The Origin of Novelty

You really are a troll aren’t' you? Either that, or just incredibly uneducated.Are you seriously not aware that the melanin that 'white' skin can produce is a very limited function and takes time? A family friend of mine got a job in Liberia in West Africa in the 1980's. On the second day out (before he'd started his new job) he decided to do a bit of sunbathing. He lay on his front for what should have been 15 minutes but fell asleep. He awoke two mere hours later in pain. The pain turned excruciating and he was shipped back to the UK (the Liberian hospitals being poorly equipped to deal with third-degree burns) and he had more than half a gallon of blister serum taken out of his back over the next 48 hours. He became permanently scarred and ultimately died of melanoma 8 years on.That's your 'melanin producing ability’ in albino skin for you. It is insignificant compared to that of black skin, I've heard it said that there isn't an adult Australian (not counting the aborigines of course) who don't know someone who has been lost to skin cancer - I can't verify the truth of that statement - but there's a reason things like that get around!You see - evolution often reverses or 'partially' reverses scenarios depending on the effects of natural selection in a setting. i.e. the crap-wired eyes of mammals where the cat evolves the tapetum - a reflecting layer to concentrate light for dark adaptation. If the eyes in mammals (indeed vertebrates in general) were like those of the cephalopods then dark adaption would be already there from aeons ago - cephalopods live in deep very very dark waters - they cracked it before vertebrates got going....I keep asking (and you keep ignoring) why an 'intelligent designer' would fuck up like that.And here we have another example - the albino mutation losing ability to produce melanin - and generations later when albino alleles become fixed in the gene pool - a secondary mutation that allows back 'some' melanin production. I assume you are white skinned. If you think your melanin production is a match for the African sun then be my guest - go there, strip off to the waist (without sun protectors as our ancestors had no such thing) and see how your melanin production helps you (why did your God ‘fuck up’ with white skin — when he’d already cracked the melanoma issue by ‘inventing’ black skin? —
Don't forget to have an air ambulance facility standing by to take you to the nearest intensive care burns unit!We are back to selling cars where only some get air bags whilst the rest get a spongy vest for the driver instead!! Madness Earth’s ecosystem is full of examples of suboptimal partially reversed engineering fuck-ups —over and over — the result of successive changes in environmental conditions favour different mutations that come along, features moving in one direction, only to change backwards in another setting. Animals who had eyes, losing them when they became dark cave dwellers such as invertebrates like cave-dwelling millipedes — or olms. But still retaining the vestiges of the old features. Why would an intelligent designer give olms (cave-dwelling amphibians) ‘eyes that can’t see’?Janet & John's idiot guide to mutation and natural selection:1. Because chemistry is NOT exactly reproducible (i.e. it is stochastic) mutations are INEVITABLE
2. Mutations give rise to phenotypic changes (changes you can see in the individual - such as albinism).
3. Mutations can be deleterious, neutral or advantageous UTTERLY DEPENDING ON THE ENVIRONMENT THAT SURROUNDS THAT INDIVIDUAL (this bit in capitals as people like you and Faith seem to have continuous brain farts on this point - it really is secondary science stuff this!!).
4. The advantageous mutations (for that environment) will get 'fixed' in the gene pool at the expense of the allele(s) it replaces - purely as a result of natural selection favouring it IN THAT PARTICULAR ENVIRONMENT.
5. The deleterious mutations (for that environment) will be selected against and will dwindle (IN THAT ENVIRONMENT) - purely as a result of natural selection NOT favouring it IN THAT PARTICUALR ENVIRONMENT.Only lethal mutations (those that interfere with early structural development of important systems i.e. embryonic developments can be said to be definitely deleterious in ALL circumstances (the individual ‘dies’ as an embryo). In nearly all cases where birth occurs then novel features DO have particular environments that can be advantageous. There are simply so many environments out that that this will always be the case. Whether the novel feature of an individual finds the environmental niche that will ‘support’ its novelty is another matter. The Galapagos Islands of 16 very different ecosystems are one of nature’s best examples of experiments in evolution. The species divergence is incredible — and so are the very different conditions from island to island — go read a book or (better still) watch a video on it (UK’s greatest living celebrity naturalist David Attenborough has produced a fascinating series on the Galapagos ecosystem).The pattern of life on earth with its nested hierarchy, pattern of fossils, pattern of DNA, pattern of population demography, loss of features (correctly wired eyes) followed by partial regain by some other method (development of the tapetum), possession of suboptimal often dangerous engineering concoctions (shared tube to breathe and eat, recurrent laryngeal nerve, appendix in humans) ALL are explained exactly by that 5 point sequence above. There is and never has been ANY other even close explanation by any other hypothesis WHATSOEVER.And this is why the ToE is taught is science classes in schools to the next generation of children. The education of our next generation is FAR too important to fuck about with. The only science theories that can be taught are those that tally with the evidence. That's why we teach Newtonian/Einsteinian celestial mechanics in physics, the chemistry of carbon bonding in organic chemistry and the ToE in biology.Unless and until you can come up with something that at least matches the ToE in terms of fitting with THE EVIDENCE then you are 'pissing in the wind'. We do not waste our children's future on teaching nonsense that doesn't tally with the real world.Endex!PS: I’ve decided that your ‘glimmer of insight’ from your previous post was indeed ‘just random words strung together’ that looked on first reading that you might have gained insight, but in light of the post to which I’m replying obviously isn’t.Edited by Drosophilla, : No reason given.

No. Speak for yourself. I am defining "novel" as new and original. I have never defined "novel" as "dwarfism, pituitary gland diseases, deformed bones, peeling skin", because I am not insane.But if I did, then I guess right now I'd be telling you that you have a dwarfism, pituitary gland diseases, deformed bones, peeling skin notion of what the word "novel" means.You see how that doesn't work? Your redefinition, you see, is new and original. But it is not dwarfism, pituitary gland diseases, deformed bones, peeling skin.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Let's start with the mutations in pocket mice that we were talking about before you started in with your deranged gibberish. According to your crazy fantasy, "these mutations are all very deleterious to the animal". This is not true. According to sane people, there are conditions under which they are adaptive.

OK, so why would you guys claim that anything is a baramin? "God magicked it that way" would always be an equally good explanation for the observations, and since you evidently believe in God magicking species into existence and (implicitly) that he does so in such a manner as to fool people into seeing relationships where there are none, then you have no reasons not to suppose that in any given case.So how could you possibly identify anything as a "baramin" or, for that matter, assert that any group is unrelated, except that your personal preferences lead you to do the former but not the latter?

Not so fast.This whole scenario simply describes exactly what one would expect from this sort of aggressive breeding program, but still only changes within the Kind or baramin. I really have to question that they got new GENES, they must simply be talking about a whole new set of alleles for many different genes, which everyone sometimes mislabels new "genes" though it isn't what is actually meant.I'll have to go review it but back on the Introduction to Genetics thread, as I recall the question about the formation of actual new genes was answered with a NO by the genetics guys posting there, it does not happen. How could it? The DNA strand would have to incorporate an entirely new segment thousands of codons long between other genes, including the stop-start coding and the works. If this ever DOES happen, it isn't going to happen in a breeding program within a short period of time.Speciation certainly does happen but it isn't what it is often thought to be. It is what happens at the end point of severe genetic reduction in the service of bringing about new phenotypes. This ordinary process of microevolution can reach a point where the new phenotype cannot interbreed with others of its Kind, others of its "parent" population, due to severe genetic mismatch. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

What a great scientific answer. If insults were a sign of intelligence I would rate you a genius. Oh wait, any pre-school kid knows how to give insults, so it doesn't demonstrate any intelligence at all. So why would you want to hand out insults if it demonstrates your lack of ability to be mature? Are you showing off to the moderators? What's the motive?

My spin-off thread hasn't been promoted so I'm still posting here, hoping it's not interfering with the ongoing discussion.This should probably be taken to the Introduction to Genetics thread, where I believe you also participated.A mutation is a new sequence along an existing gene locus, correct?What you are saying is that you know this was a mutation, that is, new, because it doesn't have as many variations along its length as the "older" allele for light fur.This you could only know by comparing the genomes of many individuals, right? So what you find is that among the light-furred individuals you find many "neutral" variations in the alleles for the light color, but comparing the genomes of as many individuals in the dark furred group you find that the allele(s) for that trait do not vary from one another the way they do in the light furred group?Do I have that much right?So what is the idea here? That it is over many generations of being passed from parents to offspring that alleles collect these variations, so that if a number of individuals with an allele for dark fur don't have such variations in that allele this proves that allele is a recent mutation, that is, it laid itself out along a gene length just as any allele does, but its sequence is new compared to the others because it's identical from individual to individual.Am I getting this right at all?You call this a "recent selection event" but doesn't that end up meaning a recent "creation" event (not in the Creationist sense), that is, the mutation didn't exist before along that genetic stretch so it's brand new? So now it gets passed on to progeny without variations for some reason for some number of generations before it accumulates these neutral variations?But aside from all that, how is it that you could expect a mutation of such obvious benefit to the organism to just show up when needed? Isn't it normally understood that mutations don't exactly appear on demand because they are random mistakes in the DNA and that to get such a beneficial mutation right when it's needed is highly improbable, to astronomical proportions? Perhaps you have to assyume the mutation occurred some time previously and was then selected? But in that case why would it not show what you consider to be the usual marks of being an old allele with all those neutral variations? And also, if it was there before it was selected, I'd assume it was a regularly occurring allele just as I said. it got selected because those individuals survived in the new environment.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Oh really? Well then just present your evidence of where any part of DNA would favor evolution over 600 million years over creation and some minor evolution over 6500 years. I have been asking this quite a few times in this thread, and not even a weak attempt to answer this. If this thread is full of those who intelligently represent evolution, then surely you guys can come up with SOME evidence in the DNA itself, where it looks like a 600 million year process of being evolved. You see my faith is 100% sure on creationsim, but I acknowledge that empirically the evidence is currently about 50/50 for both views. I don't pretend that biological evidence currently strongly favors creationism and don't feel obliged to show that.HOWEVER you evolutionists believe that biological evidence strongly favors evolution, then its up to you to show it. Without showing it, and by putting the ball back in my court every time, you are indicating to the impartial observer that its more like a 50/50 situation, which is what I am saying. I believe the proven nested hierarchies that show limited evolution from a very recent common ancestor puts the evidence slightly in favor of the baramin concept. ok you are referring to radiometric dating now, which isn't appropriate to this thread. I can explain so-called old fossils. They are young. Radiometric dating has flaws.I've already explained the absence of clear genetic gaps, I believe there are nearly always clear genetic gaps. But grey areas are possible under the baramin view and would still fit into creationism, but hoping you can actually point out an example of a grey area.Evolution shows a LACK of significant transitional fossils. Its a weakness, not a strength of evolution. The clear nested hierarchies are once again, small changes from a common ancestor of the same era. This points to baramins. The so-called transitional fossils between the main animal kingdoms and major phyla , which is the extreme claim of evolution, is lacking. I've seen nothing significant, every point of yours I've answered clearly and logically. If there is anything I've missed, kindly point it out and I will deal with it again.

I would assume that the word normally refers to new features or functions that are not deleterious because we're talking about how these novelties get passed on as part of evolution. Of course the prevailing evolutionist explanation for how novelty arises is mutations, so when "novel" is strictly defined to include deleterious, neutral and beneficial mutations (which is pedantically correct enough of course), it seems to be changing the context or the point of this thread, which is to explain novelty that gets passed on. I believe there was an enormous lot of variability built into the original genome of each creature so that this is what is playing out over time. Novelty is a pretty standard occurrence in this scenario as there is so much variability new features and functions can come to expression through normal sexual recombination in newly reproductively isolated populations. Depends on the individual situation. I believe natural selection does operate in some cases, selecting individuals that survive in a new environment while nonadaptive others die out. That's the evolutionist argument, yes. I don't see any beneficial mutations myself but only genetic diseases as a result of mutation, or no effect in some cases. As Bolder has pointed out the only VISIBLE mutations, those that are really known, are the deleterious ones. The beneficial ones are assumed. I haven't been part of the discussion of "loss of function," that's Bolder's topic. I don't have any objection to your view of this. He believes it's a logical deduction from the facts that evolutionism should acknowledge that all you have is such deleterious results of mutation and that if there is anything to evolution through novelties by mutation you'd have to find your novelty in such deleterious mutations. It IS a reductio ad absurdem argument. It's his argument, I'm arguing something different. Yes, I get that. The whole idea of novelty on this thread as I understand it has to do with what evolutionism predicts. My own view is that what novelty is actually seen in nature is the product of normal genetic possibilities that come to expression through rare events. The genetic basis is always there but it takes being isolated in certain ways to show up in the phenotype. After it shows up it may be selected in or out according to environmental selection pressure. Again you are talking about Bolder's argument, not mine. And again, in my scenario in a sense there is nothing actually "new" because it's all potential in the genome to begin with. But novel features show up all the time because of population splits that change gene flow etc. etc. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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Oh really?

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Yes, really. If you imply that it's silly to even think that you had the augment you claimed to have then it's pretty clear that you didn't have an argument.

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Well then just present your evidence of where any part of DNA would favor evolution over 600 million years over creation and some minor evolution over 6500 years. I have been asking this quite a few times in this thread, and not even a weak attempt to answer this. If this thread is full of those who intelligently represent evolution, then surely you guys can come up with SOME evidence in the DNA itself, where it looks like a 600 million year process of being evolved. You see my faith is 100% sure on creationsim, but I acknowledge that empirically the evidence is currently about 50/50 for both views. I don't pretend that biological evidence currently strongly favors creationism and don't feel obliged to show that

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I've already given you one. There is no evidence of baramins in the genome. That is actually a very strong point.But here's another one. How about the cytochrome-C sequence. Cytochrome-C is a protein found in all eukaryotes and is strongly conserved. There are variations, though, and the pattern of these variations are strongly consistent with common ancestry of eukaryotes (i.e. the differences are as we would predict based on taking the pattern of branches proposed by common ancestry.). There's no evidence that the differences are functional (human cytochrome-C seems to work just fine in yeast) and there's no real reason to expect created baramins to show the same pattern (they could all start with the same or with versions too different to fit the pattern).

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ok you are referring to radiometric dating now, which isn't appropriate to this thread. I can explain so-called old fossils. They are young. Radiometric dating has flaws.

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In fact I am referring to multiple dating methods (not all radiometric) since i only need to find life older than 6500 years - and there's no good reason to think that radiometric methods are nearly bad enough for your view to be a real possibility.So again, another strong point against you.

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I've already explained the absence of clear genetic gaps, I believe there are nearly always clear genetic gaps. But grey areas are possible under the baramin view and would still fit into creationism, but hoping you can actually point out an example of a grey area.

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Until you can actually show these gaps there's really no reason to think that they are there. Nobody else seems to be able to find them.

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Evolution shows a LACK of significant transitional fossils. Its a weakness, not a strength of evolution.

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No, that's not true. The "lack" of transitional fossils is a shortage of fossils indicating species-level transitions. There are plenty of transitional fossils at higher taxonomic levels.

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The clear nested hierarchies are once again, small changes from a common ancestor of the same era. This points to baramins.

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That's impossible. It points to common ancestry. Baramins can't predict a nested hierarchy beyond the boundaries of each baramin. Therefore the presence of nested hierarchies that include multiple baramins is evidence against them.

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The so-called transitional fossils between the main animal kingdoms and major phyla , which is the extreme claim of evolution, is lacking.

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I.e. we don't have many fossils of small soft-bodied creatures from the Cambrian. But we don't need to look at those to refute your view. The fossils documenting the transition from the reptilian to mammalian jaw structure, for instance, are a clear evidence against your baramins.

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I've seen nothing significant, every point of yours I've answered clearly and logically. If there is anything I've missed, kindly point it out and I will deal with it again.

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I don't see how you can possibly believe this.

There was nothing implicit in anything I said that would point to God fooling people. the fact that you are resorting to such weak arguments once again reveals the weakness of your position.In what manner would the creation of two highly similar species be deliberately fooling people into seeing relationships? An intelligent designer would design organisms in groupings, just as car designers do. Entire ranges of designs are suitable for certain conditions and would have similarities to eachother in a grouping or range. This is not deception or "fooling" in any manner, and I find your interpretation of my position lacking any logic whatsoever. I don't believe its difficult to define baramins, as long as extensive genome sequencing has been done, refer to humans/chimps. genome.gov describes the differences in this manner, emphasis on the fact that only 29% of the genes match regarding coding for proteins. These are very obviously separate baramins because of the vast gulf between the two:
http://www.genome.gov/15515096
The DNA sequence that can be directly compared between the two genomes is almost 99 percent identical. When DNA insertions and deletions are taken into account, humans and chimps still share 96 percent of their sequence. At the protein level, 29 percent of genes code for the same amino sequences in chimps and humansI really do believe that baramins could be very clearly defined in future as genome sequencing advances, but in theory, its possible for there to be one or two instances of close matches that are grey areas. The occasional grey area would not threaten the view of baramins in any manner whatsoever, I don't see why you are insisting that grey areas would somehow discredit a view.

Do you realize this is kindergarten debating. My response that I have already made to this point you are making repeatedly is that neither does evolution have any evidence of 600 million years as opposed to 6500 years of evolving evidenced in the genome. So the same finger is pointing back at you. But I have said this already, and yet you are repeating the same point. Thanks for posting this, could you kindly give me a link so that I can look into your claims, thanks. Even if you are right about radiometric dating and other dating methods, which you are not, even so timeframes are not a good enough reason to favor evolution over baramins. A chimp and human match protein coding by only 29%. http://www.genome.gov/15515096 So humans and chimps are obviously not baramins, with their small 29% match. I believe a 99.5 percent match would possibly be a good indication of baramins. IF you have any evidence to the contrary I would like to see it, and maybe I could adjust that percentage to a better level. Under the creationist/baramin view, there has not been enough time for any significant genome evolution in the last 6500 years, and so any significant differences in genomes represents different baramins. There can however be vast phenotype differences, but to define baramins we have to look at genotypes not phenotypes.Edited by mindspawn, : No reason given.

Please keep your focus on the topic and not the participants.

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Do you realize this is kindergarten debating. My response that I have already made to this point you are making repeatedly is that neither does evolution have any evidence of 600 million years as opposed to 6500 years of evolving evidenced in the genome. So the same finger is pointing back at you.

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If the only way that you can answer my point is to resort to "kindergarten debating" then maybe it's because it's a good point. So, the lack of clear boundaries in the genomes clearly points to common descent over baramins.

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Thanks for posting this, could you kindly give me a link so that I can look into your claims, thanks.

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Here is one site discussing it, with some sequence data.

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Even if you are right about radiometric dating and other dating methods, which you are not, even so timeframes are not a good enough reason to favor evolution over baramins.

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But, of course, it IS a strong point against all those baramins being created 6500 years ago.
Which is a part of your hypothesis.

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A chimp and human match protein coding by only 29%. http://www.genome.gov/15515096

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Only 29% of proteins are IDENTICAL in sequence. Small neutral variations in protein sequence would be perfectly compatible with two species being in the same baramin.

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So humans and chimps are obviously not baramins, with their small 29% match

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That seems a pretty big match when only one small mutation anywhere on a gene is needed to change the sequence. And the change may well have no effect at all.So I'm still looking for a clear genetic gap that would indicate the existence of baramins. Mere differences won't do. Is there not one group of mammals that is obviously a separate creation from the rest ?

The evolutionist side suffers from the disadvantage of multiple voices leading to a confusion of arguments and phraseology. Different people come at the topic from different angles, some people's understanding of evolution is better than others, and all this does cause inconsistency and even contradictions, and it isn't always just the mere appearance of inconsistency or contradictions. Someone trying to make sense of the torrent of disparate explanations should not be blamed for drawing incorrect conclusions.The creationist side suffers from a credibility problem by giving evolutionists good cause to wonder whether this is really a serious discussion. It is not difficult to give the impression of working too hard at not understanding what is being explained. There *are* things that we do know.Both sides should be credited with keeping the discussion fairly civil. Thanks.