Some mutations sound too good to be true

Ta. Not exactly equivalent. An abstract has no physcial property. A symbol can point to an abstract or a concrete.DNA patterns could work as natural signs, so long as there is only one referent within the local domain. However, functional issues asside, can this be said to be symbolic? Does the ball symbolize "rolling downhill", as it were?This message has been edited by Graculus, 09-26-2005 11:01 AM

Hey you two,Good discussion about symbols and genetics. Feel free to open a new topic to discuss this side-issue. This thread is for discussing what mutation is, what "beneficial" mutations are, and how they come to be.Thanks.

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There is more evidence than you may realize, but for a person who can't interpret it, boatloads of evidence will mean only what someone else says it means. When you say that you don't (and, perhaps, can't) understand the details of the process, I can't help at some point to wonder why, in the light of that acknowledgement, you continue to place so much importance on your lack of ability to see how close examination of those details lends support to the theory. I'm not mean, but I do get frustrated at times. It really was a question; a testing, as it were, of a hypothesis. I accept your claim of sincerity; please accept my apology. Let's move on. Here, you've put your finger on an important issue. In fact, the frequency with which observations may turn out to be little more than assumptions in disguise -- and the full extent to which this may act as a limit to human understanding -- is a subject to which a lot of thinkers have devoted a lot of energy (sometime when you've caught up some on your biology studies, you might give Immanuel Kant's Critique Of Pure Reason a quick read). But note also that scientific investigation includes much cumbersome methodology designed explicitly for the purpose of minimizing the potential for errors of this nature. I consider this a perfectly valid complaint, and a reasonably accurate assessment of the current state of evolutionary neuroscience; there is indeed much of a very speculative nature. (But note this objection: your assessment is based on an intuitive feel for the level of confidence being expressed, rather than on a personal review of the evidence that lead to the conclusions; there's a BIG difference).For example, I have real problems with statements like this:
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"We've done a rough calculation that the evolution of the human brain probably involves hundreds if not thousands of mutations in perhaps hundreds or thousands of genes -- and even that is a conservative estimate."
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The results of the recently completed Human Genome Project indicate that there may not be enough genes available to make that true.Antibiotic resistance in bacteria is, by comparison, much more straightforward, and much better understood (and we still have a very long way to go toward a complete understanding of antibiotic resistance in bacteria). Maybe we should try to stay focused on that for now.This message has been edited by Cal, 09-26-2005 11:51 AM

What you are proposing is that after a Flood that left absolutely no evidence in the geological record there was a period of hyper-hyper-fast evolution that never the less operated at different rates in different organisms in order that no evidence of a common genetic bottleneck remained.You are also claiming that:-Earthworms can swim across oceans.
-Noah and family were infected with every disease known. Syphilis, herpes, plague, yellow fever, leprosy, cholera, tuberculosis, AIDS, etc, etc....
-That only one hundred years after the Flood there were enough people to build a city and support the building crews for the Tower of Babel.Among a variety of other absurdities.

Not to drift too far off topic but...RE: Wire Hair cats and Adam's Blue/Green/Brown eyesIf all genetic variety is available in a single individual from brown eyes to an albino's pink eyes, or from long haired, to hairless, to wire haired cats, then isn't it reasonable to assume that even the differences between species are locked up in the same genetic coding?I mean, how different are chimps and people really? Lose some hair, shorten the arms, lengthen the legs, etc.By your proposed interpritation of the genetic make up, all variety within the human population was available in Noah and his family. So the 12ft giant and the 4ft dwarf. The hairless guy and the "wolf" kids from South America.If it's all a matter of unlocked junk DNA, it sounds like your proposal nicely covers cross-speciation.

In that case the gene for wire-hair should exist in populations that have not been so "reduced", right?It isn't there.How do you propose that an ancestral organism manages to carry several mutually exclusive genes at the same time without ever expressing any of them? Are you denying that mutations occur? Are you denying that mutations change the expression of genes?

Dang, busted.

Re: Wisdom teeth and Alpo A-1 Milano BlendIn both cases you've asked the same question (essentially)- "How do we know that this mutation is in fact a mutation and not some built in varient which has laid dormant?"This is an interesting question, and I'm going to approach it from two angles.1) You're wrong. It's not a dormant varient because we haven't seen it elsewhere. It wasn't available in previous generations. Look to Mendel, you don't suddenly have a pea with arms pop up after 100 generations of laying dormant. The genetic code, though incredibly complex, is not THAT complex. It's either in the gene or not.2) You're right. Here's now this is possible, specifically using the A-1 Milano scenario.Position 173 has an A instead of a C. 99.99 percent of the population has the C, these guys have the A. But there are A LOT of As and Cs in the genetic code.Where did the A come from? It was a copy error. An A from someplace else was brought in by mistake.So, in a sense, the A was being stores someplace else in the code until it wound up here.Now, that's a VERY VERY expansive view of stored genetic variation. An analogy would be that the dictionary is really exactly the same as the Bible, because all the letters are there, just in a different order. They in fact aren't different books at all. If you were to make enough copies of the dictionary, eventually the Bible would come out. But no specific chance in any word or word order would be considered a "mutation" since all the letters were there in the first place.

As well as being of general interest this Washington Post article has some relevant content. The mutations involved are different in the different cultures, even though the selective effect is the same in each case. Thus, the evidence is that this is neither due to preexisting variations or a mechanism of programmed change.

This is what I had in mind. Whatever maximizes the potentials. I can't rule it out absolutely if only because I don't yet have a really clear idea what sorts of events are truly mutations and what their effects are. However, I suspect there are other, inbuilt possibilities but that scientists are not used to trying to think through the YEC conjectures, but in fact in the opposite direction, and so are not likely to come up with them. One has to think outside the uniformitarianism box, and possibly outside other boxes. However it could happen that many many more traits than we now have could possibly once have been packed into the genome, that's the direction a YEC thinks in. Interesting. It does suggest that a former greater chromosome count could be part of the picture here. Also, what about the possibility that junk DNA was once functioning genes? Others here have debunked the idea but --maybe just because I'm scientifically naive-- it still doesn't seem impossible to me.

Do you realize that "junk" DNA is mutating too? As well as mitochondrail DNA?

Of course it is very clear that some junk DNA was once funtioning genes. It seems reasonable that some of it could become functioning genes as well.But how can you possibly miss the point that this means the once genes or the future genes would have to undergo mutations to be turned off or brought into play? (odd little thought:The existance of junk DNA may well turn out to be beneficial to organisms with a "too" good DNA repair mechanism as it may be a source of genetic diversity when acted upon my mutations.)In any case, your suggestion here doesn't have any obvious, to me, affect on the question of mutations. I'm rather surprised you missed that. Or maybe I am missing something; could you explain?

"Burying it in semantics" COULD be what is happening with this definition of a mutation as any gene change, as it makes what I'm trying to say very difficult. IS that the definition? ANY gene change? Any change whatever from one chemical to another at at a gene locus?When I used the term "normal" I wasn't thinking statistically. Often a brand new trait appears in a population simply because a dominant trait was selected against, perhaps by a bottleneck situation, allowing a recessive trait to come to the fore in the bottlenecked new population. Darwin's turtles on the Galapagos for instance, with their somewhat different shell design from those on the mainland from which they had been genetically isolated. This shell design might not have appeared at all in the larger population, or perhaps only very rarely, as a normal variant.As I understand it, this would not require a mutuation in the sense of something truly novel, merely the circumstantial selection of a recessive allele over others. This is what I meant by a "normal" process, though statistically it is not normal.So, by your definition this variation in the turtle requires a mutation? And since I expect you to say yes, this mutation is the substitution of one chemical for another at a particular locus, perhaps more than one? And somehow this particular mutation got selected by the bottleneck? Or, if this description is wrong, please correct.But what about the homozygous-heterozygous Mendelian situation? What is going on with the chemicals in that situation? Say the blue-eyed/brown-eyed classic. When bb pairs with BB what is going on chemically? or when Bb pairs with bb or whatever. In the case of a trait that is controlled by more than one gene, wouldn't there be many normal variations possible, of which some could remain dormant in the population just about forever unless special circumstances eliminate the dominant variants?Please make allowances for imprecision in my concepts.

Oh good. Maybe I misread the other information then. I did think somebody had denied that destroyed genes is what junk DNA was -- or maybe that that doesn't describe the majority of it or something? Yes, you think nicely in evolutionist terms. I of course think in the opposite direction. You believe diversity is created only by mistakes in the repair machinery. I think it's built in the way the dominant-recessive pattern changes traits -- at least that way. So I think only in terms of the junk DNA having ONCE BEEN genes -- destroyed by mutation in some cases I suppose. I can imagine that another mistake could turn one back on here and there but not as a pattern -- whereas the continuing death of genes makes sense. Well I have no problem with DELETERIOUS mutations, or even neutral mutations, or even mutations per se. I'm sure they occur. But that they produce anything truly beneficial remains in doubt to my mind, as I'm still thinking that most of what gets called mutation is not novel, but just the way a variety of traits normally get genetically produced -- while true mutations are accidents that almost always do damage to the genes. Sometimes the damage may confer a backhanded benefit, a tradeoff as in the sickle cell anemia/malaria situation, or bacterial resistance, but that just can't be the normal way traits are created and inherited. And most of the time such damage doesn't do anything beneficial at all, does it, but causes some kind of disease situation. Even "neutral" mutations probably do SOMETHING that just hasn't been detected, since if they alter the genetic code SOMETHING must be affected by it. But the process of one chemical's being substituted for another seems like it would have to be a NORMAL process. But there is still a lot of vagueness in my ideas here.

??? I figure each species has its own coding given at its creation. Not sure what you are asking. Well, they say 98% of the genome is similar to human beings. I have no reason to dispute it but I also don't know exactly what that looks like or why it matters, since if the design is similar so would the genes be similar. Yep, the works, and in fact that implies a prodigious amount of variation in the human race (and all creatures) BEFORE Noah. {Edit: However, both the death that entered with the Fall and the catastrophic death that came with the Flood -- a humongous population bottleneck for all species on the ark -- would have changed the various genomes in drastic ways and brought out some variations that would never have appeared before too.) I don't know what it's "all a matter of" yet except that the genome for any species or Kind would have once looked different from what it does now.This message has been edited by Faith, 09-26-2005 02:23 PM