The Nature of Mutations

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There is tremendous variety in all species and the so-called proofs of evolutionists are what I believe to be mere variations, or minor changes within the same species.

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Are you saying that there are no new species?

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Billions of living organisms and fossils have given us absolutely no evidence whatsoever to show the slightest tendency to evolve out of the original kind to which each belongs.

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And what are those original "kinds"? And what is the barrier between them?

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The TOE must prove Transmutation- that being a change in nature, substance, form, and alteration of essence by a slow and gradual process of mutation from one species to another, and from the lower to the higher. TOE just cannot find a way to do this, or find existing proof that it has happened, and without a change OF species there can be no evolution.

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What would you take as evidence for this? What would the minimum be that you would require? Do I have to see a reptile change into a bird in one generation in front of your eyes?

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Since reproduction is a prior condition to evolution, it Cannot be a product of it. This fact and the logical neccessity for the power of continued reproduction is a significant stumbling block to TOE. The power of reproduction is Not in the embryo, but only in the mature parent. Can an egg produce an egg? No. Can an egg improve upon itself? No. Improvement can only come in and through the mature form. Therefore, if life needs the mature form first, where does that leave us?? Quite a dilema for TOE indeed.

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And what does this have to do with anything?

Correct. All things discovered are always without fail accurately placed as a variation within an existing species.Original Kinds?... Well, anything from a molecule to a Human being- with close to 3,000,000 different species, take your pick.
Now, the barrier between them?... A scientifically proven inherent failure to be able to transmutate into another species.Evidence?... The same as you. Any shred at all! Which we've yet to see. Given the above statement however, I believe no generation will ever see evidence to turn TOE into Scientific fact.And what does this have to do with anything?... Everything. Re-read it and put it beside TOE and you'll see what I mean. Then again, I believe you know exactly what it means and are simply baiting.Paul :-)

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Original Kinds?... Well, anything from a molecule to a Human being- with close to 3,000,000 different species, take your pick.

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So you take a kind as being equivalent to species? So there were more than 3,000,000 kinds on the ark. Is that correct?
And if a new species arose you'd be wrong. Is that correct?
By this I mean any living thing which was viable in itself but could not interbreed with species which had been ancestral to it.

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Now, the barrier between them?... A scientifically proven inherent failure to be able to transmutate into another species.

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Oops, this statment is invalid in itself without outside reference. You're saying that a negative has been "proven". Aside from that not finding an example does not demonstrate a barrier. Let's pretend there weren't any "transmutations" into "another species". That doesn't explain why. I asked you why it can't happen. What is the genetic barrier which makes it impossible?

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Evidence?... The same as you. Any shred at all! Which we've yet to see. Given the above statement however, I believe no generation will ever see evidence to turn TOE into Scientific fact.

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So if a new speices arose that would be evidence?If a fossilized form (or preferably a series of them) that showed characteristics of one higher taxa and another mixed together that would be a "shed" of evidence.If the genomes of species (and higher taxa) which is where your barrier would have to be were closly related without any barrier visible then that would be evidence?In each of the above, if you say it wouldn't be evidence please give reasoning to support your position.No I don't know what you mean. I've assumed I know what people mean a lot of times and found out that just gets confusing. As best as I can tell you are confusing the origin of life with evolution. Will you confuse quantum physics with evolution next?{Fixed one quote box - AM}[This message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 04-14-2003]

Ark ? Did I metion an Ark in my post ? Please Ned, stay on track.Now back to Evolution- It's the Law of Sterility that stands guard at the far frontiers of each species to guard against transmutation, and in fact protects the integrity of each individual species. It's just there, period. Thats your barrier.There's no confusion whatsoever on my part Ned. As I said, TOE is a speculative, bankrupt PHILOSOPHY that thinks it's using science to further establish itself, when in fact day by day science is quickly clearing a space on the shelf for it.Paul :-)

Law of Sterility? Eh?

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Ark ? Did I metion an Ark in my post ? Please Ned, stay on track.

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Oops, pardon me. Maybe you could tell me where the species came from then?

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Now back to Evolution- It's the Law of Sterility that stands guard at the far frontiers of each species to guard against transmutation, and in fact protects the integrity of each individual species. It's just there, period. Thats your barrier

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So if an asexually reproducing organism changed from one generation to the next the "Law of Sterility" will somehow stop it from reproducting?I asked about what you would accept as evidence. Please elaborate. It is possible for a new species to arise. One that is separated from it's ancestral species by the so called "law of sterility" you know.
While you're at it please give some more detail on exactly what the "law of sterility" is and who formulated it first. A reference or two would be nice.

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There's no confusion whatsoever on my part Ned. As I said, TOE is a speculative, bankrupt PHILOSOPHY that thinks it's using science to further establish itself, when in fact day by day science is quickly clearing a space on the shelf for it.

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But I offered a guess as to what you might be talking about in the original paragraph. You haven't told me what you were saying. So you now say you weren't confusing the origin of life issue with evolution. I've demonstrated that I don't know what you are getting at. You assertion of the quote above doesn't contain any meaningful information. It is a statement of your unsupported opinion.Go back and clarify the original paragraph please.
Here is it in case you've forgotten.

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Since reproduction is a prior condition to evolution, it Cannot be a product of it. This fact and the logical neccessity for the power of continued reproduction is a significant stumbling block to TOE. The power of reproduction is Not in the embryo, but only in the mature parent. Can an egg produce an egg? No. Can an egg improve upon itself? No. Improvement can only come in and through the mature form. Therefore, if life needs the mature form first, where does that leave us?? Quite a dilema for TOE indeed.

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Were you aware that all scientists and even the majority creationists accept the reality of speciation? There's hundreds of examples of a single interbreeding population splitting into two populations who can no longer breed with each other, gaining unique characteristics in the process. That speciation has been observed to happen in the wild and in the lab is a fact that you may wish to acquaint yourself with.This is why scientists reject the idea of immutable "kinds". Firstly, there's no scientific definition for the word. Secondly, new species arising from old ones is observed reality. Thirdy there's no observable barrier to the capacity of speciation to create new variety in taxonomic forms.You may wish to learn about population genetics. If your idea of speciation is an individual changing species (and finding no mates, as it is the first of it's kind) then you need to think of species not as individuals but as populations. When gene pools no longer mix (reproductive isolation) speciation occurs. Not really a dilemma. Can a cell reproduce a cell? yes it can. Do unicellular organisms even have a mature state? No, they're always "mature". A bacillus can divide as soon as it has been "born" (by division of it's parent).No one argues that reproduction "evolved", anyway. Reproduction and replication are the foundation of life. The first living molecule must have been one that could self-replicate. In the beginning, asexual reproduction was the order of the day. The path to sexual reproduction follows a large number of transitional states, some of which persist in species today.------------------
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Let me leave the impossible to grasp aspect to continue in other threads and have you note that I am increasingly begining to think that there is not a typo in Mendel's Experiments in Plant Hybridization that the FINITE bionmial expansion will lead one to suggest in the genetics problem set but that Like Cantor Mendel was actually OPERATING (if this is true than the e-numbers would provide in the standard form of transfinite factorization some symbolic programming punch for genomics...)with acutal infinites in the sense that philosophically Cantor clearly marshalled but that Nageli incorrectly confused theory and expt with in asserting that Mendel could not use "integers" which were actual inifinties when the a posteriori reality was that the quantities' magnitudes were emprical (not statistically by division 1:3). I think Gould went just too far in trying to ban creationism. He could have stuck with the empircs and left Lewontins double coupled differential equations of bio-change to suffer their own intelligent fate map.But for this to be true and not just English, I will need to re-read genic balance and all sorts of genetic things I am not familiar with. At least I think it possible.The point is that Aggaszi was not the LAST legit creationist but one of the first established ones.

I was trying to express my different understanding of Chip Acquadro's review in a recent Journal about the future of limits to knoweldge in population genetics especially as to if larger data sets and or better computation will help one move "unknowable" things one can think are listed into a 'knowable' category but the intelligence to have in the take home lesson is that I "SAW" this guy appear at Cornell and I had already struggled tru GENETICS281 where in the begging of the course the TA's claim that what is revlead to the student in the microscope is an "unknown" and by the end of mapping a few genes suddenly the unknown IS "known" and yet you are still looking thru the same scope at the same flies mutation and all no matter the proportion of mutation to time.Steve Wolfram has been around this country this year promoting a NEW KIND OF SCIENCE in which he shows a model of mutation that depends crucially on single rule changes to cellular atutomata incremented by single changes and in the post above I merely used this notion to review why it may be that orthogenesis is not standard biology BECASUE orthoselection of fixed point mutations could potentially differentiate an amorph from a hypomorph when not also being a neomorph (but this antimorph would have to argue ANGAINST Wolfram's use of natural selection for which neither I nor Chip has any information on as far as I can tell) but this at least could be known while Chip asserted in the article I was drawing from that not only would it be hard to determine (if a lot of acutal polymorphism) if a single point mutation fixed was due to selectio or not but that in the current best-computation statistical tests there ARE cases where strong selection is preety much known and yet the result is null (neutral). There is a stopgap or disconnect here to WOlfram's notion of materaility of programs (physics vs engineering) that reasoning from statistics can not gain say to which I took lexicographic adavantge in the post and assert a possiblity for bio-change that need not cycle with Gould if species selection were reduced to the mecanics of taking one rule off another back to the limit of the number used to "compute" the morphometrics of the morph mutant that would have been classified by sorting from the group under the microscope. I know that was quicky. Ask again if it is still too dense in itself.

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So if there was a specific example of a mutation that was not there to be activated but occured by chance and that mutation confered benefit then you'd be wrong in your assertions?

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A mutation is nothing that can be activated, it is only an accidental copying error made during DNA translation. And again, if the mutation happened to give any degree of "beneficial" effect, which I never said did not happen, then we must remember that this mutation is still deleterious in its direct effect upon the organism.

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Just to clarify: You're saying that all beneficial mutations are a result of a gene activation?

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No, that is not what I said. I said that there is no such thing as a catagory of pure "beneficial" mutations, any such mutation that confers a benefit does not fall into the catagory of neutral mutation, so it must fall under the catagory of deleterious mutations. Genetic changes that are activiated via environmental ques are NOT mutations. They did not become expressed by mutations.

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But you will agree that there are "real" mutations (that is genetic changes which were not there at all before)?

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Definitely.

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What stops the "real" mutations from ever being beneficial?
What causes the gene to be activated when needed?

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A mutation may confer some degree, however slight, of beneficial outcome, but there is no evidence at all that there has ever been a mutation that was not neutral, or deleterious, but only beneficial. Adaptational genes are activiated by an environmental que, whatever they may be. I do not ever remember reading any papers on discussions of what those ques were.Greetings!

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Are you saying in the above that if there was any mutation that didn't have the deleterious side effect that the sickle cell mutation does that it would still not be "beneficial"? How could you say that?

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Or do you mean that you don't think there can be any such mutation that while beneficial don't also have some deleterious effect?

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First, let me clarify that mutations aren't "side effects". Mutations that are neutral have no effect, and deleterious mutations have destructive effects upon the organism in which they occur. The "side effect" would be such as the SCA mutation, where the side effect is the protection against the disease. It is not that I don't "think" that there is such a thing as a purely beneficial mutation, it is that this is what genetics has observed and recorded.Greetings!

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The mutation has some effects which are beneficial, and other effects which are detrimental. How, then, can you label it as deleterious? There are some environments in which it is a benefit.

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(There is a subtle point here also, in that the major deleterious effect is in homozygotes for the mutated allele.)

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What this demonstrates is that beneficial and deleterious are both defined with respect to an environment.

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First, thanks for clearing up my verbology!
Second, environment has nothing to do with the catagory, nor the effects of deleterious mutations. They are deleterious no matter what, and can cripple an organisms life processes or outright kill it within days or weeks. The only place where environment comes into play is with the so-called beneficial side effects of the mutation.

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This is merely berwildering. What do you think variation means? Of course mutations lead the variation. How could they not?

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On this part I not only disagree, but so does the observations of genetics. There is no observational evidence anywhere which states that variation has its origin within mutations. Think about that for a minute, if the only mutations that have an effect upon the genotype as well as the phenotype are deleterious (because we both know that neutral mutations have no effect) and only some very rare ones hold any kind of beneficial side effects depending upon the environment in which the organism lives, how many are left that could really lead to variation? Every deleterious mutation shortens the life span of the organism in which it occurs, as well as conferring genetic illness which is usually the reason the organism dies.How then can you come up with variation from deleterious mutations? For that is all that one has to work with. No, evolutionary theorists assume purely beneficial mutations and they assume that variation originates from mutations because there is no other place form them to come from in a naturalistic paradigm. But, who ever said that the naturalistic paradigm is the correct one?

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The mutations change the DNA sequence, which changes the protein sequence, which has an effect, which is sometimes advantageous and hence tends to spread through the bacterial culture as generation pass.

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True, however, these insertions are not random, and they require specific enzymes in order to be inserted into the DNA sequence. So what we have here is NOT a mutation, but a specific mechanism for turning on protein sequences when they are necessary for cell survival. These not only are not mutations (only genetic changes which are not mutations), but they do not help evolutionary theory since it is adamantly reported that evolution is NOT directed, but random as far as mutations go.

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Shrug. Any biologically heritable change is evolution, by definition.

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Yes, as defined by evolutionary theorists when they could not produce a viable beneficial mutation.To the quick - any biological change, heritable or not, is NOT evolution in progress. It is only a biological change. The sooner mainstream science understands this, evolutionary theory will disappear over the horizon. It's day is coming, and coming fast.Greetings!

The basis of your thinking from this and other posts appears to be that you think that organisms have some kind of "perfect", normal state that any mutation represents a deviation from. Since any deviation from perfection must be worse, you label all mutations that have effect as "destructive".This platonic idea is false. It's pretty easy to prove that no organism exists that is perfectly adapted to its environment. (You may be interested to know that the aerobic metabolic pathways in animal cells are only about 20 percent as efficient at using glucose as they could be.) There's always room for improvement. Plus your blanket assertation that effacious mutations always shorten the lifespan of an organism is also false and unsupported, as evidence of life-extending mutations have been found.Basically what you're saying is that all mutations that have effect are deleterious because they make the organism different than it's "supposed" to be. And what we're saying is that organisms have no ideal state, and the difference between a "better" and "worse" change is based only on environment.Here's an example that comes up a lot: bacteria that, on a nylon substrate, mutated to become able to digest mylon. (Well, only a few of them did. The rest died because there was nothing else to eat. Eventually the population consisted mainly of nylon-eating bacteria.) In doing so, they lost the ability to digest carbohydrates. (I don't have the link on hand, maybe somebody could post it?)It's your position (I assume) that this is a deleterious mutation because they can't eat carbohydrates anymore, thus they're worse off than before. It's the evolutionist position that it doesn't matter what they could do before because that environment (carbohydrate) is no longer avaliable to them. All they have is nylon. If they can eat it as a result of mutation they are better off than they were before because they'll outlive others in their environment. They're life expectancy has been considerably lengthened by the mutation, and their progeny are much more succesful than those without the mutation. Thus, it's a beneficial mutation.Basically all you're offering is your own value judgement that no effacious mutation could be beneficial because it makes the organism different from it's ideal state. And what we're saying is that no ideal state has ever existed. Just because something is different doesn't make it worse.------------------
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To the quicker - this isn't what ToE says. ToE says that any inheritable biological change that confers a survival advantage on an organism will tend to persist in the population. This IS evolution in progress because it's the combination of random, inheritable change with natural selection, which has been proven to be a sufficiently creative force. And the sooner you understand this, the sooner your protests will evaporate.

And I ask again: Phospholipid, are you Phospho that once was on the Origins Discussion forum? If you are, do you remember our discussion of Hemoglobin C?