Syamsu's Objection to Natural Selection...

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Told ya I was going to have to start picking fights with the evolutionists.

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I would offer to remove 99% of my brain and believe anything Jerry Falwell says to further the debate by becoming the other side..but I think that it would hurt too much ...or is being a creationist painless i.e. ignorance is bliss? Sy should be able to answer that one...

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Such as the location of particular spots on a calico cat? hmmm... not sure if this is an appropriate example. Pretend it is.

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Lets say we clone such a cat. Lets clone about a thousand of them. We remove all the cats with white spots on their foreheads, and breed the rest. The frequency of white-spot-foreheadism will not have changed?

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Acutally a better example would be fingerprints...they are determined by stochastic process which is why no two are the same...if a human clone is ever born it will not have the same fingerprints as the original copy..or whatever the hell you call the person who is cloned.In the cat example a range of coat color patterns should always emerge in unpredictable ways regardless of who you remove from the population...i.e. you can't select for the pattern you want.

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Such as mutations in the developing embryo? Ok. That makes sense. hmmm.... but that would be genetic? And, depending on when the mutation occured, might be heritable-- but not always. That leave us with developmental weirdness caused by lead exposure, say? Wouldn't there be a genetic component to susceptibility to this sort of thing?

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I was thinking more along the lines of Hox gene expression. Most of this is in gradients which give a cell positional information and tells it what to become and when. If this happens a little later or a the gradient is offset in any way, you will get phenotypic variation...this does not require an underlying genetic difference. I don't mean full scale mutations or dramatic developmental abnormalities but more like why I have a unique nose compared to my either of my parents...ok maybe that one is because I have landed on it a few times to often ...ultimately to get gene expression, proteins have to interact with each other and with DNA to drive RNA expression which then involves proteins and nucleic acids again...at each step their will be stochastic variation...the protein does not bind the gene promoter so well..expression is weaker on Tuesday's embryos than Wednesdays because of whatever in the environment...you will end up with phenotypic variation that is not heritable and not based on a sequence difference.

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But unless it is the heritable type, the variantion would be irrelevant to evolution, yes? Ok. It is starting to make more sense.

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Heritable epigenetic changes are selected for or against like plain old genetic differences. There are epigenetic diseases associated with screwed up imprinting like Prader-Willi and Angelmann syndromes...why imprinting even evolved in the first place is a fairly active area of research. But you are correct, if it not a heritable change, evolution won't do anything with it...but it could cause a phenotypic change without changing a single base of DNA...it is probably why a lot of cloned animals suffer from obesity and other developmental abnormalities...got the DNA right but the imprinting was wrong.

Are you saying that non-heritable features could
be selected for?Like, I dunno, all the big strong ones survive to breed
cause they are bigger and stronger, but they got to be bigger
and stronger 'cause their mum's had a good feeding season while
they were pregnant?I meant 'directionless' in the sense of no intended outcome.If you are saying that NS can act on traits without promoting
evolution, then I agree.NS isn't evolution, it's just one enabler.

I think you have what I was saying now, I was trying to point out to Rrhain that the fact that even if there was no genetic variation in a hypothetical population of gazelles, his hypothetical not mine I hasten to add, it would not lead to either all the gazelles being eaten or being able to escape predation, there could be non heritable variation within the population affecting which members, if any, were more prone to predation.Assuming that predation is being seen as a selective process for one extreme of the varying trait, say leg length, then it could act on phenotypic as well as genetic variation, but as you say it would have no evolutionary consequence on the prevalence of that trait in the next generation.The outcome is neither here or there when the question is whether or not the variation is a suitable target for evolution.

Wounded King responds to me:

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I certainly don't feel this is any less disingenuous than your original argument.

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Well of course...we're on opposite sides of the debate.The point is that selection happens on variations. If there is no variation, there can be no selection. Now, evolution is a process involving heritable variation coupled with selective pressures.

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Firstly, we are not unable to gauge the variations in a population,

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I didn't say completely. What I said was that we have a hard time noticing the differences from a herd thundering past. Given the huge interplay of forces, it requires a meticulous study of the individual and the environment in which it exists in order to detect the variation between it and its companions unless we happen to have a big selective force like, say, death by predator.But notice that the selective force doesn't tell us why it got away. Did that particular gazelle manage to avoid the lion because it had better hearing and thus could tell when it was in danger sooner leaving its less sensitive brethren to be taken? Perhaps the gazelle was faster than the lion and could out run it. Perhaps it was more agile and could keep the lion off balance. Perhaps a combination of all of these and more. The point is that there is variation among the individuals.

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there is no reason why one could not do a thorough study of both morphological and genetic variation in a population of gazelles.

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As they're thundering past?

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Secondly, by environmental factors I wasn't solely reffering to nutrition of the whole herd,

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I know. I was merely referring to a single example so as not to get bogged down in minutiae.

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I was pointing out that even allowing for a herd of genetically identical gazelles they would almost certainly present a range of phenotypes,

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I know...one way of producing variation in phenotype is through such a thing as nutrition. Another, since we're dealing with mammals, is exercise. There are lots of non-genetic things that can cause variation.

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Thirdly, your argument that the continued existence of both predator and prey proves there must be variation, all this continued existence really requires is that the predator not eat more of the prey than the population can replace.

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I said that directly.And that's where the disingenuous part comes in. Obviously it is trivial that if the predator doesn't eat prey at a rate faster than the prey can replenish itself, then the population will remain stable.What makes you think the predator can do that? That environmental conditions will be so stable so as to keep the predation rate solid enough to keep the two around? Especially over a long period of time? The gazelles and the lions have been out on the savannh for thousands of years.

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Even if the predators could catch the entire gazelle population they need not kill every single gazelle.

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I know. I said that directly. And again, you're being disingenuous.So long as the predation rate is less than the replenishment, there will be prey. But what makes you think those two will remain consistent? And you're forgetting about the feedback loops involved. If the predation rate exceeds the replenishment, it tends to make the replenishment rate become even less since there are fewer individuals around to create the next generation.

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Given the correction proportions and reproductive rates, i.e. predators are fewer in number and slower to reproduce, I can't see any real problem with having a stable predator/ prey system where the predator can always catch the prey.

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Neither can I......for a while.You think that's going to happen for thousands of years?------------------
Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

OK, I understand that your argument was that we couldn't guage morphological and genetic data for a population of Gazelle in motion. This seems rather an odd point though, if you can measure them before and after what is lost by not measuring them as they go past. Just because Syamsu doesn't understand any basic biology is no need to lower yourself to the same level of slapdash thinking.i.e.

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Since there is variation, there is selection among the variants.
Hence, evolution.

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Which obviously doesn't actually follow if the variation can be from non-heritable sources.It isn't trivial that given the right dynamic the predator prey rlationship can be stable without variation if your entire argument is that their continued existence proves both the existence of variation and evolution. You couched your argument solely in terms of the predator prey relationship, adding environmental changes in as a requisite and post hoc fix makes what you said considerably more reasonable, but why not make it clear in the first place? If the point of the exercise is to show Syamsu that he is wrong the least we can do is try and be rigorous about it.As to ignoring the feedback loop, obviously as I am saying a pre-requisite of this stable population is a predation rate equal to or below the replacement rate then why should I take into account a feedback loop based on a predation rate higher than the replacement rate.As to predators not eating everything, why shouldn't it be able to do that? If the prey outnumber the predators 10 to 1 I can't see the Lion chasing around killing 10 Gazelle Just for itself.I can't find pretty much any of the things you claim to have said directly in any of your posts, did you say them prior to post 255?

I understand what you mean by 'suitable target for evolution'
now.

I know you have your designs set on stopping any and all meaningful discussion about the subject, but why should I take your drivel about baseballbats as the final say on the matter? You're engaging in suppression, intimidation etc.For the rest, again..., you are simply invalidating basic biology. And also you forget that you can still describe variants with a cutdown definition. Again... the standard definition limits the scope of what organisms it covers for requiring there to be a differential pairing for it to apply.It doesn't matter if horses are exactly the same or not, since fundamentally the cutdown definition of selection is individual. It only looks at the one horse. Other same or variant horses may then show up as selective factors to the horse being looked at.regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

and when one generation later the one horse you looked at has not bred, has not left behind a single progeny behind and a different horse that is not the same has...then what was the point of looking at one horse?..you definition is so pathetic you are already having to interject other variant horses as "selective factors" while ignoring their relative fitness i.e. contribution to the next generation..LOL!...and you accuse schrafinator of spouting drivel..LOL!

We would probably all be a lot more ready to accept your criticism if you showed any understanding of Basic Biology, you have yet to show me how you explain host/donor rejection, a fairly fundamental concept in immunology, without discussing variation. Similarly you haven't yet shown how including variation in the definition of NS invalidates the Michaelis-Menton equation. Given how detrimental the common evolutionary understanding of NS is to basic biology you have yet to actually demonstrate one single area where it causes any problem at all.

Maybe the horse is a hermaphrodite, like this table.

I suppose 'substrate' might be a better word, I see how 'target' made you think I was suggesting some specific end.

What are you attempting to examine with your idea?What reprsents reproductive success of an individual?

yeah like those wild herds of parthenogenetic mustangs..hi ho salty

Syamsu,Please answer the question posed in this post. Why the reluctance? You seem so confident in your assertions, this should be a breeze.Mark------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

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The frequency of white spot foreheadism should not be changed in the following generation, thats right.

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Ok. I have to ask how this has been determined? What sort of experiments have been done? ( Not specific to cats, of course. )------------------
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