the phylogeographic challenge to creationism

Deal with whoever you want. What do I care? Just, employ the terms as they have been properly defined. Respond to corrections by correcting your behavior and usage.Don't shift the blame for your ignorance onto us.

Ask her. Or did you not notice that I was repeating her remarks to me? If you're concerned about the direction the tone of the thread is taking, look to the one that instigated it, not me. I didn't resort to it. Faith finally responded to many, many posts where I patiently explained her error by berating me and admonishing me to "make an effort", as though it's somehow my problem that she doesn't know how to use words in the English language. I was so interested; right up to the point where Faith abandoned civil dialogue with me. Don't try to make this out to be my fault.

Thank you, but I believe I'll continue to post my points as I concieve them, and not rely on others to communicate haphazardly the things I believe I'm best equipped to say. I've never expected Faith to reply, but despite continuous assertions that she "isn't interested in talking to me", she continues to address posts to me.And if she insists on lowering a previously-civil thread to a personal level as she did, I'll respond in kind, as I have. I've never demanded that Faith reply to my posts. She's never been forced to. If she doesn't want to talk to me, that's fine. But if she is going to reply its her obligation to be civil about it.

And you consider that a feature of civil dialogue?You're hopeless. Almost every thread where I engage with you winds up in the same place - you're unable to defend your arguments, so you attack me personally. I keep your best example of your personal vitriol against me on a bookmark; it's hilarious.

Boo-fuckin'-hoo. YEC's like Faith don't substantially respond to points or bother to correct their misapprehensions unless you drill them with it. That doesn't seem to be something you're prepared to do.But, you know, if you want to go around in circles with her, be my guest. But try not to misrepresent my posts in this thread; they only appear "content-less" because you've only quoted the sections and posts that were not substantitive replies but simply my attempts to defend myself against misrepresentation and personal attack.Sort of like your entire post, in fact. The source of the thread degeneration is your opponent, not any of us. Threads are going to degenerate no matter what when a participant consistently responds to being told that the sky is blue with "what's that? The sky is pink? Thank you very much for agreeing."

What are you talking about? I did that almost 200 posts ago in this thread. You pleaded total ignorance of what I was talking about, called me some names, and stopped talking to me.Look, Faith, if you don't understand how evolution works, and how evolutionists model the changes in genetic diversity that stem from the additive and subtractive mechanisms, thatt's fine. But please don't pretend like we don't understand either, or that we haven't been trying to present exactly what you're asking for. We've been doing nothing else for an entire thread.

Well, we know it wasn't built-in - as part of the experiment, it was taken out.It wasn't present anywhere in the original organism. In subsequent organisms, it was present. That proves mutation. The only "genetic potential" for these sequences to arise was the unlimited potential for genetic change that mutation represents. There was nothing specific about it. Most organisms did not mutate the same way, but mutated in other ways; and they died. The mutation was random, not specific; but the conditions selected one particular mutation and eliminated thousands of others.It only appears specific because we're only looking at individuals with a specific mutation. Other individuals with other mutations were not selected and not observed. It only appears specific because selection was used to limit our field of view.

Well, by definition, the selection doesn't tend to decrease the beneficial mutations. Maybe you could? It's not really his job to comment on my arguments for you.

It actually doesn't matter. The genetics are basically the same. Sure, sexual organisms are diploid, but that should work in their favor; each organism can store more in the way of built-in genetic variation than the bacteria can, not less.So, if even bacteria, hampered as they are by being haploid organisms with less built-in potential variation, can generate variation in excess of what was built into the founder organism, then there's absolutely nothing to prevent sexual organisms from doing the same.Bacteria don't have a power that more complex organisms don't have, or something. Anything that applies to bacteria basically applies to all other organisms; which is why we perform the experiments on bacteria in the first place.

Mendelian sexual recombination doesn't actually constitute a source of variation, though - it's only an explanation for patterns of variation.For instance, Mendel's models explain how much of a population of pea plants will be tall, and how many will be short. They do nothing to explain where the "tall" and "short" traits actually come from. For that, mutation is required.It really doesn't make any sense to examine variation in the absence of mutation, although I understand that you're tenaciously attempting to do so because the very existence of mutation completely undermines your argument.

It's not clear to me what additional evidence would be neccesary to prove to you that, in fact, it's been proven that mutations are fundamentally random and not the product of predictable law-abiding processes. But I should think the fact that we observe variation within species beyond, that cannot be explained by, the basic Mendelian mechanisms of dominance/recession (which largely don't apply to the majority of genes, anyway), would be sufficient to do so.You might just as well assert that airplanes cannot possibly exist, because Bernoulli's principle doesn't provide enough lift. And yet, the airplanes fly. What you need to understand is, when your conception of things leads logically to conclusions that are demonstratably untrue, that's proof that you're wrong. We've already explained how mutations overcome this effect. But, to repeat: mutations overcome the contraction of genetic diversity via natural selection by increasing genetic diversity.It's really very simple. What part of that are you having trouble with? You don't understand how a mutation increases genetic diversity? It's logically correct, but it's been proven that mutation overcomes the contraction of diversity in gene pools that result from selective processes. Proven about 200 posts ago, as I seem to recall, and as yet, unchalleneged by you or any of your peers.Can we dismiss the fiction that mutation doesn't provide enough diversity to overcome selection, now?

The proof, as I said, has been presented. Mutations are random; we know this because random mutations, with random fuctions, occur whether or not they represent a survival advantage to the organism. And we know that they're not the result of some pre-programmed cellular mechanism because if they were, the clonal decendants of a single organism would never develop diversity, because they'd all develop the same mutations at the same time (because, being clonal, they have the same cellular mechanism.)It's proven that mutations are random, and not the result of the processes you describe. If you wish to challenge this point, by all means do so with evidence. But simple protestations of "nu-uh!" and "I heard you're wrong!" don't constitute anything but fallacious appeals to ignorance and anonymous "authorities." Not really. If you read it that way it's because you're not educated enough to understand what people are telling you. That you lack any basis of knowledge in regard to physical chemistry and genetics was made abundantly clear, as you'll recall, when you misinterpreted the abbreviations for nucleotides in a codon as the abbreviations for elements in a molecule. No, you don't. Mutation provides enough diversity to counteract your "half a dozen" diversity-contracting mechanisms - a fact that has been abundantly proven to you. It's predictably random, which proves my point. Moreover the fact that some mutations are lethal is irrelevant. We're talking about diversity, not fitness.

If it ever seemed like you were capable of absorbing the information, or were interested in doing so, I might. As it is it's not so much a matter of "patience" as it is me getting tired of bashing my head against the same brick wall.Some people are too old to be taught, I suspect.

I don't understand what you mean here. "Speciation to the max"? Doesn't make any sense. If you have a population with no diversity, then you have one species. Not speciation to the max, which would be every individual in the population being their own species."Speciation" is when a population gives rise to a subpopulation of a new species. It's not a condition of genetic diversity, and a lack of genetic diversity doesn't cause it. It's a condition of gene flow that, often, results in decreased genetic diversity for both populations, because they each lose access to the distant genes of the other population.For instance, if you were to take the state of Alabama and send all the white people here and all the black people there, each of those new populations would be less diverse than the population they were when they were joined; but if you were to populate a new state with nothing but identical clones of a single individual (no genetic diversity at all), that would not be "speciation" of any kind.

No, mutation - increase in diversity - is the source of new traits. We've already established that your position is nonsense; it's ridiculous to assert that new traits in a population connote reduced diversity, since diversity by definition is a measure of how many different kinds of traits exist in a population. New ones mean, by definition, that diversity has increased.Speciation is not the same as new traits. You conflate the two but you do so in error. Speciation means new species, not new traits. New species tend to develop new traits, of course, but that's a function of rebounding diversity after the speciation event.As I said, this is going to be very difficult indeed if you're completely unwilling to correct your mistakes. By definition, new traits cannot connote a reduction in diversity. Since they are new, diversity must have increased. No one's challenged this. I'm agreeing with you. It's you who doesn't seem to understand that. What hasn't made sense? Did it occur to you that you could ask me questions, ask me to clarify? It would certainly be much more prudent if you actually made an effort to comprehend the information I'm presenting to you, before you summarily dismiss it. Right, but it wouldn't be "speciation to the max", it would be one single instance of speciation. I don't consider "one" to be "the max", so it's still not clear to me what you meant by "speciation to the max." Somehow I doubt it's even clear to you.