Some mutations sound too good to be true

If the cheetahs had not started to increase in genetic diversity they would still have no more than 4 alleles per gene. A bottleneck would have to be very severe to noticably reduce that. Therefore the more recent bottleneck would have no detectable effect unless genetic diversity were increasing.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't it work as follows:Renaming the family as Patriarch and sons and daughters-in-law, and labeling alleles A B C D E F G etc,Patriarch and wife could have alleles AB and CD, right?And their three sons could have AC, AD, and BC, that is, the maximum possible, and that makes six for the three of them.Their wives could have EF, GH and IJ, couldn't they? And wouldn't that add up to twelve alleles to be passed on?What have I missed?

Right. A is one allele, B is one allele, C is one allele, and D is one allele. Right. Wrong. That makes four for the three of them; allele A, allele B, allele C, and allele D.

Thank you! Obvious of course, once it's shown me.

Actually there is new evidence that the lack of wisdom teeth may be beneficial in that there is a lower risk of gum disease (I know, yucky topic). This is important, as gum disease can cause heart disease and pregnancy problems among other things. Sorry to rub it in, but this is yet more evidence of bad design imo.

No it is not a straw man. You said, "You assume that what is seen now must apply in the past and I don't". If you make a statement like that you are implying that some change in basic genetics occurred. What are those changes? You have postulated in the past many times that major changes occured at the time of the Fall and the Flood. So my observation is spot on - not a strawman. A strawman argument is when I set up an argument that you have not raised and then attack it. But it is you who set up the arguments about genetic changes taking place in man at the time of the Fall and the Flood. It is also a "God did it" argument because there is not a natural explanation for such an occurance. Whenever you claim something that lacks a natural explanation you open yourself up to being accused of invoking the supernatural in that lacking the natural we are only left with the supernatural. You are trying to "have your cake and eat it to" if you would claim something that has no natural explanation but insist you are not invoking a "God did it" explanation.

That's kinda hard when ther are no other populations of the same species. A good example would be the Wisent (European bison). The current population is descended from only 30 odd individuals.

Yep, that is a real problem for these populations.Extinction is when populations fail to make it through a bottleneck.There are far more extinct species than there are existing species.See, you're getting the hang of this.This message has been edited by Graculus, 09-27-2005 07:18 PM

I have an answer to that, but bringing up our theories is not permitted on this thread.

"God did it, that settles it" is a straw man. I have NEVER EVER argued from such a position. AND it is not permitted on this thread. Please take it to another thread if you want to pursue it.

That's fine. I jsut want to be sure we are talking strictly about mutation, and that recombination is not going to be brought into the mix. Sorry so much space has been wasted on it.This message has been edited by Faith, 09-27-2005 07:32 PM

Well, I've discussed this particular situation at EvC before. But the purpose of this thread is to learn more about the specifics involved.There may not be enough space left on this thread to discuss this very far, but the question at this point that I'd still like to know more about, is just how much is actually OBSERVED about mutation's consequences.You have said that (I think it was you anyway) that genetic diversity is known to increase after a bottleneck but so far I haven't seen the actual evidence for this. I pointed out a ways back that the cheetah has not shown much increase in diversity, if any, in 10,000 years, but that your information that every human child has 100 mutations difference from its parents suggests that some such situation must be applicable to other species, and this raises the question why in 10,000 years so many generations of new mutations haven't sufficed to rescue the cheetah from its genetic dead end?{{Edit: And a related question: If it takes so long to recover some genetic diversity from a bottleneck, extinction would seem to be astronomically more likely.}}This message has been edited by Faith, 09-27-2005 07:43 PM

The issue is, as I pointed out, low population numbers depress recovery. Cheetah populations crashed so hard that inbreeding depressed fertility, and only 5% of cheetah cubs make it to adulthood. So cheetah numbers have remained too low for any real recovery of genetic diversity. In a way, the cheetah is a species that has spent the last 10,000 years on the brink of extinction, due to the severity of the crash and the lack of population recovery.Now, if every species around today was descended from only a single breeding pair on the Ark, we would expect to see a situation like this for everything, not just the cheetah.

Can you tell me how it was established that it has been 10,000 years since the cheetah bottleneck?

"To further define the timing of such a bottleneck, the character of genetic diversity for two rapidly evolving DNA sequences, mitochondrial DNA and hypervariable minisatellite loci, was examined." HereA Pleistocene bottleneck appears in a fair number of megafauna populations, but the cheetah was particularly hard hit.