What is the mechanism that prevents microevolution to become macroevolution?

You might as well say its behind the sofa Faith.How could there possibly be evidence in the 'junk DNA' which would somehow contradict the patterns of diversity we do see in various genetic populations in favour of your bottleneck from 4500 years ago.You could maybe try and argue that 4500 years is enough time to obscure the bottleneck but I don't see how you can possibly argue that the evidence is hiding in some magical form in the 'junk DNA'.TTFN,WK

This shows a highly faulty grasp of what the ToE 'requires'. At most it requires, in order to fit the diversity of life we see today, occasional duplications at the gene and higher levels up to that of the entire genome. These need not be 'chaotic' although they are likely to be random.The evidence for such duplications is hard to ignore look at the [i]Xenopus [i] family of frogs. Xenopus have genetic complements ranging from diploid (2n) to dodecaploid (12n). Are all of these frogs from different 'kinds' if not then kinds can clearly accomodate very large scale duplications of chromosomes or even entire genomes.Such duplications, of genes and genoes, provide a wealth of material for diversification of gene families otherwise constrained by selection and the families of genes we find throughout the kingdoms of life reflect this.TTFN,WK

How can current human genetics suggest to you 'a lot of death of human beings over the millennia', except in as much as it suggests that people are human and we know that humans die?Rather than not knowing how the genetics work 'exactly' you don't seem to know how they work at all. I think my punctuation may have confused you, my point was that the diversity we do see contradicts the idea of such a recent bottleneck. So your 'answer' is just agreeing with me that there is diversity which under your schema should not be there.For a review of some theories on ancient human bottlenecks there is an interesting review by Hawks et al. (2000). This covers a range of genetic markers used to measure genetic diversity and estimate historical population sizes. The most conservative estimate covered is for a population of 175,000.Some theories, not in that paper, go as far as estimating a population of as few as 1,000 - 10,000 individuals as the result of some global catastrophe, but even estimates for that date are at around 70,000 years ago. As far as I can tell the genetics for this dating is mostly from X chromosmome and mitochondrial data and the coclusions drawn are somewhat iffy.TTFN,WK

Wow! Did you even read the whole abstract? They cover 'microsatellites, Alu insertions, and single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), as well as single genetic loci, including -globin, dystrophin, and ZFX', and that is only the autosomal elements. They also refer to analyses of mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosme. Fer Cryin' out loud. Not a mark like a stamp on the DNA saying 'I honk for bottlenecks'. The mark is the particular patterns of genetic deiversity across different genes which suggest they originated within a population of a particular size.There is no way that anything in Junk DNA can lessen the diversity at other genetic loci, and subsequently no way that it can represent any sort of mark outside of whatever contribution comparisons of 'junk' elements such as in the case microsatellite regions themselves make to the estimates of ancient population size.You have to realise Faith that your Supergenomes that you posit are nothing but make believe. There isn't a scrap of evidence that they ever existed and the whole concept of them makesany analysis of genetic bottlenecking completely irrelevant. If we allow a very few individuals to carry the genetic diversity we would expect in a population size of thousands then our genetic analyses are next to meaningless. Which should be no surprise, when you start making up magical genetics ad hoc it is always likely to lead to conflict with the actual genetics that we see in operation all around us.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

I think that in this instance you are miepresenting mjfloresta's arguemnt. You left out the end of that sentence which specifies that they have never been demonstrated '...to overcome the loss caused by speciation. The Net Change then is negative.' So mjfloresta is not denying that mutations exist that can increase genetic diversity but rather that subsequent to a reduction in diversity during speciation such diversificaton will not replenish or replace lost diversity.It is a different argument from the traditional one you are addressing. I don't think it is a much better argument, and it certainly isn't one that mjfloresta puts forward anything except his oen hypotheticals to support, but it is distinct.TTFN,WK

Well in bacterial systems dupliction of large gene clusters happens all the time due to multiple copies of genes in the epigenomic DNA of plasmids. In multicellular organisms it is rare but by no means unheard of.From the invertebrates through the vertebrate lineage comparative genomics suggest that there have been 2 clear rounds of whole genome duplication in the early development of the vertebrates (Dehal and Boore, 2005).I'm not sure of rates of single gene or chromosome duplications, I'll see what I can find.TTFN,WK

Equinox's calculations seem to be essentially base on nucleotide substitution rates. Consequently the 'mutations' he is discussing ar of a completely different character to the large scale chromosomal ones you insist on focusing on.The problem is that there are lots of things in the world that people find 'mind-boggling' because people have limited minds which are easily 'boggled'. The degree to which something 'boggles' your mind is not an accurate way of measuring whether it is likely to be true or not. Pretty much everything you say after this point is either just made up or so badly reworded to fit whatever point you are trying to make as to make it virtually nonsensical.Unraveling has a specific meaning which completely fails to apply to any of the elements you discuss. The 'mega-ToE' is a creationist strawman in which creationists have strung together all the bits of modern science that they don't like and decided to label them all evolution to keep things simple.TTFN,WK

If you don't understand the terms and teminology then just ask for an explanation. I like nothing better than discussing this sort of stuff in detail.Instead of asking you rattle of a reply as if you understand when the content of your reply shows that you don't. No one is going to think you are stupid for not understanding a technical article, or even its abstract, but to continue to debate it when you know that you haven't understood it seems ridiculous.If you want me to explain this paper in greater detail it might be better to start another thread as it may be slightly derailing for this one.TTFN,WK

The whole point of that thread was that you asked questions so we could elaborate on the nature of mutations. Since you gave up on that idea without asking a single question just because a couple of other people had asked questions requiring more technical answers, the threads purpose was rather undercut.TTFN,WK

Some of these definitions are pretty wide of the mark.
Specifically... An allele is has 2 slightly different forms dependent on whether one is thinking of classical or molecular genetics.A classical mendelian allele is simply one form of a mendelian gene. Alleles are alternative forms of specific genes and may be dominant or recessive in terms of the phenotypic traits they produce.A moelcular allele is usually a genetic polymorphism where there are extant sequences in a population where the genetic sequence is different, often only in a single nucleotide. These need not neccessarily be in a classical molecular biology gene, i.e. in a region coding for production of a protein. Divergence has a lot of different usages and what you describe particularly is more appropriately described as incipient speciation or simply speciation. Divergence usually simply describes any differences in genetic or morphological traits between and group of organisms. I have never actually come across anyone in evolutionary biology using the terms 'Devolution' or 'De-evolution'. By specifically searching for the term on pubmed I can still only find about 10 references and only a handfull use the term in a way which your definition would fit. You seem to be saying that Junk DNA is simply telomeric DNA. In fact the usage of 'junk' that you dismiss, for non-coding DNA with either no function or an as yet unknown function, is common in the scientific literature.I think what you are trying to do is worthwhile but as far as clearing up the communication difficulties goes I fear you are more likely to exacerbate them with these particular definitions.TTFN,WK

This makes no sense. You must have a completely novel definition of 'genetic change' if it is somehow dissociated from mutation. The sort of changes in allelic frequency you have been discussing are not genetic changes as that term is understood scientifically, they are changes in a populations genetics which is quite different. So if you think that all of the variation we see below the level of 'kind' is due to the reduction of allelic variation which was already present in the breeding pairs which got of the Ark then you clearly are denying the existence of small genetic changes. But there is considerably less evidence for the sort of superallelic variation you posit, than there is evidence for the ability of genetic mutation to create variation. All you are explaining is an ad hoc fantasy without a shred of evidence to support it. Why assume a vast amount of completely undemonstrable lost genetic information over a clearly demonstrable facility for genetic material and its machineries of reproduction to produce genetic variation.The sort of alleles we see in populations are completely consistent with the sort of genetic mutations we see regularly ocurring, where does the need to posit some other origin for these alleles come from other than from a religious pre-conviction, what evidence suggests we should adopt your hypothesis?TTFN,WK

'these genetic changes' being presumably the no-genetic changes in allele frequency. Why can't you just call them changes in allele frequency? This is nonsense. While there is nothing super about the normal rearrangements of existing alleles and phenotypic variations arising based on these you hypothesis neccessitates either a massive initial population for a kind, from which all subsequent organisms within that kind have derived and of which those subsequent organisms represent a gentic subset, or a small population with a highly abnormal genetic architecture, i.e. the sort of supergenomes we have previously discussed.There is no evidence to support the supergenomic theory and none, as far as I can see, to support the massive ancestral population theory. Your theoretical example seems to be just you pulling numbers out of the air.Without a clear enough definition of kind to specifically identify a given set of populations derived from an ancestral 'kind' population it is hard to guage what the original level of genetic information was. It would be equivalent to the sum of the information in all the extant alleles across all the populations descended from that ancestral 'kind' population. In the absence of any actual way of knowing what these progenitor populations are we are left with the ad hoc explanation that these 'kind' progenitor populations which were either highly heterogenous genetically or very large existed.To fit this into a scenario with a 'kind' progenitor population of only 2 you have even more problems. Take your 6 allele variant population. To descend from only a single breeding pair that pair must have had 3 alleles for the gene each. This suggests that they would have needed at least 1 extra chromosome each to stash these spare alleles on. So while I appreciate your distinction that in your view you could aggregate all the extant genetic variation in order to derive the makeup of the ancestral population that population would have had to be supergenomic with dozens of times the chromosome complement seen in modern species within that 'kind', either that or they would have had to had a completely different from of genetics. The whole point is that where your line of argument, since you haven't actually produced any evidence just argumentation, leads is to something which all the evidence contradicts. The initial allelic variation must come from somewhere, we have plenty of evidence that it could come from mutation and none at all that it comes from any sort of 'kind' progenitor population with the allelic complement of all the descendent populations pre-existent within that population and certainly no evidence that such a population could consist of 2 individuals.TTFN,WK

I think it was Phillip rather than Faith that was using this term.TTFN,WK

So essentially you use the word speciation in a way that makes it completely meaningless to anyone else?TTFN,WK

And no doubt the evidence supporting this will arrive just as soon as 'creation science' starts its research efforts.TTFN,WK