A barrier to macroevolution & objections to it

Mutation isn’t wanted it’s factual, as you yourself have asserted. Indeed I believe you said that it even could be beneficial, though not beneficial enough. But then again you take a giant leap backwards when you state that the super gene is responsible for “all the microevolution” which of cause leaves no room for mutation whatsoever.As for the super-gene it is ridiculous beyond compare! Imagine that you have a human and you stuff all the genetic variety of the entire human race in this man. What du you imagine you would get? A person afflicted with every single hereditary decease, every deformity, every skin colour, every nose form, every blueprint for length, every blueprint for protein synthesis. There would most likely not be a single cell in that body that could manage to perform its first division. Alleles are not only either or’s in a strict hierarchy of dominant and recessive. They are as well both and’s and mutually exclusive’s.That not accounted for all life would hasten to it’s end since meiotic drive would sooner or later make every single species a homozygote on every single allele. Every organism would be like bacteria, just copying itself! Edited by jerker77, : No reason given.

Since this thread is getting near the end I just don't want to get into a discussion with new posters. I still want to discuss the cod example when anybody gets around to deciphering it for me.Meanwhile I am having serious computer problems and I don't know where it's going to end up. I've dumped tons of old files and cleaned up the disk and it's still freezing up on me and I have to reboot a dozen times a day. So I MAY not even get back to this thread at some point. So far I've been able to keep getting on, and I just reboot when it freezes, but the time periods are short before it freezes again.Just so you know.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I don’t know why you are have this obsession for cod!? The study Is just an account of changes in the number of alleles in cod caught during a period over 40 years, under which the cod population had two severe drops. It's not a closed population i.e. the cods caught over time were not direct decedents and migration did occur. All it showed that has baring on our discussion was that the number of alleles can increase even if the population is dwindling. It doesn’t prove, nor even attempt doing so, that the new alleles were beneficial nor that they were a result of mutation, though they deem mutation as a likely candidate for some of the changes in the allele counts. That's all! The point the author tries to make is that the cods genome is stressed i.e. the rapid changing environment has had a damaging effect on the cods survivability, as with the cheetah and the dog.Edited by jerker77, : No reason given.Edited by jerker77, : No reason given.

Too bad this came at the end of this thread. We have been talking at cross purposes. Although I'm not sure how you can state this so authoritatively since you wouldn't read the article and wouldn't accept my word (and later Equinox's) for what the article contained, you are at least partially correct. Mutation was "assumed" for the creation of novel alleles. Here's the rub, however: there were enough distinct alleles between the subpopulations examined that recombination, genetic mixing, and sequestration of alleles could not account for the divergence. There COULD be epigenetic effects that might account for some of the diversity (i.e., it might not necessarily be due exclusively to mutation), but it most assuredly was NOT due to recombination exclusively, either. Simply reshuffling existing alleles can't explain the genetic diversity. That, of course, leaves mutation, even though the article didn't specifically address mutation. Remember this part?

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Making a long story short, there is sufficient genetic divergence between the two "ends" of the E. eschscholtzii chain to indicate that a) the most distant populations do not simply represent a statistical assortment of existing alleles, and b) genetic diversity has not only not decreased, but has actually increased over the range of the species.

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The only way we can get further into the "data" you keep requesting is to dig deeper into the literature and begin discussing things like quantitative trait loci (QTL) studies, which if you think the articles already provided are too technical, are going to be very difficult to digest. I'm happy to give it a whirl, but given past history, I'm not sure we're going to get very far - especially with such a short time remaining in the discussion.

Well, are there enough, or aren't there? If you didn't mean to say there weren't enough, then why did you say there weren't enough? If you have an objection to the bacteria studies, you certainly haven't told anybody what it is. Until such time as you're able to express exactly why bacterial studies, long used as model organisms for the study of genetics, are somehow invalid here, they constitute a large line of evidence that you've simply chosen not to address - to pretend like it doesn't even exist, in fact. Losses don't bring about new traits. Something is not new simply because it is what is left over.If I have a full refrigerator, and I throw out all the fresh fruits and vegetables and simply mix together two containers-worth of leftovers, I have not made a new meal. We're still eating leftovers.New alleles are required for new traits, because over enough time, given a constant number of alleles, all possible allelic sexual combinations are eventually expressed. Simple statistics. You eventually get every possible phenotype just at random, so reducing alleles doesn't get you anything new. Maybe it gets you more of something, maybe less, but neither of those are new.Genuinely new traits require genuinely new alleles, and mutation is the source of new alleles. How are you ever going to figure out what that article says if you immediately reject any explanation of it that appears to support evolution? If you're waiting around for someone to explain it to you in a way that undercuts evolution, you're going to be waiting a long time. Evolution is accepted by scientists because the evidence supports it, so when evidence is presented for it, you're simply not going to find a way, except fallaciously or dishonestly, to use that evidence against evolution.

Drat, Q, I DID accept what you said it contained and I said so more than once.My computer usually freezes up in just a few minutes so this is all I'm going to say.

Depends on what you mean by "genuinely new traits." Most novel traits do NOT need anything more than a new combination of alleles already present in the population.

It seems this "barrier" thread has bogged down in a bit of detail.The detail has to do with speciation events and the effect they have on the gene pool. In addition, it concerns the relationship between genetic reshuffling and phenotypic traits. I'm not able to remember any more than that.Faith believes she has demonstrated something by doing some arm-waving (without the necessary math) about the reduction in genetic diversity in sub-populations when a larger population is split as a first step toward eventual specation.I think most here agree with her (without doing careful math) that this will happen under some particular and specific scenarios.Obviously if a split-off population is small enough it has a high probability of not containing all the alleles of the original larger population.Obviously if some alleles are rare enough in the original population then a sub-population may well not contain them.We know this happens from real world examples given. (None of them by Faith). We also are told that in the real world this reduction in diversity or population size is enough to result in an extinction of the smaller population -- sometimes.However, it is just as easy to visualize (again without the math which would be required to arrive at any real conclusion) that these cases do not always apply. There will be times when the subpopulations are large enough to be just as diverse as the original.Thus it simply doesn't matter if population split, reform, split with one dying out (or both). It doesn't matter if some subpopulations are drastically reduced in diversity. These things don't always happen. In the seething stew of interacting populations in the wild it all happens all the time.It has been shown that mutation gives rise to increased diversity. Faith is now on the "beneficial" kick. It doesn't matter to diversity if the new genetics is beneficial or not. It only matters that it is un-harmful enough to be maintained in the population. It then adds diversity. That is all that is required.This leaves this whole issue as a red herring. Populations can subdivide and maintain or regain diversity.Now we can look at what happens next.

Anyone & Everyone,Faith says she has provided evidence in support of her position, but despite repeated requests to Faith to point to the particular post that does this, & trawling through the entire thread myself, I am still drawing a blank.Can anyone point me to the post where Faith provides evidence of her own position, please?Cheers,Mark

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There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those that understand binary, & those that don't

Apart from the fact that this is a bare assertion that you need to back up with evidence, I would also point out that "most novel traits" does not mean all novel traits.So, by your own admission, there must be novel traits that are not the result of a remixing of existing alleles, but of the much dreaded new alleles. If the barrier this thread is about really exists, then this should not be the case.Edited by Parasomnium, : subtitle

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

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But I have concluded, not assumed, from the fact that all the "evidence" is inference, speculations, assumptions and hypotheticals,

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1) I thought that there were at least a dozen real-life examples provided to you in this thread, which are the opposite of "hypothetical"?2) All science relies upon inference. If you reject inference, you reject the vast, vast majority of scientific conclusions about everything.

Traits that hitherto have not been present in the population. Says you, but that's a statement contrary to both logic and evidence. And you seem to be forgetting the most basic principles of Mendel; namely, that traits as often as not are discreet, independantly-variable aspects controlled at a single genetic locus, not the result of any kind of genetic "mixing." A few traits exhibit that sort of behavior, but many more do not."New" is not the same as "left over." Reduction in alleles cannot be the source of truly new traits. And truly new traits are required to explain the diversity of life on Earth in the present and past.

Thanks crash, that was exactly what I've been trying to express. Although some new phenotypes can be created through recombination occasionally, the vast majority are caused by "something else" (since Faith doesn't want to use the term "mutation"). There is entirely too much diversity - both phenotype and genotype - between populations that have been separated for any length of time to be the result of simply recombining existing alleles or sampling error. That's the part that I simply have been unable to get across to Faith.

hmm..Whether that's true or not seems to be dependent on your underlying assumptions of how much diversity there actually is. If you assume ToE, then sure there's been too much diversity for mere non-mutational forces too account for.If, however, you were to properly ask if all of life's observed diversity can be the result of non-mutational processes, then the answer would seem to be yes.If you pushed the level of variation up to the assumed (by creationists) level of kinds, non-mutational processes would again seem to be sufficient (hampered of course, by the lack of a definite placement of the kind level for every kind.

We don't need to assume diversity; we can observe it and measure it. Any disagreement creationists may have in regards to the amount of diversity is simply their refusal, once again, to admit the existence of any fact they find inconvinient to their ideology.