Y.E.C. Model: Was there rapid evolution and speciation post flood?

I've been accepting this notion that a lot of alleles per gene are necessary to explain all the diversity of people and animals from the ark, but recently it began occurring to me that this is unnecessary. I don't know where the notion came from, but isn't it true that genes have two and only two alleles? I think of the classical example of brown eyes versus blue eyes: the options are B or b and that's it. Each individual has a gene that combines those two possibilities and no others. A bb and a Bb (my own parents) will produce three brown eyed Bb's and one bb on average. A bb and a BB will produce all Bb's. Etc.I looked up a page on this subject in Morris and Parker's "What Is Creation Science? where Parker is discussing how all the skin colors of the human race are explainable from two genes, each with two and only two alleles. You get the entire range of darkest to lightest, with most in the mid-range, from only those two genes with their two alleles each. A, B, a, b and that's it.Supposedly some genes are observed to have many alleles in a population, though, and I spent some time trying to figure out how that could be the case if we started from two parents, Adam and Eve. What hit me recently is that genes have the two alleles, so that all those other alleles must be mutations that don't affect the function, the protein product or the phenotypic outcome. Then I kept thinking about Adam and Eve having four alleles until it finally dawned on me that a gene has TWO, and that's IT. (abe: Adam would have had two, B and b for eye color, and so would Eve. That would no doubt also have been the case for all their genes so that we can suppose that they had all mid-range traits even though their offspring could have the extremes of all the traits. /abe)From the example of the skin color range it's clear that some traits are governed by more than one gene, each gene having two forms or alleles. This is probably true of eye color as well as skin color but I'm not up on all that. But I finally came to the conclusion that this is all it takes to explain all the diversity we see in people and animals. So on the Ark there would have been two alleles per gene among all of them, but probably more genes than we have today for many traits but also in general overall.I've many times suggested that "junk DNA" is a record of formerly functioning genes that have lost their function due to the Fall, most of it probably through destructive mutations. I still think this very likely but since it is now being claimed that it isn't junk and actually has a function I guess I have to wait and see what is concluded about that.In any case the allele count is Two Per Gene. Period.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Sounds like you didn't read my whole post since I deal with that claim about genes having more than two alleles, so it needs to be answered. As I said in my post, after giving the Bb example of a typical gene with two alleles, I suspect all those extra alleles people talk about are the result of mutations that don't change the function of the gene. Have you evidence of 100 different phenotypes from those 100 alleles in immune systems?How about a mere four? If you can't show actual phenotypic differences between those four then the best explanation is that two of them are normal built-in alleles that do specific identifiable things like produce blue eyes or brown eyes, and the others don't do anything different, making them "neutral" mutations. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Well, if I'm getting what you are saying, I think it's really only one that each person would contribute to the next generation. We possess two alleles per gene (no matter how many there might be circulating in the population), one from father and one from mother (I got blue eyes from a combination of my parents' alleles: a b from my mother's Bb and a b from my father's bb; my sister got her brown eyes from our mother's B and of course our father's b).Again, we all get a gene made up of two alleles from our parents, NO MATTER how many there might be in the whole human population.Is this correct? If each person had their own two alleles different from others' yes, and I was thinking along those lines until just recently. But when I realized how the blue eyes/ brown eyes gene works I saw that the same two in each person works fine; it's standard for that particular gene. And then seeing that only two genes for skin color with two alleles each is all it takes to produce 16 different skin colors (abe; Well, sixteen combinations but the color shades are probably eight), the entire range of color from darkest through many shades in the mid range to lightest, it became clear that we don't NEED more than two alleles per gene to get a lot of diversity.That's a different question from whether there ARE more alleles for some genes in the population, and bluegenes has given the example of blood type which is an interesting one. Also, Parker, who gives the skin color example, says he thinks there may be three genes involved in skin color -- not more than two alleles per gene though. But his calculation of 16 different shades is based on only two genes with two alleles each. Yes, and I'd been assuming that all those different alleles were proof of functioning mutations, but when it occurred to me they may not actually change anything in what the gene does I figured they aren't really functioning alleles but neutral mutations. Or most or some of them anyway. Bluegenes' example of blood types is all I know about so far of more than two alleles for a gene that actually change its function. (But some discussion is needed on this too since O and AB are sort of combinations of A and B(?) Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The skin color example I've given implies that there is so much variation built into two genes made up of two alleles each that we don't need greater numbers of alleles to get the entire range of diversity in humans and animals that we see today. Three or four genes for the same trait with two alleles each would give enormous diversity.But again not needing it isn't the same as whether it exists or not. If it does I don't see how it would contribute to any different rate of speciation in any time period. Gary Parker showed it in a chart in "What is Creation Science?" -- the 16 different shades that result from only two genes with two alleles each. He also suggested there may be three genes for skin color but his calculation was based on two. Some people equate pseudogenes with junk DNA; different people give different percentages of how much junk DNA may be actually functional and so on.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The blood types is an interesting example, it needs some thinking about.About all the alleles in the immune system it COULD be that all or most of them don't actually produce differences in phenotypes; maybe some do, but at the moment this isn't known, right?Meanwhile it's becoming clearer to me that a great deal of variability is possible from two alleles per gene, especially where a trait has more than one gene. I do think they have to be mutations, most of them "neutral" and that the original was two alleles per gene and that is enough for a great deal of variability. But this is an idea I'm still trying on for size.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Well, this is a thread for creationist ideas and I gave my thinking on how I arrived at this conclusion, which is new for me. The problem has always been how to explain all the variation we see without a lot of alleles in the population, and if there are all those alleles, as there are in some cases, where did they come from since Adam and Eve could have had a maximum of four. I don't remember what got me started rethinking this but I realized there's a lot of variability without a lot of extra alleles. And that made me start thinking down the line of how the extra alleles have to be mutations, most of which probably don't change what the gene does.It's all hypothetical at the moment, but it's based on seeing that there's a lot of variability available for instance in the example of a great range of shades of skin color from two genes with two alleles each. there are sixteen possible combinations that produce I think eight different shades from very dark to very light. Add one more gene with two alleles and I suppose you'd get more subtle variations added to the mix. A lot of variation, however, without a lot of alleles. Well, you are one of the guys who studies genetics, and apparently what all the extra alleles do is not known by you either. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Not if you assume much greater genetic diversity among those on the Ark, especially much higher heterozygosity for more genes than we see today. More genes too. This is where I keep coming back to the idea that junk DNA is dead genes that used to be functional and contributed greatly to the greater genetic diversity, from which all the different species we see could easily have evolved since the Ark. Bottlenecks can be life-threatening now but that's because of the overall decrease in genetic diversity due to generations of microevolution from population to population; but the bottleneck of the Flood would merely have reduced the percentage of heterozygosity, but there would still have been quite enough for all the variation we see now. Maybe so but it's hard for me to tell because he goes about his reasoning rather differently. He talks about "chromosomes" instead of genes for instance, which keeps throwing me. I suspect in the end we are on the same page but it's hard to tell.

Please clarify. I've been assuming these huge numbers of alleles refer to that many individuals each possessing one or two of them. So if you say hundreds to thousands you are talking about individuals, right? Or am I getting this wrong?

Not if they are all neutral or deleterious mutations.

To be clear, the conclusion I've come to is that just TWO alleles per gene is all it takes to produce all the diversity we see, not four, especially where there is more than one gene per trait, and even more especially where there were a lot more living genes, that are now junk DNA.I was trying to account for all those extra alleles until I realized they aren't needed for diversity. Although bluegenes has shown a few -- or just two? -- examples where they do actually produce a new phenotype, the odds are good that most of them are just mutations, neutral mutations, that do nothing at all for the organism except manage not to screw it all up so far. That's possible under extreme conditions, yes, but it would take something like wiping out the earth with a nice collection of nuclear bombs and in that case a lot more than varieties of skin color would be lost. Perhaps a single small group of Inuit near the North Pole might survive? Which wouldn't be the best outcome because they are already subject to a lot of genetic disease but anyway.As I do keep arguing, the way genetic diversity is lost is by isolation of a group from the rest of the population. This produces new phenotypes -- this is in fact what evolution really is, the production of new phenotypes through the loss of genetic diversity, that's why "evolution defeats evolution." You'll get a new race by this process, new races of animals, new varieties of plants, but in every case by losing genetic diversity. Natural selection does this, as does domestic/artificial selection, but the most common way it happens in the wild is probably migration and geographic isolation of a new population.{ABE: This happens where evolution is actively occurring, remember, where some smallish number of individuals have become isolated from the rest of the population, but the genetic diversity that is lost in that evolving population is not necessarily lost to the rest of the population. It's where evolution is actively occurring that it is lost. Hybridization restores it, the reuniting of formerly separated populations will restore it. It won't increase it but it will restore it. And there can be many evolving popualtions at the same time, each producing a new species or phenotype while losing the alleles that don't support that phenotype. /ABE}As long as different races keep mixing together the genetic diversity is kept high. It's reproductive isolation that brings about the loss of genetic diversity. And while this is a bad thing in our fallen world I think it must be the normal method of variation that was originally built into every living thing, which would have been fine if death had never come to the world. OK, but how often does this happen? Mutations are accidents of replication, right? I gather that some sequences are more prone to them than others, but most mutations are not a good thing, in most cases "neutral," or at least not changing the function of the allele, but a truly beneficial change? How often? Not often enough to save the cheetah that's for sure. So why would it be often enough to save the human race? Or even a skin color?And if you do get such a beneficial change, say you get a different skin color in the population OK, but it won't be a novel skin color. Seems to me the best that could happen is that a formerly lost allele would be accidentally reproduced by mutation and bring back a lost skin color. But new colors? You'd have to show this has ever happened. This is an article of faith more than a reality though. You'd have to show that all those alleles bluegenes says exist in the immune system actually do something to protect the immune system in different ways, but as bluegenes talks about it it appears to be wishfully assumed but not demonstrated. On the other hand, natural selection and other events that reduce genetic diversity take their toll very rapidly, in a matter of a few generations. But even with the known proliferation of mutations how often is even one beneficial mutation demonstrable? What if they really are accidents that do far far more harm than they could ever do the slightest good? I'm hypothesizing. I just recently changed my mind from the multiple-allele position to the two-allele position based on the fact that the eye color gene has two, and that you can get the whole range of skin colors with two genes with two alleles each, and that mutations at best don't change the function of an allele so even having hundreds of them isn't beneficial.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Fine, but it's a new hypothesis for me, a new conclusion in relation to my former position. The evidence is all in the reasoning. The fact that you can get two different eye colors from one gene with two alleles, and eight different skin colors from two genes with two alleles each. Any traits governed by more than one gene would have a lot of variability with only two alleles per gene. And greater heterozygosity (genes with two different alleles) in former times along with a larger number of functioning genes (before they died and became "junk DNA") would produce a LOT of variation down the generations from there. What I realized is that variation is more about having many different possible combinations than it is about specific alleles for specific effects. Three genes for eye color, three for skin color, three for any other traits you want to name, in all their many possible combinations, would produce an enormous range of variation, new races/varieties/species too. (As I've been looking at the pages in that creationist book I mentioned I realize that Gary Parker spelled this out very clearly, the same thing I've been trying to say for years. And he didn't get sidetracked by the idea of many alleles as I did either, he recognized all the way back in 1982 that two alleles per gene plus more than one gene per trait, and migration/isolation is all it takes to produce a great range of diversity in any creature. I don't think he mentions junk DNA but all the rest is there.) That hits me as a very silly question. Why do you ask it? Can. But only as an accident, a fluke, and so rarely as to be of no use to the organism. Besides which, again, this is far more an article of faith than it is a demonstrated reality. And meanwhile mutations are known to have produced thousands of genetic diseases, and in the best scenarios they simply don't change anything. You say all that as if it were a good thing. I can't see mutations as a good thing at all. Mostly neutral, secondly deleterious and very very rarely as a fluke maybe beneficial, usually in a way that piggybacks on something else like the sickle cell trade-off. I think all those mutations are bad for us, disease processes that over time will accumulate into actual diseases. Yes, but what are the odds you'll even get that? Mutations are accidents, the beneficial effects have to be rare flukes. But this is only an assumption based on your acceptance of the ToE, it has not been demonstrated. You assume mutations are the explanation for the differences, you haven't proved it at all, it's just that the theory tells you this is how it happens. It's all theory, no evidence. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Tis indeed all abstract, but so is the ToE, so is the claim that mutations are the source of variation, and in that case not just abstract but pure wishful thinking. There is no need to conjure with all the complications and details of genetic inheritance, Mendel demonstrated how it works just fine, which applies to eye color and skin color just fine.

These are not statements of the ToE. All the time and it is not a good thing. Yes but misleading since evos attribute the differences to mutation which mostly creates no differences in function or undesirable differences. Another misleading definition and I'm not sure it's completely true as stated anyway. That is, the crucial differences may be in particular parts of the genome; that is, in particular sequences that are responsible for particular differences rather than in a mere summation of sequence differences. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I'm going with two alleles per gene
More than one gene for some traits
No beneficial mutations, they are all an interference
Strong selection isn't needed, nor drift, though either might occur; just migration + isolationEdited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

You haven't shown that those alleles actually do anything. You think they do, but it's all an assumption from what you've said. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.