Evolution: a red herring?

Who are you agreeing with?TTFN,WK

Actually it should be pretty clear that all you are describing is Galton's coining of the term 'Eugenics' and his own approach to it. The concepts utilised by eugenics have been know and practiced well before the, comparatively, recent evolutionary theories of the 19th century were developed. Probably the wrong people.If your best argument is a specious post hoc ergo propter hoc then you basically don't have an argument.TTFN,WK

*ABE*Sorry totally got confused with a different discussion I was having.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

This is simply untrue and indeed was just neatly rebutted in another thread by Obvious Child. I myself have rebutted this umpteen times, Ill give you the same challenge I did the last person to bring this up to me.Can you provide any evidence that any of these drosophila experiments were actually designed to 'try and force a genetic mutation that is actually beneficial to the organisms viability'. This is a popular bit of anti-evolution clap trap which ignores the fact that most of the large scale mutational screens, such as the seminal Nusslein-volhard and Wieschauss screen (Nusslein-volhard and Wieschauss, 1980), on drosophila were specifically performed to identify genes which were embryonic lethals or for other equally apparent large scale phenotypic effects and in most cases were the product of induced mutations by crude methods such as radiation exposure of treatment with mutagens.If you think that is not the case then please provide some references for these drosophila experiments over 100 years and thousands of generations which were meant to 'force a genetic mutation that is actually beneficial to the organisms viability'.There are many examples of successful selection experiments to enhance specific traits which might be considered beneficial such as longevity , pesticide resistance or differing levels of geotaxis but virtually all mutational screens set out with the specific intention of breaking genetic systems to see how they work.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

Yes, we have lots. Of course whether they will satisfy you rather depends on your definition of 'genetic information' but there are a number of information theory metrics for which an increase can be observed as the result of mutation.So how do you define 'genetic information'? I'll be very interested when you show us the many fruit fly experiments that were actually done with this in mind. Or are you just mentioning in passing that a whole lot of experiments not intended to achieve this result didn't happen to achieve this result as a side effect?TTFN,WK

So in fact you were making a pointless argument that a whole set of experiments which had no intention of either doing what you were talking about or looking for what you were talking about see these things while they were looking for something completely different.Compelling.So in fact you might as well have said - In 100 years of breeding and mutational experiments on fruitflys none has ever produced a tortoise that could dance the Macarena. Only someone with no familiarity of either evolutionary theory or experimental genetics would expect such a thing. Which seems to fit in with everything else you have said. Make up your mind, do you want a new species, like you said a sentence ago, or just a single mutational providing a benefit in the wild. Either way this isn't an experiment that could be performed responsibly, you can't just release a potentially more fecund form of a pest species into the wild for the sake of tracking that trait through the population. This also depends to a large extent what you consider to constitute the natural environment since most strong selective experiments use a heavy enviornmental stress, such as pesticide exposure. So in the wild a Methoprene tolerant fruitfly will not outcompete a wild type fruitfly unless they are exposed to Methoprene in the environment at which point a population of Methoprene tolerant flies will almost certainly outcompete the wild type (based on experiments in muligeneration population cage experiments where even a low level of Methoprene leads to 0% survival of a wild type strain (Minkoff and Wilson, 1992)). Does the natural environment have Methoprene based pesticides in it or not, the answer is of course yes and no at different times and in different places.Once again you want something which no one works on and in this case which no one would be able to get past the ethics board if they did.TTFN,WK

Because that is exactly as relevant to the vast majority of mutational and breeding experiments as what you want to see. You don't know what the observed results are in the context you are putting forward because no-one was looking for data that would tell us. No one in the Nusslein-Volhard mutational screen was taking flies that weren't embryonic lethal breeding them and releasing them into the wild, they were looking to see what the genetic basis of the embryonic lethal mutations were. Its of enormous value to our understanding of the genetics of metabolism, development and behaviour since those are the sorts of things that the experiments are designed to study. What I'm saying is that if we are only looking for the opposite of A in an experiment then the fact that we only the opposite of A is neither surprising nor informative as to the occurrence of A. Its not like flipping a set number of coins where you know that everything that isn't a head will be a tail. The amount of work required to identify a beneficial mutation is orders of magnitude more than those required to identify an embryonic lethal mutation, so unsurprisingly we have many many more examples of the latter than former, and maybe none which have been tested in the wild for the reasons I mentioned earlier. Well again this depends on what you consider to be its environment. What is normally though to occur is that speciation, in the only ways we can observe it, occurs between populations and usually between populations in isolated and ideally differing environments. Each population will over time become adapted to its own environment and the more different the environments are the more divergent we would expect these adaptations to be. But if you take a subgroup of the population adapted for one environment and place it in competition with a similar subgroup from the other population in an environment replicating ones home environment but not the others then we would expect the one whose environment is replicated to outcompete the other. In fact what we would more likely see would be a lot of crossbreeding unless the populations had been seperated for long enough for some form of reproductive isolation to be established. But were we to follow the genetic constitution of the population we would expect those traits adapted to the environment to prevail compared to those from the less adapted population. That is what you are suggesting by wishing flies experimentally selected for a beneficial trait in one environment to then outcompete a wild type population in a different environment.While we might expect to see a continuous history of adaptive changes as environments fluctuate we don't expect a whole population to become a new better adapted species, rather we expect to see a diversification into several forms better adapted to exploit specific niches, such as the diversification seen in Cichlid fish in some of the African great lakes (Won et al., 2005).It may be that were we to be able to take an individual from different time points along a species evolution we might find that they were reproductively isolated from each other, we might now be able to do this sort of thing with a cryogenically frozen genetic stock and a long term breeding program but previously it would have been impossible, the closest example in the wild would be ring species where we see a spectrum of reproductive isolation between populations. If you want to start debating honestly then go ahead. Maybe you could start by defining information for us or by refraining from demanding people satisfy your requirement to hold up the strawman version of evolution you put forward and actually read some current literature showing what modern evolutionary theory would actually lead us to expect to see.TTFN,WK

Sure but that is to improve things to our advantage, not to the advantage of the organism, so it is only beneficial in the context that humans will go on propagating it.Think of the animal breeding programs which produce practically sterile animals with severe health problems, these aren't maintained as a population because of they fit a niche in the wild but because they fit ones defined by the arbitrary whims of humanity. Well since to a large extent GM involves the transfer of genes across large stretches of taxonomic distance, i.e. jellyfish fluorescent protein in rabbits, it isn't a suitable model for mutation in general unless you consider huge leaps of Horizontal Gene Transfer to be occurring at a much higher frequency than current observations suggest.TTFN,WK

Again this is not the sort of mutation we see day to day but rather the wholesale cross-species transmission of genes. This sort of cross-species transmission of some genetic material does happen more frequently in plants than in large metazoans but still not to the extent we would need to view Genetic modification as a suitable model of evolutionary processes.Again the fact that this is almost always in the context of agriculture or livestock farming, i.e. a manmade environment, makes this a difficult example to use with someone like EODoc who is hung up on things in their 'natural' environment.TTFN,WK

That depends to a large extent what you mean by 'the theory of evolution'.I would be very hard put to believe that all modern multicellular animals aren't descended from a common population.I find it virtually impossible that there could be evidence contradicting the concept that men and chimpanzees share a common ancestor.I doubt that any clear barriers to genetic plasticity other than those caused by genetic and environmental constraints exist, i.e. the barriers of kind.It certainly would be impossible to show that organisms don't show mutations and that these can be beneficial and that such mutations will propagate through a population, since it already has been shown.SO what exactly do you mean, and while your at it you could get round to defining information for us as well.TTFN,WK