith, that's crap you made up.

It's been observed, Faith. I gave you six examples, remember? Whereas you gave no examples of your fantasy version of genetics. Reproductive isolation also has no interest in producing a homogeneous breed. A distinction without a difference. And yet since mutation exists, any realistic scenario would involve it at some point.

Quite so. As I pointed out, dog breeders try to produce a homogeneous breed. Reproductive isolation doesn't. And natural selection "tries" not to insofar as this is harmful to the gene pool.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Faith, we see new alleles being created by mutations. We don't see species being poofed into existence by God. So the "assumption" you complain of would be like "assuming" that a chocolate egg was made in a chocolate factory rather than laid by the Easter Bunny. You want another run at that paragraph?

We all know that you've said that, Faith. It just seems to be rubbish.

Of course I "get it". I understand your blithering nonsense perfectly. But because I also know stuff about the real world, I am able to see how real stuff conflicts with the nonsense you've made up in your head.

Well, Faith hasn't come up with anything new, so I may as well provisionally summarize now.Faith has constructed a brand new theory of evolution of her own. The distinctive feature of the Faith theory is that it ignores known genetic mechanisms which we can watch in action. Mutation is simply ignored. Events are freely posited that run contrary to the law of natural selection. Indeed, the only mechanisms that are taken into account would seem to be the founder effect and recombination.Such a theory, having been deliberately crippled and blinded, must necessarily fail to explain evolutionary phenomena. And that's what it's for. It is intended to be unable to explain macroevolution, so that Faith can reverse the usual practice of science by rejecting the fact of macroevolution because it doesn't fit the Faith Theory (whereas a scientist would say: "What do you know, the theory I carefully designed to be wrong is wrong.")Faith tries to lend credence to her theory by claiming that it does explain the sort of microevolutionary events that she doesn't want to deny. The trouble is, it doesn't. The experience of geneticists and of breeders are full of evolutionary events which don't fit into her paradigm because they're known to involve mutation. (We have given her examples. She has ignored them.)Indeed, Faith has yet to provide a single example of a breed or subspecies or species which is known to have been produced by Faithesque mechanisms. I emphasize known because of course she can baselessly conjecture that such a thing has happened (as with the cheetah); what she can't do is produce any observations showing that it has.Finally, we should note that the Faith theory doesn't even fail in the way it's supposed to. Recall that the purpose of the Faith theory is that it should be unable to explain past macroevolutionary events, so that they can be dismissed as inconsistent with the theory. But it is also purported to be sufficient to explain the production of all modern dog breeds from two wolves. Now if this can have been achieved in the past by a process of loss of genetic diversity, then what can not? Why couldn't an even greater loss of diversity have produced all mammals from Morganucodon? Or humans from some more basal ape? If we take the Faith theory seriously, its consequence is that evolution will stop at some unspecified point in the future, but it seems to place no limit on how much could already have happened in the past. This has been drawn to Faith's attention and she has made no real attempt to fix it; her response has simply been along the lines of "that's ridiculous". So it is, Faith, but it's your theory as it now stands.