Why Darwinism is wrong

That sounds like an intersting source of genetic diversity.I had similar thoughts about Lamarckian mechanisms when I started learning about heritable epigenetic markers such as methylation which can be affected by environmental factors such as diet. But I realised that they were really just another form of mutation for the standard Darwinian mechanisms of evolution to act upon.TTFN,WK

Thats really quite an assumption. As does all mutation.In what way is this any sort of evidence for your model?Once again it is simply an example of a particular form of mutation. It has nothing to do with supertwinning and doesn't seem to be an example of anything not entirely consistent with modern evolutionary theory. Simply because the mechanism by which the genetic changes are effected without viral insertion is unclear does not automatically mean you can claim it as evidence, you don't even know how substantial the changes are, an induced point mutation can easily affect phenotypes, it might simply be that some anti-viral immune response has increased the rate of point mutations throughout the plant. I realise that EZ mentioned genomic rearrangements, but there is no need to assume that they alone account for phenotypic diversity.TTFN,WKThis message has been edited by Wounded King, 05-12-2005 11:58 AM

This assumption is still completely unwarranted.TTFN,WK

Is this ever going to go anywhere?I point out that you are making a totally unwarranted assumption and your only comeback is to say that we should still assume it and then your argument will make sense?Your theory simply seems to want to choose an extreme hopeful monster like scenario and then to get around the obvious problems with such a scenario resort to an even more unlikely mechanism of supertwinning. You also assume that incest would be natural, another assumption with little support. If the reproductive isolation was post-mating then why would the MISTWGM need to resort to incest? How different morphologically are you proposing these hopeful monsters of yours are?TTFN,WK

Why bother? It is already established that selfing organisms can effectively undergoe speciation in a single generation via hybridisation or polyploidy. What fudamental difference is one more mechanism, and one there is absolutely no reason to assume has caused speciation in a single generation, going to make? Well why not provide some evidence of it's likelihood? What is the prevalence of 'supertwinning' in different animal populations? Presumably you could make a rough estimate if you know the rates of production of monozygotic twins of different sexes and survival of embryos after 'significant' levels of genomic/chromosomal reordering. Then you could show the incidence rates of incest in those same populations.Now if your 'bottleneck' is a true bottleneck for the ancestral population rather than just an artifact of the genetics involved in 'twinning' then even with totally random mating you might have some inbreeding with a small enough population, but in a moderately large population with random mating the chances are much poorer, and poorer still if they occur in a animal which tends to avoid incest.It is all of these factors that predispose me to think that it is an unlikely situation. Something resembling a coherent mechanism and some idea of how constituent parts of that mechanism are know to operate. As I said, it is not unknown for monozygotic twins of different sexes to be born, but if you knew the frequency then you might have a basis for calculating the likelihood of 'supertwinning'. Unfortunately in human cases of monozygotic twins of different sexes the female suffers from Turners syndrome, due to loss of a Y chromosome making her XO, but this need not be the case for other animals. Indeed and this sort of pre-mating isolation has been shown to be mediated by both culturally learned behaviours and geneticaly determined sexually selected characteristics (Grant and Grant, 1997), not forgetting that song itself may be determined by genetics in some species. In what way does this have any relevance to your hypothesis? If only a small change is needed then why is a point mutation not a sufficient level to start at?If anything cultural inheritance of song as a mechanism of pre-mating isolation provides a Lamarckian mechanism of speciation and certainly doesn't offer support for your hypothesis.TTFN,WK

I'm sorry but I just can't help myself.The Nylon bug is an awful example.A) There is no documented frameshift mutation, only a hypothetical one based on a putative pre-existing open reading frame.B) It is pretty much nonsensical to talk about speciation in reference to a mutation contained on a bacterial plasmid.For a more detailed critique of the way the Nylon bug is abused as an example see the"Is the evidence concerning the Nylon bug being exaggerated" thread.TTFN,WK

I'm sure we are all eager to hear some new thoughts on these issues. It might be better for you to start off a new thread to discuss your views and evidences as this one only has less than a hundred posts to go before it reaches the limits for thread length.TTFN,WK

The problem with such probability calculations is that they are only as good as the assumptions they are based on, and a lot of the relevant factors are so far back in time and many rely on our level of understanding of the processes involved consequently many of the neccessary assumed values are the next best thing to guesses.It is probably also a good idea to provide a source for claims that you make here. As it stands you could have made those numbers up off the top of your head just while you typed. A source would allow the rest of us to get a better idea of what sort of calculations and assumptions actually were involved in determining those figures.Another common objection to this type of reasoning is that it is so often predicated on the need to produce exactly one evolutionary outcome, i.e. the chances of humans evolving, when in fact evolutionary theory doesn't require humans to evolve to be correct. Our reconstruction of human evolution is in large part based on our understanding of evolutionary theory but the theory itself as a way of understanding how life changes does not require humans to evolve or an understanding of human evolution in particular.It is therefore like calculating the odds of picking out a specific predicted series of 10 cards out of a pack as opposed to just taking any 10 cards. The probability of picking any 10 cards will be the same but once you have picked ten cards then, however unlikely it was previously, that is the outcome you will have. It only becomes incredible if you predict which ten cards you are going to draw beforehand.TTFN,WK