quote:
The thing is, the selection (random or targeted), of pre-existing alleles is the NORMAL way new phenotypes are brought about. Mutation is the UNusual way. This is why you need REAL evidence, and all you have is these suppositions.
But what about what mick said in
message #147?
First let's deal with the idea that populations having undergone population subdivision or bottlenecks are unable to recover the allelic diversity that was lost during those events. If you were to take a single bacterium and place it in a petri-dish, this would represent the severest possible bottleneck event for that bacterium and its descendants growing in the petridish. Now, if you left the petri-dish for a week and came back to sequence the DNA of the bacteria covering the gel, you would find alleles that were not present in the initial founder bacterium. The allelic diversity in the petri dish would have increased over the week. I don't think that this is seriously disputable. Allelic diversity can and does increase within populations due to mutation.
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