The End of Evolution By Means of Natural Selection

I don't think you will find anyone in evolutionary genetics who doesn't think drift is an important factor affecting genetic variation, the question has always been over the relative importance of drift against selection or other factors affecting variation in specific evolutionary elements such as speciation or following a bottleneck.As for drift eliminating variation, if your allele has a low frequency initially then the chances of it being eliminated by drift are much higher. That is why so much variation is transient since a de novo mutation is by its very nature of very low frequency and therefore highly prone to loss through drift. There are many experiments where inbred lines have been used to identify novel mutations affecting specific traits, but I don't know of any studies where looking at the recovery of variation was the primary focus in the absence of any sort of intervention such as the introduction of an immigrant individual. The effects of even a single immigrant in raising levels of genetic varaition are one of the reasons why the existence of variation in other populations is such an important point.TTFN,WK

Thanks Faith, this was a very clear demonstration that you haven't bothered to use any of the intervening 5 years since you started the other thread to actually learn anything more about evolutionary genetics.Given your determination to address everybody's responses and your determination to be wrong about pretty much everything I'm not sure how you expect to be any less swamped this time around. It seem to me that a topic like this would really be much more suitable for something like a great debate.To address some specific points from your OP ... Not overlooked, simply not true. Evolution can very readily occur without any alleles being eliminated. Having said this you then go on to do nothing of the sort. The fact that genetic drift and selection can both lead to the fixation of an allele within a population in no way means that they must or that this forms an 'inexorable' trend.You have no evidence, you have no demonstration, all you have is your totally uninformed assumption about what happens, one that is plainly contradicted by the evidence. Not true, to be 'established' a trait just needs a sufficient frequency that it will not be readily eliminated from the population by the vicisitudes of genetic drift. Other alleles absolutely do not have to be eliminated for this to happen, although obviously their relative frequencies will change somewhat. As others have pointed out that is just flat out fantasy, cheetahs aren't an example of extreme genetic reduction due to being 'wonderfully selected' but due to a severe population bottleneck back in their evolutionary history. How can you justify basing an argument on ignoring all the evidence and just lying to yourself like this repeatedly for five years?*ABE* Just to add, this ... The entire basis for your 'model' is a simplistic demonstration on wikipedia with a population size of 20 individuals? This sort of behaviour is why people consider creationists and IDists a joke.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

I'm not sure this is fair, what is mostly being referred back to is the thread on this exact same topic that Faith herself referenced in her OP. She isn't making any new arguments or bringing in any new evidence this time round.All she has to do to get her straightforward answers is re-read the thread from 5 years ago.TTFN,WK

I've said it before and I'll say it again, why wouldn't this be a more sensible discussion to have in a great debate with just one or two folk from the evolutionary camp? As it is you are just asking for a hellacious dogpile, to the extent that you seem to have slathered yourself in tasty marrowbone jelly as well.I understand your willingness to take on all comers and I'm sure it says something about your character. But approaching a thread this way just seems to produce an exercise in frustration for everyone involved.You don' t have the time to respond fully to everybody. Any contentious response you make tends to attract multiple replies most of whom will expect a response and since everyone has their own particular approach the whole thread just seems to become chaotic and unfocused switching between microsatellite sequencing in cheetahs, to microbial experiments, to finch beaks and then to dog breeding.*ABE*In fact looking at your new 'rabbit trail' thread proposal maybe what is really needed is several great debates. You could have a bacterial evolution thread, an endangered species/speciation thread and a artificial vs Natural selection thread for all the domestic breeding issues.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

If you expect to still be making the same stupid arguments after 5 years with no better understanding then your graduate program must really suck.It isn't Faith's argument that people object to, it is that we went through exactly the same farrago of nonsense previously. She's had at least 5 years to actually find out what mutations are, and at least 2 threads opened specifically for her to do so. The fact that she still doesn't seem to understand really can't be put down to anything more than that she doesn't wish to understand because understanding the process of mutation totally invalidates her whole premise.TTFN,WK

You are simply reinforcing Faith's false dichotomy thinking here. The point of 'rabbit fossils in the precambrian' isn't to provide evidence of creationism but rather an example of evidence which could falsify or call into doubt a substantial portion of our understanding of the evolutionary history of life on Earth.The rabbits have nothing to do with creationism. Whether or not they would be consonant with a creationist worldview is entirely irrelevant to the point they are intended to demonstrate, i.e. that evolutionary theory can produce hypotheses that are falsifiable and is therefore a science in the Popperian sense.TTFN,WK

I think the problem stems from no-one calling her on this bait and switch ... Somehow someone being convinced of the truth of ToE by evidence contradictory to the ToE becomes equivalent in Faith's mind with someone becoming convinced of the falseness of evolution by evidence contradictory to creationism. She has totally changed the premise and made it nonsensical.Obviously the truly converse situation would be someone being convinced of the falseness of evolution when shown evidence directly supportive of evolution, much like Faith herself pretty much all of the time.TTFN,WK

I think that, as usual, Faith is confused. What people have said is that it is quite possible for evolution to happen without speciation ocurring. What is not possible is to have a theory of the evolutionary history of life on Earth that doesn't account for speciation.More specifically it is possible for the same population at very distant times to become 2 distinct morphospecies at least. Undfortunately the real test that is needed is not so much genes from fossils but the ability to try and breed between populations vastly separated in time. I guess that we could start looking at that sort of thing now, or at least preparing for such studies in the future, if we started systematically freezing down sperm and egg stocks of specific populations of interest, but I think it might be hard to account for the differences in interfertility that might simply result from the materials being in long term storage.In other words, if one species becomes two contemporaneous species then you have obviously had a speciation event. If however one species over time becomes what we would identify as a distinct species, based on morphological criteria, then I'm not sure if you could say there has been a speciation event or not.TTFN,WK

Maybe Faith should just re-read her Is there really such a thing as a beneficial mutation? thread, which was the consequence of almost the exact same set of arguments in her five year old thread she mentioned in the OP.If she wants to go round it again I'd be happy to discuss the existence or otherwise of beneficial mutations in a Great Debate, I'll even ignore bacteria if she insists, I can tie one hand behind my back as well if it helps .TTFN,WK

If Faith is happy discussing beneficial mutations then I will, but I know it is a slight deviation from the original topic of the OP.I agree with you that their existence or non-existence is one of the cruxes of her argument, but I don't know if she does since she seemed to indicate to Bluejay that she doesn't even accept that mutations can give rise to novel alleles.TTFN,WK

And vice versa, no one has ever said that deleterious mutations don't outnumber beneficial mutations, you are the one consistently claiming that beneficial mutations don't even really exist.TTFN,WK

You need to bear in mind that you could easily have a beneficial mutation, or a neutral one given the redundancy in many gene networks, which is the result of a 'dead' gene, i.e. a mutation which obliterates a transcriptional start site or radically truncates the transcript so the protein product no longer functions.TTFN,WK

Well that is your repeated assertion, but since you repudiate the evolutionary concept of beneficial, a mutation which confers upon its posessor an increase in evolutionary fitness in terms of reproductive success, and refuse to provide your own definition of beneficial ,beyond that you will know it when you see it, there isn't really any way to determine whether this is true or not.It certainly isn't true going by the scientific definition, but going by the 'Faith' 'definition' it will probably always be true since you are the only arbiter of what constitutes a beneficial mutation in that respect and you wont let the rest of us know what your criteria are.TTFN,WK

I don't see what any of your reply has to do with the points I raised. You dismiss the actual evidence as 'the occasional odball fluke' which is surely exactly what we would expect a low frequency event to be? Only if you don't care about establishing whether something is true or not. The scientific approach gives very specific criteria for what constitutes a beneficial mutation and we can readily apply them to mutations in various simple model organisms from bacteria to invertebrates such as C. elegans or Drosophila. For humans and other vertebrates with longer generation times it is more difficult, but in most cases still doable, humans present their own issues of course in terms of research ethics.There is an inference that existing genetic variation is the result of historical unobserved mutational events, but it is an inference consistent with what we see occurring every day throughout the natural world in terms of mutations creating genetic variation.TTFN,WK

But this doesn't escape Faith's last thursdayist trap. Unless we have actual genetic evidence of the de novo origin of such alleles she simply dismisses them as having always been extant since the original ancestral population was created.So while the sort of examples you speak of can certainly show differential fitness between different alleles either generally or in different environments,through population genetic stidues of traits such as Sickle Cell, HbC, HIV resistant CCR5 variants etc.., they don't help us with Faith since she simply denies that they originate from mutations (or in the case of sickle cell almost certainly claims that it is not truly beneficial).TTFN,WK