Faith writes:
What you are calling errors are of course not errors, they reflect another way of looking at these things than evolutionists do. I cannot see how an increase in vegetation could "exert" any kind of "pressure" of any sort on a lizard population, sorry. Unless they lacked other food, as I said.
It seems that for you even the simplest concepts are difficult. Environments exert selection pressures. Environments that remain largely the same will exert consistent selection pressures that tend to keep species unchanged. Any change in the environment changes the selection pressures, and species will change in response to those different pressures. There are no types of environmental change that do not influence selection pressures. Both increases and decreases in food sources will change selection pressures.
In the case of the lizards of Pod Mrcaru, the greater availability of vegetation as a food source provided a survival and a reproductive advantage to those individuals best able to consume and digest vegetation, and they would contribute the most offspring to the next generation. Their offspring would have the same advantage, or even a greater advantage to the degree that any morphological changes better enabled them to consume and digest vegetation.
Again you give me a generalization or an article of faith rather than evidence, just a statement of the evolutionist creed about how these things work, all an interpretation which cannot be proved. Which is OK because all we have in such cases IS interpretation. But then you can't treat it as ironclad fact as you do, and my interpretation holds up just as well.
Again I acknowledge that Natural Selection must sometimes operate, and again I'll say I don't see any reason to think it was operating in the case of the large-headed lizards. There is no reason to think the small-headed type suffered from reproductive disadvantage and eventually died out because they couldn't eat the vegetation as well as the large-headed type; they died out because they were the older generation and their allele frequencies combined so that their offspring all eventually inherited the large head and jaw. It's all genetics-driven in my scenario. It can be regarded as an alternative viewpoint or interpretation, and there's nothing really about yours that is more reasonable than mine.
You do not have merely "another way of looking at these things." You have a way of closing your eyes to even the most obvious facts.
What you are calling "facts" are just the evolutionist theory of how these things occur; it's all interpretation, not facts. Nobody KNOWS that the vegetation had anything to do with the emergence of the large headed lizards, it's all a matter of "faith" in what the ToE says.
They have to inbreed for a number of generations in reproductive isolation to bring out their peculiar shared traits, and the larger the original number of individuals the longer it's going to take to produce a group identity as it were...Pets are not normally allowed to breed...
It seems you can't even get facts about daily life right. You do realize that many people keep hamsters or mice or gerbils for generations and generations, right? Don't you think it would have been noticed centuries ago that if you breed a small group for generations that they become different?
Yes I think it would have occurred, but perhaps not have been noticed, and there may be good reasons for that. Perhaps the differences aren't of particular interest to their owners who are more interested in the individual differences perhaps, the character of each pet, and certainly aren't interested in creating a new variety. Perhaps they do select individuals for breeding too, because they like a certain look, and that would interfere with the random mixing that would occur in the wild. Evolutionist teaching is that migration is one of the "mechanisms of change," and surely the isolation of a family of pets can be likened to migration away from the mother population, so change ought to be expected if breeding patterns that occur in the wild are allowed to occur in domesticity as well, for whatever number of generations it takes.
Don't you think that if all one had to do to get unique phenotypes was buy a couple hamsters at the pet shop and breed them for 20 generations without selection that it would be one of the most common science fair experiments out there?
Not necessarily, because people aren't normally thinking in these terms. It MIGHT become such an experiment if it interested someone to try it. I'd recommend it myself. But normally I'd expect that people really can't keep themselves from preferring and selecting and favoring certain types so I'd expect them to keep interfering. And again they wouldn't have any interest in finding out what nature would produce from the random mixing of the allele frequencies, they are interested in raising PETS and they like individual differences. I would myself. But it would be nice if someone WOULD do such an experiment.
Don't you think that if what you claim were what really happens that it would be a popular family activity to buy a couple gerbils when the kids are young and see how different the descendants become by the time the kids graduate college?
If they thought of it, they might, but what would make them think of it? it would take a few generations just to bring out the new range of traits and then more generations to let them inbreed until there's a characteristic trait picture. People are going to get bored and interfere before there's a real test. Unless they have this idea in mind and are looking for it. But I'm not even sure it could happen in most domestic environments anyway. We're talking a LOT of animals over those twenty or so years.
But no one ever observes anything like you claim.
Even if they did it wouldn't interest them or carry any significance for them so they wouldn't make an issue of it. But in reality it probably hasn't been given a real test.
Again, if a random process such as migration is a "mechanism of change" the isolation of ANY subpopulation ought eventually to demonstrate the change.
...and breeders simply don't LET their animals breed randomly among themselves.
That's right, because it doesn't work.
It won't produce the particular changes that interest them so in that sense it doesn't "work" and that's why it wouldn't occur to them to try it. But if they DID try it eventually they would get change of some sort over many generations because that IS what happens in the wild, with all the random ways subpopulations get isolated and inbreed among themselves.
But breeders have no motivation to do this. They are always looking to maximize particular traits and minimize others of their own choosing. Nature's random methods aren't too likely to produce what they happen to like.
Breeders use selection because long before we knew anything at all about genetics the secrets of how to breed effectively were already known: mate pairs who most possess the qualities desired.
Exactly. Nature isn't going to do that, it's going to allow matings of all kinds of individuals inbreeding within a particular subpopulation and what eventually emerges will be change because of the different allele frequencies from the population that they came from, but not the particular changes breeders have in mind.
If isolating a small population were all it really took to generate new phenotypes then breeders would have discovered it long ago, and in the hope of generating new and useful phenotypes they would allocate a portion of their efforts in this direction.
But breeders aren't INTERESTED in generating just any random set of new phenotypes, they have particular phenotypes they want to promote. The only way anyone would do such a thing is on the basis of an interest in what nature does left to its own devices, and as far as I know there's been no reason for anybody to have such an interest.
But breeders don't do that. Because the world doesn't work that way.
See above.
Faith, buy a couple gerbils and prove this to yourself. They breed once a month, it won't take long.
Many times I've wished I were in a position to do such an experiment but I'm too old, have too many other things on my mind, don't have the proper space and I'd be a terrible owner of animals since I couldn't give them the best environment for their needs.
And it would take a few years at least to see the kind of results I expect. Besides which, I wouldn't do this to a mere couple of gerbils anyway as it would maximize in their offspring whatever diseases they are prone to. It would have to be started with oh at least ten individuals, and that would take more time to play out, though not beyond a young person's expectable future. Besides which I just read up a bit on gerbils since you made this suggestion and found that they can be a bit cranky and hard to manage. Not the best animal for me to experiment with.
™ Version 4.2
