Evolution Requires Reduction in Genetic Diversity

This is completely incorrect. You cannot provide any evidence for what you keep saying. None, nada, never.Mutation happens in every organism. It happens every time organisms reproduce. It is inevitable and accounts for every single trait in every single organism for the whole 3.8 billion year history of life.Mutation and selection swamp the minor loss of diversity when populations split. It has been happening for 3.8 billion years, with no end in sight.

Oh mutation happens all right, but what YOU can't prove is that it produces the changes you claim it does. It was always understood until this mutation fiction took over, that variation is simply a matter of the sexual recombination of genetic material.

It was always misunderstood you mean. I don't know who you think always understood this. It was wrong.The variation in the genetic material is all made up of mutations. The ongoing study of modern genetics has steamrolled your naive views. They are based on a profound lack of knowledge about biology and genetics. I am amazed that you just keep harping on the same mantra over and over, as if repeating errors will make them less erroneous.

Oh that's for sure. A pure fiction has steamrolled the truth. Happens all the time these days.

Knowledge trumps ignorance every time.

Not needed for what? Perhaps a better choice of words would be that they are not wanted. Not wanted by you.Mutations are not needed to do the limited things you want to allow, like producing at least some of the breeds of dogs or explaining why family members can vary so much. But mutations are needed to drive changes as described by the theory of evolution. In short what your position is exposed to be is simply denying that mutations exit. Yet your claim is that the theory of mutations cannot work even with mutations.Of course there is irrefutable genetic evidence for mutations of the very sort that you deny. Tigers, chinchillas, and mice are all known to have mutated variants that affect their color to the point where the exact mutation have been identified. So what your position amounts to is just denying the truth. It is not that such mutations are simply not needed. For you to be right, they cannot exist, even in relatively rare numbers. And yet they do.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

How could mutations not produce these changes?Why do you think that humans and chimps are different? It is because their DNA is different, right?Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

And indeed between that thread and this thread and the one we're doing now.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Wow, I do hope that you just throw major parts of modern genetics into the litter box.Anyway, it is not true as an abundance of experiments showed.Let's take one of those: the long-term Lenski experiment on E. coli.
Sources:
- http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/, and:
- Just a moment...Lenski took E. coli bacteria and bred them in 12 separate subpopulations (for reasons of proper experimental design). Some strains were exposed to deprivation of their normal energy source, glucose - almost to starvation. But they also were exposed to another energy source in the same time - citric acid. Normally E. coli bacteria cannot process citric acid in aerobic conditions.Somewhere around the 30,000th generation, some strains were able to process citric acid in aerobic conditions. While Lenski's team kept a frozen sample of each generation - their "evolutionary history", they were able to trace back the exact differences in the genome.Some 100 genes had changed their expression.
That means what is says: CHANGED.Intermezzo: I DO hope you know that bacteria don't reproduce sexually.
Hence: the changes in the gene expression in the E. coli bacteria in Lenski's experiment were entirely due to CHANGE in the base pair sequences. And that was exactly what Lenski observed and he also traced those mutations back to the exact loci and spelled out the exact altered base pair sequences on the CATG level.Moreover, somewhere else you addressed the problem how a very small population of just 8 persons (after the Flood) could have produced the currently observed, pretty extensive genetic variance in humans by condoning that it came from the redundancy of junk DNA.Let's take skin colour. Skin colour in humans in controlled by several genes. In order to obtain the current variation in skin colour out of 8 persons from the same genetic background, some junk DNA must have been CHANGED - well, according to *your* scenario. Because in that scenario non-functional DNA sequences allegedly became functional (coding for melatonin, pheomelanin or eumelanin.But sexual reproduction DOES NOT change alleles.
In non-random mating they can change the frequency of alleles but it cannot introduce genetic CHANGE by altering junk DNA sequences into functional genes.Already Mendel realized that.
Each allele in a heterozygote is EITHER from the mother OR from the father and is rendered UNCHANGED. So Mendelian genetics is not a matter of blending alleles but of segregated sorting. I thought we knew this for 150 years - the inheritance patterns of traits as observed make no sense in a blending model.

Sorry, I don't accept anything about bacterial genetics (your E. coli example) as applying in this discussion. You have to use examples from sexually reproducing creatures. What? Don't know what you have in mind here.Nothing "changed" in anything I said. I believe junk DNA is genes that died over the millennia as a result of the Fall, most as a result of the Flood which was a very severe bottleneck. If about 95% of the genome is junk DNA today, a rough guess would be that maybe about .0003% was junk DNA at the time of the Flood. So it just seems likely that there were even more genes governing skin color and every other variable trait as well. Good thing then that I don't think so either. The only thing I suggest is that genes died as a result of all those people and animals dying in the Flood, whose traits were lost to the species and therefore the alleles for those traits, so the genes just died and remain in the genome as corpses. Again I don't see what this has to do with anything I've said. But as far as blending goes, allleles don't blend but apparently the effect of so many genes for variations in skin color pretty much amounts to a blending of the traits themselves. You get degrees of lightness and darkness as well as combinations of shades of yellow, red and blue.But I'm afraid I don't get what you were trying to say in this post anyway.

But we know for a fact and you have been shown Faith that what you claim is simply bullshit. We have examples of human genes that were contemporary with Adam if Adam had actually existed and from even thousands of years before Adam and they show that human and animal and plant and bug genes were pretty much the same before and after the imaginary Fall or Floods.The reality and truth is that there never was a "Fall" or either of the "Biblical Floods" and it's time you stopped using falsehoods and nonsense and tried truth and reality.

True in a strict sense, but they do engage in sex, the technical term is conjugation. It depends upon how you define sexual reproduction. If it's defined as extending from the production of gametes through fertilization then since a mutation could occur during that process it must therefore be acknowledged that sexual reproduction can change alleles.

Participants don't get to dictate the parameters of discussion. Please explain why you don't believe bacterial genetics are relevant to this discussion. Please concentrate defense of your position on scientific evidence. The Bible is an excellent source of ideas and inspiration, but not of scientific evidence. If you believe that for the most part junk DNA is once-active DNA that has been disabled (and certainly some of it is) then you must support that idea with facts.Edited by Admin, : Grammar.

I know but this is not the kind of sexual reproduction Faith was referring to nor is it relevant for his ideas about sexual recombination that allegedly lead to genetic change conceived by Faith.I'm afraid when I would incorporate such details, post are getting very long and too detailed. Because there are constantly many more such points crossing my mind when writing my posts! Yes but Faith was talking about the effects of Mendelian processes and excludes himself the possibility of mutations having any effect on a gain in genetic diversity.Maybe I better had applied the term "sexual recombination" instead of "sexual reproduction" here.

I thought we were discussing genetic and evolutionary PROCESSES here instead of the genetics of particular life forms.Now I mentioned a case of clear genetic innovation in E. coli bacteria involving genetic mutations being sorted out by the process of natural selection and leading to the emergence of a new trait.Do you think that the genomes of sexually reproducing species all of a sudden do not experience genetic mutations? And are sexually reproducing species not exposed to selective pressures due to natural selection anymore?As I explained to you, EXACTLY because of a lack of Mendelian processes of sexual recombination in bacteria, they are a PERFECT example of gain in genetic diversity in the ABSENCE of such processes. Thus proving you wrong on your claim that genetic diversification is impossible to be caused by them. Please, respond to the things I actually say.
Yes, I know that you think that genes died over the course of time and turned them into junk DNA.But I was saying here that in order to account for a gain in alleles of the very same genes to account for a difference of 59 - 16 = 43 alleles between the maximum number possibly present in Noah's crew and the number in the extant human genome, you have 2 scenario's:
1. genetic mutation and natural selection leading to new alleles, or:
2. those new alleles emerging from junk DNA - which ALSO implies genetic mutations to accomplish that.If you know any OTHER scenario, let me know. Well, to put it just quit and simple: according to Mendelian processes, sexual recombination per definition cannot lead to new alleles. In Mendelian processes, which govern sexual recombination, alleles are not added or changed or deleted. They are only - as the word says itself, recombined. They are reshuffled. A child may inherit one allele of the same gene from its mother and the other from its father or both alleles from its mother or from its father. No alleles are added or deleted or altered. the child NEVER inherit the same allele party from its father and the other part from its mother. It's the WHOLE allele from the father or the WHOLE allele from its mother. No "mixing" of alleles here. I think there was no such flood but that would be exceeding the scope of the actual thread so let's concentrate on genome again.So you believe that the genome lost much of its genetic diversity.
Do you, again, also happen to have empirical evidence for that?
I already offered you some possible sources for that in another post to do the comparison.Now the effect of a genetic bottleneck on the genome of a species (whether it is caused by the Biblical flood or not) is that a very small subpopulation out of the total gene pool is retained and the rest discarded.Now explain please:
1. did the genome lost GENES or ALLELES by those being turned into junk DNA or BOTH?
2. if genes, which traits were lost than? Because your position implies that an astonishing number (accounting for at least a substantial part of the current 95% junk DNA) of different traits must have been lost.
3. if alleles, I shall have to remind that you already had severe difficulties explaining how Adam and Eve both could only have a maximum of 4 alleles and the Noah's crew a max. of 16, while in extant human populations, some genes can have as much as 59 alleles. So alleles were added since Adam and Eve or since the Deluge. And you are SUBTRACTING them from the initial genome.Edited by Denisova, : Forgot something.Edited by Denisova, : Correcting a wrong number.