The End of Evolution By Means of Natural Selection

I have not suggested that. Those are not the terms that are feeding the wrong ideas that many people have. It's "nice" of you to include unnecessary and inappropriate insults in your posts.

Hi Wounded King, Oh I am aware of the slippery eel there, however to claim that there is no evidence of beneficial mutations, when you have definite proof of beneficial mutations in bacteria, an analogous situations in other organisms, makes the argument that the higher forms do not have beneficial mutations rather weak.We also have the situation now where there is a lot of genetic information being gathered and documented, such as the study of children and their genetic inheritance. While a lot of these focus on finding deleterious mutations known to be in parents to see if they show up in the children (for early treatment) we are also likely to find mutations that counter them.Enjoy.

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Hi Percy, I'm aware of this, and that similar can happen around the ring, but I want Faith to derive it, and then be fixed by it, while we discuss the ramifications. I don't think the end result is what she thinks it is.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : clrty

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Seriously NWR, if you are claiming that Faith's lack of understanding is due to evil neo-darwinists using the term 'Beneficial mutation' then you left reality at a severe tangent some time in the past.You really don't think the popular understanding of those terms, if any even exists, contributes to misapprehensions about evolution/biology? How often have you seen new headlines declaring that scientists have found the gene for something? How many people have a conception of mutation that isn't more firmly rooted in the x-men and sci-fi than in biology? We've had more than 1 creationist come in and spout nonsense that shows they clearly don't even understand the central dogma of molecular biology, i.e. people talking about the amino acid composition of dna. What can I say, it's my 'value added'.TTFN,WK

Of course I am not saying that. I am well aware that her creationist commitments are the major source of the problem. However, in this particular thread which has been discussing mutations, it has been a significant factor.

Hi RAZD!I don't think Faith is going to be able to follow the type of long structured arguments you favor.Faith rejects studies of simple and short-lived bacteria that falsify her position because she claims bacteria are too different from multicellular life to be relevant, and no one has yet produced any equivalent studies of multicellular life.What Faith doesn't have is a single example of reduced allele diversity producing speciation. Domestic breeding reduces allele diversity and never produces a new species, as creationists are fond in pointing out about cats and dogs. If reducing allele diversity was all it took to create a new species then breeders would have done it many times across human history, yet I don't think there's a single example.Faith can't explain why a parent population that has every allele of a reduced-allele daughter population never produces individuals that are not of the same species. If all it took to produce speciation was a certain mix of a subset of alleles, then just by chance large parent populations should be constantly producing individuals that are a different species. Speciation should happen all the time in just a single generation, but it never does.Faith's ideas are wrong in so many ways and on so many levels and even just at the level of simple biology that they should be overcome quickly and easily, but Faith's true genius is using her antagonistic temperament to avoid discussion.--Percy

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What Faith doesn't have is a single example of reduced allele diversity producing speciation. Domestic breeding reduces allele diversity and never produces a new species, as creationists are fond in pointing out about cats and dogs. If reducing allele diversity was all it took to create a new species then breeders would have done it many times across human history, yet I don't think there's a single example.

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I think this is partly due to the ambiguous definition of species, and that in some cases potential species from artificial selection are defined away.From wikipedia Could you elaborate on the definition of species a bit?Beyond this, the breeding potential of dogs and cats works in her favor, as it proves that there is a vast quantity of alleles already present in the dog/wolf population, which is necessary for her model.I doubt there would have been enough time from domestication point to produce all(or most) of the alleles seen, though some were probably produced by mutation. I might be wrong in this however(both points).(Whether or not the alleles originally came from mutations is the point up for debate).

Hi, Pluto. I think you're going to need to explain this a little better.Are you saying that the ability of a diverse assemblage of dog varieties to interbreed can somehow be used as support for Faith's idea that all that genetic diversity was present in the original gene pool of dogs/wolves?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

No. Not any more.One of the consequences of evolution is that our habit of dividing organisms into species may be useful to us but can never have any logical foundation. Your point is obscure.Remember that Faith's "model" involves every non-kosher animal being reduced to a single breeding pair around 2517 B.C. Given that there were only two wolves on the Ark, then how, in Faith's model, did the "vast quantity of alleles" originate?Faith is a creationist, she doesn't do joined-up thinking.

Hi, Wounded King. My take on this is that, while neo-darwinists’ using the term didn't cause Faith's lack of understanding, it hasn't helped. Her main problem in her debate with me was not being able to understand that the term beneficial mutation doesn’t refer to a beneficial mutation, per se, but to a mutation that causes a beneficial phenotype. She honestly thinks that there is a meaningful difference between beneficial and deleterious mutations, as if they arise from two different kinds of processes, even though this is very similar to categorizing automobiles by their colors, rather than by their class or manufacturer.This led her to think it was perfectly reasonable to demand separate evidence for deleterious and beneficial mutations, and then for separate evidence for beneficial mutations in different kinds of organisms. My showing her an example of the same kind of mutation (an A -> G substitution) leading to both beneficial and deleterious effects on phenotype apparently failed to convince her: as I feared, the combination of seeing an undeniable beneficial mutation and not understanding that benefit is irrelevant to the occurrence of mutation led her off on some insane story about how bacteria have a special means of changing their genomes, rather than to take it as evidence that beneficial and deleterious mutations are, in fact, not different things, but the same thing with different consequences.While I don't object to the usage of the term "beneficial mutation," I think it should be used cautiously until someone can get the idea that "beneficial" is not a mechanistic category to penetrate Faith’s skull.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

This is really a comment for Faith in Message 71 of thread Reduction of Alleles by Natural Selection (Faith and ZenMonkey Only). I think I understand what you are getting at.Let's imagine a very early mammal. And perhaps there were 10 alleles for a particular gene. Note that my hypothetical example is very unrealistic.Suppose those are allele 1, allele 2, ..., allele 10.
Allele 1 produces some doglike traits.
Allele 2 produces some catlike traits.
Allele 3 produces some mouselike traits.
Allele 4 produces some monkeylike traits.
etc.You are saying that in order to get a dog, you have to lose allele 2, allele 3, allele 4, etc. And you see that as a loss of diversity.However, what can happen is that, with new mutations, these are replaced by allele 1.1, allele 1.2, allele 1.3, etc which are variations of doglike traits. So there can be still just as much diversity as measured in the number of alternative alleles, but the new diversity is more narrowly spread and all within the doglike range.Edited by nwr, : Add message reference for the other thread.

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I think you're going to need to explain this a little better.

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Are you saying that the ability of a diverse assemblage of dog varieties to interbreed can somehow be used as support for Faith's idea that all that genetic diversity was present in the original gene pool of dogs/wolves?

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Ya, I'm not very good at explaining things sometimes.For Faith's model to function, there needs to be a starting pool of alleles to work off of that would generate the variety of phenotypes we observe. If there is not a pool of alleles to work off of, or modification of this pool cannot generate significant variation, then the death knell of the theory is sounded.The point dogs started getting domesticated(a point which would occur in any model, creationist or evolutionist) is a good starting point for looking for evidence that such a pool potentially existed. According to wikipedia, man began domesticating dogs about 30k-7k years ago. This is not a significant amount of time for truly random mutations to build up to significant quantities(correct me if I'm wrong), and thus it is reasonable to assume that the vast majority of the variation that is observed is due to pre-existing alleles(or alleles that are generated by non-random mutations, which are probably only in specific places.).Thus, at the point of domestication, there existed a large pool of alleles. Given the vast range of dog breeds that can be generated from this original pool(which, if they occured in the wild, many would probably be termed different species), it is conceivable for a pool of alleles to cause significant speciation without the aid of random mutations. This part of the model had been challenged by Percy, partly based on the nebulous term 'species.'Her model for speciation has thus not experienced any significant challenges yet. 'Cept the flood reduction bit to effectively 4 alleles per gene, but that's a different issue. It doesn't have really any direct links to the validity of this model.

Some points you need to consider:We have evidence that the variation in the dog population has been increased by mutation.
(The short legs seen in dachshunds, referenced earlier in these threads).Faith's model requires that variation is continuously decreasing. Showing that there is plenty of variation within modern species isn't exactly helpful to her view. (The more so when you consider that she believes in a literal version of Noah's Flood. I would suggest that Faith's model is in serious conflict with her YEC views, and in fact only make sense if OEC is assumed).There doesn't seem to be any great need to challenge Faith's model of speciation beyond the fact that in real speciation as opposed to dog breeding the timescales are extended so that mutation plays a greater role (it is likely required if reproductive incompatibility is involved) - remember that for dogs we are talking about the time to establish a new breed, not the whole of the domestication period. It also likely does not involve the same level of inbreeding. However, if mutation can restore the diversity of the species over its lifetime then Faith's argument has failed. (It should also be pointed out that natural selection - unlike dog breeders - does not directly care about maintaining the distinctive traits of species - if a trait gives a reproductive advantage it will be selected, if not it will not be selected.)Faith's speciation argument seems to be based on the idea that each speciation fixes alleles (which cannot then change at all) and eventually the lineage will run out of genes that could be fixed. The problem is that fixation is defined as including variants of the allele produced by mutation - which means that the allele can be changed, and a new version fixed. Also genes can be added and traits can be lost as well as gained. So the argument as Faith has outlined it is not a sure thing at all. Faith needs to quantify her argument to show that it actually works.

Well it hasn't happened over the previous five years, so I shouldn't hold my breath if I were you. Nothing has helped, including dozens of people explaining the overwhelming importance of the environmental context of a mutation for it to be judged beneficial in words of one syllable to her.This isn't really a problem unique to Faith of course, it turns up in debate with many creationists. They consider any change from some platonic ideal of a created gene, or presumably in Faith's case a created set of alleles for each gene, to be of necessity deleterious because of course divinely created alleles are the best alleles they can be.Smooth Operator did this a lot, saying that even mutations which clearly produced a beneficial phenotype were deleterious mutations because they changed the protein products conformation, even if the conformation change had no functional effect other than providing the beneficial phenotype.The worst example to my mind was when he claimed that a bacterial enzyme mutating so that it no longer had a high specificity binding site available for an antibiotic to bind to, and thereby kill the bacterium, was a deleterious mutation because the enzyme had lost the function of binding the antibody with high specificity. Admittedly he couched things in terms of genetic information to add another whole layer of obfuscatory bullshit, but the basic premise was the same.TTFN,WK

One of the still open questions about dog evolution is whether its diversity springs from mutation after separation from wolves some 30,000 years ago, or from periodic breeding with the original wolf population.You don't want to get into a discussion about the definition of species. It's very messy. Suffice to say, and as Dr Adequate already alluded, species is an artificial categorization that humans impose upon a process of continuous change.--Percy