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NOT-SO-GREAT DEBATE THREAD. ROBINROHAN AND FAITH ONLY, GUEST POSTERS BY INVITATION ONLY.
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population reducing events"? What on earth are you talking about?
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I guess you haven't followed those arguments. I'm not up to laying it all out at the moment.
You don't have to go into great detail. Just give me an idea of what you're talking about.
Not all that easy but here goes. By the way I just posted on the subject again on the "phylogeographic" thread, where I did a lot of that all along. My very first thread at EvC back in February or March or so was on this topic too, that had something like Natural Limits in the title. So if I can't get it spelled out here clearly enough, I'll see if I can track that down and link it.
The basic idea is that a Kind may turn out to be defined by natural limits to variation which must ultimately be reached if mutation turns out not to be the great generator of new useful genetic possibilites it is claimed to be. This comes about by the usual processes I've seen called Evolutionary Processes on sites about Population Genetics, such as
migration (the moving of part of a population away from the "parent" population),
natural selection {which singles out a portion of a population for its adaptive genes), changing the frequencies at least so that the adaptive genes proliferate while the unadaptive are either eliminated altogether or simply reduced in the population and not expressed;
bottleneck, which severely isolates a small portion of a population, in which the alleles are severely reduced from what was in the parent population.
All these are processes that divide populations initially reducing the population of course -- you have fewer numbers of individuals, that is, and new frequencies of alleles in both new populations (or new and old or in the one that survives if the other dies), [which is the usual definition of evolution (change in allelic frequencies over time),] and in the process reduce the genetic diversity. Fewer alleles = less diversity. Either or both new populations may increase in numbers after the split, of course, but the new allelic frequencies will bring new traits to expression, the changes that are called microevolution. As a general rule, that does have some exceptions: New traits = less genetic diversity.
It doesn't always happen in every population shift, even though frequencies may shift. That is, stability or equilibrium does occur. But the only processes that actually ADD anything genetically are mutation and recombining populations, or hybridization, and the latter doesn't add anything NEW, merely reintroduces genetic possibilities that were lost in earlier splits. Mutation is a topic unto itself.
SO the overall effect of all these processes, with the exception of mutation, is the reduction of genetic diversity. But interestingly, these are called "Evolutionary" Processes, as they produce the phenotypic "microevolutionary" changes that are taken for evidence of the ToE. But if in the process of producing these changes the population loses genetic diversity, this would seem to be a change in the direction away from evolution. You get new phenotypes by bringing some alleles to expression at the expense of others -- by eliminating or reducing the frequency of others. All these population dividing processes do this. It is just funny that the very processes that produce the change, even all the way out to actual speciation, are processes that reduce diversity.
If these processes continue out to their ultimate conclusion, you get new types that may be highly adapted but also genetically compromised to an extreme. This is seen in domestic breeding all the time. They have been developing ways to cope with this effect, but the point is that it IS the natural effect of these processes -- new traits at the cost of reduced genetic diversity.
So these Evolutionary Processes produce change, certainly, but they also produce degrees of genetic depletion, even to a great degree over time, out of which which further change becomes less likely and less possible, the opposite of what evolution needs if it works.
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Sorry, I rushed through that and I'm sure it's not as clear as it should be, but maybe I can clean it up later.
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You need a designer, that's for sure, but this is just as valid a theory as the evo theory, and there is plenty of evidence for God, which has been given here many times by many posters.
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OK, no problem. I waive that point.
Thanks.
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NOT-SO-GREAT DEBATE THREAD. ROBINROHAN AND FAITH ONLY, GUEST POSTERS BY INVITATION ONLY.
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This message has been edited by Faith, 12-20-2005 11:19 AM
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