Introduction to Genetics

Oh how sad. Oh well, I've struggled along this far with a stacked deck against me, can't expect that to change I guess.

I accept that the EVENT called "speciation" occurs but I do not accept the name "speciation," I simply feel obliged to put up with it because it DOES describe an actual event. "Macroevolution" does not so I feel free to discard it. The actual event is merely the loss of ability to interbreed with the parent species that occurs in a particular subspecies, nothing more than microevolution, and the loss of breeding ability can happen just because there has been such a great loss of genetic variability the genomes no longer work together. There is nothing about this whole scenario that supports the ToE at all, in fact it challenges it, so the terminology is wrong from every conceivable point of view. As long as it remains a cat a creationist shouldn't call it "speciation" or "macroevolution." If you have to call it something, call it "subspeciation." However, many of those cats retain the ability to interbreed with others of the cat kind so "speciation" doesn't fit their case anyway. "Macroevolution" implies that the genome can eventually morph into another kind of genome. Evolutionists believe that happens, creationists don't. Yes, I know, they keep giving definitions that try to deny this but what else can it mean if all creatures have descended from ancestors way back there that are completely different? Besides, if "speciation" in actuality brings about inability to interbreed through a loss of genetic variability which makes the genomes incompatible, which is really very likely, then it works against the whole idea of evolution from species to species or genome to genome anyway, even over millions of years. Sigh. Once boiled down to the actual facts with the interpretive baggage removed from them, such claims can be explained in creationist terms. I have no doubt that this is just the usual case of similarities being mentally transformed into genetic descent, just say it and abracadabra presto changeo it is whatever your magical incantation wants it to be, which is how the ToE works. Just interpret the facts to fit the theory, who needs to prove any of it? but I don't want to take the time now to try to sort this one out, it would only take this thread even farther off course. Except they are not speciation events but subspeciation events and nothing has changed in the structure of the genome itself which is what macroevolution requires, and again, the reason for the loss of interbreeding ability is probably loss of genetic variability which oddly enough the ToE never anticipates, because it's such an optimistic formula, everything is always onward and upward. That genetic variability often actually decreases with the formation of daughter populations just can't exist in the ToE framework. It would completely muddy up the creationist point of view and it's important to try to keep it as clear as possible. No way, it needed to be answered.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Just the usual formulaic answer based on theory and utterly devoid of actual fact. Oh well.

Bach is good for the soul, unravels the knots brought on by lies and misrepresentations and other kinds of abuse.Quite nice with a cup of tea.Bach said "Music's only purpose should be the glory of God and the recreation of the human spirit." I need the recreation, and this thread needs an interruption.Oh yes I know this will only bring on an avalanche of more of the same.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

But it's not a change from a cat genome to the genome of some other species. It's still a cat genome. The cheetah's genome is still a cat genome but its many fixed loci prevent it from breeding with other cats. That's a change at the gene level but not in the structure of the genome itself. As I explained just a few posts ago, the terminology I insist on is not tendentious interpretive terminology, as the evolutionists' "macroevolution" and "speciation" and "divergence" are. This obvious fact was absurdly denied but it remains true. Those are interpretive and not descriptive factual terms. "Subspecies" describes the actual situation that is wrongly called "speciation;" it is also still microevolution, not macroevolution. Those terms are based on the ToE, they are not simply descriptive terms. I'm asking for descriptive factual terms, neutral terms, which do NOT compromise your ToE. If it's a cat, it is not "speciation" and it is not "macroevolution." Period. The morphing is all internal to the cat genome, it is not a morphing OF the cat genome into some other kind of genome. Again, my call is for neutral descriptive terminology which defines nobody's paradigm out of existence, although the ToE terminology certainly defines creationism out of existence and you along with all the rest of them are insisting on doing just that.And my remark about magical incantation is very seriously meant to be descriptive of what is actually going on, genetic descent is merely ASSUMED, it is not proved, cannot be proved, it is assumed based only on various similarities, and so aggressively assumed nobody dares point out that it is NOT a proven fact. A great deal of the ToE is merely MENTALLY CONJURED, it is nothing but unproven and unprovable hypothesis. That is true for instance of the idea that mutations are the source of viable alleles. That is simply an article of faith, an assumption, raw theory. And all that is meant seriously, it is not the usual ridicule for ridicule's sake that is heaped on creationists.I don't care how smart anybody is, the ToE has you all under a spell.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

But of course I disagree with your entire assessment of creationist thought and I'm just as serious about my view of the ToE as you are about creationism. I think the ToE is NOT scientific and that you are all fooling yourselves into thinking it is. I really believe that. Most of the tenets of the ToE are unprovable, merely unvalidated hypotheses. You can't prove that mutations do anything but damage DNA. You ASSUME mutations create alleles, there is no evidence whatever for that assumption. You ASSUME genetic relatedness between various species. That can't be proven either, it starts as an assumption and it remains an assumption. You CALL it science but it is very far from the usual requirements of science. Well 1) it isn't much of a science, and 2) its methods and terminology and definitions are tendentious and interpretive rather than descriptive and factual as one would expect of a genuine science, and of course 3) creationists are not anti-science at all, only anti the unscientific science of the ToE and of course the Old Earth.Oh, also you said that Creation Science has disappeared? Not that I know of. It's still going strong.Peace.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Of course not. Some species have a lot of genetic variability left. No. I'm sure it varied a great deal depending on the species, the circumstances, the generation time, the number of daughter populations, the number of the founding individuals of the daughter populations and many other things. I don't know if there's any way to know for any given species. But certainly the idea that any of it took millions of years is out of the question.

I don't think the earth has been around for more than thousands of years and don't expect it to last more than maybe another thousand. And no, a creationist doesn't think anything becomes a "completely new beast," just interesting variations or races of the given species. Looks that way to me, yes. Well, if they say things that disagree with God's word, I can't accept them. I stick to a general idea of how things would have played out, but there's nothing hard and fast about it. I assume it can be adjusted for specific cases if necessary. ABE: Species don't evolve at the same rate. But it's also likely that animals of the same name then may not be exactly like their counterparts today anyway. Very similar of course.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Eventually we're going to get a new earth. The billions of stars aren't going to go to waste.ABE: Oh and this one COULD have stuck around but, you know, the Fall and all that kind of wrecked things.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

As I think I've said somewhere up thread, macroevolution is the only one I really don't want to use. Speciation I use because it refers to something recognizable and it would be too confusing to try to use other words instead; suggestions for other words came up in the context of trying to explain what I think it really is, not intending to propose a different word in its place. That is, just descriptively it seems to be nothing more than a subspecies that has lost its ability to interbreed with former populations of the species.I might add here that although it hasn't come up in this discussion so far, I've been half expecting someone to question that description and maybe you should since it may not ALWAYS lead to inability to interbreed? Please clarify. If it doesn't, then I don't know what there is to differentiate this new population from any other subspecies.One issue I have with the concept is that I would expect it to show the trend to decreased genetic variability because it's a product of a population split or even a series of population splits, so that to call it a new "species" which implies it's a step in the process of evolution on to further species, is a tad overly optimistic.And I wasn't asking anyone to redefine "divergence" and "mutation," just to try in this discussion to use simple descriptive terms for the first, such as "difference" and to use "mutation" only where a change is KNOWN to be a mutation rather than the frequent use of it as an assumption that all alleles were originally mutations.But after all this rather rancorous discussion, I think I'm ready to just leave it all alone and struggle through the establishment terms as well as I can. "Speciation" implies something other than the usual development of a subspecies, it implies something outside the Kind or Species itself, a step outside (and having skimmed ahead a bit I see that RAZD is going to claim just that), but there's nothing in the actual facts that I can see to justify this idea; it seems to be purely an artifact of the ToE to claim this, not a description of the reality. Same of course with "macroevolution." An arbitrary term for something that is nothing more than the usual development of a subspecies, implying that it is more than that. "Divergence" clearly implies evolution of one species from another, but it should be possible to simply describe the factual differences between the genomes of the two without implying that. "Mutations" sometimes refers to actual known mutations and sometimes is used as almost synonymous with "allele," because of the theory that says alleles are the product of mutations, only because of that theory, not because there's any way to prove this; it's purely an assumption based on the theory.Yes the fox example looks like a lot of change in the structure of the genome, so either that isn't a determinant of a Kind or there is something else in the genomic structure that determines it. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

That's all I meant to be asking for. I tried to be very clear that I am NOT refusing to use the term "speciation" but that in fact I DO use it BECAUSE I know it would cause confusion not to. I TRIED to be very clear about that. Unfortunately I got involved in further discussion about my objections to the term and apparently you took that to mean I was refusing to use the term, which is not the case. I certainly don't see how this is true. Population splits are the best example of how new subspecies are formed, and I make a lot of my case about how this leads to decreased genetic variability from this example, so the idea I'm objecting to the mechanisms makes no sense. I AM objecting to the idea that what they lead to is a new "species" rather than just another subspecies. I see no justification for that term since the mechanisms are not different.As for going on to discuss genes, chromosomes and alleles, the problem is that I'm still back on Taq's much earlier post where he said some things I wanted at the time to figure out, but now I've forgotten what those were. The question that I began with was about identifying one species from another genetically. Really that's the question that started the whole thread, it just keeps coming up in different contexts for me. Taq was the only one who said this could be done; others have said right now not enough is known.I'll have to regroup as it were and see if I can recover my questions from those earlier posts.

This is how creationists use it. But the point is that microevolution occurs within the Kind, while macroevolution implies change outside the Kind or beyond the limits of the Kind, toward something other than the Kind; and I was looking for a way to show that the genome itself is limited to microevolutionary change, not successfully so far. My argument remains that you can't get evolution outside the Kind simply because the mechanisms that bring about evolution also reduce genetic variability. But this is not the thread to argue this. I've argued it to death on other threads. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

ABE: So all you've done is define "speciation" so that there is no way to differentiate the development of a subspecies of a Species from a change that makes one Species into another -- it's ALL "speciation." You are objecting to this very concept although you know as we all do that this is why creationists object to the ToE. /ABEThe problem with that system, RAZD, is that while it's technically true enough it blurs the line where you get another Kind from a former Kind, which is still what the ToE claims and what creationists are arguing with. All you are doing is insisting that the change comes about so gradually that one can't identify that line at all, basically trying to define the debate out of existence. But of course you know as all the rest of us do that the reason creationists object to the ToE is not about all those microevolutionary changes which have been known forever, but about the point at which you would claim that microevolution has become macroevolution.So perhaps you would be so kind as to provide us the terminology you would find acceptable for identifying that point so we can actually have this debate?But this really doesn't belong on this thread anyway.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

But the problem is you aren't looking for reduction in genetic variability (not "viability"), which is why you have not "seen" it. You are not looking where it would be found. There is no way this is NOT the case. When you have a population based on reduced numbers you HAVE to get reduced genetic variability in the population as a whole, ABE: though this may not be apparent until the numbers have been appreciably reduced so that the trend can become apparent. At first you'll just get the usual remix, the new gene frequencies, and new phenotypes from them, but in order to do that you have to reduce the competing alleles, and this only becomes apparent as an overall reduction in alleles as you get further population splits. This COULD be demonstrated in a laboratory. /ABEBut this should not be on this thread, which should be about the genome.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

But again all you are going to do is define this common ancestor into existence from your charts, not from knowing that there was in fact genetically such a common ancestor. Again, a lot of manipulation on paper, and no proof in actual reality. Greater heterozygosity in the long-lived people and creatures on the ark, but you probably aren't going to find any of those anywhere and if you did, not in a condition where you could test their genome. After the ark my creationist theory would predict a rapid increase in homozygosity in the genome of all the creatures. Today's percentage ABE: OF HETEROZYGOSITY /ABE in human beings is about 7%; a guess would be 30 to 50 percent or more in the generation right before the Flood and the eight on the ark who had lived before the Flood. After that there should be a rapid decrease in heterozygosity. Got a way to test for this?ABE: Oh and a lot less "junk DNA," a LOT less. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.