What is the mechanism that prevents microevolution to become macroevolution?

Actually, I doubt he made the assertion that every speciation involves the loss of a gene or genes, which was your claim in your Message 108. Kindly reference this.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The divergence of genotypes is the same as the divergence of phenotypes as far as what I'm saying goes. I expect both to diverge. I expect speciation or incipient speciation to be occurring in the two subspecies at the far ends of the territory. I've been saying this in the last few pages. I have been arguing that this divergence of phenotypes AND genotypes is the result of the differing frequencies of alleles between the two populations, and most likely the loss of some alleles as well in one or both populations which is what "reduced genetic diversity" means.In other words, divergence of both phenotype and genotype is no refutation of anything I've said but a confirmation of it. And since this appears to be the whole supposed refutation offered by that article, it fails; in fact it confirms my view and not yours. This does NOT refute what I'm saying, but the opposite, it confirms it, as I've already said. I have repeatedly said that I EXPECT greater divergence with greater distance, and that gene flow would INTERFERE with speciation --- the reduction or absence of gene flow ENHANCES the speciation processes. It appears that you haven't even made the slightest effort to follow the argument. You are describing this article as proving exactly what I've been saying, yet you are claiming it refutes me.I suppose it is that you have such a totally evolution-focused bias that you can't hear this thing I'm saying no matter how many times I say it. There is no reason whatever to assume that these alleles are novel in the sense of brand new. My argument has been from the beginning that when you have a strong shift in allelic frequencies, which in ring species is very likely to include the loss of some alleles, you get VERY new allelic combinations, new genotypes, new phenotypes. The novel alleles are not novel in the sense of brand new to the species, they were simply suppressed or latent or of very low frequency in the original combined population, and may very well now be completely absent except in the population where they are noted -- why? Because they were low frequency to begin with. Merely sampling a few individuals would likely miss their existence too if they continue to exist in low frequency. So what you mean by "increased genetic diversity" is merely mutations.But absolutely nothing in anything you have said about what the article is about demonstrates that mutations have any part whatever in any of it.The mere fact of divergence or incipient speciation, and the presence of some supposedly novel alleles, seems to be enough to prove in your mind that mutation must have a part, but this is merely assumed. Nothing has been said to demonstrate that this is the case.What is actually described of the circumstances fit MY scenario -- the divergence of phenotypes and genotypes, the lack of gene flow, the appearance of previously suppressed alleles, all that proves what I have been saying from the beginning. It is all thoroughly explained by allelic shuffling and reduction of genetic diversity (loss of alleles).Mutation has no necessary role in any of this, and there is not one iota of evidence that it actually does in this case, in anything you've said or the article has said.It seems to be the case that mutation is merely assumed to have a role because you aren't grasping the fact that it is not necessary, that when there is reduced gene flow and clear divergence between the populations, or incipient speciation, changed allele frequencies including previously suppressed alleles now being expressed, and lost alleles (or loss of genetic diversity), explain it perfectly.Since you aren't grasping that, or refuse to believe it, being evolution-focused, you stick mutation in there to explain it. But you must SHOW that mutation has contributed to this at all instead of assuming it. You haven't done this, nor has the article. The fact is mutation isn't involved, you and the article are simply projecting it into the scene by assumption. All of which is apparently focused on proving that divergence and even incipient speciation has occurred, which is far from disputed by me. But none of what you've said actually demonstrates that the genotype differences can't be accounted for as I've claimed, you have merely asserted it. All completely hollow claims. The entire scenario is easily explained by allelic shuffling. I can't even understand why you doubt this. There is nothing in the scenario itself to suggest it can't occur as I've described.You, and the article, are simply *asserting* that alleles are novel without proving they are novel (just because they didn't turn up in a sampling of the population left behind?), and merely *asserting* that mutation is bringing about the genotypic diversity instead of proving it, and so on. Again, you seem to think that the mere facts of divergence and reduced gene flow are evidence enough, although they are evidence for what I'm saying instead.AGAIN, despite your offering of evidence, there is no ACTUAL evidence for your position in any of this, because everything you have actually provided supports MY position instead. Thank you for asking, I appreciate it very much, and you ARE missing what I'm trying to say despite my many repetitions of it.So let me try it again to say it clearly, God willing:What I'm claiming is that a reduction in genetic diversity (loss of alleles) is the OVERALL trend over time in all the processes that lead to speciation. These are the same processes that bring about change in allele frequencies, only from time to time the change is a reflection of alleles having been lost altogether. This is clearly the case in bottleneck which is why the cheetah keeps coming up -- a dramatic unusual extreme case of speciation that involves great loss of genetic diversity that I bring up to illustrate the principle. I also bring up domestic breeding of animals such as dogs, because it is also demonstrable there that a loss of alleles brings about a new breed, and that no amount of inbreeding of that type would turn up a whole raft of alleles that other dog breeds possess. The absence of these alleles is part of the definition of the breed, a part of the process of developing a new phenotype, genotype, organismal type etc.Many events that bring about a new phenotype are merely the shuffling of alleles rather than outright loss of diversity through loss of alleles, but the ONLY cases where an increase in numbers of kinds of alleles occurs is hybridization. Gene drift may increase the frequency of some and reduce the frequency of others, but an actual increase in alleles only happens with hybridization or the recombination of previously isolated populations. Since hybidization is the ONLY situation in which an increase in genetic diversity occurs, and you think an increase is necessary to speciation, then hybridization should be where you would look for evolution to occur. But it isn't where you look. You look where there is no increase or even a decrease, but without recognizing this decrease as intrinsice to the processes of speciation.In none of these processes except hybridization does the production of a new phenotype involve an increase in genetic diversity (increase in kinds of alleles). Population splits either do not reduce genetic diversity, simply changing frequencies, or they DO reduce genetic diversity through loss of alleles, which must happen quite frequently when populations split off in a series of splits as in the example of ring species, so that the farthest apart populations would have alleles that the other doesn't have at all or has at very low frequencies.The point is that since increase in diversity is of absolutely no use in speciation (unless you want to count hybridization as THE track to evolution), but decrease allows formerly suppressed alleles to produce new phenotypes, the overall trend of speciation processes is reduction of genetic diversity.These are all the normal processes that bring about speciation. Nothing new is needed. There are plenty of alleles for all kinds of variations of most species. But out at the extremes of speciation there will be fewer alleles per locus, and this also no doubt accounts for the inability to interbreed with other populations of the same species.Again these are the NORMAL proceses of speciation.Now you want to introduce mutation into a process that doesn't need it for starters. You think genetic diversity must increase for speciation to occur, the opposite is counterintuitive as you say. I suppose it is. You have to get rid of alleles for others to form new phenotypes, that's all. Otherwise a population will stay pretty much the same or slowly change through gene drift as frequencies change due to internal influences. Change in phenotype/genotype requires a new allelic collection that reduces or gets rid of the old in order to allow the expression of something new and different.ENTER MUTATION. But where does it enter into this scenario? It appears that evolution merely assumes it, because it assumes that all alleles were once brought about by mutation. It is not needed for speciation. Certainly it occurs, perhaps now and then it is selected, I wouldn't deny that, I just haven't seen that it actually contributes anything necessary or important to speciation, which follows from allelic shuffling quite well.I hope that's clear for the umpteenth time. I'd have to look up a dozen words, have to study to understand their whole context of usage in science, so yes, it is probably out of the question. I did take your word for it. I took what you said about it completely straight, and I answered, more than once by now, that it is not proving what you think it proves.

I'm not accusing you of making stuff up, merely misreading.In Message 34 he is talking about a loss of alleles of ten genes, not a loss of genes: I'm a bit unclear about what he is saying about what is isolated from what, but it's not at all unclear that he's not talking about a loss of ten genes but a loss of alleles for those ten genes.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Considering how many alleles must be no longer available, forcing the few that got bottlenecked to define the new organism / phenotype /genotype, I hardly see how it could avoid bringing about new traits. I used "selection" in the informal sense of "random selection" -- I guess that can be confusing. I didn't mean anything like the alleles were chosen, only that they did just *happen* to get bottlenecked. But there certainly is a different collection of alleles from the original population since many must have had to be left behind. Well, but the whole point of the bottleneck (and founder effect) example is that it is not at all likely that you would get anything like the same distribution as was in the original population, because the new population is so much smaller. Two alleles per gene might be the total available in such a case, whereas there might have been even a dozen or more for the same genes in the original population. So unless the original population was already very allele-poor you are not going to get anything like the same diversity, you are going to get something dramatically different from the original after a few generations of inbreeding in the new population with the very few allelic possibilities. Well, I'm trying to avoid being all that strict, I'm trying to argue a TREND here, a trend TOWARD speciation that involves overall reduction of genetic diversity, normally over many generations, not a clearcut formula for instant speciation. The usefulness of the bottleneck and founder effect examples is that they cut to the chase -- they are examples of a drastic reduction in genetic diversity while at the same time they should be expected to demonstrate the formation of a new phenotype or even speciation as a result of this reduction. I don't know why you are focused on a "strict relationship" since I've been trying to say that this is trend, not a strict anything. Overall you get a reduction in genetic diversity along with the development of new phenotypes. But there are situations where such a reduction doesn't happen of course, such as gene drift within a population or a population split in which both are quite numerous, or any form of selection that simply reduces the frequency of alleles in a population without eliminating them. To get the genetic reduction I'm talking about alleles are totally eliminated, they no longer figure in genotypes for their traits so new traits from other alleles take their place and gradually shape the new phenotype.Again, the bottleneck simply demonstrates this process of reduction of alleles at an extreme. Most situations simply shuffle alleles rather than eliminating them altogether.But in neither case is there an increase in alleles. All these processes that lead toward speciation either shuffle or reduce alleles. The only situation in which there is an increase in alleles is hybridization but this does not introduce anything new, it simply recombines formerly separated alleles.My remark about mutation was that mutation is absolutely the only thing that could possibly ADD alleles. All the processes of speciation otherwise over time involve reduction of alleles. I haven't claimed that genetic diversity is reduced for anything but the population being discussed, in which it brings about new phenotypes and even speciation.The idea that mutation now takes over and produces new alleles is pure fantasy, an assumption dropped into the story without any warrant whatever. For starters, mutation is not needed for speciation, since the shuffling of preexisting alleles alone can bring it about, most especially the expression of formerly suppressed alleles when others are lost to the population -- this is all it takes to form new species or variations out of the existing collection of allelic possibilities. Mutation is absolutely NOT needed. Again, while mutations do occur, and are occasionally selected, it has not been shown that they contribute anything beyond negligible (or destructive) to the formation of new species.{EDIT: EXCEPT OF COURSE IN BACTERIA. And here's an answer to that one, Crash, if you're paying attention. You are dealing with ONE cell there. You get a mutation that allows that cell to survive a threat and multiply. But multicelled creatures do not get mutations in all their reproductive cells all that predictably, do they? They don't get mutations at anything like a rate that would contribute useful traits, and as you have said many times MOST of such mutations are either supposedly useless or a bad thing.} Sorry I am not following you. Bottlenecks MAY cause a new species, but I don't see how species cause bottlenecks, they may simply exemplify them. Um, I hope the above has clarified what I was saying since none of this represents it.{Edit: First, I haven't said that bottlenecks are CAUSED BY speciation at all, this is your own thing completely. And second, I'm sure bottlenecks don't always cause speciation, but it would be very unusual if they didn't bring about new phenotypes in the new population with its drastically reduced genetic diversity (numbers of alleles available per gene.)Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Rereading this thread, realized I could answer some contentions a little more clearly perhaps: This is false. We are constantly affirming that genetic changes accumulate, creating new varieties or breeds as a regular thing, even to the point of speciation. What we deny is that this goes beyond the Kind and that it involves mutations. All it takes is the playing out of the given complement of allelic possibilities, as I spend this entire thread, and a few other threads, explaining. We have no interest in demonstrating that small genetic changes don't accrue over time; we affirm that they do. We merely deny that they accrue beyond the Kind, and in this thread I'm arguing where the barrier to further evolution / divergence /variation /speciation beyond the Kind is to be found. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

It isn't hard to find discussions of these common phenomena in relation to conservation programs with endangered species, that is, the reduction in genetic diversity through population isolation. What they usually leave out of the discussion is that these processes are related to speciation, certainly at least the development of new genotypes and phenotypes, or divergence of populations phenotypically one from another, which is a step on the way to speciation.As the article you linked is concerned to prove, the geographically isolated populations of Ensatina can probably be termed incipient species or possibly even species due to their lack of contact with one another or lack of gene flow between them. This means that each is inbreeding with its own different frequencies of alleles and possibly even an absence of some that the other population retains. This gets called incipient speciation in that article. Perhaps Ensatina is not yet on the verge of extinction, but a few more splits off the existing populations, leaving more alleles behind, and it could very well go in that direction.Anyway, what I've been talking about all along is this common pattern which leads to the endangerment of species (in the very process of differentiating them). Here's one discussion of this pattern.Page not found – Essig Museum of Entomology Which is what the article about Ensatina identifies. Isolation, which leads to formation of new phenotypes or incipient speciation, not mentioned here but think about it, is BAD for genetic diversity which bodes ill for the prospects of the species in a fallen world.And if mutation were anywhere near the power claimed for it, so many species would not be on the verge of extinction as a result of becoming isolated and changing in the ways that may be called incipient speciation or outright speciation.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Here's the problem I'm talking about in the context of domestic breeding. From the very first sentence it ought to be clear that the very processes of developing a new breed or species lead to reduction in genetic diversity. Speciation=reduction in genetic diversity. BUT this is bad for the species' survival prospects so they are trying to encourage breeders to avoid this usual speciation process: http://www.lhasa-apso.org/health/wolves.htmIt's rather odd that this common fact that reduced genetic diversity is associated with the development of new species is not easily recognized among evolutionists. They put all their hopes on this phantasm called mutation, yet have never shown that mutation occurs in any degree or quality that could overcome the effects of the inevitable downside of speciation -- the trend to extinction. Mutation occurs, it sometimes gets selected, and all their focus goes there.Meanwhile, species speciate further and further and get closer and closer to extinction, and conservationists have to deal with the nitty gritty reality that speciation is NOT a healthy development. The implication from this fact that there's no way that evolution could ever be built on such a reality seems never to enter any evolutionist's mind. They just claim that it's all saved by .... The Mighty Mutation, this fantasy that can't be demonstrated to do anything like what is claimed for it.Meanwhile, again, conservationists are working to UNDO the effects of speciation, because, well, it just plain doesn't go in the direction of evolution, it goes in the direction of extinction. Imagine that. Cross-Species Amplification of Bovidae Microsatellites and Low Diversity of the Endangered Korean Goral | Journal of Heredity | Oxford AcademicThe fact is that all living things were given a genetic package back at the Creation and it has simply been playing out ever since, losing much of its contents over the centuries and millennia, but still capable of a lot of variation. Only now more and more species are getting out to the speciation limits of their Kind where extinction threatens. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

My argument is that reduction in genetic diversity is the inevitable inexorable trend of all natural processes towards speciation, and all species undergo these processes. It's a trend, not an "instant conver[sion]" to new species. I don't think a bottleneck always leads to speciation, but it may in fact, meaning it may lead to a new phenotype / genotype that can no longer interbreed with others of its kind -- if any near relations are even still around. I think that nowadays it is most likely to lead to this condition, however, because of the overall depletion of genetic diversity across pretty much all species. That's a guess, but as a principle, no, speciation isn't a necessary result of a bottleneck, merely likely. Bottleneck is merely a way to illustrate the situation of severe genetic reduction caused by population reduction. The kind of domestic breeding programs that simply aim to get the best of a type without regard to its survival prospects bring about the same condition, the kind that a quote I gave above called "breeding to exinction." What is breeding but a step on the way to speciation if not speciation itself? You select, you change genetic frequencies and if you get down to a few founders you certainly remove lots of alleles / genetic diversity from your new breed. That's how you GET the new breed. Yes, they are possible in the original species, but the traits of some alleles are not expressed much or at all, and could be said to be "latent," either because they occur in very low frequency or are recessive or affected by other genetic conditions I wouldn't know a lot about. These are the ones that breeders breed FOR after all, the unusual trait, the low frequency trait. These are the ones that pop up and surprise by their seeming newness in a drastically reduced new population that happened to contain them. All this newness does not require anything really new, at all, just the coming to expression of formerly suppressed or latent traits, because of the removal or reduction of competition from other alleles that formerly dominated in the original population. The point is just that it is very hard to get across this fact of inexorable genetic depletion through the normal processes of variation and speciation, because mutation keeps being assumed to take up the slack of this depletion. In fact it simply doesn't. Evolutionists automatically think in the direction of mutation as the driving force of evolution, by its supposedly increasing genetic diversity, producing new alleles and new traits to be selected, and it is very hard to get the focus off mutation and onto the fact that all the OTHER processes that affect genetic diversity are working to decrease genetic diversity. Mutation has to be able to occur at a prodigious rate with prodigiously useful effects to overcome this inexorable reduction, if the ToE could possibly be true, and so far what has been demonstrated of mutation just doesn't meet the challenge.

Well, I was using the term Archer Opteryx used, and took it in a rather generic sense as he seemed to be using it, speaking simply of observable changes accruing over time, which is certainly not disputed by creationists. You seem to want to insist that the term must imply mutation, and I suppose it probably does for evolutionists, but simply descriptively there is no reason why it should. I guess I could drop the "genetic" if that helps, and simply say that we do not deny all the observed changes that evolutionists say accumulate in species, we simply explain them differently. But these changes occur both in the phenotype and the genotype and involve alleles shuffling -- and I guess I'm back at "genetic changes." Don't really see how to give up the term even if evolutionists mean something different by it than I do. Again, I have no other word for it in order to answer what was clearly meant by Archer O, since clearly he meant that we deny the accumulation of new traits toward speciation, and the fact is that we do not deny that. Well, as long as you insist that "genetic changes" = "mutation" then of course I am denying them. But those genetic changes as a matter of observed fact I do not deny, merely the explanation for them. There is nothing "super" about it. It's all normal well-known shuffling of alleles you can find described in any basic genetics course or certainly on domestic breeding sites. Surely there is a ton of evidence that the alternating of different alleles for a gene produces variation. Perhaps it is so ubiquitous and taken for granted it is simply hard to recognize. Mutations create variation but at nowhere near the rate of allelic substitutions and most of it is useless to the organism. "Undemonstrable lost genetic information?" What's undemonstrable about the effect of changing alleles? If you have a dozen alleles in a population for a particular gene, you get very different traits from each. If 6 of those alleles are left behind in a population split you'll have 6 in each new population that will come to characterize each population as they spread and sort through it over time, and both populations will eventually look appreciably different from each other and from the original population that had 12 alleles -- certainly a step toward speciation or divergence between the two. Genetic effect of the most common gardenvariety kind. No role here for mutation. Well, an allele looks like an allele I guess, and if mutations make alleles then why would they look different? I'm not selling a religious belief, I'm arguing evidence. I would say that the evidence I've given on this thread ought to make you realize that speciation does not require mutation, even if it occasionally makes a small contribution to it, and that nothing more than that has yet been evidenced. All the changes are all quite easily explained by the most ordinary common normal genetic operations. This does lead to suppositions about a beginning point in the past, but stick to the evidence itself. You don't have to follow me there. The evidence will lead you there.

Chutzpah I've got, in a way, but it's simply based on seeing how what I'm arguing is true, even if I get some of it cockeyed here and there. I'm not particularly clever, I'm arguing a pretty straightforward point, but I do pray a lot to be able to understand it and convey it. However, what I've given IS evidence. All you have to do is follow the reasoning. It's all there. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I've never once used the term "mutation pressure." I have no idea what it means.The only way I've used "driving force" I got off a definition of mutation at Wikipedia: mutation as the driving force of evolution.{Edit: OK I see where you recognized your error, that you should have imputed it to Philip instead of me}Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Not necessarily at all. The particular alleles for the traits that characterize the cheetah were there in the population, but the particular combination of them that is the cheetah may not have been, and in fact probably wasn't, it took the bottleneck to isolate them and combine them.All the alleles for the Great Dane or the poodle or the spaniel were already there in the dog population hundreds or thousands of years ago, but there is every reason to believe that neither a Great Dane nor a poodle nor a spaniel ever existed until recently. All the alleles for all the modern breeds were there even if the dogs all looked like wolves or mutts. No, it removed alleles, and left those that put together the cheetah. Well, others here seem to be disagreeing with you more than I am even. They tell me that I can't even talk on the level of the phenotype at all, that all the processes I'm talking about are about the genotype -- or something like that; I guess I'll eventually get around to those posts. I think that's wrong since the genotype codes for the phenotype and it's the phenotype we have in mind when we talk about evolution.But in any case I disagree with your picture as I just explained. The cheetah phenotype did not exist until the bottleneck. It came about as the result of the alleles for it being isolated and recombined by inbreeding in the new population. Not so, only the alleles for it were, and they were most likely mixed up among all the other alleles, and could only make the cheetah when they were isolated out. They could have been selected, for the special adaptive abilities of the fast cheetah for instance, but in this case they were bottlenecked. It's POSSIBLE that the cheetah in basic form did exist and the bottleneck merely streamlined it, but that's not necessarily the case, and the virture of the example of the bottleneck for my purposes is as a demonstration that dramatically new phenotypes can be put together by drastically reduced genetic diversity. Yes, if you focus on only one allele you can say the phenotype was already there, although it's even possible then that a recessive just never got expressed at all, or at least very very rarely in the population and it took a bottleneck for it to get expressed -- that would mean that the bottleneck just happened to isolate a pretty rare combination though, but it could happen. In any case, it's the combination of all the alleles of all the genes that make up the cheetah that wasn't there. Or probably wasn't. Well but even in that case you can talk of having an entirely new population even if the phenotype for that population did occur occasionally in the old. But again, it's a more complicated combination of many traits and their alleles that happens in reality, such that the new phenotype really has never been seen before.{Edit: Not that it stops looking like its predecessors in any case, but that it is a new version of them, of course. All the new species that arise still have most things in common with all the others of their Kind. Whether this comes about as I am describing or by totally novel mutations, nothing newer than a variation on the theme happens phenotypically} I don't know where you think you've proved this. The occasional mutation certainly wouldn't prove it. Yes. But Crash, you've said this many times and have NOT shown it to be the case in anything but the onecelled bacteria, and I'm not even certain in what sense the allele that pops up there is really "new." In multicelled creatures and sexually reproducing creatures, however, you are *assuming* that mutation brought about all the genetic material, but you haven't shown anything like that, not even the beginning of it. I'm not. See above. Consider dog breeding.Edited by Faith, : changed select to isolateEdited by Faith, : No reason given.

Here's my answer. It's selection operating on the pre-existing alleles in a population. "Selection" in the broad sense. It can mean natural selection, or sexual selection, or the random selection processes of geographic isolation, migration etc etc etc. But it all operates on pre-existing genetic potentials, that is, the variety of alleles available.

It was probably not very numerous in the population at large, and to be expressed probably had to get paired up with another of the same, a low probability occurrence. Other people could be carriers of it without expressing it, if this is how it operates. No. It could be an allele that used to be very numerous but has been destroyed by deleterious mutations {Edit: or by one of those "neutral" mutations that "don't do anything" because their effect isn't detectable unless you know what the allele that got destroyed was supposed to do}. So this allele in its original form only survives in small numbers here and there. A random sample could all too easily fail to pick it up. What's to notice? Are you checking everybody's DNA? Some people live longer than others. Are you checking the DNA of all of those? You can't even identify them UNTIL they've lived longer. Maybe they live longer because they have this allele but there could be other factors. How are you going to identify who has this allele if it's rare?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Do you have a link to a discussion of these factors in this case?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.