A test for claimed knowledge of how macroevolution occurs

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Others described the immune system as having an enormous number of mutations/"alleles," and IIRC said they did have functions in protecting against diseases, or many of them did or something llke that. All I did was realize that if that is the case different individuals have protections against different diseases, making it llke Russian roulette.

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For individuals, perhaps. For the species it is good to have a wider range of immunities. It seems entirely possible that the range of immunities is greater than a single individual could carry.

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have to review the discussion to remind myself what it was all about, but I also remember thinking that its genes must originally have been fixed for certain diseases, which would have meant EVERYONE had the same protections.

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No, it wouldn’t have to be true, since you only need one allele for protection and I don’t expect strong, sustained selection for any single allele.

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The mutations would have scattered the protections so that many individuals would have been deprived of the originals

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That doesn’t make sense. Aside from the fact that diseases also mutate so the resistances needed would not be constant, why would mutation “scatter” resistances ?You are also ignoring the fact that heterozygosity is an advantage, giving the resistances of both alleles. The smaller the number of alleles the smaller the proportion of the population to have that advantage.Edited by Admin, : Fix quoted sections.

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I've found it difficult to take the nested hierarchy notion seriously for some reason. If it's just the fact that there seems to be a regularity in inheritance patterns from generation to generation, that seems rather trivial or obvious and of no real importance.

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If you don’t even understand what the nested hierarchy is - and you obviously don’t - then it is not surprising that you are having trouble.The nested hierarchy is a feature of taxonomy going back to Linnaeus. To give a general overview (there are niggles in the details) it is like this:If you classify species according to their traits you find that there are traits defining groups at various levels. And you find that the smaller groups are entirely contained within the larger groups. E.g. all mammals are vertebrates or all sparrows are birds (and all birds are vertebrates).It doesn’t need to be this way, so the question is why it is. Evolution from a single common ancestor predicts this. Separate creation does not. There is no reason why a Creator would have to make things fit so neatly into a single nested hierarchy - but evolution from a common ancestor has to.

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For one thing the only pattern of inheritance that could be observed is microevolution -- which you acknowledge -- so anything to do with the ToE, inheritance beyond the species, is all assumption, nothing you could demonstrate.

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First, micro evolution is very much a part of the ToE. Second the nested hierarchy is evidence of a pattern of inheritance going beyond the species. The distribution of traits observed in life is entirely consistent with the inheritance of traits from a common ancestor, augmented by extra traits accumulating over time - which are also passed on.

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And by the way, normal sexual recombination is quite enough to produce the changes you are talking about, you don't need mutations as well, so I'd guess the mutations are also an assumption and not actually observed.

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Of course we know that mutations do happen and do add new traits. If you want to argue that it didn’t happen over the hundreds of millions of years life has existed then you need more than the assumption that sexual recombination could account for the differences.

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You are terrifically confused, but aggressively sure you are right about what you're wrong about.

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Well let’s see.

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What you are calling the "scientific facts" I'm supposedly "admitting I can't explain" are what I've been saying are relevant to the ToE but not to Creationism. That being the case there is nothing for me to explain.

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So in other words they are scientific facts you can’t explain. But you ignore them because you are doing bad religious apologetics rather than science. They are scientific facts. They are relevant. If Creationism can’t explain them - which is what you mean when you say they aren’t relevant - too bad for Creationism.

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I understand that everybody's mind is so enveloped in evolutionism it's hard to think in creationism terms.

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It’s not about evolution versus creation - it’s about science versus bad apologetics.

Yes, he did. The Taxonomy of Linnaeus divided three “Kingdoms” (animals, plants and minerals) into orders, orders into genera and genera into species.The classification of animals is still recognisable, although there have been many changes over the years.

Bradypus appears to refer to the sloths.

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I've seen that chart many times and it is vey hard to read even zoomed to the max but I don't see how it shows a nested hierarchy?

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You’d probably find it easier if you paid attention to the explanations that Jon and I have already given.Nevertheless here is how it works.The whole two-page spread covers the Animal kingdom.The six major columns are the classes. The first is “QUADRUPEDIA”. Defining traits are listed below (so we can see that the “QUADRUPEDIA” are mammals - I can grasp Latin enough to see that they are hairy, have four “feet”, females give live birth and lactate)The subdivisions of those columns are the more detailed parts of the hierarchy.Thus on the left we have the order “ANTHROPOMORPHA” which is subdivided into the genera “Homo”, “Simia” and “Bradypus”. Traits are again listed.The next sub-column to the right is the defining traits of the genera.The next sub-column divides the entries into species, and includes division into subspecies. (Homo has the entry “H” and the sub-divisions are bracketed together - humans subdivided into Europeans, Americans, Asians and Africans). The entries for “Simia” are not bracketed together, nor are the entries for “Bradypus” - they are full species. Traits are not listed.So there you have the nested hierarchy, kingdom, order, genera, species, subspecies.Each subspecies is fully contained - nested - within a species.Each species is fully contained within a genus.Each genus is fully contained within an order.Each order is fully contained within a kingdom.

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Saying it's not relevant to the creation model is not the same thing as saying I can't explain it.

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But it is saying that the creation model has no explanation. If the creation model dismisses facts as irrelevant then surely they are outside the model.

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I would probably explain it as mutations that are mistakes that don't change anything.

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But you aren’t being asked to describe the source of individual changes. You are being asked to explain patterns of genetic similarity - patterns which can obviously be explained by common ancestry, but have no obvious alternate explanation.

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You can't get "patterns of common ancestry" from random mutations.

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The patterns are there. Common ancestry is the best explanation. If they are outside the creation model as you claim then you have a problem. Ignoring them for an obviously spurious reason is not a sensible response.

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Sorry, I'm going to wait for RAZD to continue this discussion

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Do you mean Taq ? Because this doesn’t seem to be one of Razd’s subtopics.

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In reality microevolution can't lead to macroevolution because the processes of variation require the loss of genetic variability.

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That’s your opinion, and one that is almost certainly wrong.

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Domestic breeding always seems to be the best illustration

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Even domestic breeding makes use of mutations, if the breeder likes them. However, because of the shorter timescales and strong selection it is certain to underestimate the importance of mutations. Moreover, it does not seem to produce new species.

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When Darwin formulated his theory based on Natural Selection he assumed it was open ended and didn't realize it requires genetic loss, and neither does anyone today it seems.

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As you know perfectly well we believe that mutation replaces genetic variation. And the evidence supports us.

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Getting a new population with new characteristics either in breeding or in the wild requires loss. That's what selection IS and DOES, i

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Interestingly the most rapid evolutionary change occurs while selection is weak. And, of course, we all know how selection works.

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I know you have the usual ToE assumptions about all this but they don't work

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I think you mean that you don’t like them because they do work.

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In a ring species what REALLY happens is that a population multiplies for some time and then individuals migrate from it to a new location and start a new population. These individuals carry a new set of gene frequencies from the set that formed the first population, so if they are have reproductive isolation, which may not be perfect but for the sake of discussion we can assume it is, then after some generations of breeding within this new population you'll have a completely new "species" that may have some dramatic new characteristics simply because it is combining a new and probably smaller set of alleles. It can probably interbreed with the original population.

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And then after this second population is well established and its numbers have grown a great deal, individuals migrate away from it and establish a third population and the process repeats: new phenotypes from new gene frequencies and NO mutations necessary at all.

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Of course you do not know what really happens, you just assume.And you do not explain why more distant populations lose the ability to interbreed. That is what makes it a ring species rather than a collection of subspecies.

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And of course all this is microevolution..

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If you remove the intermediate populations, a ring species would become two species. That’s a good example of how microevolution can lead to macroevolution.

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That's just a lot of assertive bla-bla.

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Less so than your post. Besides I am recapping points already covered in past discussion.

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...but if you are going to interject, at the least you need to give evidence of your claim

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Your post was notably free of evidence. Of course I did do better than you did, showing that ring species support macroevolution and explaining why breeding is not so good a model.

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The inability to interbreed by the last population is most likely the result of its severe genetic depletion after so many losses through the earlier series of populations

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That seems rather unlikely to me. What makes it more likely than mutations reducing interfertility ? Do you have any evidence or is it just your opinion ?

Just to clarify. While the origin of the sequence in question may be a random mutation the pattern - the species it is found in - is explained by common ancestry.E.g. ERVs - the origin is a viral insertion event, but after that it’s just ordinary vertical transmission, parent to offspring.

There are a lot of assertions there but no real evidence.

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So even if you could have a long series of daughter populations branching off a parent population, eventually they have to run out of the genetic stuff which makes evolution possible at all, and again, mutation can't prevent this from happening. At best it could put it off for a short period, but I don't even think that happens.

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The pocket mice demonstrate that mutation can produce new selectable variation. Your assertions don’t even make sense. Even if evolution did reduce a species to being genetically homogenous- something we have never seen - new variations would still allow evolution to proceed. Why should we accept your unsupported opinion when it defies evidence and reason ?

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Again consider domestic breeding. You get your breed, you get a purebred maybe, what happens if you get a mutation at that point? Well, you'll either want to incorporate it into your breed or you'll want to get rid of it. You have that choice by how you select breeding partners at that point. In the wild that mutation will probably get selected out, but if by chance it multiplies and survives maybe it will become a trait in the new population. A TRAIT, one single trait.

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The obvious error here is that you are considering only one mutation when there is a constant stream of mutations arriving. Whether a species becomes “genetically depleted”, as you put it is down to rates as I have explained from the very start. That is obvious from the mathematics. But you don’t supply any evidence that the rate of mutation is low enough to support your claim - and the evidence we have says that there is no “genetic depletion” except in species that have undergone unusually severe bottlenecks.

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To hold onto the curled ear mutation that shows up occasionally in cats required a lot of careful breeding, and in the wild it's just going to throw away that kind of mutation. It may still show up here and there down the generations, but the odds are it isn't going to become part of the characteristic phenotype. (And by the way I still doubt that's a mutation, I suspect it's the result of something that happens in the normal processes of breeding when a particular trait gets multiplied, in this case a weakness in the cartilage, and shows up once in a great while for that reason. Yes, I know I'm a pain.)

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If that were true then the trait would be very hard to breed. It isn’t. If all you have is speculations untempered by the evidence - which appears to be the case - then you lose. Because we do have evidence and reason on our side.

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Doesn't matter how many mutations there are

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It certainly matters for your argument.

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anything that adds to the genetic diversity has to be reduced/selected/subtracted/depleted or whatnot in order to get new phenotypes or a new "species."

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And more mutations will come along to replace them. That is what it means to have a constant stream. Again it all comes down to relative rates. Until you can address that properly - and you never have even though I brought it up right at the start - you don’t have a real argument.

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But I'm not going to spend time on your posts in this thread, at least not yet. I've got enough to do dealing with RAZD's

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What matters far more than who you reply to is whether you produce real evidence - rather than taking the attitude that that is just for other people. You would think after all the years you’ve been pushing this argument that you would have something, but no.